In a short post, Jim Nielsen reflects upon the purpose of reading, that being to expand your thinking. This thinking was in part inspired by Dave Rupert’s discussion of ideas over facts and how we check these.
The goal of a book isn’t to get to the last page, it’s to expand your thinking.
The challenge that both Nielsen and Rupert touch on is that we are not always conscious or critical of the ideas (or dots) as we consume them, even so they make us who we are:
I cannot remember the blog posts I’ve read any more than the meals I’ve eaten; even so, they’ve made me.
It’s a good reminder to be mindful of my content diet — you are what you eat read, even if you don’t always remember it.
This is based on a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:
I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
For me, the notion of unconscious ideas harks back to something J. Hillis Miller once said about the ethics of reading:
As we read we compose, without thinking about it, a kind of running commentary or marginal jotting that adds more words to the words on the page. There is always already writing as the accompaniment to reading.
Source: ‘The Obligation to Write’ by J. Hillis Miller
According to Strauss, a person can only be called a great thinker if they are able to bring solutions to major challenges. Unlike great thinkers that directly deal with the challenges associated with human existence, scholars only come into play when it is time to weigh the difference in the methodology of various great thinkers.
I don’t create or publish in the hopes of influencing others. I create things because I have an urge to create. But it sure is great to help others along the way, however small my contribution might be. I don’t care about being found online and I am certainly not actively pushing my stuff down others’ throats (Kleon’s rule #7: Don’t turn into human spam). I love reading about the creation process of others. I love sharing my creation process. It’s almost second nature: it feels like a wasted opportunity to do something good in this world if I didn’t.
Faith, Hope and Carnage is an extended conversation between Nick Cave and Observer journalist, Seán O’Hagan, who have known one another for thirty years. Created from over forty hours of intimate recordings, the book examines questions of faith, art, music, freedom, grief and love. It draws candidly on Cave’s life, from his early childhood to the present day, his loves, his work ethic and his dramatic transformation in recent years. From a place of considered reflection, Faith, Hope and Carnage offers ladders of hope and inspiration from a true creative visionary.
The audiobook, narrated by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan, and directed and produced by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, features sixteen musical codas and elements from Carnage, Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen and includes an exclusive 12-minute conversation between Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan.
‘Astonishing… This beautiful book is a lament, a celebration, a howl, a secular prayer, a call to arms, a meditation and an exquisite articulation of the human condition. It will take your breath away.’ – Observer
‘This is a book about the freedom attained from understanding that life is precarious. Everyday carnage has brought forth a book of hope and freedom and life. *****’ – Telegraph
‘Illuminating . . . If it meets a need for Cave, it also feels like a gift to the reader’ – Sunday Times
‘Unerringly frank, self-interrogative and insightful’ – Guardian
‘Remarkably candid . . . One of Cave’s greatest skills is to bring a secular eye to the religious and a religious eye to the secular, the sacred and the profane intertwined’ – New Statesman
‘The reveals come thick and fast, as does the wisdom. Meanwhile, the insight into Cave’s songwriting is profound, and he is thoughtful on the contrast, thematically and structurally, between then and now. *****’ – MOJO ‘Music Book of the Year’
‘Cave’s humour and insight into the human condition shine through. … Down in the darkness is a kind of consolation too.’ – Uncut
‘A book that’ll stay with you forever’ – Stylist
I wrote my review for Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan here.
Faith, Hope and Carnage is a meandering on and off conversation between Nick Cave and journalist, Seán O’Hagan, captured on the page through fourteen chapters. Beginning at the start of the 2020 and carrying on through to the end of 2021, Cave walks through the process of creativity as it happens, as well as reflecting upon the death of his son, grieving, life and music. It is very much a pandemic project brought about by the strange times.
In terms of what you and I are doing here, it is difficult for me to go back there, but it is also important to talk about it at some point, because the loss of my son defines me. Page 12
In terms of what you and I are doing here, it is difficult for me to go back there, but it is also important to talk about it at some point, because the loss of my son defines me. Page 12
My music began to reflect life as I saw it. Page 12
by the time we wrote Ghosteen, Warren and I were purely improvising. I would play the piano and sing, and Warren would play electronics, loops, violin and synth, with neither of us really understanding what we were doing or where we were going. We were just falling into this sound, following our hearts and our understanding of each other as collaborators, towards this newness. We spent days playing more or less non-stop. Then there were more days of sifting through it all and collecting the bits that sounded interesting. And, in some instances, that was maybe just a minute of music or a single line. After that, it was really about constructing songs from these lovely, disparate parts. Our editing process was initially akin to collage or a kind of musical assemblage. Then we’d work at building songs on top of that. Page 13
I come to the studio with loads of ideas and an enormous number of written words, most of which, by the way, are discarded. Page 14
you only need ten songs, ten beautiful and breath-taking accidents to make up a record. Page 14
the lyrics lose their concrete value and become things to play with, dismember and reorganise. I’m actually very happy to have arrived at a place where I now have an utterly ruthless relationship to my words. Page 15
The creative impulse, to me, is a form of bafflement, and often feels dissonant and unsettling. Page 16
Really, what I was aiming for on Ghosteen, though, was the creation of a single moment that was being looked at from various different points of view. I didn’t quite get there, though. Page 19
Essentially, Ghosteen rises out of that moment of peace, of calm, of simplicity, before everything shattered. It’s quite hard to explain but I think that comes close to it. Page 20
I know it’s a valuable line when my body reacts accordingly. An almost erotic enchantment – a sort of sunburst! Page 22
It seems to me that my best ideas are accidents within a controlled context. You could call them informed accidents. Page 23
Religion is spirituality with rigour, Page 25
those early Birthday Party shows were religious in their way, with all that rolling around on stage and purging of demons and speaking in tongues. Page 27
older, I have also come to see that maybe the search is the religious experience – the desire to believe and the longing for meaning, the moving towards the ineffable. Maybe that is what is essentially important, despite the absurdity of it. Or, indeed, because of the absurdity of it. When it comes down to it, maybe faith is just a decision like any other. And perhaps God is the search itself. Page 28
I think music has the ability to penetrate all the fucked-up ways we have learned to cope with this world – all the prejudices and affiliations and agendas and defences that basically amount to a kind of layered suffering – and get at the thing that lies below and is essential to us all, that is pure, that is good. The sacred essence. I think music, out of all that we can do, at least artistically, is the great indicator that something else is going on, something unexplained, because it allows us to experience genuine moments of transcendence. Page 29
sadly, organised religion can be atheism’s greatest gift. Page 30
Sometimes you need to say out loud what you think or talk to someone else about the ideas you hold, just in order to see if they are valid. It helps clarify things for me to be challenged on my beliefs. This is the essential value of conversation, that it can serve as a kind of corrective. Page 31
Perhaps, but rational truth may not be the only game in town. I am more inclined to accept the idea of poetic truth, or the idea that something can be ‘true enough’. To me that’s such a beautiful, humane expression. Page 32
believing itself has a certain utility – a spiritual and healing benefit, regardless of the actual existence of God.. Page 33
I mean that all my songs are written from a place of spiritual yearning, because that is the place that I permanently inhabit. Page 35
God is the trauma itself. Page 36
Collective grief can bring extraordinary change, a kind of conversion of the spirit, and with it a great opportunity. Page 38
Well, that’s what it feels like with some songs. The more I’ve written, the harder it is to disregard the fact that so many songs seem to be some steps ahead of actual events. Page 40
Stepping into a church, listening to religious thinkers, reading scripture, sitting in silence, meditating, praying – all these religious activities eased the way back into the world for me. Page 42
there is a kind of gentle scepticism that makes belief stronger rather than weaker. In fact, it can be the forge on which a more robust belief can be hammered out. Page 42
The priest and religious writer Cynthia Bourgeault talks about ‘the imaginal realm’, which seems to be another place you can inhabit briefly that separates itself from the rational world and is independent of the imagination. It is a kind of liminal state of awareness, before dreaming, before imagining, that is connected to the spirit itself. It is an ‘impossible realm’ where glimpses of the preternatural essence of things find their voice. Page 43
I think to be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. Page 45
found a kind of invincibility through acute vulnerability. Page 50
When you are making music together, conversation becomes at best an auxiliary form of communication. It becomes unnecessary, even damaging, to explain things. Page 52
In my experience, boredom is often close to epiphany, to the great idea. In a way, that is very much the agony of songwriting – because boredom is just boredom until it’s not! Page 56
The nature of improvisation is the coming together of two people, with love – and a certain dissonance. Page 57
One of the many things Arthur gave us was Ghosteen. Directly, I believe. I hope so, anyway. Page 60
It seems to me, life is mostly spent putting ourselves back together. But hopefully in new and interesting ways. For me that is what the creative process is, for sure – it is the act of retelling the story of our lives so that it makes sense. Page 69
she was unconditionally supportive of me even when I was at my least deserving. That’s a mother’s love. Page 71
Children need their parents, but parents need their children, too. Sometimes it’s all they have. Page 73
Religion is asking the question: ‘What if?’ And to me, that question is also, in its way, a completely adequate answer. Page 77
To me, the great gift of God is that He provides us with the space to doubt. For me at least, doubt becomes the energy of belief. Page 77
Why would I deny myself something that is clearly beneficial because it doesn’t make sense? That in itself would be illogical. Page 78
it has the ability to lead us, if only temporarily, into a sacred realm. Music plays into the yearning many of us instinctively have – you know, the God-shaped hole. Page 78
It deals with the necessity for forgiveness, for example, and mercy, whereas I don’t think secularism has found the language to address these matters. Page 80
But it could be that using heroin and the need for a sacred dimension to life were similar pursuits, in that they were attempts, at that time, to remedy the same condition. Page 83
you say dumb stuff when you’re young – that is the very definition of being young, then as now, as far as I can see. Page 85
It seems to me that much of our remembered past, especially around traumatic incidents, is based on assumptions and misunderstandings we collected at the time of the trauma and have gone unchallenged ever since. Page 88
t made me think about what our lives actually are, in the end. What are they made of? Are they only semi-fictions, received information and false, or eroded, memories? Are they stories you’ve told about yourself so many times, and shaped and reshaped, that have very little relation to the truth? There’s that famous Joan Didion line – ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’ – which gets to the heart of our need for narratives that make sense of, or impose order on, our meandering lives. I guess it’s a way of making the cold, hard truths more palatable. Page 88
But in Mark’s version it’s like I was just eating up everyone who came near me and taking what I could from them creatively. Now, that is very much a matter of perspective. One of the criticisms aimed at me by people in the book is that I always needed a collaborator, as if that is some kind of weakness, rather than just a self-evident way of making better art – to be open to the ideas of other people, to be helped by other people. Some people he spoke to saw that as almost vampiric or something, but it’s interesting, because that kind of criticism almost always comes from people who were not engaged in creating art themselves. They were mainly peripheral, perpetual onlookers who know nothing about what it takes to create something of value. And if you were to ask me how I defined myself as an artist, I would say I was a collaborator, then and now. It’s actually one of the things I am most proud of, that I have had sustained productive relationships with people that have ultimately been mutually beneficial. I think most of the people I have worked with would agree. I always do my best to amplify and push to the front these people, you know … well, more or less. Page 90
I think we contain these traumatic memories in the cells of our body, in our blood, in our bones. Page 93
Some take drugs because they love the chaos and disorder; I took heroin because it fed into my need for a conservative and well-ordered life. Page 94
heroin addiction is all right until it’s not. It quickly escalates – very quickly, actually. Chaos is always just around the corner. And these kinds of rock and roll stories may be funny but they obscure a lot of darkness and pain. Page 97
I became a person after my son died. Not part of a person, a more complete person. Page 102
this will happen to everybody at some point – a deconstruction of the known self. It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation. Page 102
I think we both worked out that we could be happy and that happiness was a form of insubordination in the face of, I don’t know, life, I guess. It was a choice. That’s it, a choice, a kind of earned and considered arrangement with the world, to be happy. No one has control over the things that happen to them, but we do have a choice as to how we respond. There was a defiance there, in the face of the world’s indifference and apparent casual cruelty. Page 103
I really don’t think we can not talk about it if we are talking about the creative process. It’s simply part of the whole thing. The creative process is not a part of one’s life but life itself and all that it throws at you. For me, it was like the creative process, if we want to call it that, found its real purpose. Page 104
I write songs is perhaps different from many songwriters. I don’t write continuously. Instead, I’ll put an actual date in my diary for when I will begin writing the next record. And that date is the starting point, the initial action towards making a record.
With songwriting, there are always these little glimmers embedded in all the scrambled nonsense and false starts and failed ideas. They’re buried in there like clues. What happens is that they suddenly present themselves, rise from the page, and begin to hold hands. Not all at once, necessarily, but quite rapidly, and then you start to get a creative momentum, a kind of collecting together of information that moves towards the basic framing of a song. Page 109
Travelling the world but seeing none of it! Page 110
you don’t want to then engage in some parallel occupation that makes you feel even worse, that picks away at your self-regard, makes you feel smaller or emptier or insignificant or a failure, or plunges you into a dark place that you have to climb back out of, or makes you cry, or makes you despair. Songwriting does that. Songwriting would be essentially the last straw. It’s just too fucking hard. So you write a book instead, or a screenplay, or an epic poem, or design a T-shirt, or something. Page 111
So thank God, quite literally, for music, because it’s one of the last remaining places, beyond raw nature, that people can feel awed by something happening in real time, that feeling of reverence and wonder. Page 112
Being on stage for me was just an amplification of the general way of life I was living at the time, but it wasn’t a great work ethic. In the end, after many years, I settled for chaos in the mind, order in the workspace. Chaos in the mind? That’s not something I associate with you these days. I mean chaos as a bounty of competing ideas racing around in your head. Page 114
it felt like there was a kind of radical intimacy taking place. Page 115
I could do it on my own, but I don’t think I’d do it nearly as well. The people I’ve worked with have brought a huge amount to the table. That began with Mick, and then Rowland came along with his extraordinary guitar playing and musical inventiveness. Page 116
On some level it’s just the nature of the beast, I guess. It is what I call the corrosive power of collaboration. Collaborations that work are the most glorious and productive of things. But if the collaboration is not attended to properly, with care and respect, it can eat away at itself. Page 119
We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time, frantically trying to build its sense of self – This is me! Here I am! – in any way that it can. But then time and life come along, and smash that sense of self into a million pieces. And then comes the reassembled self, the self you have to put back together. You no longer have to devote time to finding out what you are, you are just free to be whatever you want to be, unimpeded by the incessant needs of others. You somehow grow into the fullness of your humanity, form your own character, become a proper person – I don’t know, someone who has become a part of things, not someone separated from or at odds with the world. Page 121
The idea of encroaching mortality isn’t a concern – the idea of death as a sort of endgame, something separate, waiting down the line. It doesn’t feel like that to me. I guess I feel, day to day, and in a profound way, enmeshed in death, as if it is a clear and present state of being that manifests itself in a sort of vitality. I feel a certain receptivity to its positive influence or presence. Page 124
Susie is my wife, but also a collaborator. Page 126
You know the film I just made of ‘Idiot Prayer’, the solo show I did at Alexandra Palace during lockdown? Well, it was originally called ‘An Evening with Nick Cave’. That was what the team and I had always called it, and it had just sort of stuck, but when Susie found out that’s what it was called, her reaction was, ‘Wow! Could you even find a more boring title?’ So, I’m like, ‘Well, Jesus, babe, that’s just what it’s called! I can’t fucking change it now!’ And she’s like, ‘Okay, but I’m just saying it’s boring.’ So, after a while, I say, ‘Okay, what about “Idiot Prayer” then?’ And she’s like, ‘There you go.’ That sort of thing happens a lot. So a good result, but exasperating at the time. Page 126
Most of the time, I just don’t solicit other people’s opinions if can help it, unless of course I know their opinion is going to be the same as mine. I prefer to go with the flow, provided it’s my flow, Page 127
What I’m trying to say is that I am not just influenced by her, but emboldened by her. Page 128
And you’re right. She is astute to say that about my songs – ‘I always seem to be walking in and out of them’ – because it’s true; I don’t ever sit down with the intention of writing a song about Susie. It’s more that, when I am in that shadowy creative flow, I find it difficult to maintain my own form, so welded am I into her being. I find myself adopting her perspective – flipping from one to the other. A therapist would have a field day with this! Page 128
Sometimes I am trying to manage several voices in my songs – my voice, Susie’s voice and our shared voice, and of course the subjective or observational voice. Page 129
She doesn’t sit down and write the lyrics to a song with me, because there is no room in the process for her, or anyone else, for that matter. And I don’t physically help her design her dresses, because she has her own highly distinctive ideas about beauty and needs to get in touch with that. Page 129
I find not knowing about something in art, that kind of adventuring innocence, whether it is songwriting, scriptwriting, dress designing, score work, sculpture or any other thing, a distinct advantage much of the time. At least initially, anyway, because you enter into the project naïve to the potentially destabilising and corrosive aspects of it. You just blunder in and give it a go. Page 130
In the case of the Charlie Poole song, the lost, cuckolded man moving from house to house, retelling his tale of woe, generates a kind of narrative push to the song itself. Almost like the rhythm of the train tracks under a Johnny Cash song. It’s very beautiful. Page 138
I think we probably find the things that we love early on, and never stray too far from them. I read somewhere that there is something that happens within the brain between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three that makes us super-receptive, particularly to music, and that’s why we attach ourselves so strongly to pieces of music from that period of our lives. That certainly applies to me. To be honest, I simply don’t have the same attachment to music now, or maybe I don’t have the same fundamental need for it as I had back then. Even when I find something that completely blows my mind, there’s an almost academic remove. I don’t have the urge to play it over and over. Page 140
We have a kind of duty to remain engaged. There are a few lines towards the end of ‘Lavender Fields’ that are about that. Once I was running with my friends All of them busy with their pens But the lavender grew rare What happened to them? Page 142
To some degree I feel I have the distinct advantage of having made a long lifetime of terrible mistakes. Like most old people, I have been hurt more, I have suffered more, and I have fucked up more. I have also overcome things that are incomprehensible to younger people. I have experienced more by virtue of being in the world for a really long time. Older people may be broken down, but we are also vast repositories of experience and, if we have been paying attention to world, a certain amount of wisdom, too. This has value. It is worth something. Page 143
thinking about that some more, too, and I was reminded of that beautiful notion of William Blake’s – of Jesus being the imagination. And also that startling image from Matthew 27: ‘Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, who remain standing there in front of the tomb.’ That always makes me think of what it’s like to experience the birth of a creative idea; it’s as if you are waiting for the Christ to appear, to step from the tomb, and reveal Himself. That’s quite an analogy. Do you see songwriting at its best as a kind of creative self-revelation? Yes, and in order for it to happen, you have to be patient. You must have faith. And often you must do the waiting alone. You have to have forbearance, a patient self-control and a tolerance of the process itself. And also an alertness. It is easy to lose one’s nerve, to run away like the apostles did, to go and do something else, but we do that at our peril. That’s when you risk missing the astonishing idea, the Jesus idea. Page 144
the residual idea that pretends to be the astonishing idea. As an artist, you really need to constantly be on the lookout for that. I would say, ‘Beware the residual idea!’ Page 144
Exactly. I tend to find that when I first sit down to write new songs there is a kind of initial flurry of words that appears quite effortlessly. They seem to be right there, at hand, so there is a cosiness about them, a comfortableness. And because they aren’t too bad, really, you immediately start thinking, this is all going to be easy. But these are the deceiving ideas, the residual ideas, the unused remnants of the last record that are still lurking about. They’re like the muck in the pipes, and they have to be flushed out to make room for the new idea, the astonishing idea. I think a lot of musicians deal in residual ideas, because they’re seduced by the comfortable and the familiar. For me, that’s a big mistake, although I can understand the temptation to create something reassuringly familiar. And, in a way, the whole industry is set up to cater to that – to the well-known or second-hand idea. Page 144
I think music can have a way of influencing the heart in a righteous way that enables us to do better, to be better. Especially when the songs get played live. Collectively, we can experience the music actually improving the condition of the listener. I see it all the time. I experience it myself as well. It’s a very real thing. Page 146
In the collective moment of a performance, people are united by the music. That, in itself, has a moral force. Page 146
It requires a certain amount of nerve to rip it all up and start again with something that feels new and, therefore, dangerous. For a start, your brain does not want to go there and it’s telling you that. It’s challenging to write away from the known and the familiar. Page 147
What I’m saying is that you can’t get to that truly creative place unless you find the dangerous idea. And, once again, that’s like standing at the mouth of the tomb, in vigil, waiting for the shock of the risen Christ, the shock of the imagination, the astonishing idea. Page 147
I think the old become not just repositories of lived experience, but of the dead, too. Page 148
I think these absences do something to those of us who remain behind. We are like haunted houses, in a way, and our absences can even transform us so that we feel a quiet but urgent love for those who remain, a tenderness to all of humanity, as well as an earned understanding that our time is finite. Page 148
always myself – even when it’s a character it’s just me in disguise. Page 150
I have absolutely no idea why I told you that story. You actually are like a therapist. Page 151
It’s all in the performing – performing in front of an audience. That’s when the fullness of the songs presents itself. I think the audience draws forth the true intent of the songs. Not that the recorded versions are lesser forms, mind. I actually prefer original recordings to live ones as something to casually listen to. They’re less histrionic, less demanding, but the live versions of the songs are much more experiential and communal. Page 152
blew it. We squandered it. Early on, many of us felt that a chance was presented to us, as a civilisation, to put aside our vanities, grievances and divisions, our hubris, our callous disregard for each other, and come together around a common enemy. Our shared predicament was a gift that could potentially have transformed the world into something extraordinary. To our shame this didn’t happen. The Right got scarier, the Left got crazier, and our already fractured civilisation atomised into something that resembled a collective lunacy. For many, this has been followed by a weariness, an ebbing away of our strength and resolve and a dwindling belief in the common good. Many people’s mental health has suffered as a consequence. Page 154
Yes, that’s right, the work is a form of salvation. Page 156
Twitter is really just a factory that churns out arseholes. Page 165
The Red Hand Files brought about a significant change in my life. For better or for worse, they became the channel that allowed me to step outside my own expectations of what it was to be a rock singer, or whatever it is that I am. They freed me from myself. Page 166
It all comes down to seeing, essentially, to the visual nature of things. That is the way I’ve experienced the world since childhood. And that is the way I write songs – as a series of highly visual images, often violent, mostly sorrowful. Warren, on the other hand, hears the world. Page 167
I kind of loved everything back then, especially painting. Van Gogh, El Greco, Goya, Munch, the nudes of Renoir. I loved Piero della Francesca and Stefan Lochner and Rodin and Donatello. Titian, too, and Rubens. Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele Page 171
For me, it has always been about the nature of the human soul rather than the problems of the society we live in. Page 173
Insofar as the rules that govern our lives no longer apply. I am very familiar with this feeling. It is the compensatory gift at the heart of grief. The usual precepts collapse under the weight of the calamity: the terrible demands that we place upon ourselves; our own internal judging voice; the endless expectations and opinions of others. They suddenly become less important and there is a wonderful freedom in that as well. Page 174
But, you know, I feel that the song addresses the idea that there is a bottomless rage out there that has been animated somehow and is now mutually sustaining – each side fuelling the other. The cosy arrangement that the Left and the Right have traditionally had has turned into something else entirely. It constantly feels like things are going to blow. Page 178
So you learn to make peace with the idea of death as best you can. Or rather you reconcile yourself to the acute jeopardy of life, and you do this by acknowledging the value in things, the precious nature of things, and savouring the time we have together in this world. Page 182
However, God cannot be defended, hence we must. Page 186
I can’t imagine there is anyone with no regrets, unless they are leading extraordinarily unexamined lives, or they are young, which often amounts to much the same thing. So, yes, I have my regrets. Not that regrets in themselves are bad things, of course. They are generally indicators of a certain self-awareness or personal growth or distance travelled. Page 189
prayer is not so much talking to God, but rather listening for the whispers of His presence – not from outside ourselves, but within. It’s kind of the same with the questions that come in to The Red Hand Files. I think they are singularly and collectively trying to tell me something, which may just be ‘I am here’. I think they reflect my own needs. There is an exchange of a sort of essentialness, wherein we attend to each other through a sharing of our collective need to be listened to. Page 190
one of the reasons the project was created was an attempt to find a language to set forth, in words, the travails of grief. Page 191
I do have a strong commitment to the primary impulse, the initial signalling of an idea – what we could call the divine spark. I trust in it. I believe in it. I run with it. Page 192
There is a sense of discovery about it. Things unfold. This place of discomfort and uncertainty and adventure is where an honest, good-faith conversation can happen. It’s all the same thing. Page 192
Grief actively revolves around a point of torture, a moment of realisation, an actual tangible thing. Page 194
There is a responsibility around The Red Hand Files that I had no idea I was getting into. Page 195
in a sense, Andrew was right, because if Arthur hadn’t died, I would not have been doing any of these things. But grief gave me a reckless energy. It afforded me a feeling of invincibility and a total disregard for the outcome, a sort of fearless abandonment to destiny. The worst had happened. Page 197
I can only imagine. So is Arthur a kind of guardian angel? Well, he does protect me, but he is not a guardian angel. Arthur is my son and he died. He exists just beyond my vision and my reason and a whole sea of tears – as a promise, maybe, or a wish. Page 197
This is how I have chosen to live my life – in uncertainty, and by doing so to be open to the divine possibility of things, whether it exists or not. I believe this gives my life, and especially my work, meaning and potential and soul, too, beyond what the rational world has to offer. Page 198
They may well be delusions, but these poetic intimations guide us back to the world. In that respect, they are as real and true as anything else, and perhaps the most beautiful and mysterious things imaginable. Page 199
what I am trying to present is the idea of grief as a gift. Grief as a positive force. Grief that can become, if we allow it its full expression, a defiant, sometimes mutinous energy. Page 200
Ironically, I think the rise of woke culture is akin to a fundamentalist religious impulse. Page 202
Any question where you have to mount an argument and do it in a few paragraphs without coming off as strident or conceited or like you’re pushing an agenda. This is difficult for me, as you know. Page 203
Negative responses take up mental space. They require time and energy they often don’t deserve, time and energy I would rather put elsewhere. Page 204
Well, music is one of the last great spiritual gifts we have that can bring solace to the world. It becomes a sort of duty, in my opinion, to use your music, not for your own aggrandisement, but for the betterment of others. As far as I can see, that is our purpose as artists. The Red Hand Files have come to belong in that tradition – as a small gesture of service, and, maybe, as a form of spiritual sustenance and kindness that may go some small way in helping people with their lives. Page 204
the night it happened feels acutely real and then everything afterwards goes kind of blank. Page 207
It felt like I was walking through treacle, or walking against the wind. Throughout the entire Skeleton Tree session I just felt dead, but I knew if I didn’t do the record then, I never would. Page 211
I was actually much better by then, but I do think, for a time, I lost agency somehow. I think that’s what happens: you essentially become a person who needs someone to tell them what to do. Page 215
I think grief needs to be measured by action. It’s not so much about working on your feelings. Your feelings come and go. They retreat and change and can ultimately surprise you. But you need to put some structure and method in your day, as best you can. I mean, that seems sound advice for any situation. You have to construct a series of actions around your day in order to survive: you exercise, you go down to the sea for a swim, you meditate, you make breakfast for your kid – you do all the small things. Page 216
we are not strong. We survived because we remained together. It is as simple as that. When one crashed, the other stepped up. That is important. Page 217
I don’t know how we got to where we are, because, in truth, I don’t know where that is. Page 218
People are good. I rarely see badness in people; rather, I see layers of suffering. Page 219
Love, that most crucial, counter-intuitive act of all, is the responsibility of each of us. Page 219
I feel the goodness of the world must be experienced to some extent through the mechanism of suffering – the God in the cloud – if the notion of goodness is to hold any kind of truth or real substance. Page 219
Yes, but you learn in time that this is just nonsense. In fact, you learn all sorts of things: that personal chaos is not a necessary condition for creating good art; that the pram in the hallway is as much a source of inspiration as anything else; that being strung out on drugs doesn’t necessarily make you a better artist. These days, that kind of compulsive mania I once had I find almost embarrassing. That said, I do still lose control over certain impulses from time to time. Page 223
It’s not so much the creative impulse itself that is so compelling, but rather doing something that feels challenging and vulnerable and new, whether that is ceramics or a different-sounding record or The Red Hand Files, the In Conversation events, Cave Things, this book, whatever. There is a risk involved that generates a feeling of creative terror, a vertiginous feeling that has the ability to make you feel more alive, as if you are hotwired into the job in hand, where you create, right there, on the edge of disaster. You become vulnerable because you allow yourself to be open to failure, to condemnation, to criticism, but that, as I think the Stoics said, is what gives you creative character. And that feeling of jeopardy can be very seductive. Page 224
Something tells me you’re quite a perfectionist about this kind of stuff. Well, I don’t know about that. I just need things to be done in the right way. Page 225
Ultimately, the figurines are not saying anything, they are not declaring anything, in the same way that all my work for the last six years is not saying anything. It is asking for something. Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen, Carnage, The Red Hand Files, the In Conversation Events, the live shows, even this book we are writing – they are all asking for the same thing. Which is? Absolution. Page 231
Well, in my experience, art does have the ability to save us, in so many different ways. It can act as a point of salvation, because it has the potential to put beauty back into the world. And that in itself is a way of making amends, of reconciling us with the world. Art has the power to redress the balance of things, of our wrongs, of our sins. Page 232
we find too much rehearsing becomes deadening. You need to learn the songs, of course, but then you find that everything changes when you play live, anyway Page 236
a record is never a thing in itself; rather, it’s just one part of a larger experiential event that terminates in a live concert. Page 238
I think art goes some way to reconciling the artist with the world. I guess that’s really what I’m talking about. Music can be a form of active atonement. It can be a way of redressing the balance somehow by explicitly putting good into the world, the best of ourselves. And, of course, that requires the participation of the world. Page 243
I don’t know about you but I find I have to write my ideas down to really know what I think. And, furthermore, I have to say those ideas out loud, or indeed to sing them out loud, to somebody else, before I know if they are valid or meaningful, or not. It’s that relational thing I was talking about. Page 246
We need to be able to exist beyond disagreement. Friendships have to exist beyond that. We need to be able to talk, to make mistakes, to forgive and be forgiven. As far as I can see, forgiveness is an essential component of any good, vibrant friendship – that we extend to each other the great privilege of being allowed to be wrong. One of the clear benefits of conversation is that your position on things can become more nimble and pliant. For me, conversation is also an antidote to dualistic thinking, simply because we are knocking up against another person’s points of view. Something more essential happens between people when they converse. Ultimately, we discover that disagreements frequently aren’t life- threatening, they are just differing perspectives, or, more often than that, colliding virtues. Page 246
Hope is optimism with a broken heart. Page 247
if I look back at my past work from the certainty and conviction of the present, it appears as if it was a series of collapsing ideas that brought me to my current position. And what’s more, the actual point I’m looking back from is no more stable than any of the previous ones – in fact, it’s being shed even as we speak. There’s a slightly sickening, vertiginous feeling in all of this. The sense that the ground is constantly moving beneath your feet? Yes, exactly. So how do you deal with that? Well, I have learned over time that the creation itself, the thing, the what, is not the essential component, really, for the artist. The what almost always seems on some level insufficient. When I look back at the work itself it mostly feels wanting, you know; it could have been better. This is not false humility but fact, and common to most artists, I suspect. Indeed, it is probably how it should be. What matters most is not so much the ‘what’ as the ‘how’ of it all, and I am heartened by the knowledge that, at the very least, I turned up for the job, no matter what was going on at the time. Even if I didn’t really understand what the job was. Page 247
It’s like we are running towards God, but that God’s love is also the wind that is pushing us on, as both the impetus and the destination, and it resides in both the living and the dead. Around and around we go, encountering the same things, again and again, but within this movement things happen that change us, annihilate us, shift our relationship to the world. It is this circular reciprocal motion that grows more essential and affirming and necessary with each turn. Page 248
But in Mark’s version it’s like I was just eating up everyone who came near me and taking what I could from them creatively. Now, that is very much a matter of perspective. One of the criticisms aimed at me by people in the book is that I always needed a collaborator, as if that is some kind of weakness, rather than just a self-evident way of making better art – to be open to the ideas of other people, to be helped by other people. Some people he spoke to saw that as almost vampiric or something, but it’s interesting, because that kind of criticism almost always comes from people who were not engaged in creating art themselves. They were mainly peripheral, perpetual onlookers who know nothing about what it takes to create something of value. And if you were to ask me how I defined myself as an artist, I would say I was a collaborator, then and now. It’s actually one of the things I am most proud of, that I have had sustained productive relationships with people that have ultimately been mutually beneficial. I think most of the people I have worked with would agree. I always do my best to amplify and push to the front these people, you know … well, more or less. Page 90
I think we contain these traumatic memories in the cells of our body, in our blood, in our bones. Page 93
Some take drugs because they love the chaos and disorder; I took heroin because it fed into my need for a conservative and well-ordered life. Page 94
heroin addiction is all right until it’s not. It quickly escalates – very quickly, actually. Chaos is always just around the corner. And these kinds of rock and roll stories may be funny but they obscure a lot of darkness and pain. Page 97
I became a person after my son died. Not part of a person, a more complete person. Page 102
this will happen to everybody at some point – a deconstruction of the known self. It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation. Page 102
I think we both worked out that we could be happy and that happiness was a form of insubordination in the face of, I don’t know, life, I guess. It was a choice. That’s it, a choice, a kind of earned and considered arrangement with the world, to be happy. No one has control over the things that happen to them, but we do have a choice as to how we respond. There was a defiance there, in the face of the world’s indifference and apparent casual cruelty. Page 103
I really don’t think we can not talk about it if we are talking about the creative process. It’s simply part of the whole thing. The creative process is not a part of one’s life but life itself and all that it throws at you. For me, it was like the creative process, if we want to call it that, found its real purpose. Page 104
I write songs is perhaps different from many songwriters. I don’t write continuously. Instead, I’ll put an actual date in my diary for when I will begin writing the next record. And that date is the starting point, the initial action towards making a record.
With songwriting, there are always these little glimmers embedded in all the scrambled nonsense and false starts and failed ideas. They’re buried in there like clues. What happens is that they suddenly present themselves, rise from the page, and begin to hold hands. Not all at once, necessarily, but quite rapidly, and then you start to get a creative momentum, a kind of collecting together of information that moves towards the basic framing of a song. Page 109
Travelling the world but seeing none of it! Page 110
you don’t want to then engage in some parallel occupation that makes you feel even worse, that picks away at your self-regard, makes you feel smaller or emptier or insignificant or a failure, or plunges you into a dark place that you have to climb back out of, or makes you cry, or makes you despair. Songwriting does that. Songwriting would be essentially the last straw. It’s just too fucking hard. So you write a book instead, or a screenplay, or an epic poem, or design a T-shirt, or something. Page 111
So thank God, quite literally, for music, because it’s one of the last remaining places, beyond raw nature, that people can feel awed by something happening in real time, that feeling of reverence and wonder. Page 112
Being on stage for me was just an amplification of the general way of life I was living at the time, but it wasn’t a great work ethic. In the end, after many years, I settled for chaos in the mind, order in the workspace. Chaos in the mind? That’s not something I associate with you these days. I mean chaos as a bounty of competing ideas racing around in your head. Page 114
it felt like there was a kind of radical intimacy taking place. Page 115
I could do it on my own, but I don’t think I’d do it nearly as well. The people I’ve worked with have brought a huge amount to the table. That began with Mick, and then Rowland came along with his extraordinary guitar playing and musical inventiveness. Page 116
On some level it’s just the nature of the beast, I guess. It is what I call the corrosive power of collaboration. Collaborations that work are the most glorious and productive of things. But if the collaboration is not attended to properly, with care and respect, it can eat away at itself. Page 119
We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time, frantically trying to build its sense of self – This is me! Here I am! – in any way that it can. But then time and life come along, and smash that sense of self into a million pieces. And then comes the reassembled self, the self you have to put back together. You no longer have to devote time to finding out what you are, you are just free to be whatever you want to be, unimpeded by the incessant needs of others. You somehow grow into the fullness of your humanity, form your own character, become a proper person – I don’t know, someone who has become a part of things, not someone separated from or at odds with the world. Page 121
The idea of encroaching mortality isn’t a concern – the idea of death as a sort of endgame, something separate, waiting down the line. It doesn’t feel like that to me. I guess I feel, day to day, and in a profound way, enmeshed in death, as if it is a clear and present state of being that manifests itself in a sort of vitality. I feel a certain receptivity to its positive influence or presence. Page 124
Susie is my wife, but also a collaborator. Page 126
You know the film I just made of ‘Idiot Prayer’, the solo show I did at Alexandra Palace during lockdown? Well, it was originally called ‘An Evening with Nick Cave’. That was what the team and I had always called it, and it had just sort of stuck, but when Susie found out that’s what it was called, her reaction was, ‘Wow! Could you even find a more boring title?’ So, I’m like, ‘Well, Jesus, babe, that’s just what it’s called! I can’t fucking change it now!’ And she’s like, ‘Okay, but I’m just saying it’s boring.’ So, after a while, I say, ‘Okay, what about “Idiot Prayer” then?’ And she’s like, ‘There you go.’ That sort of thing happens a lot. So a good result, but exasperating at the time. Page 126
Most of the time, I just don’t solicit other people’s opinions if can help it, unless of course I know their opinion is going to be the same as mine. I prefer to go with the flow, provided it’s my flow, Page 127
What I’m trying to say is that I am not just influenced by her, but emboldened by her. Page 128
And you’re right. She is astute to say that about my songs – ‘I always seem to be walking in and out of them’ – because it’s true; I don’t ever sit down with the intention of writing a song about Susie. It’s more that, when I am in that shadowy creative flow, I find it difficult to maintain my own form, so welded am I into her being. I find myself adopting her perspective – flipping from one to the other. A therapist would have a field day with this! Page 128
Sometimes I am trying to manage several voices in my songs – my voice, Susie’s voice and our shared voice, and of course the subjective or observational voice. Page 129
She doesn’t sit down and write the lyrics to a song with me, because there is no room in the process for her, or anyone else, for that matter. And I don’t physically help her design her dresses, because she has her own highly distinctive ideas about beauty and needs to get in touch with that. Page 129
I find not knowing about something in art, that kind of adventuring innocence, whether it is songwriting, scriptwriting, dress designing, score work, sculpture or any other thing, a distinct advantage much of the time. At least initially, anyway, because you enter into the project naïve to the potentially destabilising and corrosive aspects of it. You just blunder in and give it a go. Page 130
In the case of the Charlie Poole song, the lost, cuckolded man moving from house to house, retelling his tale of woe, generates a kind of narrative push to the song itself. Almost like the rhythm of the train tracks under a Johnny Cash song. It’s very beautiful. Page 138
I think we probably find the things that we love early on, and never stray too far from them. I read somewhere that there is something that happens within the brain between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three that makes us super-receptive, particularly to music, and that’s why we attach ourselves so strongly to pieces of music from that period of our lives. That certainly applies to me. To be honest, I simply don’t have the same attachment to music now, or maybe I don’t have the same fundamental need for it as I had back then. Even when I find something that completely blows my mind, there’s an almost academic remove. I don’t have the urge to play it over and over. Page 140
We have a kind of duty to remain engaged. There are a few lines towards the end of ‘Lavender Fields’ that are about that. Once I was running with my friends All of them busy with their pens But the lavender grew rare What happened to them? Page 142
We have a kind of duty to remain engaged. There are a few lines towards the end of ‘Lavender Fields’ that are about that. Once I was running with my friends All of them busy with their pens But the lavender grew rare What happened to them? Page 142
To some degree I feel I have the distinct advantage of having made a long lifetime of terrible mistakes. Like most old people, I have been hurt more, I have suffered more, and I have fucked up more. I have also overcome things that are incomprehensible to younger people. I have experienced more by virtue of being in the world for a really long time. Older people may be broken down, but we are also vast repositories of experience and, if we have been paying attention to world, a certain amount of wisdom, too. This has value. It is worth something. Page 143
thinking about that some more, too, and I was reminded of that beautiful notion of William Blake’s – of Jesus being the imagination. And also that startling image from Matthew 27: ‘Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, who remain standing there in front of the tomb.’ That always makes me think of what it’s like to experience the birth of a creative idea; it’s as if you are waiting for the Christ to appear, to step from the tomb, and reveal Himself. That’s quite an analogy. Do you see songwriting at its best as a kind of creative self-revelation? Yes, and in order for it to happen, you have to be patient. You must have faith. And often you must do the waiting alone. You have to have forbearance, a patient self-control and a tolerance of the process itself. And also an alertness. It is easy to lose one’s nerve, to run away like the apostles did, to go and do something else, but we do that at our peril. That’s when you risk missing the astonishing idea, the Jesus idea. Page 144
the residual idea that pretends to be the astonishing idea. As an artist, you really need to constantly be on the lookout for that. I would say, ‘Beware the residual idea!’ Page 144
Exactly. I tend to find that when I first sit down to write new songs there is a kind of initial flurry of words that appears quite effortlessly. They seem to be right there, at hand, so there is a cosiness about them, a comfortableness. And because they aren’t too bad, really, you immediately start thinking, this is all going to be easy. But these are the deceiving ideas, the residual ideas, the unused remnants of the last record that are still lurking about. They’re like the muck in the pipes, and they have to be flushed out to make room for the new idea, the astonishing idea. I think a lot of musicians deal in residual ideas, because they’re seduced by the comfortable and the familiar. For me, that’s a big mistake, although I can understand the temptation to create something reassuringly familiar. And, in a way, the whole industry is set up to cater to that – to the well-known or second-hand idea. Page 144
Exactly. I tend to find that when I first sit down to write new songs there is a kind of initial flurry of words that appears quite effortlessly. They seem to be right there, at hand, so there is a cosiness about them, a comfortableness. And because they aren’t too bad, really, you immediately start thinking, this is all going to be easy. But these are the deceiving ideas, the residual ideas, the unused remnants of the last record that are still lurking about. They’re like the muck in the pipes, and they have to be flushed out to make room for the new idea, the astonishing idea. I think a lot of musicians deal in residual ideas, because they’re seduced by the comfortable and the familiar. For me, that’s a big mistake, although I can understand the temptation to create something reassuringly familiar. And, in a way, the whole industry is set up to cater to that – to the well-known or second-hand idea. Page 144
I think music can have a way of influencing the heart in a righteous way that enables us to do better, to be better. Especially when the songs get played live. Collectively, we can experience the music actually improving the condition of the listener. I see it all the time. I experience it myself as well. It’s a very real thing. Page 146
In the collective moment of a performance, people are united by the music. That, in itself, has a moral force. Page 146
It requires a certain amount of nerve to rip it all up and start again with something that feels new and, therefore, dangerous. For a start, your brain does not want to go there and it’s telling you that. It’s challenging to write away from the known and the familiar. Page 147
What I’m saying is that you can’t get to that truly creative place unless you find the dangerous idea. And, once again, that’s like standing at the mouth of the tomb, in vigil, waiting for the shock of the risen Christ, the shock of the imagination, the astonishing idea. Page 147
I think the old become not just repositories of lived experience, but of the dead, too. Page 148
I think these absences do something to those of us who remain behind. We are like haunted houses, in a way, and our absences can even transform us so that we feel a quiet but urgent love for those who remain, a tenderness to all of humanity, as well as an earned understanding that our time is finite. Page 148
always myself – even when it’s a character it’s just me in disguise. Page 150
I have absolutely no idea why I told you that story. You actually are like a therapist. Page 151
It’s all in the performing – performing in front of an audience. That’s when the fullness of the songs presents itself. I think the audience draws forth the true intent of the songs. Not that the recorded versions are lesser forms, mind. I actually prefer original recordings to live ones as something to casually listen to. They’re less histrionic, less demanding, but the live versions of the songs are much more experiential and communal. Page 152
blew it. We squandered it. Early on, many of us felt that a chance was presented to us, as a civilisation, to put aside our vanities, grievances and divisions, our hubris, our callous disregard for each other, and come together around a common enemy. Our shared predicament was a gift that could potentially have transformed the world into something extraordinary. To our shame this didn’t happen. The Right got scarier, the Left got crazier, and our already fractured civilisation atomised into something that resembled a collective lunacy. For many, this has been followed by a weariness, an ebbing away of our strength and resolve and a dwindling belief in the common good. Many people’s mental health has suffered as a consequence. Page 154
Yes, that’s right, the work is a form of salvation. Page 156
Twitter is really just a factory that churns out arseholes. Page 165
The Red Hand Files brought about a significant change in my life. For better or for worse, they became the channel that allowed me to step outside my own expectations of what it was to be a rock singer, or whatever it is that I am. They freed me from myself. Page 166
It all comes down to seeing, essentially, to the visual nature of things. That is the way I’ve experienced the world since childhood. And that is the way I write songs – as a series of highly visual images, often violent, mostly sorrowful. Warren, on the other hand, hears the world. Page 167
I kind of loved everything back then, especially painting. Van Gogh, El Greco, Goya, Munch, the nudes of Renoir. I loved Piero della Francesca and Stefan Lochner and Rodin and Donatello. Titian, too, and Rubens. Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele Page 171
For me, it has always been about the nature of the human soul rather than the problems of the society we live in. Page 173
Insofar as the rules that govern our lives no longer apply. I am very familiar with this feeling. It is the compensatory gift at the heart of grief. The usual precepts collapse under the weight of the calamity: the terrible demands that we place upon ourselves; our own internal judging voice; the endless expectations and opinions of others. They suddenly become less important and there is a wonderful freedom in that as well. Page 174
But, you know, I feel that the song addresses the idea that there is a bottomless rage out there that has been animated somehow and is now mutually sustaining – each side fuelling the other. The cosy arrangement that the Left and the Right have traditionally had has turned into something else entirely. It constantly feels like things are going to blow. Page 178
So you learn to make peace with the idea of death as best you can. Or rather you reconcile yourself to the acute jeopardy of life, and you do this by acknowledging the value in things, the precious nature of things, and savouring the time we have together in this world. Page 182
However, God cannot be defended, hence we must. Page 186
I can’t imagine there is anyone with no regrets, unless they are leading extraordinarily unexamined lives, or they are young, which often amounts to much the same thing. So, yes, I have my regrets. Not that regrets in themselves are bad things, of course. They are generally indicators of a certain self-awareness or personal growth or distance travelled. Page 189
prayer is not so much talking to God, but rather listening for the whispers of His presence – not from outside ourselves, but within. It’s kind of the same with the questions that come in to The Red Hand Files. I think they are singularly and collectively trying to tell me something, which may just be ‘I am here’. I think they reflect my own needs. There is an exchange of a sort of essentialness, wherein we attend to each other through a sharing of our collective need to be listened to. Page 190
one of the reasons the project was created was an attempt to find a language to set forth, in words, the travails of grief. Page 191
I do have a strong commitment to the primary impulse, the initial signalling of an idea – what we could call the divine spark. I trust in it. I believe in it. I run with it. Page 192
There is a sense of discovery about it. Things unfold. This place of discomfort and uncertainty and adventure is where an honest, good-faith conversation can happen. It’s all the same thing. Page 192
Grief actively revolves around a point of torture, a moment of realisation, an actual tangible thing. Page 194
There is a responsibility around The Red Hand Files that I had no idea I was getting into. Page 195
in a sense, Andrew was right, because if Arthur hadn’t died, I would not have been doing any of these things. But grief gave me a reckless energy. It afforded me a feeling of invincibility and a total disregard for the outcome, a sort of fearless abandonment to destiny. The worst had happened. Page 197
I can only imagine. So is Arthur a kind of guardian angel? Well, he does protect me, but he is not a guardian angel. Arthur is my son and he died. He exists just beyond my vision and my reason and a whole sea of tears – as a promise, maybe, or a wish. Page 197
This is how I have chosen to live my life – in uncertainty, and by doing so to be open to the divine possibility of things, whether it exists or not. I believe this gives my life, and especially my work, meaning and potential and soul, too, beyond what the rational world has to offer. Page 198
They may well be delusions, but these poetic intimations guide us back to the world. In that respect, they are as real and true as anything else, and perhaps the most beautiful and mysterious things imaginable. Page 199
what I am trying to present is the idea of grief as a gift. Grief as a positive force. Grief that can become, if we allow it its full expression, a defiant, sometimes mutinous energy. Page 200
Ironically, I think the rise of woke culture is akin to a fundamentalist religious impulse. Page 202
Any question where you have to mount an argument and do it in a few paragraphs without coming off as strident or conceited or like you’re pushing an agenda. This is difficult for me, as you know. Page 203
Negative responses take up mental space. They require time and energy they often don’t deserve, time and energy I would rather put elsewhere. Page 204
Well, music is one of the last great spiritual gifts we have that can bring solace to the world. It becomes a sort of duty, in my opinion, to use your music, not for your own aggrandisement, but for the betterment of others. As far as I can see, that is our purpose as artists. The Red Hand Files have come to belong in that tradition – as a small gesture of service, and, maybe, as a form of spiritual sustenance and kindness that may go some small way in helping people with their lives. Page 204
the night it happened feels acutely real and then everything afterwards goes kind of blank. Page 207
It felt like I was walking through treacle, or walking against the wind. Throughout the entire Skeleton Tree session I just felt dead, but I knew if I didn’t do the record then, I never would. Page 211
I was actually much better by then, but I do think, for a time, I lost agency somehow. I think that’s what happens: you essentially become a person who needs someone to tell them what to do. Page 215
I think grief needs to be measured by action. It’s not so much about working on your feelings. Your feelings come and go. They retreat and change and can ultimately surprise you. But you need to put some structure and method in your day, as best you can. I mean, that seems sound advice for any situation. You have to construct a series of actions around your day in order to survive: you exercise, you go down to the sea for a swim, you meditate, you make breakfast for your kid – you do all the small things. Page 216
we are not strong. We survived because we remained together. It is as simple as that. When one crashed, the other stepped up. That is important. Page 217
I don’t know how we got to where we are, because, in truth, I don’t know where that is. Page 218
People are good. I rarely see badness in people; rather, I see layers of suffering. Page 219
Love, that most crucial, counter-intuitive act of all, is the responsibility of each of us. Page 219
I feel the goodness of the world must be experienced to some extent through the mechanism of suffering – the God in the cloud – if the notion of goodness is to hold any kind of truth or real substance. Page 219
Yes, but you learn in time that this is just nonsense. In fact, you learn all sorts of things: that personal chaos is not a necessary condition for creating good art; that the pram in the hallway is as much a source of inspiration as anything else; that being strung out on drugs doesn’t necessarily make you a better artist. These days, that kind of compulsive mania I once had I find almost embarrassing. That said, I do still lose control over certain impulses from time to time. Page 223
It’s not so much the creative impulse itself that is so compelling, but rather doing something that feels challenging and vulnerable and new, whether that is ceramics or a different-sounding record or The Red Hand Files, the In Conversation events, Cave Things, this book, whatever. There is a risk involved that generates a feeling of creative terror, a vertiginous feeling that has the ability to make you feel more alive, as if you are hotwired into the job in hand, where you create, right there, on the edge of disaster. You become vulnerable because you allow yourself to be open to failure, to condemnation, to criticism, but that, as I think the Stoics said, is what gives you creative character. And that feeling of jeopardy can be very seductive. Page 224
Something tells me you’re quite a perfectionist about this kind of stuff. Well, I don’t know about that. I just need things to be done in the right way. Page 225
Ultimately, the figurines are not saying anything, they are not declaring anything, in the same way that all my work for the last six years is not saying anything. It is asking for something. Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen, Carnage, The Red Hand Files, the In Conversation Events, the live shows, even this book we are writing – they are all asking for the same thing. Which is? Absolution. Page 231
Well, in my experience, art does have the ability to save us, in so many different ways. It can act as a point of salvation, because it has the potential to put beauty back into the world. And that in itself is a way of making amends, of reconciling us with the world. Art has the power to redress the balance of things, of our wrongs, of our sins. Page 232
we find too much rehearsing becomes deadening. You need to learn the songs, of course, but then you find that everything changes when you play live, anyway Page 236
a record is never a thing in itself; rather, it’s just one part of a larger experiential event that terminates in a live concert. Page 238
I think art goes some way to reconciling the artist with the world. I guess that’s really what I’m talking about. Music can be a form of active atonement. It can be a way of redressing the balance somehow by explicitly putting good into the world, the best of ourselves. And, of course, that requires the participation of the world. Page 243
I don’t know about you but I find I have to write my ideas down to really know what I think. And, furthermore, I have to say those ideas out loud, or indeed to sing them out loud, to somebody else, before I know if they are valid or meaningful, or not. It’s that relational thing I was talking about. Page 246
We need to be able to exist beyond disagreement. Friendships have to exist beyond that. We need to be able to talk, to make mistakes, to forgive and be forgiven. As far as I can see, forgiveness is an essential component of any good, vibrant friendship – that we extend to each other the great privilege of being allowed to be wrong. One of the clear benefits of conversation is that your position on things can become more nimble and pliant. For me, conversation is also an antidote to dualistic thinking, simply because we are knocking up against another person’s points of view. Something more essential happens between people when they converse. Ultimately, we discover that disagreements frequently aren’t life- threatening, they are just differing perspectives, or, more often than that, colliding virtues. Page 246
Hope is optimism with a broken heart. Page 247
if I look back at my past work from the certainty and conviction of the present, it appears as if it was a series of collapsing ideas that brought me to my current position. And what’s more, the actual point I’m looking back from is no more stable than any of the previous ones – in fact, it’s being shed even as we speak. There’s a slightly sickening, vertiginous feeling in all of this. The sense that the ground is constantly moving beneath your feet? Yes, exactly. So how do you deal with that? Well, I have learned over time that the creation itself, the thing, the what, is not the essential component, really, for the artist. The what almost always seems on some level insufficient. When I look back at the work itself it mostly feels wanting, you know; it could have been better. This is not false humility but fact, and common to most artists, I suspect. Indeed, it is probably how it should be. What matters most is not so much the ‘what’ as the ‘how’ of it all, and I am heartened by the knowledge that, at the very least, I turned up for the job, no matter what was going on at the time. Even if I didn’t really understand what the job was. Page 247
It’s like we are running towards God, but that God’s love is also the wind that is pushing us on, as both the impetus and the destination, and it resides in both the living and the dead. Around and around we go, encountering the same things, again and again, but within this movement things happen that change us, annihilate us, shift our relationship to the world. It is this circular reciprocal motion that grows more essential and affirming and necessary with each turn. Page 248
But definitely, something is going on that has temporarily shut down our ability to access a sense of the timeless in order to construct stable notions of ourselves in relation to it. For the time being, we seem to be eternity blind, unable to see past the sound and fury of reboots and reruns of our collective memories.
Tom Critchlow talks about going beyond the right answer to instead positing the ‘next most useful thing’.
I’ve been using this phrase “the next most useful thing” as a guiding light for my consulting work – I’m obsessed with being useful not just right. I’ve always rejected the fancy presentation in favor of the next most useful thing, and I simply took my eye off the ball with this one. I’m not even sure the client views this project as a real disappointment, there was still some value in it, but I’m mad at myself personally for this one. A good reminder not to take your eye off the ball. And to push your clients beyond what they tell you the right answer is.
This reminds me about Donald Winnicott’s notion of ‘good enough mother’.
Winnicott thought that the “good enough mother” starts out with an almost complete adaptation to her baby’s needs. She is entirely devoted to the baby and quickly sees to his every need. She sacrifices her own sleep and her own needs to fulfill the needs of her infant.
As time goes by, however, the mother allows the infant to experience small amounts of frustration. She is empathetic and caring but does not immediately rush to the baby’s every cry. Of course, at first the time-limit to this frustration must be very short. She may allow the baby to cry for a few minutes before her nighttime feeding, but only for a few minutes. She is not “perfect” but she is “good enough” in that the child only feels a slight amount of frustration.
So often when developing ideas, it can be easy to get caught up with the ideal, rather than coming up with an idea that responds to the situation at hand.
I was inspired to reread Thomas More’s Utopia after reading Dave Eggers’ The Every. A part of me wondered if it was how I remembered it from twenty years ago. It was how I remembered it, but then I read Susan Bruce’s introduction to Three Early Modern Utopias and I discovered that there was much more to More’s text than I appreciated.
Bruce explores the many ways More’s text has been interpreted over time:
The text has generated diametrically opposed interpretations from its critics, ranging from the dubious claim that Utopia describes a real historical community to the assertion that it is only a literary game; and from readings which maintain that it is a vision of an ideal Catholic society to those which see it as a proto-Communist text.
Discusses utopian texts in general, she makes the connection between the fictional creations and the exploration of the New World. Although More’s text is sometimes construed as an ideal, it is not clear that this is what More was trying to achieve. This is something Terry Eagleton captures in his reflection on utopias:
Not all More’s proposals would delight the heart of Jeremy Corbyn. The perfection of his utopia is not tarnished in his view by the fact that it contains slaves. On certain festive days wives would fall down at their husbands’ feet, confessing that they have performed some domestic duty negligently. Adultery would be punished by the strictest form of slavery. One should recall that More, far from being the liberal-cum-existentialist portrayed in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, showed not the slightest compunction in torturing and executing heretics. In choosing one’s mate, men should be allowed to see their prospective wives naked, since who wants goods that aren’t on show? Feminists, however, should note that women would enjoy the same prerogative. Brothels would be abolished, but so would alehouses. There would be no lawyers (a generous-hearted proposal, since More was one himself), but no tolerance for those who waste time, either.
The other worldliness of the utopias served as a critique of the dominant ideology, often They often capturing what these societies are not. More’s Utopia is probably best appreciated as a provocation written to promote further debate.
With such a massive tome on offer, though, Nightingale feared that this most vital conclusion might be overlooked. So she developed a series of charts meant to make it even clearer to the reader. Her most famous graph, displayed at the top of this article, shows the number of soldier deaths per month from various causes. Each pie slice represents a different month, from April 1854 through March 1856, and each color stands for a different cause of death. It takes just a quick glance to achieve the two main takeaways: that disease, colored blue, killed far more soldiers than either “wounds” (red) or “other” (black), and that it was reduced greatly in 1855.
Celebrating the birth of Florence Nightingale, Cara Giaimo discusses her impact in regards to the spread of ideas, not just as the ‘Lady with the Lamp’. After returning from Crimea, Nightingale spent two years putting together her notes and data. Fearing that the conclusions might be lost in the length of the report, she developed a series of infographics, some of which she even leaked to the press.
It is interesting considering this in light of the modern world where all information is presented to the press using such visuals and then the scientific community. I wonder if it would have still been lost in the noise?
Innovation work should start with narrative. Create a perspective on the world and from there develop a set of research / data / prototypes / experiments that all ladder back to your narrative.
This narrative-first approach to innovation feels designed for a professional world that is increasingly a “space of flows”.
Of course, it’s harder. Because most innovation teams don’t have a perspective on the world. They don’t have a thesis or core insight about how the world is changing or where things are headed. Instead they get obsessed with new shiny things.
So the lesson is: Treasure your long hunches. Gather wool slowly, and patiently. Keep lots of notes about things you’re learning and thinking about, and don’t worry if you feel like you’re being digressive. If you find yourself reading up on something that seems like a weird side-distraction, let yourself go there. It might be your brain working slowly — very slowly — on a hunch that won’t reveal itself for another ten years.
But when it does, it’ll be great.
Clive Thompson reflects upon the importance of slow hunches. He traces his journey from reading Oliver Sack’s discussion of proprioception to the recognition that Twitter is an example of social proprioception. Thompson highlights the importance of collecting ideas and keeping a commonplace book.
There’s a great bit in Mel Brooks’ memoir All About Me about how to deal with bosses with bad ideas: “Always agree with them, but never do a thing they say.”
I, like Luhmann, see writing as integral to complex thinking.4 Therefor, my goal in keeping a zettelkasten is to link ideas and turn these links into essays, blog posts, books, and content for my newsletter. Writing is, to use Karl Weick’s term, an act of sensemaking. A generic note storing system—were it sentient enough to have feelings—would not care if you made sense of the way your notes interacted or if you turned that sense into a book. But, a zettelkasten—with equal sentience—does. A zettelkasten “cares” that you connect your ideas and find ways to express them, because doing brings life to you, your creative work, and the zettelkasten itself.
What’s the best way to work your way through the back catalog of an artist you love?
I see at least two options for such time-traveling:
Chronological or reverse-chronological. Starting at the beginning and moving forward, or starting with the artist’s most recent work and moving backwards.
Zigging and zagging. Starting with your favorite “hot spot” and working outwards, leaping and jumping or skipping to what seems interesting.
Words often get in the way of creativity so it’s no surprise that the word “idea” often gets in the way of ideas.
1. We use the word “idea” to describe thoughts and suggestions. “I know this is heteronormative of me but I have an idea: let’s eat kimchi soondubu at Food Gallery 32 in Koreatown for lunch.”
2. We use the word “idea” to describe new concepts. “I have an idea — it’s a business where we turn memes into bath products – Dank Tank.”
3. We use the word “idea” when someone says something stupid. “You have no idea.” That’s a mean use of the word. Don’t be mean. The world doesn’t need it.
If we focus on the first two examples, the word “idea” telegraphs that something new is coming. And if you can pause on your Internet memes about whether anything is ever new (I’ll raise you post-modernism and ask if anything is ever real), what we now want to do is distinguish between the way we use “idea” as industry jargon and the way we use “idea” where we’re in casual mode.
Ideas are thoughts but not all thoughts are “ideas.” Here’s an example of the use of the word “idea” in an agency setting: “I have an idea — let’s do something with augmented reality or Blockchain or make a special lens.” This isn’t wrong; it’s sloppy.
,What’s an idea? What sorts of ideas are there? And how to explain them once you have them?
Mark Pollard unpacks the idea of an idea by demonstrating how to unpack an idea. This reminds me of Ewan McIntosh’s book, How To Come Up With Great Ideas and Actually Make Them Happen.
Do you feel lost? Alone? Powerless in the face of forces beyond your control? Timothy Morton can help—if you’re ready to have your reality blown apart.
To David Graeber, it was a matter of plain fact that things did not have to be the way they were. Graeber was an anthropologist, which meant it was his job to study other ways of living. “I’m interested in anthropology because I’m interested in human possibilities,” he once explained. Graeber was also an anarchist, “and in a way,” he went on, “there’s always been an affinity between anthropology and anarchism, simply because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible. There’s been plenty of them.” A better world was not assured, but it was possible — and anyway, as Graeber put it in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, “since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify and reproduce the mess we have today?”
With the release of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Molly Fischer digs into the life and thinking of David Graeber. One of the interesting things for me was that Graeber achieved what he did, whether it be his writing or correspondence, by only slept for five hours a night.
In Graeber’s classroom, such questions of status had little weight. Even the big-name theorists he discussed — in Graeber’s telling, “they were just dudes,” said Durba Chattaraj. One of his Ph.D. students at Yale, she remembers lectures speckled with the personal foibles of the greats. Apart from the entertainment value, there was a message: These thinkers “were smart, but they were doing something that anybody can do if they read enough and think hard enough, which is creating theories about the world around you.”
It’s great starting a project when you’re limited to these instruments and limited to this scale, and you’re working out what can you do with it rather than just, you know, everything being possible. I like to know what I can’t do and then work inside that.
Once you start grasping how deeply we are products of our time, you can almost invert the idea of genius. Maybe the genius isn’t so much in the inventor as in the age. When an idea’s time is ripe, maybe that idea is just gonna happen: The voltage is so strong it’ll course through several different people at once.
One of the most important Samuel Beckett documents is Tom F. Driver’s interview with “Beckett by the Madeleine” in which Beckett stressed the distress, the mess in the world today, and dismissed any overt religious interpretation of Waiting for Godot. This text is reproduced from: Stanley A. Clayes, ed., Drama and Discussion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 604-7. Diver’s interview was originally published in Columbia University Forum 4 (Summer 1961): 21-25.
In an interview with Tom F. Driver, Samuel Beckett talks about the importance of finding the right form to capture the chaos:
What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artists now.
Wouter Groeneveld
Venkatesh Rao
Steph Smith