A confession...
I recently saw 20,000 Days on Earth, the Nick Cave documentary. I’m a longtime Cave fan. I met him in 1992, and wrote about it. I sit square in the middle of the target audience of this documentary, and I devoured it.
But here’s what I didn’t see coming. This part, at the end. And no, I’m not referring to the words he speaks there, though they’re lovely. I’m talking only about the performance clips:
Check it out.
I was remembering the man I’d met when I was not-quite-nineteen, and I was remembering watching him perform on the Henry’s Dream tour a few months later, how that show has never been topped for me, how transcendent it was. Then, at the three-minute mark, there were the swelling strings of “Jubilee Street,” and Nick Cave being Nick Cave, the film mixing the performance in the present with performances going back to what looked like early Birthday Party shows. There was Nick, across the decades, owning the stage and the audiences and my laptop screen and me and I started crying. Absolutely weeping. Because watching him, recalling that power of transformation, his power to split me wide open, I felt like...no...I KNEW that I haven’t done enough in my writing. I haven’t risked enough, haven’t pushed myself hard enough. I’ve always held something back, always protected myself. The work needs to go deeper, to be bigger. It needs to be more rigorously true.
I’ve wasted so much time.
But not even Nick Cave can do on the page what he does onstage. His novels don’t destroy worlds like his music does, and not because of any failings in his fiction (a conversation for another day) but because of the limits of the written, static word. No novel will ever obliterate its reader the way music can its listener.
I hate that. Because that’s what I want to do. I want to tear you back to the bones. And I never will.
But that doesn’t change the main thing, the small, hard stone at the center of what got me weeping. I need to work harder and bigger. I need to do more. I need to go for your bones, even knowing I’ll never quite reach them.
It feels grandiose to admit this. It feels wrong, the kind of statement an artist makes when they’re very young. The kind of statement that you’re supposed to be embarrassed to make as you get older. Something you’d expect to hear from a 25-year-old, and most likely a man. Me, at forty-one, and a woman, a mother (MOTHER, a word that works to blur the edges of my identity even more than WOMAN does) ...why do I feel like I’m expected to be more modest in my ambitions? Or at least...quieter about them? But it’s true. What I want to do with my work is to break your fucking heart, and to break my own heart. I want to tear us both wide open.
I have had moments of that, particularly in The Revolution of Every Day, where I got close, but not to the degree that I want to and not to the degree that I feel I am capable. And that is because I’ve failed around the areas that scare me most. I go deep and true on a lot of things in my writing. I’m not saying I play it totally safe. But there are spaces...moments that touch on the things that are hardest for me. When I get to the things I’m most afraid of, I back off and I do a very competent job of writing around them, covering them over with words that sound good but don’t have the depth that they should. I’m not pushing my work as hard or as deep as I am capable of, because I’m scared.
I hadn’t intended for this letter project to become a series of confessions, but here we are. That’s where I’m at today.
Maybe the next letter will just be photos of my backyard chickens.
Thank you for reading.
Yours,
Cari
PS: Here’s that epistolary book review I mentioned in the last letter.
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The Revolution of Every Day
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