The Creative Mind & Mortality Podcast - S1E12: The Collapse of Meaning and the Search for Repair

The Collapse of Meaning and the Work of Repair

There are moments when the structures that once held your life together begin to loosen.

Not dramatically, at least not at first. It’s subtler than that. A thinning. A slight misalignment between the story you’ve been living inside and the experience of actually living it. Things still function, externally. But internally, something has shifted. The coherence isn’t what it was.

And what’s unsettling is that this doesn’t necessarily feel like something has gone wrong. It can feel closer to something becoming visible.

This is where the conversation around meaning often becomes too simplified. We tend to talk about meaning as something we either have or lack, as though it were a stable property of a life well-constructed. But if Becker is right—and I think he largely is—then what we call meaning is better understood as a kind of psychological structure. It stabilizes us. It gives orientation. It situates our actions within a larger frame that feels continuous and enduring.

But that structure is never fixed.

It holds until it doesn’t.

Becker’s broader claim, particularly in The Denial of Death, is that these structures exist in part to buffer us from the full psychological impact of mortality awareness. They allow us to function without being constantly overwhelmed by the knowledge that our lives are finite and, at least from a cosmic perspective, fragile. Culture, identity, even our most personal commitments—these are not neutral. They are stabilizing systems.

Which means they are also vulnerable.

When they begin to fail, what returns is not just confusion. It is exposure.

What emerges first is often disorientation. A difficulty locating yourself within the frame you once inhabited without effort. But underneath that is something more fundamental: the re-emergence of mortality anxiety. Not always as panic or fear, but as a persistent pressure. A background awareness that has moved forward.

It’s important to be precise here. What collapses in these moments is not simply happiness or motivation. It’s coherence. The sense that your life fits into something that extends beyond you. The sense that your actions carry weight within a larger continuity.

When that disappears, the problem is not reducible to mood. It’s structural.

This is where Becker’s idea of the “hero system” becomes particularly useful. A functioning worldview allows you to experience yourself as someone who matters within a world that persists. It provides a sense of symbolic durability. When that system weakens, the individual is not just left feeling bad. They are left without a stable position from which to experience themselves as meaningful.

That distinction is important.

It also helps explain why existential collapse is so often misread. It is easy to collapse it into the language of depression, but the two are not identical. Depression can drain energy, flatten affect, and reduce engagement. Existential collapse removes something else entirely, the justification for engagement.

You can still act. You can still function. But the underlying reason for doing so becomes unclear.

At the far edge of this, something more difficult can emerge. Not necessarily a desire to die, but an inability to continue within the absence of structure. Awareness becomes too direct. Too constant. What had been buffered becomes immediate.

Otto Rank’s contribution is useful here. For Rank, anxiety itself is not the problem. It is the condition of being human. The problem arises when anxiety cannot be transformed, when it has nowhere to go. In the absence of a functioning symbolic structure, it does not convert into work, relationship, or form. It accumulates.

From Becker’s perspective, this is a collapse of heroism. The individual no longer experiences themselves as capable of generating meaning that holds.

So what happens next?

In most cases, one of two responses emerges.

The first is an intensification of defense. People double down on existing structures. They move toward rigidity, certainty, or ideological reinforcement. The aim is not necessarily truth, but stability. The structure must hold, even if it becomes narrower.

The second is a drift toward nihilism. If no structure feels believable, the system can collapse inward. Motivation erodes. Engagement withdraws. The absence of meaning becomes the dominant frame.

Neither response resolves the underlying condition. They manage it.

But there is a third possibility, though it is less immediate and far less comfortable.

It begins, not with clarity, but with grief.

Ross and Rachel Menzies make an important observation here in Mortals. They frame grief not simply as a reaction to loss but as one of the earliest forms of meaning-making available to us. When the symbolic world fractures, grief is the process through which it begins, tentatively, to reorganize.

This is not resolution. It is a form of metabolization.

Ritual plays a role here as well. Not because it solves the problem of death, but because it provides a container within which meaning can begin to reassemble. Importantly, this is rarely an individual process. Meaning, at this level, is reconstructed relationally.

This is also where I find a direct connection to creative practice.

Some of the most important work I’ve made has not felt like expression in any conventional sense. It has felt closer to mourning. A slow, often resistant attempt to give form to something that does not yet have one. The work does not explain the rupture. It holds it.

That distinction seems increasingly important.

If we extend the philosophical frame further, this position sits in a kind of tension with Schopenhauer and Camus. For Schopenhauer, suffering is not a disruption of life but a fundamental condition of it. From that perspective, collapse is not an accident. It is what happens when illusion thins.

Camus, working from a different angle, identifies the problem as the gap between our need for meaning and the world’s refusal to provide it. The absurd emerges from that mismatch. His response—what he calls revolt—is not a solution but a stance. A decision to continue participating without resolving the contradiction.

That position, I think, comes very close to what Becker identifies in the artist.

The artist does not escape the condition. They remain exposed to it. What differs is the capacity, or perhaps the compulsion, to work with what is there rather than around it. To take in fragmentation, impermanence, contradiction—and to give it form.

Not to resolve it.

To hold it.

Peter Wessel Zapffe pushes this even further. His argument, that human consciousness may have overshot its evolutionary function, reframes the problem entirely. The issue is not simply collapse. It is that we are capable of seeing too much without having the structure to sustain it. His metaphor of the Irish elk—an organism whose evolutionary development became its liability—remains difficult to dismiss.

Awareness, in this sense, is both the source of meaning and the condition of its instability.

Which brings us back to the central question.

If collapse is not incidental, but structural, what do we do with it?

Becker’s answer is restrained but significant. A minority of individuals do something different. They do not fully retreat into defense, and they do not entirely collapse into despair.

They create.

Not as distraction or denial. It’s a way of metabolizing what they are encountering.

This is where the idea of repair becomes useful.

Repair is not a return to a previous state. It is a reconstruction that acknowledges the fragility of its own foundation. It does not attempt to eliminate uncertainty. It builds with it.

That process is slow. It is often unclear. And it rarely feels like progress in any conventional sense.

But something does shift.

In the studio, this shift can be almost imperceptible. Watching an image emerge in the darkroom, there is a moment where something that was not visible begins to take form. It does not solve the underlying tension. But it changes your relationship to it. You move, however slightly, from being inside the pressure to witnessing it.

That movement matters.

It is, I think, what allows the process to continue.

There’s a line from Mike Doughty that I’ve been holding onto: How can I do it? I can’t not.

It doesn’t read as resolve. It reads as necessity.

And that may be the most honest position available.

Creation, in this sense, is not always a choice grounded in clarity or purpose. It is often what remains when the alternative—complete withdrawal—becomes untenable.

The collapse of meaning is not a failure of the individual.

It is a condition of being aware.

The question is not whether it happens.

The question is whether we can remain with it long enough to build something that does not require us to look away.

Repair begins there.

And for some of us, it continues in the work.

To Buffer or Not to Buffer?

Why Not Just Buffer?

Buffering is the psychological and cultural process that regulates our awareness of death, embedding it within beliefs, identities, and meanings that make it tolerable enough to live and function. Most of us do this constantly, automatically, and without knowing it. The question worth sitting with is not whether buffering happens, but what it costs, and whether there is anything worth preserving on the other side of it.

Why not simply buffer and numb out to the reality of mortality? If it keeps us functional, stable, even relatively content, why not leave it in place?

One answer is pragmatic: in many cases, we probably do need some degree of numbing. Becker, Zapffe, and the Terror Management theorists who followed them are fairly clear on this. Zapffe, the Norwegian philosopher whose work predates and in some ways anticipates Becker's, argued that human consciousness is biologically overbuilt for survival. In "The Last Messiah" (1933), he wrote that we are the only creatures who can foresee our own deaths, and that this foresight is not a gift but a burden we spend most of our lives managing through what he called anchoring: attaching ourselves to fixed values, identities, and purposes that hold the abyss at a manageable distance. A fully unfiltered awareness of mortality is not something most people can sustain without consequence. The real question, then, is not whether buffering exists, but how much of it we rely on, and at what cost.

The argument for remaining conscious, at least intermittently, has less to do with moral superiority and more to do with what becomes available when the buffer loosens. When mortality is not fully suppressed, certain patterns become visible: the contingency of one's worldview, the constructed nature of identity, the fragility of meaning. That recognition can be destabilizing, but it can also open a different kind of responsiveness.

From one angle, this is about accuracy. You see more of what is actually structuring your experience rather than mistaking the structure for reality itself. That doesn't dissolve the structure, but it introduces a degree of reflexivity. You are not only inside it; you are also aware of being inside it.

From another angle, it shifts the register of creative work. If anxiety is only buffered, it tends to get displaced into symbolic systems that reinforce the existing worldview. If it is metabolized, even partially, it can move through the work differently, less as defense and more as material. That is where the distinction between buffering and processing becomes meaningful. It is not that one eliminates anxiety while the other doesn't. It is that one reorganizes how anxiety circulates. Rank made a related observation in Art and Artist (1932), arguing that the creative act is never simply a resolution of anxiety but a repeated negotiation with it, one that can either fortify the existing character structure or, in rarer cases, begin to transform it.

There is also an ethical dimension, and it is sharper than it might first appear. In Escape from Evil (1975), Becker argues that the same defensive structures which protect the individual from death anxiety can, under pressure, harden into aggression toward those who embody a different answer to the problem of mortality. We don't buffer privately alone; we buffer collectively, and we tend to protect those buffers by marginalizing or harming whoever threatens them. Greater consciousness doesn't automatically dissolve this dynamic, but it does make it harder to participate in unconsciously. You begin to see the mechanism, and seeing it introduces at least the possibility of refusal.

At the same time, there is no guarantee of relief or clarity. In some cases, increased awareness simply intensifies the tension. That is why many traditions, philosophical and religious alike, have treated this not as something to be exposed but contained. The Stoics practiced memento mori as a disciplined, bounded form of mortality awareness, not an invitation to sustained exposure (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, c. 161–180 CE). The point was regulation, not immersion.

What Does a Fully Unbuffered Life Actually Suffer?

If you take the idea seriously, "fully unbuffered" is not just more awareness. It is a qualitative shift in how experience is organized.

At the psychological level, the first consequence is overwhelm, not in a vague sense but something closer to what Becker describes in The Denial of Death (1973) as the terror that symbolic systems exist to manage. Without the usual filters, mortality is no longer abstract or deferred. It becomes immediate, pervasive, and difficult to bracket. The ordinary scaffolding that keeps experience coherent begins to loosen, and what follows can register as acute anxiety or panic.

Cognitively, meaning itself begins to destabilize. If cultural narratives, identities, and purposes are seen through completely, they may lose their binding force, not because they are simply false but because their constructed nature is no longer hidden. The risk is not just doubt. It is a kind of flattening, where distinctions between what matters and what doesn't become harder to sustain. That can slide toward nihilism or toward a collapse of motivational structure. Yalom describes something like this in Existential Psychotherapy (1980), noting that confrontations with mortality, when uncontained, can produce not liberation but a disorienting loss of the ordinary purposes that structure daily life.

Functionally, this matters. Action depends on a certain degree of selective blindness. You go to work, make plans, take risks, invest in relationships, all under conditions where death is backgrounded. If it moves fully into the foreground, it can interrupt those processes. Why build, strive, or commit if the endpoint is not just known but constantly present? Some people might still act, but the basis for action shifts, and often weakens.

There is also a social cost. Shared worldviews are not only individual defenses; they are collective agreements, what TMT researchers Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon (1986) describe as culturally constructed realities that function precisely because their members treat them as given rather than chosen. When one person steps too far outside them, communication strains. You begin to see the rules of the game while others are still playing it as if it were simply the world. That produces a particular kind of isolation, not dramatic, not always chosen, but persistent.

At the extreme, what full unbuffering describes starts to resemble states that clinical psychology would classify as pathological: severe anxiety disorders, depersonalization, certain forms of existential depression. That does not mean the perception is wrong. But it does suggest that the human system is not built to sustain that level of exposure continuously.

Which is why the metaphor of a dimmer switch is more useful than an on/off toggle. It implies regulation rather than elimination, a system that allows glimpses, moments where the structure thins and something more fundamental shows through, before reconstituting itself so that life can continue. The question is not how to remove the buffer entirely. It is how to move along that spectrum without collapsing; how to see more, at intervals, and still remain capable of living, acting, and making. That is the territory this work tries to stay inside, not because it is comfortable, but because it is honest, and because something that might be called clarity, or at least a less mediated relationship to being alive, waits on the other side of looking.

References
Aurelius, M. (2002). Meditations (G. Hays, Trans.). Modern Library. (Original work written c. 161–180 CE)

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.

Becker, E. (1975). Escape from evil. Free Press.

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In R. F. Baumeister (Ed.), Public self and private self (pp. 189–212). Springer.

Rank, O. (1932). Art and artist: Creative urge and personality development (C. F. Atkinson, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf.

Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books.

Zapffe, P. W. (1933). The last messiah (G. R. Tangenes, Trans.). Philosophy Now, 45, 21–24. (Original work published 1933)

The Creative Mind & Mortality Podcast - S1 E7: Culture As Armor

Culture as Armor: The Stories That Hold Us Together

I start this with a song.

An Old Norse piece about Skaði, a goddess who belongs to the mountains, to cold, and to distance. There’s no softness in that world. No attempt to hide what life is. Death is not pushed to the edges. It sits in the open, part of the terrain itself.

What hits me isn’t just the imagery. It’s the orientation.

In that world, there is no illusion that life is safe or permanent. And yet, it is still livable. Not because the conditions are resolved, but because they are accepted as given. Skaði doesn’t transcend that reality. She inhabits it.

That’s what interests me.

Because what we’re looking at there isn’t just mythology. It’s a worldview. A structure that allows a human being to stand inside existence without collapsing under it.

Every culture does this in its own way.

Some create warmth. They promise continuity, legacy, an afterlife, a sense that something of us endures. Others, like the world Skaði moves through, don’t offer that same kind of comfort. They hold beauty and severity in the same frame. They don’t deny death. They integrate it.

This is where Ernest Becker becomes difficult to ignore.

Becker argued that human beings are unique in one unsettling way. We know we are going to die. Not abstractly, not as a distant possibility, but as a certainty. And that awareness creates a psychological problem that the mind was never designed to solve.

We cannot live every day with the full weight of that knowledge. If we did, it would overwhelm us. The mind, at a basic level, has to regulate it. It has to soften the impact, turn the volume down just enough so that we can function.

But even that isn’t enough.

Because once the question is there—once we know that our lives are temporary—it doesn’t just disappear. It transforms into something else.

If we are going to die, then why live at all?

Why build anything? Why care? Why create meaning in a world where everything is passing?

Becker’s answer is as simple as it is unsettling. Culture exists because we need it to.

We tend to think of culture as something added onto life. Art, music, religion, tradition. Things that make life richer, more interesting, more expressive.

Becker flips that entirely.

Culture is not decoration. It is structure. It is a psychological shelter that allows human beings to live in the presence of death without being paralyzed by it (Becker, 1973).

It does this in a few essential ways.

First, it gives us meaning. It organizes experience so that life doesn’t feel random or chaotic. It tells us what matters and what doesn’t.

Second, it gives us a sense of heroism. Not necessarily in the dramatic sense, but in the quieter belief that our lives count for something, that we are participating in something larger than ourselves.

And third, it gives us continuity. A way of extending ourselves beyond our biological limits. Through family, religion, nation, art, legacy, history. Through the idea that something of us will persist.

Becker called this symbolic immortality.

And once you begin to see culture this way, a lot of human behavior starts to come into focus.

You start to understand why people defend their beliefs so intensely. Why challenges to religion, politics, identity, or tradition can feel deeply personal. Why disagreement escalates so quickly into conflict.

Because what is being threatened isn’t just an idea.

It’s the structure that holds the fear of death at bay.

When a worldview destabilizes, it doesn’t register as a simple intellectual disagreement. It feels like something much closer to survival. If the story that gives your life meaning begins to fall apart, the anxiety underneath it doesn’t stay contained.

It returns.

This is one of the tensions running through Becker’s work. Culture is what allows us to create beauty, art, love, and community. But it is also what divides us. The same structures that hold us together can set us against one another.

The armor protects. It also hardens.

And that raises a question Becker leaves open but doesn’t fully resolve.

What happens when the armor starts to crack?

What happens when mortality awareness breaks through, despite the structures we’ve built to contain it?

This is where Becker’s work moves toward what later became Terror Management Theory, where researchers began to study how people respond when they are reminded of their own mortality. The findings are consistent. When death becomes salient, people tend to cling more tightly to their existing worldviews, defend them more aggressively, and react more strongly to anything that threatens them (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986).

In other words, the armor tightens under pressure.

But that isn’t the only possible response.

And this is where my own work begins to diverge slightly from Becker.

If culture is armor, then the question isn’t just how it protects us. It’s whether we can relate to that protection differently. Whether there are ways of engaging mortality that don’t rely entirely on defense.

Artists, at least at times, seem to move in that direction. Not by rejecting culture, but by exposing its limits. By stepping into spaces where meaning is less stable, where the usual structures don’t fully hold, and creating something from within that uncertainty.

Not resolution. Not escape.

But form.

Something that can carry the tension without immediately closing it down.

When I think back to the world of Skaði, that’s what I see.

Not a solution to death, but a way of standing inside it.

And maybe that’s the deeper question underneath all of this.

Not how we avoid the awareness of death, or how we defend against it, but how we live with it in a way that remains open, creative, and, at least at times, honest.

References

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In R. F. Baumeister (Ed.), Public self and private self (pp. 189–212). Springer.

Holding the Unresolvable: Mortality and Form in a Kallitype Portrait

I made this image over the weekend. A friend, a fellow doctoral student, sitting in front of the camera. Bare-chested. Two skulls held against the torso, or resting there, or emerging from it. The preposition doesn’t quite hold, which is part of the point.

What you see is simple. What the image is doing is not.

I've been thinking for years about where images actually come from, not technically but psychologically. What pressures give rise to them. What gets carried into the frame, intended or not. This portrait didn't begin as a concept about mortality. It began as a feeling I've been circling a long time: that death isn't something we encounter occasionally, from a safe distance, but something we are already inside of. Always. The awareness held at arm's length. Functional, buffered, but never fully absent.

Ernest Becker called this the negotiated space of human existence—knowing, but not fully feeling (Becker, 1973). Culture itself, he argued, is largely a structure built to manage what we can't afford to fully face. We live between awareness and denial, close enough to the fact of mortality to be shaped by it and far enough to keep moving. This image tries to make that band visible. Not as argument. As form.

The Body as Pressure

The first decision was compositional: a frontal, centered figure. The kind of formal stability that early photographic portraiture used to convey dignity, legibility, and presence. That stability matters here because it sets up what follows.

Then the disruption.

The skulls aren't beside the body or held out for display. They're not props arranged for symbolic effect. They hover in the uncertain space between inside and outside the torso—not quite organs, not quite objects. The ambiguity is the point. If they were clearly internal, the image would collapse into anatomy. If they were clearly external, it would resolve too quickly into symbol. What I wanted was something less settled, something closer to what Becker describes as the ongoing, never-quite-finished negotiation between awareness and denial. Death not repressed, but not integrated either. Present, but unstable.

What I didn't anticipate until I saw the finished print was the gaze.

He isn't looking at the camera. He's looking past it, slightly—not evasively, but as if what he's attending to exists just outside the frame. That deflection changes the image's register entirely. It doesn't become a confrontation between viewer and subject. It becomes something more like shared witness: two figures—the one in the frame and the one looking at it—both oriented toward something that isn't fully visible. Something that hasn't arrived yet, or hasn't been named.

Trace, Not Symbol

There's always a risk with the skull. It's one of the most overdetermined objects in the history of art. From vanitas painting forward, it carries a ready-made meaning: mortality, transience, and memento mori.

That's not what I'm after. Or at least, not that way.

What I'm trying to do is shift the skull away from symbol and toward trace. The distinction matters. A symbol points toward meaning. A trace is the residue of a process already underway. Not a sign placed onto the surface to indicate death, but something more like the visible remains of a metabolic struggle that hasn't resolved.

In the framework I've been developing around rupture—what I'm calling the Rupture Field—this image sits somewhere between exposure and trace. The rupture has already occurred. Mortality awareness has exceeded the capacity of ordinary denial to contain it. What remains aren't conclusions. They're fragments. Partial forms. Something that couldn't be fully metabolized and so became visible instead.

That's what these skulls feel like to me. Not imposed onto the body from outside but surfaced from within it. The pressure finding form.

The Material Is Part of the Argument

The process here isn't incidental.

Kallitype, especially gold-toned, has a tonal range that is long, compressed, and quiet. Nothing leaps forward. The image doesn't announce itself—it accrues. There's something about the way the shadows pool and the highlights hold that makes the image feel like it already belongs to another time, even as it depicts someone sitting in front of a camera in the present.

And the paper—Revere Platinum—has a weight and tooth that digital processes can't replicate. You're aware that you're holding something. That the image exists on a surface that will age, fade, and eventually fail.

Otto Rank argued that the creative act is bound up with the desire to stabilize experience against loss—to produce something that persists beyond the individual life (Rank, 1932/1989). But I want to be careful here, because I don't think that's exactly what's happening in this print. The kallitype isn't trying to outlast anyone. It's not an immortality project in Rank's sense.

It's something closer to metabolization: making the pressure of mortality awareness visible while it is still being lived. Not preservation. Not transcendence. Processing. The print as a site where the rupture is held, turned over, and examined—without being resolved.

The difference matters. Preservation seals the wound. Metabolization keeps it open long enough to learn something from it.

The Necklace

I didn't plan for the necklace to do what it does. I noticed it after the print was finished, when I was looking at the full image for the first time.

Barthes would call this the punctum—the detail that arrives uninvited and redirects the image's meaning. But what interests me methodologically is something slightly different: not that the necklace pierced me as a viewer, but that it revealed itself to me as a researcher. The practice had generated something the conceptual framework hadn't predicted. The studio was thinking.

What it introduced was a different register entirely: relation, identity, and continuity. Something cultural and personal and chosen, against all the elements in the frame that belong to no one—the anonymous skulls, the bare torso, the ambiguous dark ground. The necklace says: this is a particular person. He has a history. He is located in a world of meaning.

And then everything around it reasserts: he is also mortal.

Rank makes a distinction that I keep returning to here. Religion, he suggests, emerges from collective belief in immortality—the promise that death will be overcome. Art arises from the individual's confrontation with impermanence—the refusal of that promise, or at least the refusal to look away from it (Rank, 1932/1989). This image seems to live between those poles. The necklace carries something like religious weight—continuity, relation, belonging—while everything surrounding it insists on the mortal body.

The body is no longer singular. It's carrying multiple realities at once: biological, relational, symbolic, and mortal. Not in sequence. Simultaneously.

What the Image Knows

I want to say something about methodology, because it matters here and I don't want to leave it implicit.

This image is not an illustration of a theoretical argument. It's not Becker made visual, or Rank translated into form. If it were, the essay would be sufficient and the image redundant. What I'm claiming—and what arts-based research methodology asks us to take seriously—is that the image produces a different kind of knowledge than the writing does. Not the same knowledge in a different register. Something the writing cannot replicate without remainder.

Propositional language can describe the negotiated space between awareness and denial. It can name it, analyze it, and situate it theoretically. What it cannot do is construct one. The kallitype doesn't point toward that space. It builds an instance of it. The viewer who stays with this image long enough, who lets the tonal range accrue rather than scanning for meaning, is briefly inside the condition the writing can only describe from outside.

That's not a claim about aesthetic experience. It's an epistemological one.

Practice-led research proceeds from the assumption that making is a form of inquiry, that the studio generates knowledge the conceptual framework hasn't yet predicted, and that this excess is methodologically significant rather than incidental. The necklace is my clearest evidence. I didn't plan for it to do what it does. I didn't theorize it in advance. It arrived in the finished print as something the process had produced independently of my intentions, and it changed what the image knew. That's the practice thinking. The researcher's job, afterward, is to follow where it went.

What the image knows that this essay doesn't: what it feels like to not be met by the subject's gaze. To stand in front of a figure who is looking past you, toward something outside the frame, and to realize that you are not the recipient of a statement but a fellow witness. The essay can describe that experience. It cannot produce it. The image produces it every time, for anyone willing to look long enough.

That gap, between what the writing can say and what the image can do, is not a limitation of the research. It's the point of it.

Condition, Not Conclusion

What I notice more and more in my own work is that I'm less interested in making statements than in staging conditions. This image doesn't explain anything. It doesn't arrive at a conclusion. It doesn't argue.

It presents a situation: a person, standing there, holding themselves together. With something else present. Not named. Not integrated. Not fully metabolized.

That feels honest to me.

If Becker is right, and I believe he is, then most of life unfolds precisely in that space. Not in full awareness, and not in complete denial. In the narrow band between them, where we can continue to function without being overwhelmed by what we know. The task isn't to resolve that tension. The task is to stay inside it long enough to make something true.

That's what I was trying to do here.

Not to illustrate mortality. Not to comfort anyone, including myself.

But to make the pressure visible. To let it take form. And to see what that form had to say.

References

Barthes, R. (1980). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill and Wang.

Becker, E. (1973). The Denial of Death. Free Press.

Rank, O. (1989). Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development (C. F. Atkinson, Trans.). Agathon Press. (Original work published 1932)

The Dimmer Switch Explained

Animality: The Part of Us We Keep Trying to Forget

One of the simplest but hardest ideas for people to accept is that we are animals who know we will die.

That sentence alone has more psychological weight than most of us want to deal with. We are more than just living things that move through time. We are aware of ourselves, and our bodies get older, break down, and disappear. And we know this. That information alters everything.

This is where Ernest Becker begins. In The Denial of Death, Becker posited that human psychology is influenced by a fundamental contradiction. We are biological entities motivated by instinct, hunger, fear, and reproduction; concurrently, we are symbolic entities endowed with imagination, language, and self-reflection. We have bodies that will die, and our minds can picture that death before it happens. The conflict between those two facts never goes away. It just gets taken care of.

That tension is right in the middle of animality.

Being an animal means being weak. People bleed. Bodies decay. Bodies break down. That doesn't change, no matter how smart or culturally accomplished you are. But most of modern life is set up to keep that truth far away. We keep the dying out of sight. We make decay into a medical issue. We raise the mind, the self, the brand, and the legacy as if they could somehow float away from the body.

Terror Management Theory says that this is not a coincidence. When reminders of our animal nature break through, like illness, aging, death, or even some kinds of art, they make us anxious on a deep, often unconscious level. The answer is almost never calm, though. It's protection. We hold on to our identities, beliefs, status, and moral frameworks more tightly when they promise that we are more than just meat that is going to die out.

The skull has always been one of the best ways to show this problem. It takes away everything that makes us who we are, reminding us that we are just physical matter with a time limit. Skulls don't fight. They don't talk about it. They just give testimony.

Rachel and Ross Menzies talk about how much of human behavior is based on avoiding this confrontation in their book Mortals. Not just being afraid of dying, but being afraid of being an animal that has to die. We deal with that fear by keeping busy, doing health rituals, telling success stories, and always trying to be better. In most cases, the goal is not to live forever. It is a mental distance from what will happen to the body.

That's what this picture is trying to show.

The Glasshead–Stoneman is standing up, put together, and almost ceremonial. The stone blocks make up a body that looks solid, scarred, planned, and calm. The glass head on top is clear, glowing, broken, and fragile. Skulls float behind it, not quite there and not quite gone. They didn't read as reminders of death, but as witnesses. The truth about animals is there, but it won't stay out of the way.

Glass is important here. Heat and violence make glass. It looks like it will last forever, but it breaks easily. It shows its own cracks while carrying light. It is an uncomfortable material that is between solid and broken. A lot like the human self.

Stone suggests strength. Glass makes things look fragile. The skulls show that something is going to happen.

They make a quiet argument that no amount of structure or symbolic architecture can change our animal nature. We can make identities. We can add meaning. We can give ourselves names. But the body is still there. The animal is still there. Death stays.

Even though it makes people uncomfortable, this is not a negative statement. Becker himself thought that this tension is what makes creativity, art, and meaning come to life. The issue does not stem from our animalistic nature. The issue is that we put so much effort into pretending we aren't.

Art does something important for the mind when it lets animality back into the room without being showy or moralizing. It lowers the defenses just enough for the person to be recognized. Don't panic. Acknowledgment. The kind that says, "This is what we have to work with."

The Glasshead–Stoneman does not fix the problem. It doesn't make you feel better. It just keeps the animal and the symbol in the same frame, not letting either one go away.

That might be enough.

Because confronting our animality does not diminish the significance of life. It makes it sharper. It reminds us that everything we build, love, and make is done inside a body that will eventually fail. And oddly enough, that's what makes those actions important.

Living With The Dimmer Switch

One of the biggest challenges I face when I talk about Becker, Rank, Zapffe, or Terror Management Theory isn’t that the ideas are too complex. It’s that they’re describing the very psychological machinery that makes them difficult to understand in the first place. (Becker, 1973; Greenberg et al., 1986; Rank, 1932; Zapffe, 1933/2010).

That’s the paradox.

From an evolutionary perspective, human consciousness didn’t just give us language, imagination, and culture. It gave us a problem no other animal has to solve: we know we’re going to die, and we know it with enough clarity to make life unbearable if that awareness stayed fully online all the time (Becker, 1973; Solomon et al., 2015). So evolution didn’t eliminate the problem. It built a workaround.

These thinkers essentially suggest that the human mind evolved a dimmer switch mechanism. This is not an on-off switch, but rather a regulator (Jacobson, 2025). With too much awareness of death, the organism freezes, panics, or collapses. Too little, and life loses urgency, meaning, and care (Becker, 1973; Yalom, 2008).

So the psyche learned to keep mortality awareness just low enough to function and just high enough to motivate (Greenberg et al., 1986; Solomon et al., 2015).

That’s why so many people genuinely believe they don’t think about death or aren’t afraid of dying. They’re not lying. The system is working exactly as it’s supposed to (Greenberg et al., 1986; Pyszczynski et al., 2015). These defenses operate beneath conscious awareness, the same way breathing or balance does. You don’t feel yourself regulating your blood pressure either, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

In fact, one of the clearest signs that death anxiety is present is the firm belief that it isn’t (Solomon et al., 2015).

Becker’s insight was never that people walk around consciously terrified. It was that culture exists to make sure they don’t have to (Becker, 1973). Worldviews, identities, careers, religions, politics, moral certainty, and even the idea of being a “good person” quietly serve the same psychological function: they tell us we matter in a universe that otherwise wouldn’t notice our disappearance (Becker, 1973; Greenberg et al., 1986). Once those structures are in place, the fear drops out of awareness. The dimmer switch does its job (Jacobson, 2025).

This is also why these ideas often provoke irritation or dismissal instead of curiosity. When someone encounters them for the first time, they aren’t just learning new information. They’re brushing up against the scaffolding that holds their sense of reality together. The mind doesn’t experience that as insight. It experiences it as a threat (Greenberg et al., 1986; Pyszczynski et al., 2015). The response isn’t “Is this true?” so much as “Why does this feel wrong?”

Zapffe pushed this even further and suggested that consciousness itself may be over-equipped for the world it inhabits. We see too much, anticipate too far ahead, and know too well how the story ends (Zapffe, 1933/2010). The defenses he described—isolation, distraction, anchoring, and sublimation—aren’t moral failures. They’re survival strategies (Zapffe, 1933/2010). Without them, the weight of existence would be crushing. So when people recoil from these ideas, they’re doing exactly what the human animal evolved to do.

This is where my work sits.

Artists tend to live closer to that fault line. It's not because we're braver or more enlightened, but rather because creative practice weakens the dimmer switch (Jacobson, 2025; Rank, 1932). Making art requires attention, dwelling, repetition, and exposure. Over time, some of the automatic defenses erode. You keep looking where others glance away. That doesn’t make life easier. It makes it more honest.

This is why arts-based research matters so much to me (Barone & Eisner, 2012). I’m not trying to convince anyone with arguments alone. I’m showing what happens when someone lives with the dimmer turned slightly higher than average and then tries to metabolize what comes into view. The artifacts aren’t illustrations of theory. They are the evidence of a nervous system and a psyche working under different conditions.

So when someone says, “I don’t have death anxiety,” I hear, “My defenses are intact.” And when they say, “This feels abstract,” I hear, “This is getting too close to something I’ve spent my life not naming.”

That isn’t a failure of communication. It’s the terrain.

My work isn’t about forcing understanding. It’s about creating conditions where understanding can happen without overwhelming the person encountering it (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Jacobson, 2025). That’s why I move through story, image, material, land, and memory. I’m not avoiding theory. I’m respecting the psychology that makes theory hard to hear in the first place (Becker, 1973; Solomon et al., 2015).

And in that sense, the difficulty isn’t a flaw in these ideas.

It’s the sound the dimmer switch makes when you try to turn it up.

The resistance.
The discomfort.
The urge to look away.

Those aren’t misunderstandings.

They’re the evidence.

References

Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (2012). Arts-based research. SAGE.

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In R. F. Baumeister (Ed.), Public self and private self (pp. 189–212). Springer.

Jacobson, Q. (2025). Living with the dimmer switch [Blog post manuscript]. Unpublished.

Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., & Greenberg, J. (2015). Thirty years of terror management theory: From genesis to revelation. In J. M. Olson & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 52, pp. 1–70). Academic Press.

Rank, O. (1932). Art and artist: Creative urge and personality development. W. W. Norton.

Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The worm at the core: On the role of death in life. Random House.

Yalom, I. D. (2008). Staring at the sun: Overcoming the terror of death. Jossey-Bass.

Zapffe, P. W. (2010). The last messiah. (Original work published 1933)

A Reading: Introduction In the Shadow of Sun Mountain

Introduction

In the Shadow of Sun Mountain (2020–2024)

I lived for years on twelve acres in the mountains of central Colorado, on land where the (Tabeguache) Ute had lived, traveled, gathered medicine, and buried their dead for thousands of years. That fact was not abstract to me. It was present every day. In the plants that grew around the house. In the way the light moved across the ground. In the silence that settled at dusk. The land didn’t feel empty. It felt inhabited by memory.

Sun Mountain rose nearby, not dramatically, not as a monument, but as a constant presence. Its shadow crossed the land in long, slow arcs. I began to understand that shadow less as an absence than as a reminder. Something persisted there, something unresolved. The land wasn’t haunted in the theatrical sense. It was honest. It held the residue of belief, fear, violence, endurance, and the stories that try to make those things bearable.

The plants themselves became teachers. This work is grounded in ethnobotany and spiritual ecology, not as metaphor, but as epistemology. The (Tabeguache) Ute understood land through use, relationship, and attention: which plants heal, which harm, which alter perception, which open ritual space, which return the body to the ground. Medicine was not separate from cosmology. Knowledge was embedded in practice, repetition, and care. Working among these plants, photographing them, painting them, and incorporating them into mixed media was a way of entering that lineage of attention, however imperfectly. The work does not claim that knowledge as mine, but it does acknowledge that plants carry memory and instruction, and that ways of knowing grounded in land and body predate and quietly challenge the abstractions that made conquest and erasure possible.

This work began with a question I couldn’t shake: why do human beings need an enemy to feel secure?

The Great Mullein Plant—Palladiotype from a wet collodion negative. 2022

I’d spent years photographing sites where violence had taken place, standing in spaces where something irreparable had occurred and sensing that the story told about those events was never the whole story. Living on that land intensified the question. The history of the (Tabeguache) Ute was not distant. It was botanical. Ecological. Embedded in place. Their knowledge of medicinal plants, spiritual botany, seasonal movement, and relationship to land was not a footnote to history. It was a worldview that had been violently interrupted.

The longer I lived there, the clearer it became that the question wasn’t only historical. It was psychological. What allows people to draw a line between “us” and “them” with such confidence? Why does that line harden so quickly? And what does our buried awareness of being temporary have to do with it?

My studio practice kept circling the same terrain. I worked with wet-collodion photography, color reversal prints, painting, and mixed media not out of nostalgia, but because these materials resist control. Collodion is unstable. A glass plate can appear solid and fail without warning. Silver remembers everything. Chemistry responds to temperature, breath, humidity, and time. You don’t dominate the process; you negotiate with it.

That instability mattered. It mirrored something I recognized in the human mind when it tries to manage fear, especially fear it refuses to name. What began as an old photographic process became a form of inquiry. The fractures in the plates, the fogging, the lifting emulsion, the breakage, they echoed the fractures I was seeing in our collective imagination.

Ernest Becker helped sharpen that connection. He argued that culture itself is a defense system built around the fact that we will die (Becker, 1973). We build worldviews to seem steady. We cling to identity because it promises continuity. And when those stories feel threatened, we look outward for someone to blame.

Othering is not an accident. It’s a psychological survival strategy. A way to redirect fear so we don’t have to feel it directly.

In the Shadow of Sun Mountain grew from that realization. What began as an artistic investigation rooted in land, plants, and material practice expanded into a broader inquiry into how death anxiety shapes behavior, morality, and the human capacity for cruelty. Starting a PhD in my sixties didn’t create this path. It helped me name it. Becker, Rank, and the existentialists gave language to what I had been sensing intuitively for decades: that creativity is not separate from mortality, and that artists often work at the fault line where denial begins to crack.

The chapters that follow trace how fear becomes ideology. How ideology becomes violence. How violence becomes history. And how history becomes a story we repeat so we don’t have to confront what made the violence possible in the first place.

This isn’t a moral lesson. It isn’t a condemnation delivered from a safe distance. It’s an examination of the ordinary human mind and what it does with the knowledge that life is short, unpredictable, and finite. It’s about the psychological architecture we inherit, the beliefs we defend, and the places where those beliefs fail.

Sun Mountain is both literal ground and conceptual ground. The plants, the landscapes, the objects, the materials, and the photographic processes are not illustrations of theory. They are part of the thinking itself. The shadow it casts represents what we push away: the parts of ourselves we disown, project, or punish in others.

If there is any hope here, it’s a quiet one. That facing impermanence might soften the need to harden ourselves against difference. Artists understand that tension intimately. We work every day between creation and loss. We accept what breaks. We learn from what cannot be repaired.

This book is an invitation into that space. It begins with a question and refuses to resolve it too quickly. It follows it through land, material, history, psychology, and lived experience, toward a clearer understanding of what we do in the presence of death, and what might change if we learned to see ourselves more honestly.

References
Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.

Living Truthfully Inside Impermanence

Rupture is not simply a wound; it’s the generative moment when denial collapses and creation begins. It’s the place where death anxiety, cultural myth, and personal memory are transmuted into presence. Within rupture, the artist becomes a witness rather than a defender, turning from the fantasy of permanence toward the truth of impermanence. In that shift, art no longer seeks to outlive death; it becomes a form of living with it.

Otto Rank’s distinction between the artist and the neurotic illuminates this process. Both encounter rupture, the psychic shattering that comes when one’s symbolic world no longer holds, but only the artist metabolizes it. Where the neurotic internalizes and chokes on anxiety, the artist transforms it into form. The creative act becomes a means of surviving truth, of remaking coherence in the face of its undoing. Ernest Becker described culture as a shield against mortality; I see art as the moment that shield cracks. The fracture is not failure but revelation, an aperture where something honest can enter.

My work with wet collodion lives inside that aperture. The process itself enacts rupture: collodion, glass, silver, and time. Each plate holds the risk of loss. The collodion might peel, the image might fog, and the light might fail. Yet those failures become evidence of life. The surface bears the marks of both fragility and endurance, transparency and strength. Each plate is a negotiation between control and surrender, between the impulse to preserve and the inevitability of decay. To work in this way is to accept that every act of making is also an act of unmaking. I’m connecting deeply to these ideas and am excited to see where it takes me.

Between Presence and Absence

This new whole-plate wet collodion negative feels less like a photograph and more like a question: what does it mean to hold presence and impermanence in the same breath? The man, the bottle, and the rocks: are they material, or are they ghosts caught in the alchemy of silver and collodion? The glass doesn’t just capture an image; it captures the residue of time passing. What remains when the moment is gone? What does the plate remember that we forget?

Collodion always reminds me that everything we try to fix eventually fades. The process is slow and ritualistic; it forces me into a state of attention. Light becomes a witness, not just a means. This plate, like so many I make, isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about the impossibility of permanence. It’s about standing inside the paradox that Becker, Rank, and Yalom each described in their own way: to create in the face of death is both defiance and surrender.

In that sense, this image is elegiac. The man’s presence feels temporary, the bottle reflective, and the rocks ancient and indifferent. Together they form a kind of visual equation, human transience measured against geological time. The silver surface, with its imperfections and streaks, becomes a metaphor for the self: luminous, decaying, still reaching toward meaning.