Hopefulness Can Often Feel like the Most Indefensible and Lonely Place on Earth

Nick Cave on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:

This [grief] is not particular to me. This is ordinary stuff on some level, that we, that everyone goes through eventually. In one way or another we we all go through this, these sorts of things, and we have have a choice, I think, that can…on some level there is a desire to turn inward and to sort of wrap ourselves around the absence of the person that we’ve lost…as if there’s some sort of nobility in wrapping ourselves around the absence of that person. And and I think this is a very dangerous situation and a mistake, and that we must be able to turn ourselves the other way, and look at the world and understand that we are part of the world and that the world is essentially full of people who have lost things…deeply understanding the vulnerable, precarious nature of each of us. We need to understand that that is what we are. And I I’ve found by looking at the world in that way that I saw the world not as a as a cruel place but as an extraordinarily, systemically beautiful place to live in…there is joy and there is happiness in a way you could never believe possible on the other side of grief. And it’s it’s a difficult, it’s a terrible truth about grief that that ultimately you can feel joy in a way that you you never thought you could.

When these things first happen to you, to hear someone speak in this way that I’m speaking now, it’s enraging to think that you could ever be happy. How dare you say that you could ever be happy. But it’s true. If we look at the world for what it is, there’s great joy to be experienced there.

Colbert then compares this idea to the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne:

And Jesus was a sailor
when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then
until the sea shall free them

Cave continues:

It is the devastation that, I think, that we all experience, that turns us from being a kind of a badly [he begins to say “drawn”] or a half-formed person into a fully formed or fully realized human being. It is the devastation, and I don’t mean to be sort of the prophet of doom, but this is sort of coming for everybody at some point. If you’re loved and you love this is all, this is part of the deal.

Colbert then has Cave read one of his Red Hand Files, this one from 2022:

Following the last few years I’m feeling empty and more cynical than ever. I’m losing faith in other people, and I’m scared to pass these feelings to my little son. Do you still believe in Us (human beings)?

– Valerio, Stockholmd

Cave’s response:

You are right to be worried about your growing feelings of cynicism and you need to take action to protect yourself and those around you, especially your child. Cynicism is not a neutral position—and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.

…It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, to understand that it was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope.

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth…

Yesterday I was working on taking stock of my endeavors. It is mostly a practical exercise; in this last year I’ve started many things but finished few and I need to pull the dead plants out of this garden if I want a few others hanging on to continue (yet alone thrive).

I explored three different potential business ideas, one outside of technology and two that were software. I spent some time at the end of last year catching up on the particulars of modern front-end framework development. I spent a lot of time, starting in January, learning about the current AI landscape and thinking about how to apply the tech to more than just helping someone write an email. The ideas and experiments, and the sheer amount of different tech involved, tends to splinter out into too many projects, too many dependencies to keep track of, like competing vines in my metaphorical garden.

All of that is expected and manageable. I’ve spent a professional career learning the skills required to prioritize and organize such projects.

Then I got to the creative projects—and not that building software isn’t creative, but we all know what I mean.

Last year I had an idea for a book—and I don’t really care if it’s a book or just a collection of web pages, but it does all have an outline and fits together into something, if I squint just right, about the length of a book. It has withered like everything else. I recently started to write related ideas in my notes and revisited it. But every time I think about such a project I think

There are at least 50 more books I need to read before I start putting this out here, or I’ll be just another idiot espousing ideas already written 75 years ago as if I just thought of them.
“I frequently experience moments of nausea in bookstores at the thought of adding one more page to all that fucking print.”

…and other negative thoughts about my general failures as a writer over the last 26 years.

I was working intentionally on a short story collection a few years ago. It has been dormant for a while now, I put what I had on the site, but I got bogged down when the last one started to get long, and I had no quick idea of where to take it, and the writing group I’d been in while I was working on it wound down. My notes: “Was working hard on this for a while but currently fail to see any benefit to even self-publishing an ebook vs just having them on my website.”

Then I thought about music. Other than one small show at my church last December, the last time I did anything musical was to record one cover song in the studio in 2015. I have a desire to be creative, but almost no desire to actually pick up an instrument or write a lyric (for me it’s in that order). Making music was such a large part of my life for nearly 20 years that the lack is…oddly noticeable. In my notes I wrote, “Recording something with my kids is really the only thing on the table here and that’s a pretty fleeting thought.”

There’s only one other aspect of my historic creative life, and that was these interactive house art shows I did in the early 00s. I’m still interested in doing stuff like that, but they are a lot of work. Even the thought of trying to resurrect the old pages of this website devoted to them gives me pause. “Big time-sink,” as I wrote in my notes.

The last bullet of my inventory simply says

well, this inventory was depressing

Maintaining hope is important enough to me to get a major heading in my values document, but it’s a feeling that has been in scarce supply. I feel lonely and disconnected. When we were young, even our bad art and bad ideas gained purchase, before we were all really busy, before new art and new ideas streamed by us in a never-ending feed, then gone if we so much as pause to make a trip to the bathroom.

Nick Cave recently wrote in a different Red Hand Files issue:

…loneliness is not simply down to our circumstances or whether others love us. Rather, it is an indisposition of the spirit brought about, in the main, by certain aspects of our lives that have been unintentionally left untended. Loneliness and lack of meaning seem to inhabit the same dark orbit. Loneliness is the breakdown of the overarching structure of things, a feeling of separateness or exclusion from the sum and substance of the world.

He then suggests three things:

“feeling part of a wider community—family, friends, and society in general”
“an understanding of nature and a connection to the natural order of things”
“[forming] a relationship with the sacred or divine—this can be found in art, music, poetry and religion”

…to which my natural response is…cynicism. The subheadings under “Hope” in my aforementioned document are “Gratitude”, “Generosity”, “Assuming the Best”, and finally “Creativity”. “Faith and the Numinous” gets its own heading elsewhere. I know these things. They’re not working.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Genesis the last two days. Mostly Selling England by the Pound and A Trick of the Tail, but I just skipped ahead their timeline to a song I’ve long wanted to cover: It’s Gonna Get Better, off their eponymous twelfth studio album. I don’t know why I’ve always liked this tune.

Reach out, hands in the air
Don’t care just what they’re saying
Hold out, just keep on hoping against hope
That it’s gonna get better
Don’t worry, there’s no hurry for you, for me
Everything’s gonna come around
Shout out, someone will listen to you, to me
Someone’s gonna see

I was hoping to have at least a couple of sentences with which to wrap up this post. I don’t.