What Will They Think?

Every day, I find myself exploring questions that I never had time to deeply consider before. In the quiet moments, which are few and far between in the modern world, the big questions are only briefly on our minds, and we move on. We never discuss them or have time to deeply think about them.

I was always too busy, distracted, and “tranquilizing with the trivial.” I wasn’t any different than most people. I tried to fight through it by making art and occasionally inquiring about the big questions. I was successful at times, but the culturally constructed life consumed most of my thoughts and actions; mere survival (my relationships, my financial life, paying the bills, my job, my career) always took precedence and walled me off from the bigger life and death questions.

I was constantly trying to fulfill my social role and bolster my self-esteem, like most people do (like culturally constructed meat puppets). Now, I’m afforded time—time that I’ve never had before. I rarely pay attention to the time of day or day of the week. Most of the time, I get up with the sun and go to bed when it’s dark. I lose track of time working in my darkroom and studio.

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”

— Aldous Huxley

What a gift it is to live among the black bears, mountain lions, and wild turkeys! I walk in nature every day under and beside the big Ponderosa Pine, Douglas Fir, and Aspen trees with Jeanne (or every chance I get, weather permitting). I get to see the beautiful mountains and landscape, the wildlife, and breathe fresh mountain air. To see the red-tailed hawks soaring over the mountains, the bluejays gathering food, and the hummingbirds getting busy for summer is a beautiful thing.

I live a life infused with peace, quiet, and solitude. What freedom! I’ve never really experienced those things before, and I am beyond grateful to have them. It’s radically changed me for the better. I’m closer to living an authentic life than I’ve ever been before. It’s a process, but I’m aware of it and working on it. The first step to change and improvement is to recognize what’s wrong.

Time can be a dangerous thing to have. If people could spend a few months without the hustle and bustle of being a culturally constructed meat puppet, they would begin to become self-aware. They would begin focusing on the important things and devoting their time and energy to them. Self-awareness leads to understanding and the strength to face uncomfortable ideas and make changes. Our culture doesn’t want us to do that. They want us preoccupied with conspicuous consumption, shopping, alcohol, drugs, fashion, pursuing wealth and popularity, and all of the other malignant ways we use to buffer our existential anxiety.

With time to deeply think about what it means to be human, face mortality, and ponder meaning and significance in your life, you learn how tiny you are and how finite and meaningless (cosmically speaking) you are. You can start to grasp the implications of knowing that you will die and be forgotten. You deal with impermanence and insignificance in a healthy, life-affirming way, not in a death-denying, destructive way (like a meat puppet).

You begin to see humility as a great asset and understand how gratitude will buttress existential terror. You’re in awe of life every day. I’m learning this now. We live in a death-denying culture. I’m doing my very best, through my photographic work, my writing, and these essays, to unpack what it means to come to terms with mortality and be an authentic man.

“Seeded Mullein and Antlers” May 16, 2023, 10” x 10” (25,4 x 25.4 cm) (Made in camera, no negative) RA-4 Reversal Color Direct Print-Mullein is a relaxing, calming smoke that soothes the lungs and opens up air passageways. It’s smooth smoking with a mild flavor and aroma; it is a profound respiratory tonic that opens the lungs and softens coughs, soothes irritation, and reduces dryness. Antlers were used by Native Americans in many ways, including pipes.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about our need for symbolic immortality. Ernest Becker called these efforts “immortality projects.” I can relate to this need and this desire, all while knowing that it’s a fool’s errand to pursue. What will people think of me in a hundred or a thousand years? What will they think of my work? The answer is they won’t and nothing.

However, the work we do or the projects we pursue fulfill a greater purpose. They give our lives meaning and significance. That’s extremely important. It is all ephemeral and means nothing in the cosmic scheme of things. It’s absolutely meaningless that way. As an artist, it’s my way of keeping death anxiety at bay.

Acknowledging this fact has made me even more interested in making pictures and writing about our existence as people living with death anxiety. It’s brought me joy and made me happy. I want to live with the fact that what I do is meaningful in buffering my own death anxiety; it’s my terror management, but I want to embrace its cosmic meaninglessness without having fear or dread.

Peter Zapffe called it sublimation. In his essay “The Last Messiah,” he said, “The fourth remedy against panic, sublimation, is a matter of transformation rather than repression. Through stylistic or artistic gifts can the very pain of living at times be converted into valuable experiences. Positive impulses engage the evil and put it to their own ends, fastening onto its pictorial, dramatic, heroic, lyric or even comic aspects.”

He suggests that sublimation involves transforming one's pain, suffering, and anxiety into something positive and valuable through artistic or stylistic expression.

Rather than simply repressing or denying their existential terror, individuals can channel it into creative works such as art, literature, music, or poetry. This can give their suffering meaning and purpose, as well as offer a sense of catharsis or release. By engaging with the darker aspects of life in a creative way, individuals can transform their pain into something that is not only bearable but even beautiful or inspiring.

Zapffe notes that this approach requires a certain level of skill and talent in the arts but suggests that anyone can benefit from engaging with creative expression in some way. By finding ways to channel their pain and suffering into something productive and meaningful, individuals can confront the difficult aspects of existence in a way that is both honest and life-affirming.

I’ve embedded the trailer for the film “Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality” below. I highly encourage you to see this film. On Saturday, May 20, 2023, I'll be attending an online symposium called “Ernest Becker, Terror Management Theory, and Death Acceptance: An Online Symposium Celebrating 50 Years of The Denial of Death, With Caitlin Doughty & Sheldon Solomon.” There are a lot of great speakers, and I’m excited to hear about new ideas and expound on existing theories. The gentleman who made the film “Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality” will be speaking. Also, he’ll be releasing a biopic on Ernest Becker later this year. That’s exciting news for me!

“When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.
For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I’m feeling most ghost-like, it is your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I’m feeling sad, it’s my consolation. When I’m feeling happy, it’s part of why I feel that way.
If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget, part of who I am will be gone.”

— Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary

“Seeded Mullein - Detail)” May 16, 2023, 10” x 10” (25,4 x 25.4 cm) (Made in camera, no negative) RA-4 Reversal Color Direct Print.

“ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.”

— Rebecca Elson

Becker's Transference and Transcendence Theories

“The human animal is a beast that dies and if he's got money, he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Trained in cultural anthropology, Dr. Ernest Becker was motivated in his work by an overriding personal pursuit of the question, "What makes people act the way they do?" Refusing to dismiss answers to this question coming from any field of study based on empirical observation of human behavior, Becker almost inadvertently created a broadly interdisciplinary theory of human behavior that is neither simply speculative nor overly reductionist. Becker's synthesis, which is found in the title of his most famous book, "The Denial of Death," describes human behavioral psychology as the existential struggle of a self-aware species trying to deal with the knowledge of death.

Every day we are confronted with the reality of death and our own mortality. Simultaneously, we are strongly motivated by a survival instinct. Ernest Becker's existential psychological perspective came from this realization. His basic ideas have been largely substantiated in clinical testing conditions by a theory in social psychology called Terror Management Theory, created by American psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. Their book, "The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life," provides the empirical evidence for Becker's theories.

Death is a complex struggle for human beings. The repressed (unconscious) knowledge of death keeps anxiety at bay and out of consciousness. We are born into culture, and the socialization process is largely one of learning how our culture symbolizes death. These cultural worldviews, as Becker calls them, are what we use to create the illusions we live in. The "urge to heroism," as he puts it, is what allows us to boost our self-esteem and manage our existential terror. In other words, our culture gives us opportunities, or not, to bolster our self-esteem, and in response, these illusions that our culture provides act as a buffer to our repressed knowledge of mortality.

How we symbolize death strongly impacts our sense of what the good life is and how we conceptualize the enemies (both personal and political) of ourselves and our society. Our culture's ways of heroically denying death and our habits of buffering ourselves too much or too little against the rush of death anxiety shape who we are as a society and as individuals.

As a symbolic defense against death, it's natural for people to try to ground themselves in powers bigger than themselves. It's also natural to feel attacked when our higher powers are taken away.

Freud coined the term "transference." He used it to describe a person, usually a client, transferring their feelings for another person to the therapist. In other words, the client may love their spouse, and during therapy, these feelings are "transferred" to the therapist.

Becker took this theory and applied it beyond the "client/therapist" model to almost anything. Human beings are constantly trying to mitigate their death anxiety. Using the terror management theory, they will "transfer" their love and admiration to an object in order to quell existential terror. This can be anything from a pair of tennis shoes to a religious deity.

After I read about this, I see it everywhere now. Sports teams, holidays, celebrities, cars, clothes, photography equipment—all of it seems to be used as transference objects. Because the majority of you who read these essays are photographers, I'd like to share one example from the world of photography.

Have you ever seen someone who gets a new (large format) camera and posts photographs of it? And, every now and then, a self-portrait with the camera? We’ve all done it. The bigger the camera or lens, the better. Most would apply Freud’s theory of compensation (sexual repression) to these images. In reality, Becker’s theory of transference applies here. It’s not sexual; it’s a transference object to stave off death anxiety. This can be applied, as I said before, to anything: clothes, boats, trucks, record players, computers, even spouses or significant others. Becker’s got an explanation for transference in humans; he concludes the segment with the fact that the partner worships the other person as a deity (think about the first dates) and then realizes that they have "clay feet." In other words, the transference eventually ends, and the spouse is seen as a mortal human that will eventually die.

Becker makes it very clear. We are temporarily relieved from the drag of "the animality that haunts our victory over decay and death." When we fall in love, we become immortal gods. But no relationship can bear the burden of godhood. Eventually, our gods and lovers will reveal their clay feet. It is, as someone once said, the "mortal collision between heaven and halitosis." For Becker, the reason is clear: "It is right at the heart of the paradox of man. Sex is of the body, and the body is of death. Let us linger on this for a moment because it is so central to the failure of romantic love as the solution to human problems and is so much a part of modern man’s frustrations."

Let me see if I can explain this as it relates to my work. This is another example of the way humans deal with the knowledge of their impending death and attempt to stave off the dread and fear of it. To me, it’s the most basic example of witnessing human behavior "in action" and quelling their existential dread. They don’t even know they’re doing it. It’s all unconscious behavior in service of repressing the knowledge of their mortality. These transference objects provide transcendence too. The person indulging feels "immortal" and is transcending death.

Human nature tends to lean toward the malignant manifestations of these theories. That’s what my work addresses: genocide, crimes against humanity, and "othering." Rather than using transference to tranquilize with the trivial, i.e., clothes, cars, lovers, drugs, shopping, TV, Facebook, and Twitter, some use human beings through violence and subjugation as transference objects.

Throughout history, we’ve seen human beings use "the other" to bolster their self-esteem and stave off death anxiety through torture, subjugation, and murder. That’s why, for me, it’s very important to understand these theories as they apply to the history of my work. The transference and transcendence theories are just more examples of the human condition. They answer, in part, the reasons for evil in the world.