Earlier this year, I devoured Faith, Hope and Carnage, which is essentially a book-length interview between musician Nick Cave and journalist Sean O’Hagan. The exchange printed on its back cover is what made me buy it when I saw it in Barnes & Noble:
Nick Cave: We may shed many skins, but we are essentially the same damn snake.
Sean O’Hagan: But surely your outlook is entirely different now?
NC: Well, the young Nick Cave could afford to hold the world in some form of disdain because he had no idea of what was coming down the line. I can see now that this disdain or contempt for the world was a kind of luxury or indulgece, even a vanity. He had no notion of the preciousness of life — the fragility. He had no idea how difficult, but essential, it is to love the world and to treat the world with mercy.
I’ve been through some shit the past few years. That’s all I’ll say about the past few years. And really, the shit of the past few years began with shit over many years prior. But the past few years have burned down everything I knew about life and forced me to keep sifting even after that, finding a way of living that makes me feel healthy instead of just living the way I’ve been taught to live by one person or another.
There have been times when this has filled me with that disdain Cave talks about up there.
But I don’t want to keep living like that, either. Living like that feels like living like a smoker puffing down a pack a day. You can’t breathe when you fill yourself with disdain. Acknowledge problems in life and deal with them, but don’t let them suffocate you.
That’s why a letter Cave wrote on his website, The Red Hand Files, back in February continues to play on loop in my head.
Cave uses the website to respond to fans who write in with questions. The letter on loop in my head is this one, in response to 13-year-old Ruben from Melbourne, Australia.
Ruben asks:
In a world ridden with so much hate, and disconnect; How do I live life to its absolute fullest, and not waste my potential? Especially as a creative? Also, what is a way to spiritually enrich myself? In general, and in my creative work.
Cave responds:
“When I read this question, my initial thought was that the kid who wrote this has nothing to worry about, they’re going to be all right. Ruben, you are very smart, you are engaged with the world and I’m not sure what your creative interests are, but you can certainly already write. Not only that, you are also reaching out for answers. At thirteen, this is all brilliant! Luckily for you, Ruben, I have some! So here goes!
Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts — be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential.
Absorb yourself into the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defense, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude. A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world — that will be you, my young friend, the earth shaking at your feet.
Love, Nick”
When I look back on the last few years, I see how despite all the disdain and pain I was carrying — and am still weeding out of my system — I see how time and time again, I threw myself into one form of art after another.
I never wanted to live in disdain or hatred and I turned to movies, music, books, and art as a way to escape it and then process it and then move forward from it. It didn’t feel like a conscious decision. My soul need something and that’s where it kept going.
I believe this can be true for anyone in life who turns to the things that mean the most to them when life feels its worst.
This reminds of me a video I saw once that taught a powerful lesson. I can’t find it now or I would link to it. But I remember it: someone fills a glass with water and then dumps dirt in it. First they spend a lot of time trying to scoop out the dirt. Then, finally, they simply pour new water into the glass of water filled with dirt. In time, the new, clean water forces out the dirt, and in a much smoother and less tedious and time-consuming process than simply trying to scoop out every bit of dirt.
Instead of wasting time and energy focused on the dirt and getting it out of the water, they just poured more water into the dirty water until eventually, most of the dirt was gone anyway.
That’s what I think our art can do for our souls when life gets kind of fucked up.
I think we all possess in our souls an art that sustains our soul when our human struggles. This can be writing, making music, painting. It can also be cooking, or cleaning, or building a business. It can be running a household. It can be playing taxi service to your children so they may experience all of life you can possibly give them while they’re little. It can be playing cards with your kids in your bed after a long day’s work. It can be waking up before dawn to go to the gym and get in a couple hours’ of pickup hoops.
It can be travel or reading or — whatever that Thing is that you feel that makes your soul feel alive. And the beautiful stuff that Cave mentions in his letter to Ruben — that is the stuff that feeds it.
This art of ours is our escape, in every sense of the word.
It takes us away from our problems.
Or it shows us a way forward from them.
Or sometimes both.
This echoes one of my favorite quotes, from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried:
“This, too, is true: Stories can save us.”
I love the juxtaposition, the narrative arc, between Faith, Hope and Carnage’s back cover, and the letter that Cave wrote to young Ruben.
People like Cave, and O’Brien — the artists who show the world the evolution of their lives and souls, who reveal their pain and their ways of coping with it, navigating it, healing it — these are the people I love and trust, at least as much as I do anyone in this world.
They remind me of a quote by Lao Tzu:
“He who obtains has little. He who scatters has much.”
The last few years, I’ve spent much of my time obtaining.
I’ve devoured books and music and movies and art and experience.
I still am.
But now, I also want to scatter.
This newsletter will become a way for me to do that.
I’ve always relied on editors, on feedback, on approval. And it’s good, of course, to have people you trust to make your work better help you make your work better. But it’s also good to trust yourself once in a while, too. I’ve always sucked at that.
But I think it’s okay for me to start to scatter, at least a little.
I gotta at least try, man.
Life ain’t perfect, not by a long shot. But I don’t plan to write about the hard imperfections of my life here. I don’t think I’m that kind of writer, the confessional kind that spills the contents of his/her/their life all over the page for others’ benefit. I think maybe I’m not brave enough. Or maybe I’m just too tired for the drama being that honest about my life would bring. Either way, I’ve found that it’s healthiest for me to channel all of that into fiction. (I am writing fiction now, though. I always have, then I quit for a while, now I’m trying it again. It feels damn good.)
(And yes, I appreciate the irony of this, since I’ve spent much of my career as a journalist convincing others to let me write about all their lives’ hard imperfections.)
That said — I will write here about the things that help me through.
I’ll write about the art that helps me escape, in every sense of the word.
I’ll write about the figurative clean water that I can pour into my glass.
I’ll write about the beautiful stuff.