The late emeritus Pope Benedict XVI once wrote: “The art of music is uniquely called to instil hope in the human spirit, so scarred and sometimes wounded by the earthly condition.” It is fascinating to compare this insight with the reflections found in singer songwriter Nick Cave’s new book Faith, Hope and Carnage.
Benedict wrote of the mystery of music. One of its first sources is the experience of love. When men were seized by love, another dimension of being was unveiled to them. And this also drove them to express themselves in a new way. Poetry, song, and music in general are born from this.
A second origin of music is the experience of sadness, being touched by death, by pain, and by the abysses of existence. In this case as well, they are unveiled, in the opposite direction, new dimensions of reality that can no longer find a response in speech alone.
Finally, the third place of origin of music is the encounter with the divine. For all the more reason there is present here the totally other and the totally great that elicits within man new ways of expressing himself. Perhaps it is possible to affirm that in reality also in the other two areas – love and death – the divine mystery touches us and, in this sense, it is being touched by God that on the whole constitutes the origin of music.
The question of the power of music animates Nick Cave, who is a kind of sculptor of the spirit, turning the raw materials of life — a life that has not been easy — into something of transcendent beauty.
In Faith, Hope and Carnage, he considers how music parts the veil between the known world and the mystery of being. "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.
"I think there is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things — the impossibility of things — and recognise the evident value in doing that, and summon the courage it requires to not always shrink back into the known mind."
This otherness, this beyondness, this liminal space, is what we commonly call mystery — the realm of experience inaccessible to our analytical minds, unaccountable by reason, and yet a stratum of reality we touch beyond doubt in those rare transcendent moments.
Nick Cave reflects on the supreme link our species has devised for accessing that realm: "Of all things, music can lift us closer to the sacred. Music 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. It is the art form that can most effectively fill that hole, because it makes us feel less alone. Some music can even lead us to a place where a fundamental spiritual shift of consciousness can happen. At best, In that sacred space, we get to see the world more whole — not artificially, not as a pretty delusion, but with greater fidelity to the deeper reality. The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful.
Everything we experience as beautiful is a projection of something we long for — a fragmentary fulfilment of our existential longing, every artist makes what they make out of the raw material of longing, conscious of it in varying degrees, codified in various forms.
Nick Cave notes: "All my songs are written from a place of spiritual yearning, because that is the place that I permanently inhabit. To me, personally, this place feels charged, creative and full of potential. Songs have the capacity to be revealing, acutely so.
"My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. There’s certainly a vulnerability to that, and an incredible freedom… To be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel extraordinarily alive and receptive to all sorts of things, creatively and spiritually."
Faith, Hope and Carnage is a joy in its wide-roaming entirety. Turn to Nick Cave on song writing which he sees as the remedy for despair, and art as an instrument of self-forgiveness.
Barnaby ffrench
