![]() ![]() I think music, out of all that we can do, at least artistically, is the great indicator that something else is going on, something unexplained, because it allows us to experience genuine moments of transcendence. In Faith, Hope and Carnage ( public library) - his long and luscious conversation with Seán O’Hagan - he considers how music parts the veil between the known world and the mystery of being: ![]() ![]() These questions - the power of music, the power of porousness - animate Nick Cave, whom I see as a kind of sculptor of the spirit, turning the raw materials of life - a life that has not been easy - into something of transcendent beauty. One of William Blake’s paintings for The Book of Job, 1806. Nothing restores our porousness and receptivity to that richness more readily than music - the backdoor of consciousness, through which something transcendent slips past all of our reasoned reservations, all of our guardedness and confusion, at once releasing us from the solitary confinement of the self and restoring us to ourselves, reminding us that we are always half-opaque to ourselves and this opacity shimmers with possibility. “Whatever inspiration is,” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her superb Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” And yet, with our reflex for teleological thinking - that childish grab at “I know!” - we habitually cut ourselves off from the mystery that houses the most creative, and therefore the most vulnerable and alive, part of our own souls, forgetting what Carl Sagan’s ghost so poetically reminds us: that “the universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.” ![]()
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