#The Red Hand Files

[derangedrhythms]

For me, the imagination is essentially religious as it reaches beyond truth toward meaning. And meaning itself is a kind of truth unburdened by proof. Science has its duty to truth, and so it should, but the songwriter and the poet move beyond what is known into the unknown world. They spend their time in a kind of dream world – a realm where God and his ghosts dwell, banished there by grim reason and rationality. This is our absurd and deluded dominion in all its feverish wonder. It is the enchanted forest. This is the world from where I draw my songs. 

Nick Cave, from ‘The Red Hand Files’

[vinosities]

As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides. Nature reminds us of this constantly. The world is often cast as a purely malignant place, but still the joy of creation exerts itself, and as the sun rises upon the struggle of the day, the Great Crested Grebe dances upon the water. It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse — the creative dance — that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.

— Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files

[mertatalay]

The Red Hand Files

Nick Cave

[tear-for-two]

Not a question at all. The Red Hand Files Issue #270

[blocodeespantamentos]

Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts –  be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. (...)  Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defence, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude. A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world – that will be you, my young friend, the earth shaking at your feet.

Nick Cave

[prattleskidaddle]

[ravenkings]

What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song. It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.

Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.

– Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files, January 2023: “I asked Chat GPT to write a song in the style of Nick Cave and this is what it produced. What do you think?”

[vfterluna]

A marriage is many things, and barely any of them are safe. A marriage, at its best, is challenging, dangerous, complicated and meaningful, and requires, like anything of true value, a certain amount of sacrifice and a certain amount of work. Inside it exists sorrows and joys, both big and small, and failures and triumphs too. But within this complex marital vortex there is, for me, a constant that never waivers – and here lies my safe space. My safe space is in the regard of my wife’s gaze. By this I mean when I look into the eyes of my wife I find a beauty, and this beauty has a moral value, of goodness; a goodness that manifests as a kind of benevolence. And that goodness reflects back and elicits my own goodness and, in turn, the necessary goodness of the world.

— The Red Hand Files Issue #199, Nick Cave

[derangedrhythms]

The nature in my songs knows what’s ultimately coming. It is a world of metaphor, where nature becomes alive with the promise of God, where the moon is a mute witness and the stars hang in the air like questions. 

Nick Cave, from ‘The Red Hand Files’

[vinosities]

Be wary of anyone who denies art its true complex and eternal nature, repurposing it for their own political contrivances. Art should not lecture or talk down to us or reprimand us. There is little left of the sacred in the modern world, but great art still offers us an opportunity to experience the hallowed, the mysterious and the reverential. For me, art of true significance chaffs against the prescribed modes of the day on its way to the transcendental. We are humbled by its power, as it reflects back to us something about the enigma of our own nature. We stand before it, quieted and awed, touched by the eternal.

— Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files

[mertatalay]

Maja, joy exists as a bright, insistent spasm of defiance within the darkness of the world. Seek it. It is there.

[fade-out]

In my experience, inspiration is not something that finds you, or offers itself to you, nor for that matter is faith. Inspiration and faith are similar in so far as they both ask something of us. They each require real and constant practical application. For me, inspiration comes only when I practice certain things regularly and rigorously. I must commit fully to the task in hand, sit down each day, pick up my pencil (actually it is a medium black or blue Bic Biro) and get to work. It is not exactly toiling down the coal mines, but it is labour enough, and I undertake it through the good times and the bad, through the dry periods and the periods of abundance, and I keep on going regardless of my successes or failures. Inspiration comes because I put in the work.

Faith is found in a similar way. Faith is not something that just magically materialises, rather it first calls to us with its demands, and sometimes these demands are significant. Faith in the universe, for example, requires our active participation. The world awakens to us as we set about the task of its rehabilitation. Faith is not passive but fiercely active, so we need to invest something of ourselves in the world in order to appreciate its value. The more we put into the world, the more value it appears to have.

- The Red Hand Files by Nick Cave

some things I've been thinking about lately

[bonzogalactico]

“Art should not lecture or talk down to us or reprimand us. There is little left of the sacred in the modern world, but great art still offers us an opportunity to experience the hallowed, the mysterious and the reverential. For me, art of true significance chaffs against the prescribed modes of the day on its way to the transcendental. We are humbled by its power, as it reflects back to us something about the enigma of our own nature.”

—

Nick Cave

The Red Hand Files