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.

Glass Bones: Chapter 2 - When We Knew We Would Die

Chapter 2 explores the uniquely human burden of knowing that we will die. While every living creature faces death, only human beings possess the capacity to anticipate it, creating a profound psychological dilemma. Drawing on Ernest Becker, Terror Management Theory, and evolutionary perspectives (Varkiu & Brower), the chapter argues that culture, identity, and meaning function as protective structures that keep mortality awareness at a tolerable distance. Rather than treating death anxiety as a pathological exception, the chapter presents it as the hidden force shaping much of human behavior, setting the foundation for understanding both our defenses and the possibility of a more conscious creative response.

Glass Bones: Chapter 1 - Thr Problem We Don't Admit

The chapter is titled "The Problem We Don't Admit." It asks a simple but unsettling question: What happened when human beings first realized they were going to die?

The chapter explores mortality awareness as the defining rupture in human consciousness and introduces the central ideas that the rest of the book builds upon. It draws from the work of Ernest Becker, Ajit Varki, and Danny Brower and Terror Management Theory, while asking what this means for everyday life, creativity, and our search for meaning.

If you've been following this project, I hope you'll enjoy the reading.

Glass Bones: Chapter 0 - On Existential and Aesthetic Literacy

I’m an artist, writer, and educator exploring the intersection of creativity, mortality, and what it means to be human. My work draws heavily from the ideas of Ernest Becker, particularly around death anxiety, the denial of death, Terror Management Theory, and creativity.

The book: Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind