The soundtrack to the television show X-Files contains an usually hidden track. While most often, tracks hidden on CDs are found at the end of the recording, after a lengthy pause, Nick Cave's collaboration with the Dirty Three appears on the release at the beginning, that is, at the very very beginning, before track one. To listen to it you must rewind past the beginning. Over the Dirty Three's haunting folk dirge, Cave reads the following:
We were called to the forest... when we went down.
A wind blew warm and eloquent
We were searching for the secrets of the universe...
And we rounded up demons and forced them to tell us what it all meant
We tied 'em to trees and broke them down one by one
And on a scrap of paper, they wrote these words...
And as we read them, the sun broke through the trees...
"Dread the passage of Jesus, for he will not return."
Then we headed back to our world and left the forest behind...
Our hearts singin' with all the knowledge of love.
Then somewhere, somehow, we lost the message along the way...
And when we got home, we bought ourselves a house.
And we bought a car that we did not use...
And we bought a cage and two singing birds...
And at night we'd sit and listen to the canary's song.
For we'd both run right out of words...
Now the stars, they are all angled wrong...
And the sun and the moon refuse to burn
But I remember a message in a demon's hand
Dread the passage of Jesus for he does not return...
...he does not return...
...he does not return...
In this lyric parable, the two protagonists, for we imagine that they are two even if Cave doesn't say so, receive the secret of the universe after torturing it from a demon. The knowledge of this secret, then, does not come from an elder, or a priest, or a professor, or God incarnate, but a demon, who must be handled violently. It is a forced confession. What is most perplexing here is the response to the two who read the demon's message. While the message says "dread," the two leave the forest "their hearts singing with all the knowledge of love." Somehow the condition for a knowledge of love is the knowledge that Jesus is not coming back. What can this mean? How does one live when one knows that Jesus will not return, and how then does one love others?
It is not an easy question. Here we can only say, perhaps, that when Jesus returns, I will be judged, and if Jesus does not return, then I am responsible for judging myself, in the absence of any celestial accounting that can evaluate and disentangle the good in my soul from the evil. Additionally, in Saint Paul's time, the knowledge that Jesus will return was the condition for a knowledge of universal truth. If Jesus can be resurrected, says Paul, then resurrection is available to everyone - provided they can adhere to the tenets of Christian morality. Knowledge of Jesus not coming back, then, is not only a knowledge of existential moral responsibility, but of finitude: in Cave's world, nobody gets to come back. In some way, this responsibility for judging, which I am in a way condemned to enact or burdened with, or radically bound to, combined with the knowledge of my own mortality, becomes the condition for a joyous knowledge of love.
This existential re-write of Christian themes continues in the second half of the parable, when the romantic couple has settled down into a comfortable middle-class life, complete with a "car that we did not use." This life has befallen the couple because they have forgotten the message. The fate of those who fall into a life of materialist comfort and forget the higher knowledge of the universe is a fundamental theme to Christian ethics, which so often exhorts its followers, in a variety of ways, to awaken from their 'fallen' lives on this Earth to awareness of their deeper spiritual destinies. Cave re-writes this theme by portraying the existential knowledge of Jesus' passage as the knowledge that has been forgotten, covered over, obscured - left as a kind of nagging whisper at the edge of perception. We are given only this knowledge and a portrait of a life lived in oblivion to it - the character of a life lived in full recognition of Jesus' passage is left to us to conceive.
We were called to the forest... when we went down.
A wind blew warm and eloquent
We were searching for the secrets of the universe...
And we rounded up demons and forced them to tell us what it all meant
We tied 'em to trees and broke them down one by one
And on a scrap of paper, they wrote these words...
And as we read them, the sun broke through the trees...
"Dread the passage of Jesus, for he will not return."
Then we headed back to our world and left the forest behind...
Our hearts singin' with all the knowledge of love.
Then somewhere, somehow, we lost the message along the way...
And when we got home, we bought ourselves a house.
And we bought a car that we did not use...
And we bought a cage and two singing birds...
And at night we'd sit and listen to the canary's song.
For we'd both run right out of words...
Now the stars, they are all angled wrong...
And the sun and the moon refuse to burn
But I remember a message in a demon's hand
Dread the passage of Jesus for he does not return...
...he does not return...
...he does not return...
In this lyric parable, the two protagonists, for we imagine that they are two even if Cave doesn't say so, receive the secret of the universe after torturing it from a demon. The knowledge of this secret, then, does not come from an elder, or a priest, or a professor, or God incarnate, but a demon, who must be handled violently. It is a forced confession. What is most perplexing here is the response to the two who read the demon's message. While the message says "dread," the two leave the forest "their hearts singing with all the knowledge of love." Somehow the condition for a knowledge of love is the knowledge that Jesus is not coming back. What can this mean? How does one live when one knows that Jesus will not return, and how then does one love others?
It is not an easy question. Here we can only say, perhaps, that when Jesus returns, I will be judged, and if Jesus does not return, then I am responsible for judging myself, in the absence of any celestial accounting that can evaluate and disentangle the good in my soul from the evil. Additionally, in Saint Paul's time, the knowledge that Jesus will return was the condition for a knowledge of universal truth. If Jesus can be resurrected, says Paul, then resurrection is available to everyone - provided they can adhere to the tenets of Christian morality. Knowledge of Jesus not coming back, then, is not only a knowledge of existential moral responsibility, but of finitude: in Cave's world, nobody gets to come back. In some way, this responsibility for judging, which I am in a way condemned to enact or burdened with, or radically bound to, combined with the knowledge of my own mortality, becomes the condition for a joyous knowledge of love.
This existential re-write of Christian themes continues in the second half of the parable, when the romantic couple has settled down into a comfortable middle-class life, complete with a "car that we did not use." This life has befallen the couple because they have forgotten the message. The fate of those who fall into a life of materialist comfort and forget the higher knowledge of the universe is a fundamental theme to Christian ethics, which so often exhorts its followers, in a variety of ways, to awaken from their 'fallen' lives on this Earth to awareness of their deeper spiritual destinies. Cave re-writes this theme by portraying the existential knowledge of Jesus' passage as the knowledge that has been forgotten, covered over, obscured - left as a kind of nagging whisper at the edge of perception. We are given only this knowledge and a portrait of a life lived in oblivion to it - the character of a life lived in full recognition of Jesus' passage is left to us to conceive.
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