Light and Dark and the Enduring Metaphor

In 1998, Nick Cave, an Australian rock/pop artist, was asked by the Vienna Poetry Academy to give a series of talks on the nature of song-writing. A year later he gave a slightly revised version of the same speech at London’s Royal Festival Hall:

The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love, for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil – the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here – so within the fabric of the Love Song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.

*Editor’s note: Nick Cave has at times self-identified as a Christian and at others not, regardless, the argument is an interesting one.