Nick Cave – The Red Hand Files Issue #318
You brilliantly capture the sensation of being inside the breathless rush of the creative process, where time holds no sway and the whole world seems to crystallise into a written word or a stroke of paint. Compulsive and charged with a devilish energy, you feel in your very bones that this is what you were destined to do.
You wonder whether this is a mental illness. I believe it is. The artistic impulse is an exquisite derangement – like drugs, like love, like faith, like grief – a complete and full-force commandeering of the body and the heart. It is a kind of possession, a thrilling seduction, an enchantment, as the ink and paint flow and dance. So demonically exhilarating is this sensation that we think – “This must be the purpose of life!”
But, John, it is not.
The creative urge is a gift not afforded to everyone, and those of us who possess it bear a responsibility to pursue that impulse wholeheartedly. However, there are other duties beyond those at the tip of your brush or nib of my pen – beautiful and sacrificial fidelities. You have committed to your wife and son to offer them more than just the crumbs of yourself, the dregs of what remains of you after a day with the devil in the shed. You are in service to your creative impulses – and by the same token to God – but you are also in service to the world as it presents itself, and to those entrusted to you. This is a point of honour. It is with a hard-earned understanding, and the most profound regret, that I can tell you that no artistic endeavour, no matter how sublime it may appear, is worth denying your family or sacrificing those in your care.
I capture this mostly for myself, to revisit as needed.
Just yesterday I was thinking to myself that I am constantly having to get into acceptance about the fact that I traded my hobbies for children. This was in a moment when I thought about my guitar, not in the context of using it to create anything, which I haven’t done in over a decade, but to just pick it up at all. I thought about the fact that I basically have time for work, family, and just enough exercise to not completely wither away (and the occasional post on this blog). I realized I was lucky that my son has taken to cycling, so I get to indulge in a thing that gives me joy, exercise, and time with him all at the same time.
But this idea of being in service to the world as it presents itself is also how I approach the age-old question of how to conform to the will of God as I understand him. I spent far too much time in my younger years trying to ascertain the exact “will of God”, an approach reinforced by the Christian cult in which I spent my entire college career, where the leaders invoked this idea in order to control every aspect of their followers’ lives, from who they dated to what car they bought. Thankfully, I was ripped from that environment through circumstances and by following my heart, but this false philosophical residue remained as I continued to explore faith, abandon faith, and finally return to faith through the suggestions in the 12 steps. The third step is Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. To say I was not excited about this step is an understatement. It kept me repelled from the steps as a whole for some time. Eventually I just had to admit I needed help and resigned to figuring out the details as I went.
There is a subtle but critical distinction between how I thought and was taught earlier in life and the contents of step three. It is unconcerned with determining the instructions of some higher power that speaks English into my brain, or out of a burning bush, or via some self-ordained spiritual leader. (12 Step programs are also devoid of theology or doctrine.) Rather, it simply suggests submitting my own will, plans, and circumstances into the “care of God”. As I read Nick Cave’s response to that letter I realized he succinctly and beautifully summarized this approach.
You are in service to the world as it presents itself.