This Much I Know to Be True | How do I handle seemingly having no control over my life?
Read here the Spanish version of this article.
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The first time I wrote my mother this week, she replied by telling me the son of a beloved friend of hers had committed suicide. He was 37. I never met him, but I met his mom. I embrace a pleasant memory of visiting her, a really lovely woman, during my childhood at her nice house, regularly Saturday afternoons in a classy cloudy Manizales weather after my swimming classes.
I saw a photo of him my mother sent me: clear skin, regular body size, dark hair, no beard, blue t-shirt. He dimly smiled at a tender little light brown dog that held her right front little paw against his chest.
I can also recall a couple of stories of my mother’s female acquaintances saying goodbye to their sons: one who also killed himself and another who died amid the violence of the drug gangs of Medellín during the mid-2000. As those mothers, Nick Cave, the frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, has experienced the gravity of life pushing against him, having said goodbye to his sons, Arthur and Jethro, in less than 10 years.
Arthur was 15 and fell off a cliff near Brighton, England. Jethro died unexpectedly at 31, months before the release of this documentary. Arthur’s death was why Nick opened to the public The Red Hand Files, a website where thousands of people worldwide submit questions and letters to him all the time.
This Much I Know to Be True is a recap of two albums produced by Nick Cave and his partner Warren Ellis: Ghosteen and Carnage. A search for meaning in the midst of darkness, says the Mubi review, also captures Nick Cave's reaction to some letters that fans of his submitted via The Red Hand Files.
Billy, from Scotland, writes to Cave: “My wife has thrown me out. I’ve lost my job, all within a week. Suicidal thoughts in abundance. How does one handle having seemingly no control over one’s life?” Cave answers elegantly, poetically, beautifully, and stoically:
“Dear Billy, the majority of letters that come into The Red Hand Files, in all their various forms, are essentially asking the same question. Your question. How do I handle seemingly having no control over my life? This question is often accompanied by feelings of betrayal, and rage, and resentfulness, of hopelessness. The truth is we all live our lives dangerously in a state of jeopardy, at the edge of calamity. You have discovered that the veil that separates your ordered life from disarray is wafer-thin. This is the ordinary truth of existence from which none of us are exempt. In time, we all find out we are not in control. We never were. We never will be. But we are not without power. We always have the freedom to choose how we will respond to whatever it is that life offers us. You can collapse and be dragged under. You can harden around your misfortune and become embittered. Or you can move toward the opportunity that is offered to you. That of change and renewal. The next best action is always presented to you, Billy. Look for it and move toward it. This is the great act of insubordination toward the vagaries of life afforded to us all. Love, Nick”.
Who is Nick Cave?
How else can respond Nick Cave, who has had such a particular life? He has led one of the most outstanding Australian music groups ever existed, recovered from heroin addiction, married PJ Harvey, collaborated with Kylie Minogue and Jhonny Cash, and lost two sons. How else can he write, how can he define himself, the incarnation of the solemnity? There’s one more inquiry through The Red Hand Files:
“Thank you for the words, the music, the grounding sanity that your music brings to me in my times of strife. I’m curious, behind it all, the music, the words, the suits, the grief, the tenderness, and shame, and guilt, and joy, who are you? Kev, from Ireland.”
Nick answers that he “would have defined myself as a musician or a writer. And I’m trying to wean myself off those definitions of myself that are about my occupation. And see myself as a person. As a husband, as a father. As a husband, and father, and friend, and citizen that makes music and writes stuff”.
Part of conceiving himself as a member of a larger community is having tested himself in the elapse of time. “This is going to sound sad and extreme”, he says, “but there’s that description of Satan in Dante’s “Inferno” trapped up to his waist in ice and self-absorbed in his own misery and waving his batlike wings and gnawing on his resentments with his three mouths. It’s this terrible picture of your self-interest, fanning your coldness onto other people”.
He’s happy to let go of that egotistic vision of infatuation with his own work, maybe recalling that memento mori (from the Latin: remember you will die) thought, very stoic as well, thinking of himself dead or on your deathbed, sensing someone’s gonna be next to him, probably his wife, totally unattached of the pride that maybe once might have generated his work towards him. As we say in Colombia, “one dies and carries nothing”.
Besides the reflections on the implacability of life, the documentary is a visual feast of a concert, and we can glance at the chemistry of the creative work between Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Cave is a man who wears simple but elegant: white shirt and black blazer. On the other hand, Warren looks like a prophet of the last days with his endless white beard on the piano.
There are also four chords, three chorus singers, and one percussion. There’s a crew of five filmmakers and a big tail piano, where Cave and Ellis compose. The visuals of the private concert are powerful and intimidating: lights strobe and the camera goes around in complete circles.
Despite having the appearance of the town’s madman, Warren is a colorful character who gets along well with Nick. A master composer who includes reverberated voices of a poem by May Sarton read by Marianne Faithfull, who has an herbarium of Emily Dickinson as a beloved possession, the most fragile book that exists. We see the desktop of his personal computer: a myriad of files over files disarranged with no apparent order at all, the only way he can relate to his art.
“I don’t really have a sense of form and order, it’s like being in the moment and seeing what happens” — Warren Ellis.
In the end, This Much I Know to Be True is a beautiful but delicate reminder: life is too fragile, too sad, too unfair, and too inexplicable as well. However, as we don’t control anything that’s coming, we can choose how we react instead. Nick chooses to keep showing himself every day despite his losses, as the writer who pushes to fight against the creative block or the runner who pushes against [the] cold light of morning.
“My other son has died. It’s difficult to talk about, but the concerts themselves and this act of mutual support saves me. People say, How can you go on tour? But for me, it’s the other way around. How could I not?”
Impressive documentary. 4[.7] stars out of 5.
You can read the other reviews here.
