Glass Bones - Chapter 15: When the Structure Falters

Creativity, Death Anxiety, and the Limits of Meaning

The Creative Mind & Mortality Podcast | Glass Bones, Chapter 15

What happens when the beliefs and stories we've depended on to make sense of our lives begin to lose their meaning?

How do we respond when the psychological structures that once provided stability can no longer contain what we're experiencing?

These questions are central to Chapter 15 of Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind, titled “When the Structure Falters.”

In the previous chapters, I explored Otto Rank's and Ernest Becker's understanding of the artist. Rank examined the tension between individuality and collective belonging. Becker brought mortality awareness into that relationship, suggesting that human beings construct cultural systems of meaning to protect themselves from the anxiety of knowing they will die.

Both thinkers provide an important foundation for understanding the creative psyche.

In this chapter, I bring Terror Management Theory (TMT) into the discussion and begin examining what happens when those protective systems become unstable.

Mortality Awareness and the Need for Certainty

Terror Management Theory, developed by psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, builds on Becker's understanding of the human condition.

The theory proposes that our awareness of death creates the potential for profound psychological anxiety. To manage that anxiety, we depend on cultural worldviews and a sense of personal value within those worldviews.

These beliefs help us feel that our lives matter.

Research associated with TMT has demonstrated that reminders of mortality can strengthen people's attachment to their existing beliefs and identities. When those beliefs are threatened, individuals may respond with greater defensiveness, rigidity, or hostility toward competing worldviews.

This raises an interesting question about creative practice.

What happens when the work itself requires us to question the very structures that ordinarily provide psychological protection?

Creativity and Psychological Openness

Creative work frequently involves uncertainty.

A painter may begin without knowing what the final image will become. A photographer might work with a subject that challenges familiar assumptions. A writer may spend years exploring questions that resist resolution.

In each case, the process can require a willingness to remain with ambiguity rather than immediately seeking certainty.

In Chapter 15, I examine the possibility that creative cognition can loosen some of the defensive rigidity associated with mortality awareness.

The important distinction, for me, concerns the practice rather than the personality.

I don't believe artists are necessarily more perceptive, courageous, or psychologically sophisticated than other people.

Creative practice may simply require us to spend more time working with uncertainty, contradiction, and experiences that resist familiar explanations.

That repeated engagement may influence how we respond when our beliefs are challenged.

I find this especially relevant to my own work with nineteenth-century photography, painting, and mixed media. Much of what interests me involves fragility, impermanence, and the psychological consequences of knowing our lives are temporary.

These subjects rarely offer reassuring conclusions.

Sometimes the work requires remaining with the questions.

When Openness Becomes Exposure

There's a psychological cost to this kind of engagement.

The cultural structures that provide meaning also provide stability. When we begin questioning those structures, we may lose some of the protection they offer.

Creative work can bring us closer to experiences that are difficult to contain.

Grief, historical trauma, violence, mortality, and personal loss can become material for artistic inquiry. But engaging with these subjects doesn't guarantee insight or emotional resolution.

There may be moments when the uncertainty becomes overwhelming.

This is where I introduce the concept of rupture.

Rupture: When Meaning Can No Longer Hold

I use the term rupture to describe a particular psychological threshold.

It occurs when awareness develops faster than the psyche can metabolize it. The stories, beliefs, and assumptions that once provided coherence begin to fracture, and new meaning has not yet emerged to replace them.

Rupture can follow a personal crisis, but the two are not identical.

A crisis may be an event. Rupture concerns what happens to our structures of meaning when an experience exceeds their capacity to contain it.

We may recognize that a belief no longer works, that an identity no longer fits, or that a familiar explanation can no longer account for what we've encountered.

The psychological defenses we've depended on begin to fail.

For artists, this instability may become material for creative work. The studio can become a place where meaning is questioned, broken apart, reconstructed, and tested again.

But rupture also carries risk.

The same openness that makes creative inquiry possible can become psychologically destabilizing when exposure exceeds our ability to contain it.

I think this distinction is essential.

Creativity doesn't make us immune to existential anxiety. Making art doesn't guarantee that suffering will become meaningful.

The process may, however, provide a way to engage with difficult experiences without immediately retreating into familiar defenses.

Where the Inquiry Goes Next

Chapter 15 marks a shift in the book.

Rank and Becker helped establish the artist's psychological and existential position. Terror Management Theory provides a way to examine the defensive processes involved in mortality awareness.

My interest now moves toward the experience itself.

What happens when meaning begins to break down? How do we recognize the moment when uncertainty becomes exposure? And what role might creative practice play in metabolizing that experience?

These questions become central in Chapter 16, “The Weight of Exposure,” and throughout the chapters that follow.

For me, this is where the relationship between creativity and mortality becomes especially important.

We're temporary beings who depend on meaning to live. Sometimes the meaning we've constructed can no longer hold what we've come to know.

What happens next may depend, at least in part, on how we respond to that uncertainty.

Watch or listen to Chapter 15, “When the Structure Falters”:

Glass Bones - Chapter 14: The Edge of Meaning

Ernest Becker, Otto Rank, and the Burden of Consciousness

The Creative Mind & Mortality Podcast

In this week's reading of Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind, I bring Ernest Becker more fully into the conversation about the artist and the psychological consequences of mortality awareness.

In Chapter 13, I explored Otto Rank's understanding of the artist as someone caught between two powerful human needs: the desire to belong to a collective culture and the equally strong need to remain an individual. Rank believed this tension was central to the creative personality. Artists depend on culture for meaning, language, and symbolic expression, yet their work often requires them to question the very structures that provide psychological stability.

Becker takes us further into the existential implications of that tension.

He understood that human beings live with a profound contradiction. We possess symbolic minds capable of imagining permanence, significance, and transcendence, yet we inhabit biological bodies destined to deteriorate and die.

We want our lives to matter. We want continuity. We want to believe that something about us will endure.

And we know, at some level, that our physical existence is temporary.

Becker believed this contradiction shapes much of human psychology. To manage the anxiety it produces, we construct cultural systems of meaning that tell us who we are, what matters, and how our lives might contribute to something larger than ourselves. He called these cultural hero systems.

Religion, nationalism, professional achievement, social identity, and even artistic accomplishment can become ways of establishing significance in a world where permanence is impossible.

These systems provide essential psychological protection. They also create difficulties when we begin to recognize how much of our meaning depends on beliefs we've inherited or constructed.

This is where Becker's understanding of the artist becomes particularly interesting.

The Artist's Tragic Position

Becker saw the artist as someone who may experience the instability of cultural meaning more directly. The artist recognizes that the symbolic structures we depend on are human creations, yet still needs those structures to make sense of existence.

There's a difficult tension here.

We can recognize that meaning is constructed and still experience a profound need for it. We can understand that our work will eventually disappear and still feel compelled to make it.

Becker described this condition through the idea of tragic heroism.

For me, this is one of his most compelling insights.

Tragic heroism involves acknowledging our limitations, recognizing the absence of ultimate guarantees, and continuing to participate in life anyway.

In creative practice, this might mean returning to the studio knowing that the work will deteriorate, that our accomplishments may eventually be forgotten, and that nothing we make can permanently protect us from death.

And yet we continue.

Creativity and the Burden of Knowing

I've spent decades working with nineteenth-century photographic processes, particularly wet collodion, along with painting and mixed media.

These processes continually remind me of impermanence. The chemistry is unstable. Glass can break. Images can deteriorate. A photograph preserves a moment that has already passed.

I'm interested in what happens psychologically when we work with that awareness rather than immediately trying to escape it.

Rank helps explain the tension between the individual and the collective. Becker reveals the existential pressure beneath that tension: our need for symbolic significance within a finite biological life.

Together, they offer a useful framework for understanding why creative work can be psychologically demanding.

But I think there's another question worth asking.

What actually happens when an artist remains with existential uncertainty long enough for it to influence the work?

Does the creative process change our relationship with death anxiety? Can it help us metabolize experiences that might otherwise become overwhelming? And what happens when the beliefs and narratives that once sustained us begin to collapse?

These questions move beyond the artist's psychological position and into the experience of making.

Where the Inquiry Goes Next

Rank and Becker provide much of the theoretical foundation for my inquiry, but their accounts leave important questions about the actual process of creative engagement.

They help us understand why artists might experience tension with collective meaning and why mortality awareness creates such profound psychological pressure.

What remains to be examined is how that pressure unfolds.

In the chapters ahead, I'll turn toward Terror Management Theory, the instability of cultural worldviews, and the moments when familiar systems of meaning begin to fail.

I'm particularly interested in the threshold where awareness becomes difficult to contain, where the stories we've depended on no longer provide the protection they once did.

This is the territory of rupture.

For me, the central question remains whether creative practice offers a different way of encountering that instability, one that allows us to remain present without immediately constructing another protective narrative.

Becker's tragic heroism suggests that there may be dignity in acknowledging our condition and continuing to create without guarantees.

Perhaps that's one of the most important things art can offer.

A way to work with the knowledge of our impermanence, even when we cannot resolve what that knowledge means.

Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind
Quinn B. Jacobson

Glass Bones - Chapter 13: The Pressure of Knowing

The Pressure of Knowing: Otto Rank and the Psychology of the Artist

Why do artists often seem to live at the edges of cultural meaning? What compels someone to question the beliefs and assumptions that provide other people with stability? And why does creative work so often emerge from anxiety, uncertainty, and psychological conflict?

In this week's reading of Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind, I explore these questions through the work of Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank and his understanding of the creative personality.

Rank was one of the earliest psychological thinkers to take the artist seriously as a distinct expression of the human condition. He recognized a fundamental tension in the creative life: the desire to belong to the collective world of culture and the equally powerful need to maintain one's individuality.

We all depend on culture to provide meaning, identity, and continuity. Our religious beliefs, social institutions, traditions, and shared narratives help us navigate a world in which our existence is temporary. These systems provide psychological stability, particularly when we're confronted with uncertainty and death.

For Rank, the artist occupies a difficult position within this arrangement.

Artists need culture. We depend on its symbols, language, history, and traditions to communicate. At the same time, creative work often requires enough distance from those structures to question them, challenge their assumptions, and recognize their limitations.

Too much belonging can diminish the independence necessary for creative inquiry. Too much separation can make communication nearly impossible.

The artist lives somewhere between those conditions.

The Artist and the Neurotic

One of Rank's more provocative ideas concerns the relationship between the artist and the neurotic.

He believed both experience heightened psychological tension. Both struggle with the conflict between individuality and collective expectations. The distinction, in Rank's framework, lies in what happens to that tension.

The artist gives it form.

Anxiety, conflict, and uncertainty become material for creative work. Experiences that might otherwise remain psychologically overwhelming can be externalized through painting, photography, writing, music, or other forms of expression.

This is an important insight, particularly when considered alongside Ernest Becker's theories about mortality awareness and our dependence on symbolic meaning.

But I think Rank's interpretation requires some qualification.

My Perspective: The Practice Changes the Relationship

Rank sometimes described artists as possessing a heightened or superior perception of reality.

I'm not convinced that's the most useful way to understand the creative mind.

I don't necessarily believe artists see more than other people, possess greater sensitivity, or have some privileged access to existential truth.

What interests me is the possibility that creative practice requires a different relationship with the things our psychological defenses ordinarily keep at a distance.

Artists often work directly with ambiguity, instability, vulnerability, and impermanence. We return to these conditions repeatedly because they become the material of our work.

That distinction matters.

It shifts the conversation away from the idea of an exceptional artistic personality and toward the psychological consequences of sustained creative engagement.

After decades of working with nineteenth-century photographic processes, painting, and mixed media, I've become increasingly interested in how the act of making something changes our relationship with uncertainty.

The work doesn't necessarily resolve the anxiety. Sometimes it makes the anxiety more visible.

A photograph can preserve a trace of something already disappearing. A painting can emerge from an experience we haven't fully understood. Creative work can hold contradictions that ordinary explanations struggle to accommodate.

Maybe this is one way artists metabolize existential pressure. We give form to experiences that resist easy resolution.

The Cost of Awareness

Rank understood that the artist's position comes at a psychological cost.

Remaining close to uncertainty can make life more difficult. Questioning collective assumptions can produce isolation. The need for individuality may conflict with our equally human need for acceptance and belonging.

There's a certain loneliness in recognizing that the stories we depend on are constructions, even when those stories remain meaningful and necessary.

This is particularly relevant to my larger inquiry into mortality awareness.

If culture provides psychological protection against the knowledge of death, what happens when creative practice continually exposes the limitations of that protection?

Can art become a way of living with the anxiety rather than immediately defending against it?

I think Rank offers an important starting point.

His understanding of the artist as someone caught between individuality and collective belonging helps explain why creativity can be both psychologically demanding and deeply meaningful.

My interest is in what happens within that tension.

The artist may become a witness to the instability of meaning, working with the very uncertainties that cultural systems are designed to contain.

And perhaps the work makes that exposure bearable.

In this chapter, I'm exploring the possibility that creativity offers a way to remain engaged with existential uncertainty long enough for something meaningful to emerge.

The pressure of knowing remains.

We continue making things anyway.

Glass Bones - Part One: Conclusion and Part Two: Introduction

In this week's reading of Glass Bones: Art, Morality, and the Human Mind, I conclude Part One and introduce Part Two. This is an important transition in the book, moving from the psychological and evolutionary foundations of mortality awareness into the lived experience of artists and creative people.

Part One began with a simple but unsettling fact: every human being knows they are going to die.

That knowledge shapes much more of our lives than we generally recognize. Drawing on Ernest Becker, Otto Rank, evolutionary psychology, and research on terror and meaning, I've explored how human beings developed psychological defenses and cultural systems of meaning to manage the anxiety that comes with knowing we're temporary.

We construct beliefs, identities, traditions, and worldviews that give our lives significance and continuity. These structures help us function, but they can also become sources of conflict when we feel they're threatened.

The question that interests me is whether we can develop a different relationship with this awareness.

Can we recognize the temporary nature of our existence without becoming overwhelmed by it? Can we participate in life without requiring our beliefs and accomplishments to protect us from the reality of death?

This is where creativity enters the conversation.

Creativity is a relationship with death.

I don't mean that every artist consciously thinks about mortality while working. I mean that making something involves engaging with uncertainty, vulnerability, change, and impermanence. Creative work can become a way of encountering these realities rather than continually defending against them.

Part Two explores what that looks like in practice.

I've spent over two decades working with nineteenth-century photographic processes, particularly wet collodion. Standing in my darkroom, watching an image emerge on a sheet of glass or metal, I'm reminded that everything involved is temporary. The chemistry changes. The materials deteriorate. The photograph is fragile. The person or place I'm photographing is also changing and disappearing.

The process makes impermanence tangible.

And yet I continue making photographs.

For me, this dilemma is one of the central questions of the creative life: How do we make meaning while knowing that everything we make, including ourselves, is temporary?

I'm not suggesting artists are somehow more enlightened or better equipped to face mortality than anyone else. Creative practice can simply keep certain tensions visible. Artists may find themselves standing between belonging and exile, between the need for meaning and the recognition that meaning is never guaranteed.

That position has psychological costs. It also creates possibilities.

In Part Two, I'll explore how anxiety becomes material, how personal and cultural ruptures shape creative work, and how making something can become a form of repair.

The movement is from theory to experience, from the structures that protect us to the practice of living with awareness.

Perhaps the task isn't to overcome our anxiety about death. Perhaps it's to remain present, to acknowledge our condition, and to make something meaningful anyway.

That's where Part Two begins—in Chapter 13 for next week!

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.