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.
Jimmy, 2003—Salt Lake City, Utah, 10 x 8 in. positive print from a wet collodion negative. copyright Quinn B. Jacobson
End of the Road Podcast
This was a wonderful and productive conversation. A big thanks to Michael and Lynn for this—I hope you enjoy it.
Preface and Introduction - First Reading: Glass Bones
Greetings,
I hope this finds you well.
Thank you for the tremendous response to Glass Bones. I truly appreciate it. I’ve been deeply immersed in my new project, Rupture: The Creative Response to Death Anxiety.
I also posted the first part of a reading from Glass Bones. I plan to continue the series over the coming weeks, reading sections from the book and talking a little about the ideas behind the work.
Working On Rupture: The Creative Response to Death Anxiety
Greetings,
I have been having a wonderful summer. I hope yours is going well too, or winter, if you're in that part of the world. In Las Cruces, summer starts in April, so it's been warm here for quite a while. We've been in the 100s °F (38+ °C) for most of June. I think we hit 105 °F (40°C) the other day. Whatever I might say about the heat, I can honestly say it isn't snow.
It's been wonderful to have time to think, make work, read, write, and live with questions without being forced to complete them. I don't miss the PhD program at all. I have no regrets about going through it, but I don't miss it. I'm more productive now and so much happier.
I've realized that I don't do well with busy work or assignments. I'm interested in certain questions, and if someone doesn't understand them or simply isn't interested, that's fine. Let's move on.
The program eventually felt like I was paying people to care about what I was doing. It felt like a strange kind of capitalism with a hint of colonialism mixed in. Every meeting became a transaction. "All right the hour is up. We'll see you next time." It wasn't worth it for me.
Then there was the PhD itself. The title is a bit pretentious in my mind, as is the sole desire in pursuit of it. It never meant much to me, and by the end it meant even less. They never understood that. So many of those students will have buyer's remorse. I guarantee it. I don’t even want to tell you what a year cost me—three years? Oy!
Instead, I'm making work.
I'm experimenting again. Exposing plates. Making marks on canvases. I am following ideas instead of assignments.
I was going to post a plate I made today but decided against it. I'm going to hold all of this work back for the book. Everything ends up online now. Every photograph. Every painting. Good, awful, or mediocre. We've become numb from the constant stream of images. Major image fatigue.
So, in the spirit of Roland Barthes, whose Camera Lucida I'm reading again, I've decided not to publish any of this new work online.
The two books quietly guiding this project are Susan Sontag's On Photography and Barthes' Camera Lucida. This body of work is art first. The theory sits underneath it. Those of you who have followed my work over the years know how unusual that is for me. I'm deliberately resisting the urge to explain everything. The work has to carry its own weight.
I'll say this much: I'm working with dead animals, dead plants, and dried vegetation. That may change as the work develops, but these subjects have become central to both the photographs and the paintings.
The motivation driving all of this work is remarkably simple: llustration begins with an answer, and inquiry begins with a question.
50 copies of Glass Bones. Each numbered, stamped, and signed.
Glass Bones is Shipping
I’m very happy to say that the first orders of Glass Bones shipped today. I have 50 copies of hardbacks, and the rest will be through Amazon (paperback; they are not signed or stamped). If you want to get a copy, click here. After these are gone, the paperback version will be available after June 19, 2026.
Each book has a note from me and is editioned.
It was a wonderful experience putting all of this together—thank you to all of you that have supported this project. I’m truly grateful.
This is my stamp that I emboss on every print I make—I thought it was appropriate for this work too.
Upcoming Morbid Anatomy Talk: Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind
I'm pleased to announce that I'll be giving a free online talk for Morbid Anatomy on September 28, 2026, at 5:00 PM MST.
The presentation is based on my new book, Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind, a project that grew out of more than three decades of artistic practice and years of research into mortality, creativity, psychology, and meaning-making.
At the center of the talk are two questions that have followed me throughout much of my life and work: What happens when a species becomes aware of its own mortality? And do creative people respond to that awareness differently than everyone else?
Drawing from Ernest Becker, Otto Rank, Terror Management Theory, evolutionary psychology, existential philosophy, and my own experiences as an artist working with nineteenth-century photographic processes, I'll explore how awareness of death shapes human behavior, culture, identity, and creative expression.
We'll look at why human beings construct systems of meaning, why those systems are so fiercely defended, and why artists often find themselves working near the edges of those protective structures. I'll discuss the metaphor behind the title Glass Bones, the relationship between creativity and mortality, and how art can function not as an escape from death but as a way of engaging with it more honestly.
The talk will also include images from the book, including photographs, tintypes, ambrotypes, paintings, and mixed-media works created over the course of my career.
For those familiar with my writing, this presentation serves as an introduction to the ideas that connect Glass Bones, Rupture, and In the Shadow of Sun Mountain. For those new to the work, it's an accessible entry point into the intersection of art, psychology, and the human struggle to create meaning in the face of impermanence.
One phrase that has stayed with me throughout this project is simple:
The scholar of mortality is still mortal.
No amount of theory removes us from the human condition. The questions explored in Glass Bones are not abstract problems to be solved. They are conditions we all live within. I hope that this conversation opens space for reflection on creativity, consciousness, and what it means to live with the knowledge that our time is limited.
Registration is free.
I hope you'll join us.
September 28, 2026
5:00 PM MST
Hosted by Morbid Anatomy
Event Information:
https://www.morbidanatomy.org/events-tickets/p/free-online-talk-glass-bones-art-mortality-and-the-human-mind
The Scholar of Mortality is Still Mortal
As I wait for the printer to ship a load of Glass Bones in June, I want to share what's next.
I've started a new body of work for a new book. The title is RUPTURE. The subtitle: The Creative Response to Death Anxiety.
I'm approaching this differently than Glass Bones. Creative work in the foreground. Theory in the background. The theory still matters, because I plan to do more than explain Rupture Field Theory. I want to live it out in the studio and darkroom.
Detail Ocotillio Canes. Whole plate palladium print. 2026. This is the reference for my new painting.
Why does that feel worth doing? It hasn't been done this deliberately before, as far as I know. And it brings weight to the question of what creativity can do in the face of mortality. The buffer model is well established. Most artists work that way, whether they name it or not (Solomon et al., 2015). What I'm after is something I call practiced proximity. Staying in the transitional space between rupture and form, between exposure and image, refusing to seal it over. Just as a side note: If I wanted to name what practiced proximity looks like, you could point at these three pieces. The work isn't depicting the transitional space. The work is the transitional space, made visible across three returns.
What happens in that space? What does the art say that words can't reach?
Ocotillo. 36 by 48 in. Mixed media on canvas. 2025
Those questions sit at the foundation of the book. I want to know what it means to remain there, to keep moving through the cycle of giving form to existential anxiety without converting it into protection. The harder question follows. Why not use creativity the way most people do, as a buffer for the weight of being alive while knowing we will die? What becomes possible if I stay in the rupture instead?
“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
To that end, I've started a new painting. A 36 by 48 inch canvas. Today I laid the ground, a mix of gesso and sunshine yellow. I like the way the light yellow holds the surface.
The image I have in mind is a detail of ocotillo canes. I made a wet collodion negative and a palladium print of the plant that drew me here. The new painting continues one I made in 2025. Both belong to the next book. The book is where I plan to take practiced proximity into the studio and the darkroom, and see what it gives back.
36 by 48 in. yellow ground—May 27, 2026—Even my other paintings are looking on—watching the new one begin. Rupture Field Theory in action.
36 by 48 in. layer two—May 28, 2026. The work begins.
Rupture
It's the first thing: the moment something that held your world together gives way, and you're left standing in front of a reality you can't yet take in.
Simply put, rupture is when life stops making the sense it used to. Sometimes it's sudden: a death, a diagnosis, or a betrayal. Sometimes it's slower, more ambient. The low hum of climate dread. Political instability. The feeling that the ground beneath you has become less reliable than it once seemed. Either way, something tears. The story you were living inside no longer holds, and for a time you stand in the gap with no replacement ready.
Rupture can be acute or accumulative. It may arrive all at once, or it may build slowly through a series of disruptions that, taken individually, seem manageable. Eventually the accumulated weight exceeds the capacity of the structure to hold. What matters is not the speed of the break, but the fact that the break occurred.
What makes rupture different from ordinary stress is that it isn't a problem to solve. You can't think your way back to how things were. It is a structural break. Not a bad day or a temporary setback. The scaffolding comes apart: what is safe, what lasts, and who you are. You're left looking directly at something most of us keep at the edge of our vision: that everything is provisional, including ourselves.
Rupture is not, after all, catastrophe, and it is not trauma in the clinical sense, though it can be both. It also includes the ordinary ruptures many of us now live inside. The background instability that never arrives as a single event but still erodes the feeling that things will hold.
Rupture is the crack.
The moment a structure can no longer contain reality. The instant the surface gives way, before the anxiety rushes in and long before meaning is made.
Q: What are you talking about when you talk about Rupture Field Theory (RFT)? What does it mean and why is it important?
A: Remaining near rupture is valuable because it allows a more honest encounter with reality, and from that encounter, new forms may emerge: meaning, art, relationships, and ethical responses. The claim withholds almost everything. It doesn’t promise healing. It neither promises growth nor transformation. Only possibility.
And that "may" is where the intellectual integrity of the theory lives: fragile, conditional, and never guaranteed. This sets it against most creativity-and-well-being literature, where the encounter with difficulty reliably yields resilience, flourishing, and post-traumatic growth. RFT declines that bargain. It treats proximity to rupture as honest before it is generative and refuses to assume the second follows from the first.
Here's what the passage is saying, plainly.
The core idea: staying close to painful ruptures—loss, breakdown, and the hard facts of being mortal—is worth doing because it puts you in more honest contact with how things really are. And out of that honest contact, good things might come, meaning art, real connection with others, and a more ethical way of acting. Might. Not will.
“The scholar of mortality is still mortal.”
The second paragraph is making a point about that word "might" (which the passage writes as "may"). The entire value of the theory, which I am arguing, lies in that one cautious word. It's not promising that facing challenging things will heal you, make you grow, or transform you. It's only saying something good could come of it—no guarantee.
Then comes the contrast. A lot of popular writing about creativity and well-being makes a confident promise: go through something difficult, and you'll come out stronger, healthier, and wiser. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," basically. This theory refuses to make that promise. That refusal is the "bargain" it declines: the deal where pain reliably pays you back with growth.
The last sentence draws the key distinction: facing rupture is honest first and only, maybe productive second. The honesty is the real thing; any benefit that follows is a possible bonus, not a built-in reward. I won't pretend the good stuff is guaranteed just because the facing-up-to-things is valuable on its own.
So in one line: it's better to look hard truths in the face than to look away, and that's true even if doing so never makes you happier or more creative. The looking is the point; the payoff is only a maybe.
In my opinion, illustration begins with an answer, and inquiry begins with a question. Or even, illustration seeks confirmation, and inquiry seeks revelation. A lot of contemporary art is explanation disguised as discovery. The conclusion is already known. The work is assembled to support it. But the work I’m most interested in doesn't operate that way. The Rupture Field Theory was discovered more than designed. I’ve spent decades making photographs, paintings, and books; studying Becker, mortality, trauma, memory, creativity, landscape, and meaning-making. Eventually a pattern emerged that seemed to connect them. The question is, what becomes possible when we stop rushing toward closure?
References
Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The worm at the core: On the role of death in life. Random House.
Front cover, spine, and back cover of Glass Bones. 2026
Glass Bones Going to Print
“The photograph preserves presence by recording its disappearance.” — Quinn Jacobson, Glass Bones (influenced by John Berger and Roland Barthes)
I’ll be doing the final edits on the manuscript this week. I’ve now gone through the book several times, including all 26 chapters, the introductions, conclusions, notes, and preface. Honestly, it’s hard to describe the amount of work this has been. Some days I wonder what exactly I committed myself to, and then something clicks into place, a paragraph opens up, an image suddenly belongs where it should, and I feel inspired all over again.
I want to thank the people who have acted as readers throughout this process and worked through the chapters with me each week. Your feedback, criticism, encouragement, and patience have mattered more than I can say. This book is better because of you.
I don’t know the exact date the manuscript will go to the printer yet, but my goal is to have a proof copy in my hands by the end of the month, possibly sooner. I’ll make signed hardcover copies available to anyone interested for the cost of printing and shipping, and there will also be a paperback version on Amazon at cost.
I’ve decided to hold off on the ebook version for now. I may eventually release one, but at this point I feel like this book is meant to exist as a physical object. With the amount of artwork, texture, and visual material woven through it, it simply feels better in your hands than on a screen.
“The photograph preserves presence by recording its disappearance.”
I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: this project has never been about commerce or making money. It’s about sharing ideas, artwork, and questions that I think matter. It’s about trying to better understand what drives us as human beings, especially in the shadow of mortality.
I’ll begin work on RUPTURE next week and officially start building that book in June. It will be an entirely unique kind of project. Glass Bones is heavily theoretical and philosophical. RUPTURE will foreground the artwork itself: the images, the darkroom, the studio, the materials, the failures, the residue, and the physical process of making. The theory will still be there, but mostly in the background.
What I’m increasingly interested in is whether the work itself can function as epistemological evidence. Not illustration of an idea after the fact, but evidence generated through creative practice itself (arts-based research methodology). The photographs, paintings, plates, chemicals, traces, and repetitions are becoming central to what I’m calling Rupture Field Theory (RFT). This book will lean heavily on Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida), Susan Sontag (On Photography), and many other artists and creators.