My favorite works of narrative art always include elements of mystery and doubt. But in the end, the story always has to conclude or run out of pages (or film stock.) They never drift on into eternity, there is always some kind of resolution.

My new operating theory is that every story is either a love or death story and the best have elements of both. There are obscene versions of both — pure violence or sex — designed to provoke. And we are surrounded now by pornographic politics taking a similar form.

But the most beautiful works are the most subtle. I have been quoting Adrianne Lenker a great deal lately and her Big Thief song “Change” is a beautiful example of a song that begins as a meditation on death:

Would you live forever, never die

While everything around passes?

Would you smile forever, never cry

While everything you know passes?

Death, like a door

To a place we've never been before

Death, like space

The deep sea, a suitcase

Ah, but that last word. Oh, is Adrianne brilliant. Suitcase. With one word, she transforms the song from being literally about death to being figuratively about death. The song is now about loss. It’s now a love song.

And within a couple stanzas, she is fully there:

Could I feel happy for you

When I hear you talk with her like we used to?

Could I set everything free

When I watch you holding her the way you once held me?

Change, like the sky

Like the leaves, like a butterfly

Death, like a door

To a place we've never been before

But the most beautiful thing about Adrianne’s songs is that they always seem to take the form of a conversation withheld. So often, she talks about not wanting to speak or dwells on trivia to keep the conversation moving. She’ll slip in the one true thing right at the end, almost by accident.

I don’t know her, of course, this is pure speculation, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if in her actual relationships, Adrianne has trouble saying what needs to be said. Maybe she turns to art to find her articulate side.

She can do that because art always has to end. The song has to have a point, eventually, just like the mysterious story must resolve and the baffling movie must, somehow, leave you feeling that you haven’t just wasted two hours of your life.

Life, however, often does not resolve. And maybe the great mistake I continue to make is expecting it to work out like in art — that eventually people will talk, plots will make sense, or in the great metaphor Radiohead uses, jigsaws will fall into place.

That’s art, not life. In life, mysteries can keep going as long as human being are more comfortable holding and extending them than they are in revealing their secrets.