Sacred and Profane: Nick Cave and Creativity

Sacred AND PROFANE:

Nick Cave and Creativity

Sunday Assembly, Sydney, 12 January 2014

By Dr Zoe Alderton

Nick Cave was raised a Christian, and performed in his local church choir from the ages of eight to twelve. “But the God I heard preached about there seemed remote, and alien, and uncertain. So I sat in the stalls, in my crimson cassock, while rogue thoughts oozed beneath the bolted door of my imagination.” “Even at that age I recall thinking what a wishy-washy affair the whole thing was. The Anglican Church: it was the decaf of worship and Jesus was their Lord.”

The Power and Beauty of Language

It was within the world of books and language that Cave was able to find something to believe it, and something to elevate his spirit. “A gaping hole was blasted out of my world by the unexpected death of my father when I was nineteen years old. The way I learned to fill this hole, this void, was to write”

In regard to his father, Cave writes: “Literature elevated him, tore him from normality, and lifted him out of the mediocre, and brought him closer to the divine essence of things. […] Art had the power to insulate me from the mundanity of the world, to protect me.”

Cave also started to read… In the Old Testament he found the voice of God. It was “was brutal and jealous and merciless.” He believed in God, but saw him as a malign force with The Bible as his cruel and pernicious text. “Evil seemed to live close to the surface of existence within it, you could smell its mad breath, see the yellow smoke curl from its many pages, hear the blood-curdling moans of despair. It was a wonderful, terrible book, and it was sacred scripture.”

“All I had to do was walk onstage and open my mouth and let the curse of God roar through me. Floods, fire, and frogs leapt out of my throat. To loosely paraphrase William Blake: I myself did nothing; I just pointed a damning finger and let the Holy Spirit do the rest. Though I had no notion of that then, God was talking not just to me but through me, and his breath stank. I was a conduit for a God that spoke in a language written in bile and puke. And for a while, that suited me fine.”

But there is light in the darkness...

As he grew tired of the Old Testament, Cave found a renewed gratefulness for the New Testament and the teachings of Christ.

Nick Cave, ‘Sacred and Profane’ notebook (1986-1987)

This interplay between darkness and light is best expressed in Cave’s love songs. He explains, “the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain.” Any song that does not do this is an untrustworthy “Hate Song.” “The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil.” The Bible, “bathed in bloody-minded violence,” because a blueprint for Cave’s “more sadistic love songs.”

Through the New Testament, Cave searches for a dirty, angry Christ…

“The Christ that the Church offers us, the bloodless, placid ‘Saviour’—the man smiling benignly at a group of children or serenely hanging from the cross— denies Christ His potent, creative sorrow or His boiling anger.” Cave dislikes the popular version of Christ who must be revered for his perfection. He prefers to see Christ as a liberator who helps us to throw off shackles of the mundane through the power of imagination and creativity.

“Jesus said, “Wherever two or more are gathered together, I am in their midst.” Jesus said this because wherever two or more are gathered together, there is communion, there is language, there is imagination, there is God. God is a product of a creative imagination, and God is that imagination taken flight.” “Christ spoke to me through His isolation, through the burden of His death, through His rage at the mundane, through His sorrow. Christ, it seemed to me was the victim of humanity’s lack of imagination, was hammered to the cross with the nails of creative vapidity.”

Bibliography !   Nick Cave, ‘The Secret Life Of The Love Song’, written for

the Vienna Poetry Festival, 1998.

!   Nick Cave, ‘The Flesh Made Word’, written for BBC Radio 3 Religious Services, London, 1996.

!   Nick Cave, introduction to The Gospel According to Mark, United Kingdom: Canongate, 1998.