Glass Bones - Chapter 12: When Awareness Deepens

When Awareness Deepens

I wear this t-shirt in public, and people ask me what it means. I tell them, “It means I make art to distract myself from the void, but I still have to pay taxes." I also need a haircut!

I've spent a good portion of my life thinking about mortality, both through my artwork and through the philosophical and psychological questions that have shaped my research. One of the things I've come to understand is that our relationship with death changes as we grow older and accumulate experience.

We lose people we love. Our bodies change. Things that once seemed important begin to lose their significance. We become increasingly aware that time is limited, and that awareness can change how we see ourselves and the world around us.

Chapter 12 of Glass Bones, “When Awareness Deepens,” explores what happens when our psychological defenses against mortality begin to loosen.

Ernest Becker argued that human beings construct elaborate systems of meaning to protect themselves from the anxiety associated with knowing they will die. These systems include our cultural beliefs, identities, religious convictions, achievements, and the many ways we attempt to establish significance in a temporary world.

They serve an important psychological function. We need them to navigate everyday life. Yet there are moments when these protections become less convincing, when the reality of our impermanence becomes difficult to ignore.

What happens when we begin to see through some of the stories we've spent our lives believing?

This is where existential philosophy becomes particularly relevant.

Martin Heidegger described human existence in terms of being-toward-death. His argument was that mortality is fundamental to how we experience existence. Our awareness of death shapes the possibilities available to us and the decisions we make within the time we have.

Heidegger believed that much of human life is spent absorbed in the expectations and conventions of others. We inherit beliefs, follow cultural scripts, and organize our lives around assumptions we rarely question.

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

— Oscar Wilde

Recognizing our finitude may interrupt this pattern. It can encourage us to examine whether we're actually living according to our own values or simply following the expectations we've inherited.

Jean-Paul Sartre approached this problem through freedom and responsibility. His famous proposition, existence precedes essence, suggests that human beings are not born with a predetermined purpose. We create meaning through our choices, actions, and commitments.

That freedom can be unsettling. It places responsibility for our lives directly in our hands.

I find these ideas especially relevant to creativity.

When I enter my studio or darkroom, I'm confronted with uncertainty. I can prepare the materials, control certain variables, and bring decades of experience to the process, but I cannot guarantee the outcome.

A wet collodion plate is temporary in its own peculiar way. The chemistry changes, the light shifts, and the image must be made within a narrow window of time. Every exposure reminds me that control has limits.

Painting presents similar problems. I begin with an idea, but the work often moves in directions I didn't anticipate. Sometimes the most meaningful discoveries occur when I allow the process to unfold without forcing it into a predetermined outcome.

These experiences have taught me something about the relationship between awareness and creativity. The more comfortable I become with uncertainty, the more willing I am to remain present with what is happening.

I suspect something similar may be possible in our relationship with mortality.

Terror Management Theory has demonstrated that reminders of death can intensify our attachment to cultural worldviews and self-esteem. When the systems that provide meaning feel threatened, we may become more defensive, rigid, or hostile toward people who challenge our beliefs.

Yet research also suggests that the effects of mortality awareness depend partly on how that awareness is experienced and processed. Under some circumstances, reflecting on death may encourage more deliberate choices, greater appreciation of life, and a reconsideration of personal values.

This possibility interests me.

I've become increasingly aware of my own defensive responses, particularly when an idea challenges something I believe. I can sometimes recognize the impulse to defend my position before I've fully considered what is being said.

That moment of recognition matters.

It creates a small interval between the experience of threat and my response to it. Within that interval, I may have an opportunity to examine the fear, uncertainty, or attachment beneath my reaction.

This is closely related to the ideas I'm developing in my next book, Rupture: The Creative Response to Death Anxiety.

Rupture is concerned with the phenomenology of the interval between existential threat and symbolic defense. I'm interested in what happens when we recognize our defenses while they're forming and whether that awareness might allow us to respond differently.

I don't imagine that we can eliminate death anxiety or somehow escape the psychological conditions that make us human. Becker's work suggests that such an ambition would misunderstand the very nature of consciousness.

What interests me is the possibility of becoming more aware of how these mechanisms influence our lives.

Perhaps deeper awareness allows us to become a little less rigid in our beliefs, a little more compassionate toward others, and more attentive to the brief experience of being alive.

Mortality is the condition under which everything we value exists. Our relationships, creative work, memories, and experiences all unfold within the limits of time.

For me, that recognition has become increasingly important as I grow older.

I want to spend my remaining years making meaningful work, being present with the people I love, and paying attention to the world around me. I'm less interested in the cultural expectations that once seemed so important and more interested in understanding what it means to live consciously inside a temporary existence.

That's what Chapter 12 is about.

When awareness deepens, we may begin to recognize that meaning is something we participate in creating every day.

Our mortality gives that participation its urgency. Our choices give it form.

And perhaps the most important question we can ask ourselves is a relatively simple one:

Knowing that my time is limited, how do I want to live?

In this installment of The Creative Mind & Mortality Podcast, I read Chapter 12 of Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind and explore how a deeper awareness of death may change our relationship with meaning, creativity, and everyday life.

Glass Bones — Chapter 11: Living with the Tension

The Creative Mind & Mortality Podcast

In this week's reading from Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind, I share Chapter 11, “Living with the Tension.”

This chapter explores the artist's relationship to mortality awareness, cultural meaning, and the psychological defenses that allow us to function in everyday life.

Ernest Becker argued that human beings construct symbolic worlds to protect themselves from the terror of death. Our beliefs, identities, traditions, and cultural narratives provide a sense of stability and significance. They help us live with the knowledge that our lives are finite.

Artists often occupy an uncomfortable position within these structures. Creative practice repeatedly brings us into contact with uncertainty, impermanence, failure, and disappearance. We become familiar with the fractures in meaning that culture works so hard to conceal.

That doesn't make artists superior or more enlightened. It means the work can expose us to experiences that our ordinary psychological defenses are designed to soften.

I explore Becker's distinction between becoming overwhelmed by existential anxiety and transforming that anxiety into creative form. A photograph, painting, poem, or piece of music can give shape to something that might otherwise remain difficult to understand or endure.

I also introduce Simone de Beauvoir's existential ethics. Her work adds an important dimension to this discussion: our freedom and our creative choices carry responsibility toward other people.

Art can expand what we are willing to see. It can challenge inherited assumptions and expose the limitations of our cultural stories. That gives creative work an ethical dimension without requiring it to become moralizing or instructional.

For me, this has been central to decades of photography and painting. I return to subjects involving mortality, historical violence, cultural memory, and human vulnerability because they raise questions I cannot easily set aside.

But living with this awareness has a cost. Sensitivity, isolation, anxiety, and uncertainty are part of the territory. Creative work does not eliminate those tensions. It offers a way to encounter them and sometimes give them form.

Chapter 11 asks us to consider what artists contribute to a culture organized around protecting itself from uncomfortable truths.

Perhaps part of that contribution is simply the willingness to remain attentive when the familiar explanations no longer hold.

I hope you'll join me for this reading and consider how these ideas relate to your own experience, whether or not you identify as an artist.

Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind is available in hardcover and paperback.

Glass Bones, Chapter 10: The Anxiety Beneath It All

Chapter 10: The Anxiety Beneath It All

The chapter opens with an idea that has followed me through much of my life as an artist:

Art begins where language falters.

There are experiences we can describe fairly easily. Then there are things that seem to resist language altogether. Fear. Grief. Longing. Uncertainty. Mortality. We feel them, sometimes intensely, without necessarily being able to say what they are.

Ernest Becker's work gave me a way to think about this. Most of us don't walk around consciously afraid of death. Mortality anxiety usually operates beneath awareness, buffered by the beliefs, identities, routines, and cultural structures that allow us to function.

Sometimes that buffer weakens.

We feel the pressure without necessarily understanding its source. It might appear as dread, overwhelm, numbness, or simply the strange feeling that something isn't quite right beneath the surface.

For me, this is where art becomes important.

When we create, we can take something formless and give it boundaries. Fear becomes an image. Grief becomes a photograph. Anxiety becomes a mark on a surface.

Form is manageable. Form is containable. Form has edges. Death does not.

A painting can hold what a nervous system cannot. A photograph can absorb what a psyche cannot carry alone. A poem can approach something consciousness struggles to face directly.

This doesn't mean the experience disappears.

The artist metabolizes it.

That distinction is important to me because it shifts creativity away from the romantic idea of self-expression. The work becomes a container for something that otherwise has nowhere to go.

But Chapter 10 moves into more difficult territory from there.

Creative practice repeatedly brings artists close to the edges of their own worldviews. We begin noticing the cracks in cultural stories. Things that once seemed permanent or self-evident start looking constructed, inherited, provisional.

Art can make those structures visible.

And that is partly why art can become threatening.

Terror Management Theory suggests that mortality awareness can intensify our attachment to the worldviews that give us psychological security. When those structures are threatened, people may defend them more aggressively.

Art sometimes does precisely the opposite. It loosens certainty. It reveals contradiction. It exposes the machinery of meaning-making.

The deeper function of art, then, may not always be to comfort us. Sometimes its function is to reveal.

This is where Chapter 10 connects strongly with the ideas I've been developing around rupture. What happens when meaning begins to fail? What happens in that interval before we rush to repair the fracture with another certainty?

Perhaps we can remain there for a moment.

That possibility matters because our inability to tolerate uncertainty may have consequences far beyond individual anxiety. When existential threat becomes unbearable, we may seek certainty, harden our worldview, and defend the symbolic structures that make us feel secure.

Creative practice offers another possibility: staying near the instability without immediately resolving it.

Not forever. Not without psychological limits. But long enough to see what is actually there.

This is why I describe art as a kind of training for existential muscles we don't often use.

A photograph of decay, a painting of grief, or a poem about longing lets us approach mortality symbolically. We can lean toward the thing we fear without being completely engulfed by it.

Art doesn't eliminate terror. It teaches us how to hold it.

Increasingly, I think this capacity to hold is central to the work I'm doing now.

The question isn't simply how we construct better meanings after something breaks. I'm becoming more interested in the interval before reconstruction, when the old meaning has failed and something new hasn't yet taken its place.

Can we inhabit that instability without immediately converting it into certainty?

Can we witness anxiety before it becomes defense?

Can we remain present long enough to understand what is actually happening?

Those questions reach beyond Glass Bones. They're becoming central to Rupture and to the larger framework I'm developing around creative practice and mortality awareness.

Perhaps art gives us a place to practice.

Not transcendence. Not escape.

Presence inside impermanence.

And the willingness to stay there long enough to see what emerges.

Glass Bones, Chapter 9: The Need to Matter

This week on The Creative Mind & Mortality Podcast, I’m reading Chapter 9 of Glass Bones, “The Need to Matter.”

This chapter gets very close to the heart of why I wrote the book in the first place: what does creativity allow us to do with the knowledge that we are going to die?

Ernest Becker believed that creative work emerges, at least in part, from the existential pressure created by mortality awareness. We are biological creatures capable of imagining symbolic worlds, yet we know that our biological lives will end. We make things inside that contradiction.

A photograph. A painting. A book. A piece of music.

Something internal and difficult to contain is given form.

I describe this in the chapter as practiced proximity. The artist repeatedly returns to materials, subjects, and experiences that do not allow the pretense of permanence. Creativity changes our relationship to mortality because something previously formless becomes something we can stay with.

Rachel and Ross Menzies add another dimension to this. Human cultures have always created rituals for dealing with death and grief, but many of those communal structures have weakened in contemporary life. Some of that symbolic work has shifted toward the individual. Artists often find themselves working in precisely that territory, using image, material, language, and form where older narratives no longer seem sufficient.

Nietzsche understood this problem differently. When inherited systems of meaning collapse, we have a choice. We can cling to what no longer works, retreat into nihilism, or begin creating in the debris.

That idea has always resonated with my experience in the darkroom and studio.

A plate fails. A painting changes direction. An idea I thought I understood suddenly falls apart. The work doesn't remove uncertainty. It asks me to remain with it.

That is why I write in Chapter 9:

Creative work often feels like standing in two worlds: one foot in the symbolic structure, one foot in the void beneath it.

There is something important in that position.

Culture gives us systems of meaning that help buffer mortality awareness. Creativity can participate in those systems, but it can also bring us close to their limits. The artist can work at the edge of inherited meaning, where certainty becomes less available and awareness begins to surface.

This is where Terror Management Theory becomes particularly interesting to me. Creativity may help strengthen symbolic meaning, but it can also keep the fractures visible.

And that leads to one of the central ideas in the chapter:

We build culture to protect ourselves from mortality, but we build art to stay close to it.

Irvin Yalom described encounters with mortality as potential “awakening experiences.” Awareness of death can strip away the trivial and reorganize how we understand our lives. For some people, that reorganization becomes creative.

We write. We photograph. We paint. We build. Not because creativity defeats death or makes us permanent, but because making gives us a way to remain in conversation with mortality without necessarily turning away from it.

Perhaps that is one form of creative courage. I know I will die, but I will create anyway.

Glass Bones, Chapter 8: When Meaning Breaks

There comes a point when a story we’ve depended on stops working.

It might happen after a death, an illness, a personal loss, or a change we never expected. Sometimes there is no single event. We simply notice that a belief no longer comforts us, a ritual feels empty, or the identity we’ve lived inside no longer fits.

That experience is at the center of Chapter 8 of Glass Bones, “When Meaning Breaks.”

In the earlier chapters, I explore how we build worldviews to give our lives coherence and help us live with the knowledge that we will die. Those structures matter. They connect us to other people, give us a sense of continuity, and help us decide what is worth doing. But they are not permanent. Life eventually confronts us with experiences that our familiar explanations cannot contain.

When that happens, we may feel more than disappointment or confusion. We may feel exposed. The stories that helped keep mortality at a manageable distance have weakened, and questions we thought we had settled return with new force.

What do we do when the old meaning no longer holds?

One response is to cling to it more tightly. We try to recover certainty by defending a belief or identity that has already begun to fail us. Another response is despair: the conclusion that if our old story was fragile, perhaps nothing matters at all.

I’m interested in a third response. We can begin to make meaning again.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Albert Camus, and Peter Wessel Zapffe approach the difficulty of being conscious from different directions. Schopenhauer takes suffering seriously and considers how art can briefly release us from its grip. Camus describes the absurd: our longing for an explanation meeting a world that offers no final answer. His response is to keep living, choosing, caring, and creating without guarantees. Zapffe sees human self-awareness as an overwhelming burden, but identifies sublimation as one way to give difficult awareness a form we can bear.

I don’t read these thinkers as offering the same solution. Their differences matter. What interests me is the question running through them: how can we remain present to life when we can no longer rely on an explanation that makes everything feel secure?

My studio is where that question becomes practical.

I know the feeling of watching a wet collodion image emerge in the fixer. I know what it is to work on a painting for months before something I’ve been unable to articulate begins to take shape. Certain photographs, paintings, and clay figures have felt like slow acts of mourning. They do not resolve a loss. They give me a way to attend to it.

Art cannot make a temporary life permanent. It cannot guarantee that suffering will be redeemed or that every rupture will lead to something beautiful. But making can change our relationship to what has happened. It allows us to work with an experience rather than only defend ourselves against it.

Repair also happens beyond the studio. Grief reminds us that we need other people. Shared rituals, memories, and the simple act of witnessing someone’s loss can help us begin to find our footing. Meaning is not always something we can rebuild alone.

The distinction I keep returning to is this: repair is not the same as restoration.

Restoration would mean putting the old story back exactly as it was, as though nothing had happened. Repair asks whether we can build a way of living that makes room for what we now know. It asks for honesty about uncertainty, imagination about what might come next, and the willingness to remain engaged with a life we cannot fully control.

That is not a promise that everything will turn out well. It is a way of responding without demanding that life first provide a guarantee.

In this new reading, I explore what happens when meaning breaks and why creativity can become part of the search for repair.

The question is not how to make ourselves unbreakable. It’s about how to keep living, caring, and making when we discover that we are not.

Glass Bones, Chapter 7: The Fragile Architecture of Meaning

This week's reading from Glass Bones is Chapter 7, The Fragile Architecture of Meaning.

I've been building toward this chapter through Becker, mortality awareness, denial, culture, worldviews, and Terror Management Theory. Chapter 7 brings those ideas together around something I've become increasingly interested in: how stable meaning feels from inside it and how fragile it actually is.

Culture looks solid. We have institutions, religions, political systems, traditions, identities, rituals, laws, flags, and all the stories we inherit about who we are and what matters.

But psychologically, these structures may be far less permanent than they appear.

Ernest Becker understood culture as a symbolic system constructed partly in response to mortality awareness. It gives us significance, continuity, and a place inside a world that will eventually continue without us. Terror Management Theory extended Becker's argument experimentally, showing how strongly people can defend these worldviews when mortality becomes psychologically salient.

That helps explain something about human conflict that has always fascinated and disturbed me.

When someone challenges a deeply held worldview, we may experience more than disagreement. Something underneath the argument is being disturbed. The structure that organizes reality itself begins to tremble.

This is why political disagreements can become questions of identity. Religious differences can become existential threats. National symbols acquire enormous emotional power. People may become more certain precisely when the ground beneath that certainty has become less secure.

We defend the very structures that protect us.

The problem is that no symbolic structure can completely solve mortality. Every worldview eventually encounters something it cannot explain, absorb, or protect us from. Death remains. Loss remains, chance remains, and the body fails. History interrupts us, and the world refuses to behave according to the stories we've constructed around it. The architecture cracks.

For me, this moment is also where art becomes interesting.

Artists spend a remarkable amount of time working with things that refuse complete control. Materials fail, images disappear, and paintings go somewhere you didn't intend. A glass plate that seemed perfect suddenly lifts in the wash or is damaged. Sometimes the failure becomes more compelling than the thing you were trying to make.

Glass Bones - Chapter 6: The Mechanics of Defense

I’ve posted my reading of Chapter 6 of Glass Bones, “The Mechanics of Defense.”

The previous chapters have gradually moved toward a central problem: human beings possess enough consciousness to understand that we exist, but that same consciousness allows us to anticipate our own disappearance.

We know that we will die.

And yet we still have to get out of bed in the morning.

We make coffee. We work. We fall in love. We make photographs and paintings. We worry about money. We argue about politics. We plan for next year. Somehow, the knowledge of death remains present without occupying the center of consciousness every waking moment.

How do we do that?

Chapter 6 examines some of the psychological machinery that makes ordinary life possible.

Defense mechanisms are usually discussed as ways of protecting the ego from uncomfortable thoughts, impulses, emotions, or experiences. From an existential perspective, however, they may also participate in something much larger. They help regulate our awareness of vulnerability, contingency, meaninglessness, and ultimately mortality.

Denial, repression, projection, displacement, rationalization, and other defensive processes create psychological distance between ourselves and what threatens us.

Ernest Becker understood this problem in unusually stark terms. For Becker, the denial of death was not simply one defense among many. It was woven deeply into human culture and personality. Much of what we construct around ourselves, including identity, status, morality, achievement, belief, and symbolic meaning, may function partly as protection against the terror produced by mortality awareness.

This does not mean that everything human beings value can be reduced to fear of death. I think that interpretation goes too far. Love is still love. Art is still art. Meaning matters precisely because it is experienced as meaningful.

The more interesting question is how mortality may operate underneath these structures without completely determining them.

That distinction matters.

A defense can protect us without being pathological. In fact, some degree of denial may be necessary. To remain continuously aware of our fragility would make ordinary life extraordinarily difficult. Psychological defenses allow us to narrow consciousness enough to function.

The problem begins when protection becomes rigidity.

A worldview that gives life meaning can become something that must be defended. A belief can become inseparable from identity. Another person’s values, religion, politics, body, culture, or way of living may then feel like more than disagreement. They can become psychologically threatening.

At that point, the mechanics of defense begin moving outward.

We project.

We judge.

We divide the world into categories.

We create insiders and outsiders.

We defend ourselves against ideas and people who disturb the structures through which we understand ourselves.

This is one of the darker implications of Becker’s work, and it becomes increasingly important as Glass Bones moves forward. The systems that protect us from existential anxiety can also participate in prejudice, aggression, scapegoating, and violence.

The same psychological architecture may contain both our capacity for meaning and our capacity for destruction.

For me, this is also where art becomes particularly interesting.

Creative work can certainly function defensively. Artists build identities, seek symbolic permanence, leave objects behind, and participate in cultural systems that promise some continuation beyond biological life. But art can also do something quite different.

It can expose the defense.

An artwork can place us in front of uncertainty without immediately resolving it. It can make mortality visible without explaining it away. It can hold contradiction, ambiguity, beauty, decay, presence, and absence together long enough for us to experience them.

Perhaps that is one of art’s more significant psychological possibilities.

It does not necessarily defeat the denial of death.

Sometimes it simply lets us see it working.

Glass Bones Chapter 5 - The Stories That Hold Us

In the previous chapter, Culture As Armor, I explored Ernest Becker’s argument that culture provides us with systems of meaning that help protect us from the psychological weight of knowing that we are mortal.

Chapter 5 moves inside that armor.

Culture is not simply something that surrounds us. We internalize it. Its values, beliefs, symbols, and expectations gradually become part of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, where we belong, what matters, and what makes our lives meaningful.

Those stories can come from religion, family, work, nationality, relationships, achievement, morality, creativity, and countless other sources. Some are deeply personal. Others were waiting for us long before we were born. Together, they give our lives a sense of continuity and significance.

But what happens when those stories are challenged or begin to fail?

The Stories That Hold Us moves further into Becker’s ideas about meaning and symbolic immortality, as well as the work of Terror Management Theory. It begins to examine why we can become so deeply attached to our worldviews and why challenges to those beliefs sometimes provoke reactions far more powerful than the disagreement itself might seem to warrant.

The stories that hold us together can also divide us. This is easy to see in today's world. From neighbor to neighbor or on the global stage, these stories mean survival for us. They are our buffering system that keeps existential anxiety buried. 

This chapter also brings me closer to one of the questions at the heart of Glass Bones: where does art fit into all of this? Perhaps creativity cannot resolve the problem of mortality, but it may give us a way to encounter it, express it, and make meaning from the knowledge that everything we know and love is temporary.

Glass Bones Chapter 4 - Culture As Armor

Chapter 4: Culture As Armor | Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind

In Chapter 4 of Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind, I turn to one of Ernest Becker’s central ideas: culture functions as a kind of psychological armor against the knowledge of our mortality.

We know that we will die, but we cannot live every moment fully conscious of that fact. Culture gives us ways to manage this contradiction. Religion, family, work, art, achievement, nationality, morality, and the values we attach to our lives help create a world that feels meaningful, ordered, and enduring.

This chapter begins to explore how these cultural systems protect us from death anxiety but also what happens when the beliefs that give our lives meaning are challenged by other people, other cultures, or other ways of seeing the world.

If the earlier chapters of Glass Bones ask how human beings became conscious of mortality, Chapter 4 asks the next question: What did we build to protect ourselves from knowing it?

This is where Becker’s ideas begin to open into the larger psychological and cultural questions that run throughout the rest of the book.

Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind
Chapter 4: Culture As Armor

THE BOOK IS AVAILABLE HERE

Glass Bones: Chapter 3- The Beginning of Denial

In the first 38 pages of Glass Bones, I laid out the central problem: human beings are animals who became conscious enough to understand that we will die. I examined how the awareness of death organizes much of human thought, behavior, culture, and creativity, rather than being a mere occasional fear.

Chapter 3 follows that question backward. If death awareness creates the problem, when did the problem begin? The Beginning of Denial looks at the emergence of human self-awareness and asks what happened when our ancestors became capable of imagining themselves across time and, eventually, imagining their absence from it.

This is where denial begins to take shape, not necessarily as a conscious refusal to think about death, but as a psychological adaptation to knowing something no animal seems equipped to live with easily.