Nick Cave: “Sometimes it is a sacred duty to be fucking”

The responses of Nick Cave in the Red Hand Files, the newsletter with which he has been dialogue directly with his readers for years, are always interesting and full of ideas. In the new issue, questioned by a Melbourne fan who asked him “Where do you place you?”, Cave offered an articulated and blended reflection on his political and public position in the contemporary world.

“I’m not entirely sure where you place me today,” Cave writes. “As the ground under us moves and the world stiffen around its opinions, I feel more and less uncertain and less sure than me. I am neither on the left nor on the right, finding both parts, as they present themselves, indefensible and unrecognizable”.
Cave defines himself as “a liberal tending to the spiritual conservator, with the ‘c’ tiny”, a position that is not political for him, but of temperament. “I have a devotional nature and I see the world as a broken but beautiful, believing that it is our moral and urgent duty to repair it where we can, and do not cause further damage or, worse, favor its destruction”.

Cave, in the text, says he refuses every absolute certainty and says he feels uncomfortable with some of the current logic of public speech: “I don’t think silence is violence, complicity or lack of courage, but rather that silence is often the best option when you don’t know what you are talking about, or is in doubt or conflict – that, for me, most of the time happens.

While declaring a strong moral sense and a responsibility towards those who are marginalized, Cave writes to give more value to the facts than to words. And he concludes:

Perhaps all this is very much worth, but I suppose that, in the end, I give more value to the facts than to words. I see my role as a musician, author and writer of letters as an active service at the soul of the world, and I understood that this is the position I have to take to try to cultivate an authentic change. In fact, now I begin to understand where I place myself, Alistair: I am with the world, in its goodness and in its beauty. In these hysterical, monochromatic and conflict times, I turn to his soul, as musicians know how to do, to his grieved and broken nature, to his lost meaning, to his fragile and trembling spirit. I sing, the praise, the encouragement and try to improve it – with adoration, reconciliation and faith that jumps into the void.