{"id":30994,"date":"2025-10-18T20:49:03","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T20:49:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/the-engine-of-our-redemption-nick-cave-on-how-to-use-your-suffering\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T20:49:03","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T20:49:03","slug":"the-engine-of-our-redemption-nick-cave-on-how-to-use-your-suffering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/the-engine-of-our-redemption-nick-cave-on-how-to-use-your-suffering\/","title":{"rendered":"The Engine of Our Redemption: Nick Cave on How to Use Your Suffering"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are.<\/a> What you make of your suffering is the abacus on which it all adds up. It is there that your capacities to love and to give contract or expand, there that you feel most alone, there that you touch most directly the thread of human experience that binds us. Suffering is the common record of our unreturned messages to hope, and because we are the hoping species<\/a>, it is inseparable from what makes us human. More than a cerebral operation, it is an experience of the total organism, entwining synapse and sinew, engaging the entire orchestra of hormones and neurotransmitters and enzymes that plays the symphony of aliveness. This is why AIs \u2014 those disembodied cerebrators \u2014 will never know suffering and, not knowing the transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art, will never be able to write a truly great poem><\/a>. (About suffering they will always be wrong, the new masters.)<\/p>\n

Nick Cave<\/a> \u2014 who has known more grief than most, having lost his young son and lost his own father at a young age, but has remained an unrelenting guardian of joy<\/a> \u2014 takes up the question of that transmutation on the pages of his altogether magnificent book Faith, Hope and Carnage<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>). <\/p>\n

\"\"
Nick Cave transmuting. (Photograph: Sacha Lecca)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

An epoch after Carl Jung examined the relationship between suffering and creativity<\/a>, he considers \u201cthese terrible, devastating opportunities that bring amelioration and transformation\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

Perhaps grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things. Because, in grief, you become deeply acquainted with the idea of human mortality. You go to a very dark place and experience the extremities of your own pain \u2014 you are taken to the very limits of suffering. As far as I can see, there is a transformative aspect to this place of suffering. We are essentially altered or remade by it. Now, this process is terrifying, but in time you return to the world with some kind of knowledge that has something to do with our vulnerability as participants in this human drama. Everything seems so fragile and precious and heightened, and the world and the people in it seem so endangered, and yet so beautiful.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In a passage that calls to mind the great Buddhist teacher Pema Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n\u2019s insistence that \u201conly to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us,\u201d<\/a> he adds:<\/p>\n

\n

Suffering is, by its nature, the primary mechanism of change\u2026 It somehow presents us with the opportunity to transform into something else, something different, hopefully something better\u2026 This change is not something we necessarily seek out; rather, change is often brought to bear upon us, through a shattering or annihilation of our former selves.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Reflecting on how his son\u2019s death left him feeling unbearably alone and at the same time \u201cswept up in a kind of commonality of human suffering,\u201d he recounts the lifeline of kindness that strangers extended to him and his wife \u2014 \u201cpoints of light\u201d lit up by that silent understanding of suffering we all carry in our marrow, illuminating the deepest truth of human nature that we have been bamboozled into disbelieving:<\/p>\n

\n

We began to see, in a profound way, that people were kind. People cared. I know that sounds simplistic, maybe even na\u00efve, but I came to the conclusion that the world wasn\u2019t bad, at all \u2014 in fact, what we think of as bad, or as sin, is actually suffering. And that the world is not animated by evil, as we are so often told, but by love, and that, despite the suffering of the world, or maybe in defiance of it, people mostly just cared. I think Susie and I instinctively understood that we needed to move towards this loving force, or perish.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>, also available as a stand-alone print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Pulsating beneath The Red Hand Files<\/em><\/a> \u2014 Nick\u2019s soulful almanac of wisdom prompted by questions from fans \u2014 is this ongoing yearning to make use of our suffering. He addresses it directly in one issue:<\/p>\n

\n

What do we do with suffering? As far as I can see, we have two choices \u2014 we either transform our suffering into something else, or we hold on to it, and eventually pass it on.<\/p>\n

In order to transform our pain, we must acknowledge that all people suffer. By understanding that suffering is the universal unifying force, we can see people more compassionately, and this goes some way toward helping us forgive the world and ourselves. By acting compassionately we reduce the world\u2019s net suffering, and defiantly rehabilitate the world. It is an alchemical act that transforms pain into beauty. This is good. This is beautiful.<\/p>\n

To not transform our suffering and instead transmit our pain to others, in the form of abuse, torture, hatred, misanthropy, cynicism, blaming and victimhood, compounds the world\u2019s suffering. Most sin is simply one person\u2019s suffering passed on to another. This is not good. This is not beautiful.<\/p>\n

The utility of suffering, then, is the opportunity it affords us to become better human beings. It is the engine of our redemption.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Simone Weil on how to make use of our suffering<\/a> and the young poet Anne Reeve Aldrich on how to bear your suffering<\/a> in an extraordinary letter to Emily Dickinson \u2014 neither of whom got to be an old poet \u2014 then revisit Nick Cave on the art of growing older<\/a> and the two pillars of a meaningful life<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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donating = loving<\/h3>\n

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings<\/em><\/a> for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation<\/a>. Your support makes all the difference.<\/p>\n

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newsletter<\/h3>\n

The Marginalian<\/em> has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect<\/a>. Like? Sign up.<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. What you make of your suffering is the abacus on which it all adds up. It is there that your capacities to love and to give contract or expand, there that you feel most alone, there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30995,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-life"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 21:29:07","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}