Nick Cave on Creativity as a Tool for Self-Forgiveness and the Courage of Hope in Cynical Times – The Marginalian

The world reveals itself through our engagement with it – a fact as true to the physics concept of “It for Bit” as it is to the Dzogchen concept of Tibetan Buddhism.

It is a basic fact of our human experience.

All criticism is a denial of that.

All hope is respect.

This awareness is everywhere Faith, Hope and Adventures (public library) – Nick Cave's annual interview with journalist turned friend Seán O'Hagan.

Two decades after Rebecca Solnit's epochal Trust in the Darknessin its clear and illuminating case for our reasons for fighting pessimism, Cave – who has long championed the productive value of hope – shows:

I don't have time to criticize. It feels so lost at this point.

[…]

I am always cautiously optimistic. I think if we can move beyond anxiety and fear and despair, there is promise of something changing not just culturally, but spiritually, too. I feel that the power in the air, or maybe some kind of concern and communication underground, a strong and united movement that leads to a more sensitive and improved existence… It seems possible – even if against the criminal incompetence of our governments, the health of the sick planet, the division that is everywhere, the shocking lack of mercy and forgiveness, when so many people around the world seem to hold back. anyway, i have hope. Collective grief can bring great change, a kind of spiritual transformation, and a great opportunity. We can seize this opportunity, or not play it and let it pass us by. I hope it's the first. I feel that there is a readiness for that, despite what we are led to believe.

After a long time looking at the relationship between cynicism and optimism, I often say that cynics – the people most worthy of pity – are optimists with broken hearts. There is both a lovely juxtaposition and a lovely twist of these ideas in Nick Cave's assertion that “hope is hope with a broken heart,” which seems to me like a well-thrown javelin in our endless debate over semantics in trying to distinguish between hope and hope rather than real and useful meaning. But, of course, we all arrive at these ideas locked in our own frame of reference, filled with our own sense of self, so that no two images of a state of mind or state of mind can be exactly the same.

What is certain is that no matter what we call this open-hearted longing for progress, under it flows the constant danger of always being unmet – all determination is always overwhelmed by a state of sad disappointment, and nothing is so courageous as reaching from the real to the right.

And yet this longing comes from our basic nature. To live with it and live up to it is the highest tribute we can pay, and should pay, to the unclaimed gift of life.

Addressing the “necessary and urgent need to love life with each other, despite the common brutality of the world,” Cave notes:

In some ways my work has become an open rejection of criticism and indifference. I don't have time for you. I mean that literally, and from a personal perspective. There is no time for blame or endless condemnation. There is no time for the whole cycle of endless blame. Others know how to do such a thing. I don't have the stomach for it, or the time. Life is too short, in my opinion, it shouldn't surprise us.

In my experience, there is nothing more easily doubted than withholding forgiveness – forgiveness of others, of the world, of Father Opportunity and Mother Nature; above all, by himself. Self-forgiveness is truly the most powerful antidote to self-doubt that I know.

The cave glows with the same side glow. Half a century after the folk philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm made his counter-cultural case for why self-love is the foundation of a rational society, he turned to art as a supreme tool for self-justification:

We all have regrets and most of us know that those regrets, as painful as they may be, are the things that help us live a better life. Or, rather, there is some regret that, as it turns out, can accompany us in improving our lives. Regret always floats to the surface… It needs our attention. You have to do something about them. Another way is to ask for forgiveness by doing what can be called a life of repair, using whatever gifts you may have to help restore the state of the world.

For many of us, our creative contribution – our art, to use the word in Baldwin's broadest sense – is the gift we give to renew the world and, in the process, renew ourselves. Cave reflects on his experience making music while dealing with the mysterious loss of his teenage son and his self-criticism assistant:

Art has the power to save us, in many different ways. It can serve as a point of salvation, because it has the power to restore beauty to the world. And that in itself is a way of making amends, of reconciling with the world. Art has the power to correct the balance of things, of our wrongs, of our sins… By “sins,” I mean those actions that are guilty of God or, if you like, “good for us” – that live inside us, and that if we ignore them, strengthen and become part of our character. They are the types of suffering that can weigh us down and separate us from the world. I have found that the beauty of work can go some way to reducing it.

What emerges is the idea that the end of suffering begins with self-forgiveness, which in some basic sense is the goal and end of all art:

Anyone who says they have no regrets is living a neglected life. Not only that, but in doing so they deprive themselves of the obvious benefits of self-justification. However, the most difficult thing is to forgive yourself… One sure way to forgive yourself is to come to a place where you can see that your daily actions make the world a better place, rather than a worse place—which is very easy, all people experience—and to come to this place with a certain degree of humility.

Complete these pieces from soul expansion completely Faith, Hope and Adventures with Anne Lamott on forgiveness, self-forgiveness, and the relationship between brokenness and happiness, and revisit Nick Cave on songwriting and the mystery of the unconscious, creativity and original fiction, and fear in the age of algorithms.