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.