This is a bit different. It's essentially an extended conversation with singer/songwriter/musician Nick Cave, facilitated by journalist Sean O'Hagan. Many hours of phone conversations went into the creation of the book (many of them during that awful covid period), and it was published in 2022. Cave is a very articulate person. And O'Hagan does an excellent job, knowing exactly when to push back, probe, or let go.

I listened to the audio-version, read by Cave and O'Hagan themselves. It sounds a little artificial to start with, but you get used to it. The only problem is that you keep having to stop to jot things down...

A distinct advantage of the audio-version, on the other hand, is that it also contains snippets of the music mentioned in the exchanges, which definitely made me want to hear more. I've since listened to quite a bit of Cave's later stuff. It's both visceral and ethereal, if that's possible. Both haunting and comforting. Both confronting and consoling.

I'd never heard of Nick Cave until I watched The Snow Leopard. The stunning images in that extraordinary movie are beautifully complemented (no mean feat) by the music and lyrics of Cave and Warren Ellis, his musical collaborator.

He is quite the arts all-rounder. Alongside his comprehensive musical talents, he has written a couple of novels (which don't appeal to me, I have to say), and in this book he describes a major ceramics project he's undertaking. He failed his second year at art school, which he found devastating ("all I ever wanted to be was a painter...") but his creative life continues to be informed by art.

This isn't a memoir. Yes, you get to know bits and pieces about Cave's career -- his childhood in Wangaratta, Victoria, Australia; his parents; his previous bands and records and relationships; his time in rehab (lots); his workaholic nature; and his wife (Susie, a fashion designer). But what Cave is most concerned to ponder is his growing spiritual understanding of the world, how this has been utterly transformed by the accidental death in 2015 of the couple's teenage son Arthur, and how these twin strands affected his subsequent life and creativity.


We stayed in Wangaratta a couple of times, but I have no pictures. En route, in 2007, we stopped at Seymour

The accounts of what goes into the creation of a song didn't mean a lot to me. It's alien territory to me, and although the explanations were by no means technical or abstruse, I never really felt I had much of a grip on the creative process he was describing. What I did find intriguing -- though unfathomable -- was the idea that songs (or any writing, I guess) can be prophetic. You write something. Years later, you find out what it means...

Cave's understanding of the religious journey, however (he prefers "religious" to the vaguer "spiritual"), was really fascinating. And it is all the more remarkable because it has been both sharpened and softened by bereavement. He had to contend not only with the devastating loss of young Arthur, but also with the death of his mother (during the covid-induced travel ban), and of former partner Anita Lane. And just as this book was going to print, Cave tragically lost another son, Jethro. He leaves us in no doubt about the gut-tearing, obliterating, paralysing effects of grief.


Portrait of a younger, angrier Cave by Anita Lane, 1977

But the hammer blows that might have pushed others into doubt, cynicism, and bitterness have miraculously pointed Cave in the direction of faith, compassion, and opening. And I'm in awe of that attitude. I -- so easily knocked over by every manifestation of adversity, so quick to lose my equilibrium, and so slow to adapt to the inevitability of change -- marvel at Cave's ability to take heap of shit after heap of shit, and somehow transmute it into gold.

He speaks of this outward turn like this: "I think there is a learned resilience that comes along with grief. You can learn to live with it. You don’t have to fold. You don’t have to spend your time looking inward at the absence of someone. It is possible to turn around and look at the world for what it is and understand that it is unfair, but be able to see, within that, the great beauty of the world... I know grieving people who haven’t been able to do that, and they have kind of hardened around the absence of the ones they’ve lost. And I’ve known other people that have turned around and been able to look at the world and understand the common nature of loss and that we’re all in it together, and the vulnerability or precarious nature of all of our existences."

There are many kinds of grief -- for the people and animals we have lost along the way, of course, but also for the health we have lost, and the careers we have lost, and the dreams we have lost -- and the book forced me to confront the painful truth that in many ways I'm still curled around the things I've had to say goodbye to. I'm still unreconciled, still angry, still resentful, still facing inwards.

Cave faces outwards not only in the sense of writing all this grief and redemption into cathartic music, or shaping it into quirky Staffordshire figurines, but also in the sense of reaching out to other sorrowing people. He talks in the book about a forum he runs called The Red Hand Files. Here he just invites people to ask him questions... They are free to ask anything, but many of the communications attest to grief and loneliness and despair. Cave, while admitting he is no counsellor, uses the forum to draw sufferers into a kind of solidarity. And his replies are very perceptive -- not to mention extraordinarily well written. (See, for example, these entries on grief, potential, and beautiful ordinariness.)



I find Nick Cave's discussions of faith very resonant. This is partly because he is so undogmatic, so doubtful, so willing to admit that he is still exploring, and doesn't have all the answers. A lot of the things he says very much connect with other writings I have come across in recent years:

-- The faith-shaped hole: "There seems to be a growing current of thought that tends towards... a sort of cynicism and distrust of our very selves, a hatred of who we are, or, more accurately, a rejection of the innate wonder of our presence. I see this as a sort of affliction that is, in part, to do with the increasingly secular nature of our society. There’s an attempt to find meaning in places where it is ultimately unsustainable -- in politics, identity and so on... [Religion] deals with the necessity for forgiveness, for example, and mercy, whereas I don’t think secularism has found the language to address these matters. The upshot of that is a kind of callousness towards humanity in general, or so it seems to me. And I think callousness comes out of a feeling of aloneness, people feeling adrift or separated from the world. In a way, they look for religion -- and meaning -- elsewhere. And increasingly they are finding it in tribalism and the politics of division."

-- Tentativeness: "The songs I write these days tend to be religious songs in the very broadest sense. They behave as though God exists. They are essentially making a case for belief itself, even though they are at times ambivalent and inconsistent about the existence of God... I think the only way I can fully give myself over to the idea of God is to have the room to question... For me at least, doubt becomes the energy of belief... For me, personally, it is the unreasonableness of the notion, its counterfactual aspect that makes the experience of belief compelling. I find that leaning into these intimations of the divine, that for me do exist, as subtle, softly spoken and momentary as they may be, expands my relationship with the world -- especially creatively. Why would I deny myself something that is clearly beneficial because it doesn’t make sense? That in itself would be illogical."

-- Catalytic anguish: "Suffering is, by its nature, the primary mechanism of change."

-- Absolution: Talking about his creativity and his wife's, Cave says: "There is not a song or a word or a stitch of thread that is not asking for forgiveness; that is not saying we are just so sorry."

-- Regrets: "Anyone who says they don’t have any regrets is simply living an unconsidered life. Not only that, but by doing so they are denying themselves the obvious benefits of self-forgiveness. Though, of course, the hardest thing of all is to forgive oneself… One sure path to self-forgiveness is to arrive at a place where you can see that your day-to-day actions are making the world a measurably better place, rather than a worse place -- that is pretty simple stuff, available to all -- and to arrive at this place with a certain amount of humility."

-- Vulnerability: He talks a lot (and it's easy to see why) about the shared predicament of our imperilled lives. We are all so very vulnerable... Anything can turn catastrophic at any time. Each life is precariously balanced. The question is how we deal with that dance-on-the-point-of-a-pin: Do we fear it or embrace it? "I think to be truly vulnerable," he says, "is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel extraordinarily alive and receptive to all sorts of things, creatively and spiritually. It can be, perversely, a point of advantage, not disadvantage as one might think. It is a nuanced place that feels both dangerous and teeming with potential. It is the place where the big shifts can happen. The more time you spend there, the less worried you become about how you will be perceived or judged, and that is ultimately where the freedom is."

-- Creativity: "It seems to me life is mostly spent putting ourselves back together, but hopefully in new and interesting ways. For me that's what the creative process is for sure. It is the act of retelling the story of our lives so that it makes sense."

-- Tenacity: "Hope is optimism with a broken heart."

-- Thankfulness: "I feel nothing but deep gratitude to be a part of this whole cosmic mess."

-- The need to look up: "In a way my work has become an explicit rejection of cynicism and negativity. I simply have no time for it... No time for censure or relentless condemnation. No time for the whole cycle of perpetual blame. Others can do that sort of thing. I haven’t the stomach for it, or the time. Life is too damn short, in my opinion, not to be awed... The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seem to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is, and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it."

-- Positivity: "What doesn't kill you just makes you crazier..."



***

On the way through, Cave mentions Ocean Vuong and Marilynne Robinson; Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner (must read); and the Southern Gothic tradition. (And on the subject of Gothic, listen to Cave's collaboration with Kylie Minogue: Where The Wild Roses Grow.)

There's also a mention of Philip Larkin's 1954 poem, Church Going, the ending of which sums up much about bemused, unwilling quests:

... Though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.


***

I'm not surprised, then, that this was The Big Issue Book of the Year 2022. Or that it was one of Maria Popova's favourite books of 2022.

And don't miss, by the way, Cave's collaboration with Popova. Her poem -- about vulnerability and precarity and the brevity of life -- ends like this:

And still
when the constellation of starlings
flickers across the evening sky,
it is...
enough

to stand here
for an irrevocable minute...
agape with wonder.

It is...
eternity.