What does it take to be free?

Dear Jai,

I’m sitting on a hotel balcony overlooking the city of Lisbon and reading through the questions that have come in. Maybe it’s the Portuguese late October sunshine, or perhaps it’s because we have an unexpected day off (obviously a managerial oversight), but I feel it is time to return to The Red Hand Files. I am still on tour, but the Files are calling, and your lovely question leapt out at me, making its demands.

As a songwriter, I am primarily concerned with artistic freedom – freedom of expression, belief and imagination. What it takes for me to pursue these freedoms – to feel genuinely free – has paradoxically something to do with order and constraint. I feel free to express myself and can access a greater quality of imagination when certain restrictions are put into place. As many of you know, I observe specific protocols to open the creative mind – I sit at a desk in my office and write, working exclusively between 9am and 5pm. Within ‘office hours’ I find my mind becomes genuinely free, and I feel a creativity that is qualitatively richer than anything I may experience outside of this time, in the disorder and distraction of the ordinary world. For me, what must appear to some as forced labour is where all the imaginative mischief, beauty, and love are free to happen. Freedom finds itself in captivity. Disorder, randomness, chaos and anarchy are where the imagination goes to die, or so I’ve found.

So it is with matters of faith and the freeness of belief. I experience a certain vague ‘spiritualness’ within the world’s chaos, an approximate understanding that God is implicit in some latent, metaphysical way, yet it is only really in church – that profoundly fallible human institution – that I become truly spiritually liberated. I am swept up in a poetic story that is both true and imaginative and fully participatory, where my spiritual imagination can be both contained and free. The church may appear to some as small, even stifling, its congregation herdlike, yet within its architecture, music, litanies, and stories, I find a place of immense spiritual recognition and liberation.

Thinking about it now, the same can be applied to marriage – another audacious feat of the imagination – which, for some of us, like art, like faith, draws into focus what it is to love. It is order itself that allows us to be free.

Of course, Jai, these thoughts are entirely subjective. Many creative people, especially the young, may feel their chaotic or disordered relationship with the world is indispensable to their creative freedom. The more anarchic, the better! However, after considerable fieldwork in this area, I have yet to find it so. I have come to understand that the muscle of the imagination is strengthened through resistance, discipline and order. These institutional bonds ultimately become a form of liberation where our dreams, alert and concentrated, can find their focus and run truly free.

Love, Nick

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