Review

Culture

Music

1 March 2024

8 min read

A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics

Does Adam Steiner’s rappel into Cave’s art help us understand its purpose?

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

Through illuminated dry smoke, a figure stands tall, holding a light up to his head.

Nick Cave in This Much I Know To Be True, a 2022 documentary.

MUBI

Nick Cave is inspired by the Bible, Greek myth, and literature, as well as his enduring passion for gospel, the blues, and alt-rock. His life journey arcs from his Australian childhood through his struggles with drug addiction and youthful fascination with the nightmare landscapes of America’s Wild West and southern gothic, toward a reckoning with his own Christian spirituality. In Darker than the Dawn, Adam Steiner rappels deep into Cave's songs of love and death.

The book is organised thematically within an overarching chronological arc moving from dusk to midnight to dawn. This structure aims to broadly mirror Cave's life, with its experiences of addiction, relational breakdown and encounters with grief. Steiner's themes include rock and roll, literature, humour, love, time, spirituality, death, creation, and these indicate the breadth of Cave's concerns. Politics, though, is conspicuous by its absence, being ground on which Cave chooses not to walk in his songs.

Steiner recognises here the influence on Cave, as on several other rock stars including Bruce Springsteen and Bono, of the Roman Catholic Southern Gothic novelist Flannery O’Connor.

Steiner is excellent on Cave's rock roots and biblical inspirations from language to imagery to themes. In an insightful discussion of ‘Tupelo’ from The Firstborn Is Dead, which itself becomes “a Deep South concept album”, Steiner notes that the situation of Elvis Presley’s humble background in Tupelo exposed him “to both gospel and blues music, and the roots of these musics in “spirituals” that would likely have been sung by the enslaved ancestors of his neighbors only a generation before.” Similarly, “the push and pull of deliverance and self-abnegation” are “offered too in Cave’s music alongside the glorious troubles of the blues singing tribute to the “the joys and the pain of the world of the flesh.””

The ”Christ-haunted” American South of Presley and of ‘Tupelo’ becomes the atmosphere in which the early tracks by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are “mired”. Steiner, whose own use of language is poetic, describes this as “a torrid damp heat of blood driven into sweat all suggesting a permanent sense of ruin and decline”. Within this atmosphere, “we see alienated people searching for escape or redemption, roving outcasts looking to be reborn” whose “sharp-edge story arcs follow the Southern Gothic tradition, at its essence a series of sharp turns”.

Steiner recognises here the influence on Cave, as on several other rock stars including Bruce Springsteen and Bono, of the Roman Catholic Southern Gothic novelist Flannery O’Connor. It was O’Connor who adroitly labelled the Deep South as “Christ-haunted” as opposed to “Christ-centred”. Yet, while Steiner gives us much helpful reflection on Cave and O’Connor, he doesn’t acknowledge two key concepts which also impact Cave’s approach.

The subtlety of Cave’s art, as with that of O’Connor, is that it leaves us pondering the possibility without giving the certainty that a propagandist or evangelist would deliver.

The first is that, in an age when writers with Christian concerns find in modern life distortions that are repugnant to them, their problem “will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural”. O’Connor’s answer to this dilemma was to utilise the grotesque and “make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures”. Second, O’Connor embeds this idea in her characters and in the structure of her stories through her use of epiphanies. In her work, she repeatedly gives us religion-haunted sinners who experience moments of revelation (epiphanies) about themselves in which they realise their depravity or their potential for grace or both. These experiences of awakening lead them and her readers to become aware of grace.

Like O’Connor, Cave also seeks to shock by pushing “our faces up to the ugliest side of human behaviors”, in particular when he explores “the question of a fixed human nature where some are “born to be bad” … and … others to become victims”. ‘The Mercy Seat’ is one such song; a stream of consciousness outpouring from a murderer imminently facing the electric chair. In this song, Steiner suggests “outright criminality” is being exhibited, as this Christ-haunted murderer claims he told the truth and is not afraid to die. What Steiner’s characterisation of this song overlooks, however, is the penultimate line in which Cave’s character states, “I’m afraid I told a lie”. It is possible, therefore, that this song ends with an O’Connor-like epiphany, a moment of recognition that, even as the criminal dies, opens up the possibility of grace. The subtlety of Cave’s art, as with that of O’Connor, is that it leaves us pondering the possibility without giving the certainty that a propagandist or evangelist would deliver.

Steiner is also very good when discussing the influence of the Bible on Cave’s work. He briefly outlines Cave’s journey with the Bible from chorister at Wangaratta Cathedral through his choice at 22 to mine its stories to inform his songwriting and on to his rediscovery of the New Testament and the “seduction of Christianity” when writing an Introduction’ to The Gospel According to Mark for the Canongate Pocket Canons. As Steiner notes, “Early on in his career Cave embraced the vitality and urgency of the Old Testament”, while the New Testament “introduced a more personal revelation … an awakening to the possibilities of self-transformation”. For Cave, Steiner suggests, “this would mean creating art that even in profanity, anger, and nihilism worked towards the glory of God, to become an enervating, enriching force”. His adoption of approaches learnt from O’Connor reveal how such a combination is possible.

Cave is also fascinated by the image of the Kingdom of God; a trope that Steiner somewhat overlooks. Tender Prey, the album which contained ‘The Mercy Seat’ is again key in this regard. Tender Prey ends with ‘New Morning’, a song to sit alongside the ‘New Morning’ of Bob Dylan and the ‘Brand New Day’ of Van Morrison. ‘New Morning’ begins with its protagonist awakened by the Sun shining in a sky that “was a Kingdom / All covered in blood”. He kneels in a garden and prays: “Thank you for giving / This bright new morning / So steeped seemed the evening / In darkness and blood / There'll be no sadness / There'll be no sorrow / There'll be no road too narrow / There'll be a new day / And it's today / For us.” Those that know their Bibles will recognise the reference to the coming of God’s kingdom as described in ‘Revelation’.

This vision of the coming kingdom of peace is set at the end of an album that is full of darkness and blood; a choice that becomes symptomatic of the way Cave uses imagery of the kingdom from this point onwards i.e. simply juxtaposed with his exploration of life's depravities as an alternative vision. ‘O Children’, ‘Bright Horses’ and ‘White Elephant’ are all examples of this approach. In ‘Lavender Fields’ the kingdom in the sky is the answer to the question as to where the dead go, while in ‘Sun Forest’, “A spiral of children climbs up to the sun” and God or the lost loved one are here beside in the sun and within. Cave’s most straightforward songs utilising this imagery are ‘I Have Wandered All My Unending Days’ (from Seven Psalms) and ‘There Is A Kingdom’: “There is a kingdom / There is a king / And He lives without / And He lives within / And He is everything”.

This has led to an understanding of art as a religious undertaking, in part because to repair the heart may be the purpose of making music.

Steiner ends his book with a description of Cave’s work that can be understood from either a secular or religious perspective:

“Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ songs of life, love, and death often reveal us to be flawed, vulnerable beings, and though we are diminished by death, the opportunity of life gives us the chance to experience and create great things in works of art and acts of love and kindness. In doing so we escape the limits of our mortality, forever moving against the tides in the hope that each of us will find a new day beyond the horizon.”

Although this summary can be read from either perspective, the secular reading is one that would not exist without the religious reading. Cave, as has been made clear through his conversations with the journalist Seán O'Hagan published as Faith, Hope, and Carnage, has been inclining for some time towards the religious perspective.

The grief he has felt at the tragic death of his son Arthur has led to hope in “an “impossible realm” where glimpses of the preternatural essence of things find their voice”. He believes that “Arthur lives there” and “Inside that space, it feels a relief to trust in certain glimpses of something else, something other, something beyond”. Music, of all the creative forms, he suggests “best repairs the heart”. He knows this “because it has restored me and has been my salvation”. It “radiates love and makes things better”. In addition, when his son died, he “started to understand the precarious and vulnerable position of the world”; “started to fret for it” and worry about it. As a result, he “felt a sudden, urgent need to, at the very least, extend a hand in some way to assist it — this terrible, beautiful world — instead of merely vilifying it, and sitting in judgement of it”.

This has led to an understanding of art as a religious undertaking, in part because to repair the heart may be the purpose of making music: “To make art and do things creatively is a way of redressing the balance of our sins in the world. To make art and to write songs goes some way in improving matters. There’s a sort of moral dimension to a song that they do good. And I think that’s one way of making amends or reconciling oneself to the world.”

On Seven Psalms Cave provides in ‘I Have Wandered All My Unending Days’ his own summary of his story to the refrain “There is a mansion in the sky / And we will go there by and by”:

“I have wandered all my unending days

Shuttered your shining aspect in the stars

Hidden alleys and tramp-broken highways

With little in my pockets but my prayers

And I have searched all my unending days

Slept in fields beneath a canopy of stars

Your face emerging in the early morning haze

Held in its position by my prayers

And though I have nothing but this prayer

That all will be revealed by and by

I pray someday, my Lord, you will appear

And lead me to your mansion in the sky”

Adam Steiner, Darker with the Dawn: Nick Cave's Songs of Love and Death, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2023

Column

Character

Confession

Culture

Psychology

18 September 2024

8 min read

‘Yet All Shall Be Forgot?’ Saying sorry has never been more difficult

Acknowledging wrongdoing is vital for any society to flourish. So why do we find it so difficult to apologise, especially online?

Roger Bretherton

Roger is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

On a street, two men confront each other face to face.

Darwin Boaventura on Unsplash.

People in the UK don’t like to apologise. At least that’s what a recent poll reported by the Daily Mail claims. Of a thousand British people surveyed, about forty percent of them claimed they didn’t like to apologise because they were never wrong! At least that’s what the headline said. When you actually look at the survey itself, things get a bit more nuanced. 18 per cent don’t feel ‘comfortable’ making an apology. 15 per cent don’t like admitting they’re wrong. 23 per cent feel embarrassed at the thought of apologising. Sorry does indeed seem to be the hardest word. And Elton John seems to be the hardest person to avoid quoting whenever these things come up. Which they do - a lot!

We shouldn’t really be that surprised by the findings of this study. Contrary to the popular belief that the world is divided between goodies and baddies, upstanding citizens and immoral rotters, the ethical picture is much more complex than that. The line between good and bad, as Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn noted, runs through people not between them. Many moral qualities like kindness, forgiveness, gratitude, humility and so on, are trait-like. There are relatively few pure saints and absolute villains, most of us linger in the muddy moral middle, neither exceptionally good nor reprehensibly evil. And this is what the survey indicates. Despite all our reservations about apologising, the average 20 to 50-year-old says sorry about three times a week, totting up an annual total of 150 apologies per year. We may not like apologising, but we get there in the end.

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as all that. Because while we may apologise, we don’t always mean it. If the need to apologise is a spectrum it not only includes those who NEVER apologise, but also those who ALWAYS apologise. If the non-apologisers sit at one extreme, the super-apologisers dwell at the other. These are the people who over-use apology, who never stop apologising for their existence. According to this survey, 41 per cent of us are first to apologise whether or not we think we are in the wrong, and 38 per cent apologise without meaning it. Ever found yourself inexplicably blurting out a sorry to the person who bumped into you at the supermarket? or gratuitously apologising for your emotions in an attempt to appease the workplace bully who caused them? I have. If that’s you, please pull up a chair and join me at the table of compulsive and unnecessary apologies- assuming you can sit down without apologising for taking up the air space.

With the wisdom of age most of us will learn to let things lie. Which is to say we will learn to forgive. Which is also to say we will learn to accept apologies.

It does seem, from this survey at least, that people are a bit confused about the nature of apology. ‘Sorry’, is a necessary part of the social vocabulary that makes community life possible. To say sorry is to acknowledge that we are embedded within a rich social network upon which we rely for our existence and without which human life would be untenable. It belongs alongside other basic words like ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, that recognise our social dependence. This applies everywhere: at home, at school, in the office, down the high street, at church. When we say Please, we acknowledge that there are things we cannot do and cannot know without the help of others. When we say Thank You, we accept that even our greatest achievements were team efforts, not wholly down to us. And when we say Sorry, we accept that this community of trust, this web of promises and fulfilments, is fragile. We can act in ways that fray or even break the threads that connect us to others. Sometimes we don’t show up when we said we would. Sometimes we lie to avoid shame. Sometimes we take far more than we should from those who can’t afford to give. Sometimes we are rude, hurtful, even hateful. Saying sorry is the way we recognise, renew and repair our damaged connections to the people on which our lives depend.

One of the most interesting findings in forgiveness research is that as people get older they generally become more forgiving. Now we can all think of exceptions to this - we all know people who seem to have become bitter rather than better with age - but that’s not the rule of it. Most of us will mellow and become more tolerant as the years pass. Partly because the passing of time diminishes our energy for grudges and plotting petty retaliations. But mainly because the older we get the fewer friends we have left. If young adulthood is awash with weddings, then later life is filled with funerals. To put it bluntly, as we get older more people we know have died. We increasingly realise that our connections to family and friends are priceless and irreplaceable and hardly worth severing over minor grievances. With the wisdom of age most of us will learn to let things lie. Which is to say we will learn to forgive. Which is also to say we will learn to accept apologies.

Why say sorry if there is no hope of social connectedness? This seems to be the zero-sum game played out in our digital lives.

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This by contrast sheds some light on why it might be that some people (the maligned 40 per cent of the survey) simply do not apologise. Admittedly it is likely that the tendency to offer apology varies alongside other personality traits like Agreeableness- our general tendency to get along with people. Those high in Agreeableness are more sensitive to ruptures in their relationships and therefore more likely to resolve these with a well-timed apology. And given that women tend to score more highly than men in measures of agreeableness and social intelligence, it seems equally likely that the league of super-apologisers who say sorry too often (like me) is predominantly populated by women (unlike me). By contrast those who do not apologise are likely to be at the tough-minded end of the personality spectrum, more ferociously individualistic, less emotionally aware, and not particularly sensitive to the fabric of social life into which they are inescapably stitched.

The apologiser and the non-apologiser then inhabit different universes. If apology belongs to a social network that needs to be tended, then the refusal to ever apologise is to deny the relational fabric of human life. Why say sorry if there is no hope of social connectedness? This seems to be the zero-sum game played out in our digital lives. Anyone can trawl the elephant’s graveyard of our online history and find things we said or did in our least thoughtful moments. And if they do, no amount of apology seems sufficient to rectify the mistake. Online apologies cannot erase online offences. It’s hard to imagine a better system for teaching us the futility of saying sorry.

There‘s a timing issue too. Quite often people who do not like to apologise assume their apology will result in humiliation. If they admit to being wrong, they will be publicly shamed, not restored to connectedness but excommunicated. As a result, if they ever do get round to apologising, they do so reluctantly or halfheartedly or under duress or just way too late, and consequently receive exactly the kind of vicious reaction they assume apologies usually receive. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we believe our apologies will be met with hostility, we tend to apologise in ways that make hostility more likely. It’s no wonder some people don’t see saying sorry as a viable social strategy.

To confess is to acknowledge and turn from our self-absorption, distraction, ignorance, inconsistency and whatever else detunes us from this heavenly wavelength.

It is a pity, because for those who care to look apology can address the deepest needs of the human soul. Apology restores us to the human community, reweaves the threads of trust that connect us to family, friends, colleagues, and neighbours. It assumes there is an invisible world we can rely upon, in which we can place our faith, and to which saying sorry can restore us. This is not just the logic of social apology but also the logic of spiritual apology, or to use the more traditional term, confession.

Just as we seem to be confused about apology, we are also pretty confused about confession. For many of us it belongs to movies where gangsters seek forgiveness for heinous acts through the screen of a confessional booth. Or even worse to the humiliation of being forced to publicly reveal our most shameful character flaws. But these are caricatures.

Confession, like apology, ultimately belongs to a benevolent view of reality. A view suggesting that, at all times and in all places we are in the presence of an utterly attentive, absolutely constant and unfailingly loving God. A God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves. A God who cannot help doing whatever it takes to close the distance between us, whose gentle presence hugs the contours of our lives the way the sea hugs the shore. And this divine reality is so permanent, so consistent that, like white noise, we live in complete ignorance of it most of the time. We tend to think that we are here and God is elsewhere, but actually it is God who is here and we who are absentmindedly elsewhere.

In this universe we don’t confess in the hope that our abject humiliation might possibly eke out a morsel of compassion from an otherwise indifferent deity. No. When we confess we acknowledge that while God may be unfailingly aligned with us we are less so with Him. We don’t seem capable of flying in formation with Him. If He moves in straight lines, our lines waver. To confess is to acknowledge and turn from our self-absorption, distraction, ignorance, inconsistency and whatever else detunes us from this heavenly wavelength. If apology restores us to a wider social reality than confession restores us to the deepest reality of all.