This past Tuesday evening I participated in a discussion with friends. The topic was Nihilism. The topic held a particular resonance for me. Just days ago word came that Prince was found dead.
Shakespeare speaks to the brevity of life and the challenge of Nihilism.

Out, out brief candle. Life is nothing more than an illusion. A story told by an idiot, full of noise, emotional experience—but devoid of meaning.
— Macbeth act 5 scene 5

The immediate circumstances of Prince’s death notwithstanding—what can be said about his life, and about life in general? I was never a fan of Prince’s music. Strangely I felt a tie to him in his passing. I felt as if something in myself had died.  So he is gone, prematurely, overcome by painkillers.  Is not every death an ambush, a nasty surprise? Does it really matter whether it is by cancer, or caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, –by accident, or by alcohol, or by overdose? Dead is dead. We pass over, the candle extinguishes.
The question remains. Is a reasonable to conclude that my life, your life has a ultimate meaning? Or is the accumulation of experience, our creative engagement with others — nothing but noise,  static, unrelenting until the silence comes?  Thinking of Prince, I remembered that the movie Purple Rain was screening in Waukegan at the Genesee theater.  I had to go.
The ordinariness of Prince’s pre-celebrity life impressed me: the bleak, spare Minnesota landscape in winter, the emotionally dark and dangerous atmosphere of his home-life with a musician father who fell into violent drunken rages. And the club scene sizzling with syncopated sexual energy. There the up and coming young musician scratched and clawed for his place in the world.
Finally there is the figure of Apollonia.  She is the one person in his life, that understands him, who wills to love him. Does the movie Purple Rain have a happy ending? Of course not. The father in a paroxysm of self hatred puts a bullet into his head, and is found by his son. The relationship with Apollonia falls apart. Prince is unable to modify his default pattern of responding to stress with violence, learned from his father.

Is not this a similar pattern to every family? I remain my father’s son in ways good and not so good.

Yet, at the end of the story when the ending has already been set as if by Fate, Prince takes the stage and begins to play his anthem Purple Rain. The song was composed in the aftermath of his father’s tragedy. I sat there and the tears came. The tears were for Prince, for myself,  for all of us. The anthem is a eulogy –a beautiful, inconsolable lament for all that is lost in this business of living life.

I never meant to cause you any sorrow
I never meant to cause you any pain
I only wanted one time to see you laughing
I only want to see you laughing in the purple rain

Purple rain Purple rain
Purple rain Purple rain
Purple rain Purple rain

So, what does it all amount to? Is the pain and sorrow worth it? My answer is unequivocally, –Yes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vJMTKtY4U8

      Rest in peace, my brother.