The Creative Mind & Mortality Podcast
In this week's reading from Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind, I share Chapter 11, “Living with the Tension.”
This chapter explores the artist's relationship to mortality awareness, cultural meaning, and the psychological defenses that allow us to function in everyday life.
Ernest Becker argued that human beings construct symbolic worlds to protect themselves from the terror of death. Our beliefs, identities, traditions, and cultural narratives provide a sense of stability and significance. They help us live with the knowledge that our lives are finite.
Artists often occupy an uncomfortable position within these structures. Creative practice repeatedly brings us into contact with uncertainty, impermanence, failure, and disappearance. We become familiar with the fractures in meaning that culture works so hard to conceal.
That doesn't make artists superior or more enlightened. It means the work can expose us to experiences that our ordinary psychological defenses are designed to soften.
I explore Becker's distinction between becoming overwhelmed by existential anxiety and transforming that anxiety into creative form. A photograph, painting, poem, or piece of music can give shape to something that might otherwise remain difficult to understand or endure.
I also introduce Simone de Beauvoir's existential ethics. Her work adds an important dimension to this discussion: our freedom and our creative choices carry responsibility toward other people.
Art can expand what we are willing to see. It can challenge inherited assumptions and expose the limitations of our cultural stories. That gives creative work an ethical dimension without requiring it to become moralizing or instructional.
For me, this has been central to decades of photography and painting. I return to subjects involving mortality, historical violence, cultural memory, and human vulnerability because they raise questions I cannot easily set aside.
But living with this awareness has a cost. Sensitivity, isolation, anxiety, and uncertainty are part of the territory. Creative work does not eliminate those tensions. It offers a way to encounter them and sometimes give them form.
Chapter 11 asks us to consider what artists contribute to a culture organized around protecting itself from uncomfortable truths.
Perhaps part of that contribution is simply the willingness to remain attentive when the familiar explanations no longer hold.
I hope you'll join me for this reading and consider how these ideas relate to your own experience, whether or not you identify as an artist.
Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind is available in hardcover and paperback.