Psychology, Philosophy, History, Art, and Death Anxiety

Pretty Pictures, The Technical Versus The Conceptual, and the Masses: Try Something New
We lean so heavily on "pretty" (aka "chocolate box") pictures or "process photography" pictures that we forget about narrative, meaning, and intent—all of the things that really make photographs and storytelling interesting and meaningful. This is not a new topic. I've been preaching this message for years on my YouTube channel, in my books and workshops, and anywhere else I can engage in conversation about making art and photography.

Let’s be honest; most photography is easy to forget. We see so much of it that it becomes less interesting or engaging. And it’s not anchored to anything meaningful that people can connect to. I define meaningful as something weighty in life—work that contains life lessons that we can use to become better people in some way—to be an asset to the world, not a liability.

I’m not talking about technical prowess either. A lot of times, this is conflated with meaning or importance. People love to see big photographs or rare processes. The content of the photograph seems irrelevant, and most of the time, the process and size have little or nothing to do with the subject matter.

The technical work is easy to talk about. It’s safe and universally appealing. This demographic always wants to know about the equipment you're using—what camera, what lens, etc. I always offer the Ernest Hemingway analogy. I've never heard anyone ask what kind of typewriter he used to write "The Old Man and the Sea." Why is that? It's very similar to this obsession with gear and equipment, processes, and size.

They connect technically, but in no other meaningful way. The emphasis appears to be solely on the technical, with no regard for the conceptual or narrative content. I believe they connect to these images because they want to replicate what they see and appeal to the masses to get "likes" and "views" on social media. They want the attention and adulation simply for carrying out a technical process or for owning expensive or rare equipment, period. This seems trivial and mechanical. Do you see why this type of photography is everywhere and why you see it so often? It's a feedback loop, and it’s derivative.

There’s a logical fallacy called Argumentum ad Populum (an appeal to popularity, public opinion, or the majority). It’s an argument, often emotionally laden, for the acceptance of an unproven conclusion by adducing irrelevant evidence based on the feelings, prejudices, or beliefs of a large group of people—the masses. Based on social media, this is how I see most photography today. It’s rare that we get a body of work that’s connected to a narrative or has substance, meaning, or any of the other attributes that I’ve mentioned. The pull of social media is too strong—the desire or need to be accepted and “liked” is powerful (see Becker and self-esteem). The one-off, cliched images are what the masses want. I believe we can do better. We can raise the bar. I know we can. I’m going to try my best to model this behavior with this project.

"The immediate man - the modern inauthentic or insincere man - is someone who blindly follows the trends of society to the dot. Someone who unthinkingly implements what society says is ‘right.’ He recognizes himself only by his dress,...he recognizes that he has a self only by externals. He converts frivolous patterns to make them his identity. He often distorts his own personality in order to 'fit into the group.' His opinion means nothing even to himself, hence he imitates others to superficially look "normal." - Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Having said that, I will tell you that I’m going all in on this work (In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of “Othering”). I’m going to push the boundaries as much as possible. I even want to try to transcend photography in some ways. I want the viewer to remember the message in the story—the "meat," if you will. I want them to connect in a real way to the narrative and ideas and to put that proverbial pebble in their shoe.

Trying To Do Something Different
Most of you who read my posts regularly know that this is a unique project. I might even assert that it hasn’t been done before. I’m combing art, psychology, philosophy, theology, history, and existential anxiety to talk about human behavior. This is a distinctive combination of the humanities and art. I haven’t seen anything like it in my research.

I say that with the caveat of Otto Rank’s book, “Art and Artist.” This book is a difficult and dense read. Rank’s ideas would relate most closely to what I’m trying to do, at least the ideas and execution, or simply dealing with the creative life as a psychological defense against the knowledge of death. But even this is in a different context. In his book, he contemplated the creative type of man, who is the one whose "experience makes him take in the world as a problem... but when you no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own... The work of art is... the ideal answer...”

All of this motivates me, and it makes it exciting to do the work.

The impetus behind this work is psychology. The theories of Ernest Becker are at the core of it. There are a lot of other people who have influenced the work, but as far as the main component goes, it’s Becker. The terror management theory is just as important. TMT gives evidence for Becker’s theories, so I’m leaning heavily on TMT too. I will include all of the references and resources in the book. You’ll see how vast and rich they are.

I believe these are very important ideas, maybe the most important I've ever heard. They explain so much and answer so many questions, questions that I’ve carried for 50 years. My hope is that the reader or viewer will take away positive ideas for making the world a better place. This is not about being negative or pessimistic. These ideas should nudge you toward celebrating every day we are above ground and being humble and grateful to be alive. The most valuable things are finite and have a relatively short lifespan. That describes humanity very well.

“In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of ‘Othering’”
My intention is to create a psychological connection between my photographs of the land, plants, and symbols of the Tabeguache-Ute and the historical event of colonization. I'm providing psychological evidence as to why atrocities like these and so many others happen. It’s based on human awareness of death, or death anxiety.

While I’m using a specific historical event, the ethnocide and genocide of Native Americans, specifically the Tabeguache-Ute, this could be any number of similar events in history. I’m using psychology, philosophy, theology, history, and art (19th-century photography) to tell the story of "othering" or the psychology of "othering."

It’s not just telling a story of historical atrocities. It’s describing in detail the psychological underpinnings of "othering." I'm answering the questions about why these kinds of things happen, and I’m backing my claims and assertions with empirical evidence. I’m asking and answering the “big questions:” Why do we marginalize certain groups of people? Why are we threatened by people who are different from us? Why do we start wars? Why do we commit genocide? Why are we ignoring climate change? Etcetera, etcetera. I'm attempting to answer those questions with this body of work and book.

I’m addressing this subject somewhat academically. In other words, I’m drawing on the writing and research of social psychologists, scientists, philosophers, theologians, and anthropologists. I’m also referencing a lot of writers who would be considered artists—playwrights, novelists, and poets. My approach to this work is interdisciplinary because this topic requires a wide range of information to be understood.

I live on this land now. In a lot of ways, I struggle with it. I understand what happened here and why. I can't change the past. I wish I could. What I can do is offer or extend the notion of self-examination. These events, and many others like them, should not be viewed as "in the past," but as something that can happen to anyone at any time. Consider your own psychological pathology of existential terror. Consider what psychological defenses, or buffers, you are using to repress the anxiety. Are they positive? Are they an asset or a liability to the world? It's a lot more difficult to create a great work of art than to post insults and argue on social media. They're both defenses, or buffers; one is an asset, and the other is a liability.

Consciousness is the Parent of All Horror: It’s the Worm at the Core
A more detailed definition would be that my work is about human consciousness. The knowledge that we exist and the consequences of that knowledge—knowing that we’re going to die—are too much for us to psychologically handle. It truly is the worm at the core. Sheldon Solomon said, “The thing that renders us unique as human beings is that we’re smart enough to know that like all living things, we too will die. The fear or anxiety that is engendered by that unwelcome realization, when we try to distance ourselves from it or deny it, that’s when we bury it under the psychological bushes as it were, it comes back to bear bitter and malignant fruit, on the other hand folks who have the good fortune by virtue of circumstance or their character or disposition to really be able to explicitly ponder what it means to be alive in light of the fact that we are transient creatures here for a relatively inconsequential amount of time; I buy the argument theologically, philosophically, as well as psychologically and empirically, that can bring out the best in us, and that our most noble and heroic aspirations are the result of the rare individual, who’s able to live life to the fullest, by understanding as Heidegger put it, that we can be summarily obliterated not in some vaguely unspecified future moment but at any second in our lives.”

When he says, "It comes back to bear bitter and malignant fruit," that sums up my central point about this work: answering the questions about the decimation of the Tabeguache-Ute and millions of other human beings. Why do these kinds of things happen? What are the solutions to preventing these kinds of things? These and other questions about human behavior are addressed by this psychology.

Thomas Ligotti’s book, “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,” says, "consciousness is the parent of all horror." He quotes quite a lot from Peter Zapffe's 1933 essay, "The Last Messiah," referring to anti-natalism and pollyannaism, or the Pollyanna Principle. His position, because of this knowledge, states that it would have been better to have never existed in the first place. He encourages humans to stop procreating. The end of Zapffe’s book also draws this conclusion. He posits that human consciousness was an evolutionary mistake. This sentiment is echoed throughout pessimistic philosophy; it’s not new. On one hand, it is difficult to argue against—the pain and suffering in the world can’t be fathomed. If you read Zapffe’s book, you’ll know what I mean.

"The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth's is a pond and backwater.
The sign of doom is written on your brows—how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?
But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.
Know yourselves—be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye."
Peter Zapffe, The Last Messiah

A Different Perspective
Richard Dawkins, in his book Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder, said, “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?“

You can have a different perspective on these ideas, but the bottom line returns to the knowledge of our impending deaths and the effects that has on our behavior. There is enough evidence to show that, while there are a lot of things to take into consideration, mortality salience drives most human behavior. Exploring that idea is what I’m most interested in for this body of work.

The Wounded and The Fallen

People wonder why terrible things happen in the world. I’ve had a preoccupation with this question for decades. It’s what made me pick up a camera all those years ago. Why do certain people or certain groups fall victim to horrible events? If you follow what's happening in Ukraine today and in many other parts of the world, you know what I mean. It’s heart-wrenching.

These events can be very personal, or they can be global. They usually deal with the same thing; genocide, ethnocide, loss, tragedy, and injustice. And most of the time, they are about "us" and "them." I would suggest that because we fear death, it is in our nature to always find "the other" to blame, use as a scapegoat, humiliate, demean, and ultimately kill.

And I would argue that “the other" challenges our psychological buffers against existential anxiety; we are left defenseless. This is why we can’t get along with people who are different from us. This is the definition of death anxiety. It’s our inability to psychologically deal with the instinct to stay alive and the knowledge that we’re going to die.

One of the biggest problems is a lack of self-awareness. For most people, death is a vague abstraction that doesn’t pertain to them. William James said, “There’s a panic rumbling beneath the surface of consciousness.” I can see that statement clearly when I look at the history of the world and even current events. I can see it in people and they don’t even recognize it.

Ernest Becker said in his book, Escape from Evil, "In this view, man is an energy-converting organism who must exert his manipulative powers, who must damage his world in some ways, who must make it uncomfortable for others, etc., by his own nature as an active being. He seeks self-expansion from a very uncertain power base. Even if man hurts others, it is because he is weak and afraid, not because he is confident and cruel. Rousseau summed up this point of view with the idea that only the strong person can be ethical, not the weak one."

My photographs are a way of communicating these ideas in more poetic and lyrical ways than words can. They are about ideas and emotions surrounding death anxiety and terror management theory—subtle visual cues that are difficult to describe in words.

This work is about the Tabeguache-Ute people and many other groups throughout history that have been victims of the paradoxical human condition. It’s about their land, their plants and animals, and some of the symbolism and objects they used here. At least, that’s what the images are about on the surface. In reality, they are about the "residue," or what’s left here, visually representing the psychology of the land and objects. Moreover, it's about why it happened. It attempts to answer the big questions surrounding human behavior and "the other." This work is as much about psychology as it is about photography.

The pictures are not a romanticized version of indigenous people. There are no images of people at all in this work. I’ve made a conscious decision not to photograph people. I’m not interested in promoting the white, Eurocentric view of Native Americans. I’m not interested in trying to show their "Indianness." I see this as another way of keeping them victims of the colonial gaze. It’s almost a form of continued ethnic cleansing. There is so much baggage there to unpack, and most people don’t have the skills or knowledge to do it. These kinds of images carry that weight, whether the creator or viewer are aware of it or not.

“When the angel of death sounds his trumpet, the pretenses of civilization are blown from men’s heads into the mud like hats in a gust of wind.” – George Bernard Shaw

Death Reminders & Mortality Salience

“If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.” Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was a British novelist.

"We discovered that subtle, and even subliminal, reminders of death increase devotion to one’s cultural scheme of things, support for charismatic leaders, confidence in the existence of God, and belief in the efficacy of prayer. They amplify our disdain toward people who do not share our beliefs, even to the point of taking solace in their demise. They drive us to compulsively smoke, drink, eat, and shop. They make us uncomfortable with our bodies and our sexuality. They impel us to drive recklessly and fry ourselves in tanning booths to bolster our self-esteem. They magnify our phobias, obsessions, and social anxieties."
The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

Terror Management Theory (TMT) was developed in 1986 by social psychologists Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon based on Ernest Becker’s ideas. They wrote the book, “The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life.” William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) that awareness of our inevitable, unavoidable deaths is the “worm at the core” of human existence and consciousness. Hence the desperate imperative to avoid that awareness – to deny it and to live as if somehow we might be immortal. (Ernest Becker Foundation)

The Terror Management Theory (TMT) is such good empirical evidence for Becker’s theories. It’s solid and repeatable. It answers so many questions about human behavior.

If you pay attention, especially this time of year, you’ll see droves of people with high death anxiety acting out, trying to quell their terror. Death reminders are everywhere. They’re all around us every day. The pandemic alone created daily death reminders. They happen when you see an ambulance or an accident when you're watching the news, or even when you're driving by a funeral home (usually subconsciously). These death reminders have consequences, and most people are unaware of what they’re even doing when they’re buffering their death anxiety. In Kirkegaard’s words, "they tranquilize with the trivial."

How do you communicate these ideas? It’s very difficult. Most people will shrug them off and justify what they’re doing in any way they can, or they’ll deny them completely. Moreover, most couldn’t care less about these theories. Sometimes, I feel like I’m the crazy religious guy standing on the street corner preaching doom and gloom. I’m hoping that my book will change some minds and at least open the door to being interested in what this is all about.

Psychology has persuaded me to think differently about human behavior and the reasons we do what we do. As I go through the process of deconstructing these theories, I find myself less inclined to follow the masses and less interested in activities that are blatantly in place to buffer the terror of death. The life illusions and all of the "vital lies."

As I learn more about human behavior and Becker’s theories, it makes me more compelled to offer these ideas to those who are curious about why they do what they do. These ideas are life-changing. They’ll engage your mind and, eventually, change your behavior. Moreover, you'll start to discover what's really meaningful and what you're truly grateful for.

Being conscious and fully aware of your own death anxiety and the buffers you use will give you a more authentic life. I'm not saying you'll be enlightened or reach Nirvana, but you will reveal your real self to yourself. Socrates said that the true philosopher does nothing but practice dying and being dead. “So, that’s what philosophy is: a practice for death." That brings peace, appreciation for life, gratitude, and humility—things we all need more of in these precarious times.

A Quiet Ego

As I write on the psychology of "othering," I can’t help but wonder if there are solutions to our dilemma (crisis may be a better word). Is there a way to fight existential terror besides keeping our self-esteem up by clinging to our cultural worldviews (illusions)? I believe there may be some hope in replacing our anxiety-repressing "immortality projects" with practicing humility and gratitude.

The first time I heard the phrase “a quiet ego” was when I read Dr. Pelin Kesebir’s paper on humility and death anxiety. Kesebir, P. (2014). “A quiet ego quiets death anxiety: Humility as an existential anxiety buffer.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Five studies tested the hypothesis that a quiet ego, as exemplified by humility, would buffer death anxiety. Humility is characterized by a willingness to accept the self and life without comforting illusions, and by low levels of self-focus. As a consequence, it was expected to render mortality thoughts less threatening and less likely to evoke potentially destructive behavior patterns.

In line with this reasoning, Study 1 found that people high in humility do not engage in self-serving moral disengagement following mortality reminders, whereas people low in humility do.

Study 2 showed that only people low in humility respond to death reminders with increased fear of death and established that this effect was driven uniquely by humility and not by some other related personality trait.

In Study 3, a low sense of psychological entitlement decreased cultural worldview defense in response to death thoughts, whereas a high sense of entitlement tended to increase it.

Study 4 demonstrated that priming humility reduces self-reported death anxiety relative to both a baseline and a pride priming condition.

Finally, in Study 5, experimentally induced feelings of humility prevented mortality reminders from leading to depleted self-control. As a whole, these findings obtained from relatively diverse Internet samples illustrate that the dark side of death anxiety is brought about by a noisy ego only and not by a quiet ego, revealing self-transcendence as a sturdier, healthier anxiety buffer than self-enhancement. (APA PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2019 APA).

Sheldon Solomon addressed that just being conscious of these theories would help us a lot. He said, "If we can drop back as a species and consider collectively the extent to which maladaptive manifestations of death anxiety bring out the worst in us, that would give us the capacity to nudge our species in a slightly more productive direction. The only way to get out of it is a wholesale recognition of these ideas.

The thing that renders us unique as human beings is that we’re smart enough to know that like all living things, we too will die.

The fear or anxiety that is engendered by that unwelcome realization, when we try to distance ourselves from it or deny it, that’s when we bury it under the psychological bushes as it were, it comes back to bear bitter and malignant fruit. On the other hand, there are folks who have the good fortune, by virtue of circumstance or their character or disposition, to really be able to explicitly ponder what it means to be alive in light of the fact that we are transient creatures here for a relatively inconsequential amount of time.

I buy the argument theologically, philosophically, as well as psychologically and empirically, that can bring out the best in us, and that our most noble and heroic aspirations are the result of the rare individual, who’s able to live life to the fullest, by understanding as Heidegger put it, that we can be summarily obliterated not in some vaguely unspecified future moment but at any second in our lives."

The Last Messiah and Deer Antlers

"The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by over-evolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment. In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.”

This is from Peter Zapffe's famous essay, "The Last Messiah." He argues, as do Becker and others, that the evolution of consciousness created a huge psychological problem for human beings: the knowledge that we're going to die.

In his essay, he argues that the Irish elk deer of the Pleistocene era evolved with antlers that were too big. He equates it to the human brain evolving consciousness and becoming aware that we exist and that we're going to die. He makes the point that these were evolutionary mistakes.

Zapffe was a Norwegian philosopher. He was born in 1899 and died in 1990. His doctoral dissertation was never translated into English but is said to be a great piece of writing on pessimistic philosophy. 

The species of deer that Zapffe is referring to is the Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus), which thrived throughout Eurasia during the ecological epoch known as the Pleistocene (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). The Irish elk had the largest antlers of any known deer, with a maximum span of 3.65 meters (12 feet). Historically, the explanation given for the extinction of the Irish elk was that its antlers grew too large: the animals could no longer hold up their heads or feed properly, and their antlers, according to this explanation, would also get entangled in trees when trying to flee human hunters through forests.

However, according to some researchers, the large antlers of the Irish elk may have had little to do with the extinction of the species. The Irish elk’s antlers did indeed weigh these creatures down, and Zapffe’s analogy is still illuminating in its own right.

A surplus of consciousness and intellect is the default state of affairs for the human species. Unlike the case of the deer that Zapffe alludes to, we have been able to save ourselves from going extinct. Zapffe posits that humans have come to cope and survive by repressing this surplus of consciousness. Without restricting our consciousness, Zapffe believed the human being would fall into "a state of relentless panic" or a ‘feeling of cosmic panic’, as he puts it. This follows a person’s realization that "he is the universe’s helpless captive"; it comes from truly understanding the human predicament. In the 1990 documentary To Be a Human Being, he stated:

"Man is a tragic animal, not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world." (Sam Woolfe)

This surplus of consciousness is, in fact, a psychological kick in the groin, no doubt. However, like Becker’s theory shows, and Zapffe alludes to, we repress it; we bury it deep in our subconscious. And we use our illusions (cultural worldviews) to keep it there and make day-to-day life bearable.

My Book: In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Othering

"What you're trying to create is a certain kind of an indispensable presence, where your position in the narrative is not contingent on whether somebody likes you, or somebody knows you, or somebody's a friend, or somebody's being generous to you." —Kerry James Marshall, NPR News 2017

MY BOOK
The cold weather has arrived in the Rocky Mountains. I’ve changed my routine a little bit. I’m up early every day to start a fire, make coffee, and get our cat, Moshe, fed.

I read a lot, and I’m writing a lot every day. I enjoy it immensely. I’m very excited about the content of this book. My goal is to have the text fully explain the theories that I go on about in these posts. However, I want to do it in a simple and straightforward way so that a layperson can understand and relate to it. I believe I can make that happen, I’ve been spending a lot of time synthesizing the material and translating it into simple English. I can’t emphasize how important these ideas are for every human being to understand—they are truly life-changing—and that’s not an overstatement.

In order for people to understand these ideas, I need to explain how I came to them through my art and photography work. That’s a long story with a lot of history. I’ve been struggling with articulating why I’ve done what I’ve done over the years, and now I have the answers. I’m excited to share all of it.

I’m digging up memories of my early photography days and going over past projects and work. I’m evaluating what I was trying to do and understanding what I learned from each body of work. It’s like putting a puzzle together.

I just wrote about an exhibition I had in undergraduate school. That was over 30 years ago. The ideas I was reaching for are so clear to me now. And they are more relevant to my work now than ever. The connections and insights I make doing this are really enlightening to me. They clarify my intentions and complete my journey toward understanding the psychology of "othering," which is the only issue I've ever felt motivated to address in my work. Because of that, this work is the most important I’ve ever done.

The writing has turned into a mini-biography, at least in the sense of my photography and art life. It’s going to be interesting to hear the feedback when people read these stories and see the connections I’ve made. In a lot of ways, this project is the culmination of my life’s work. It sums up everything I’ve done in my career as an artist and photographer. Not only that, but I clearly define the motivation for creating the work.

It feels really good to share the ideas, the work, the progress, and the insight gained from all of it. I think it will be valuable for people interested in the arc of a fine art career in photography. I'm grateful for my life in the arts, and I’m particularly grateful that I’ve spent my career in photography. It’s been very good for me. It’s given me insight and direction that I wouldn’t have been able to get from anything else.

I’m breaking the book into the following chapters and parts:

The Preface

Artist’s Statement

Chapter One: Introduction

Chapter Two: Landscapes

Chapter Three: Flora

Chapter Four: Symbols & Objects

Chapter Five: Essays On Mortality, Photography & Philosophy

Stay tuned!

A whole plate calotype (paper negative) in a window mat—a dwarf Ponderosa Pine tree.

Rocky Mountain Cotton Grass

Ernest Becker said, “The last thing a man can admit to himself is that his life-ways are arbitrary: This is one of the reasons that people often show derisive glee and scorn over the strange customs of other lands—it is a defense against the awareness that his own way of life may be just as fundamentally contrived as any other. One culture is always a potential menace to another because it is a living example that life can go on heroically with a value framework totally alien to one’s own.” (The Denial of Death)

What is Becker saying? I would sum it up like this: We have our own cultural worldviews, things we collectively believe in that sustain us and stave off death anxiety. When we see “the other"—other cultures or ways of being—it threatens our own. That threat creates doubt, and that doubt awakens death anxiety.

That’s why it’s so important to recognize the aggression you feel toward people who are different. This is the birthplace of those emotions. When I talk about these theories being critical, this is one that is at the top, or near the top, of the list. It’s vital to be conscious of our death anxiety and how we manage it.

Memento Mori Ergo Carpe Diem & Memento Mori, Amor Fati

Don’t you love Latin words? I’m being facetious. Memento Mori Ergo Carpe Diem roughly translates as “Remember you’re going to die; make the most of life!” This is a very old saying from the Romans. And Memento Mori, Amor Fati roughly translates as, “Remember you’re going to die; love your fate.” Friedrich Nietzsche said this. Let’s address these and talk about some definitions.

KNOWLEDGE & WISDOM: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
What’s the difference between “mortality salience” and “mortality sapience?” I’ll give you my definitions and explain why they are important to distinguish from one another.

“Mortality salience.” To simplify, I would rephrase this as “mortality knowledge.” This is the knowledge that you’re going to die someday. It’s similar to knowing that when you flip the light switch to the on position, the light will come on. You know that will happen. However, you probably don’t understand how electricity works.

“Mortality sapience,“ rephrased to “mortality wisdom.” Have you ever heard the saying, "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, and wisdom is knowing not to put it in the fruit salad?” In very simple terms, that’s the difference between knowing something and understanding it.

Learning new information involves storing information, which is knowledge. You know something. On the other hand, wisdom is more concerned with insight, acceptance, and the basic "essence" of things in life. So there is a wide chasm between knowing something and understanding it.

MEMENTO MORI ERGO CARPE DIEM & MEMENTO MORI, AMOR FATI
Terror Management Theory (TMT) proposes that humans experience a fundamental psychological conflict between the instinct of self-preservation and the understanding that death is both inevitable and, to some extent, unpredictable; a state described as mortality salience. TMT is based on the pioneering theoretical work of anthropologist Ernest Becker, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning 1973 book The Denial of Death argued that mortality salience drives most human action – and thus, much of human civilization.

TMT also proposes the schema of symbolic immortality as a coping mechanism in the face of mortality salience. The term “symbolic immortality” was coined by Harvard psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton and his colleague Eric Olson.

Lifton and Olson identify five primary methods or modes of transmission of symbolic immortality, which can be summarized as:

1) the theological (religious teachings on the supernatural survival of the soul)

2) the biological (genetic and ephemeral family heritage)

3) the creative (long-lasting artistic, scientific, and/or benevolent achievement)

4) the natural (via participation in the eternal cycles of the material universe)

5) the experiential (transcendental experiences of timeless insight).

This can be considered a symbolic immortality system within which mortality salience is the first stage, followed by an immersion in what might be described as mortality sapience. (Alt-death/Duende)

Sam Keen’s introduction to the current edition of The Denial of Death: “Becker sketches two possible styles of nondestructive heroism (…)

For the exceptional individual, there is the ancient philosophical path of wisdom. Becker, like Socrates, advises us to practice dying. Cultivating awareness of our death leads to disillusionment, the loss of character armor, and a conscious choice to abide in the face of terror. The existential hero who follows this way of self-analysis differs from the average person in knowing that he or she is obsessed. Instead of hiding within the illusions of character, he sees his impotence and vulnerability.

The disillusioned hero rejects the standardized heroics of mass culture in favor of cosmic heroism, in which there is real joy in throwing off the chains of uncritical, self-defeating dependency and discovering new possibilities of choice and action and new forms of courage and endurance. Living with the voluntary consciousness of death, the heroic individual can choose to despair or to make a Kierkegaardian leap and trust in the “sacrosanct vitality of the cosmos,” in the unknown god of life whose mysterious purpose is expressed in the overwhelming drama of cosmic evolution.”

“Seven Crow Feathers (detail)"—a whole plate palladium-toned photogenic drawing on waxed vellum paper.

The photogenic drawing straight from the contact frame - pre processing.

Are You Challenging My Illusion?

I want to direct this essay directly at you. I want to talk about your death anxiety. I’m trying to find the best way to succinctly explain it to you. I want to explain what it is, the fact that it exists in everyone, how you repress it and why, and what happens when your illusion is challenged. I hope you get something from it.

The first issue to deal with is understanding that death anxiety is the main driver or motivator in life. In hierarchical order, this is at the top. Everything else would be listed below it. Everything. Also, if you didn’t know it, it’s the premise of my project, ”In the Shadow of Sun Mountain.” This is what the work is about.

First things first, in that order. Like other living creatures, we have a strong instinct to stay alive. We are also the only beings (or animals) that know we are going to die. That creates some major cognitive dissonance, psychologically speaking. What does that do to us exactly? It creates death anxiety. How do we cope with death anxiety? We repress it. We bury it deep in our subconscious. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to stand up in the morning. It would be overwhelming.

How do we bury it? What mechanisms are in place to do that? To answer those questions, we need to address illusions, or what Becker calls “immortality projects.” He says we all strive for heroism. It’s our cultural worldview that provides the buffer and allows us to put death out of our minds. We bury this terror (the knowledge of our death) through our cultural worldviews. Whatever our culture holds up to be meaningful and significant is what we use. For example, we find meaning and significance in our jobs, our families, our social clubs, making art, religion, holidays, earning money, a manicured lawn in suburbia, material things, a fancy sports car, being youthful, being famous, etcetera, etcetera. It’s anything that the culture holds up as meaningful and significant. These distractions allow us to psychologically bury the terror of mortality. Striving for heroism distracts us from the reality of our human condition. Everyone has a buffer; if they didn’t, they would be in a constant state of anxiety and depression. Sheldon Solomon said if we had to psychologically deal with our death—if it was constantly on our mind—we wouldn’t be able to stand up in the morning. We’d be reaching for a Valium the size of a Buick to deal with existing. Whether you realize this or not, you do it every day. That’s how you make it through each day.

"The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death." - Gore Vidal

Some “immortality projects” are not ideal—the pursuit of wealth and fame, for example. While it seems worthwhile and meaningful, it’s always short-lived and very superficial. The pursuit of staying young through surgeries, botox, and hair dye will only last so long too. It’s all done in vain and will never work—none of them will. However, some are better for humanity and the environment than others. I believe good or healthy projects include creative pursuits, spending time with loved ones, being in nature, critical thinking, authenticity, and working on gratitude, humility, and openness. Albert Camus said, “There is only one liberty, to come to terms with death, thereafter, anything is possible.“ I think what he meant by this is that living in reality, as harsh as it may be, will give you freedom—true freedom from the illusions we use to buffer the anxiety of death. I think of Buddhist monks, for example. They understand that life is suffering (death anxiety) and meditate every day on death.

What happens when your illusion is challenged? Anytime your anxiety buffer, or illusion, is challenged, it will cause you to react in a negative way. Religion or politics are good examples of this. When someone from a different religion or political group says or does something you disagree with, it makes you angry, it stirs emotion, and it makes you question, subconsciously, if your illusion is the correct illusion. When that happens, your instinct is to defend your illusion, sometimes at all costs. This is where the treatment of “the other” comes into play. We start wars, we kill, we ostracize, we humiliate, and we hate all to defend our illusion or worldview. That’s how much we want to buffer the knowledge of our death and impermanence.

TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY (TMT)
This is a great video to explain all of this. The movie, “The Matrix” really deals with TMT and how we fashion the world we want to live in or not.

“Rocky Mountain Wheat Grass-Photogenic Drawing,” a whole plate, palladium-toned, waxed, photogenic drawing on vellum paper. I designed a way to process these with the deepest color and to fit cleanly into the whole plate (6.5” x 8.5”) window opening of the mat. They look super gorgeous—I hope you can get an idea from the iPhone photo!

THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE
I have to mention Thomas Ligotti's book, "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror." I have not read it, not completely anyway. I get the gist of it from what I have read. It’s heavy. It’s depressing and can challenge you with some of his “truths.” The author is known for supernatural horror stories. In this book, he uses philosophy, metaphysics, science, and biology to make the claim that life is a mistake. "Existence is a condition with no redeeming qualities,” he writes. and that’s tame compared to some of it. Here’s the strange part: there is a lot of it that I agree with. He borrowed a page or two from Becker’s books.

Like a Buddhist, he believes that life is suffering and that “human suffering will remain insoluble as long as human beings exist.” And the sooner human beings cease to exist, the better. But why does he write this, and what is the “conspiracy” of the title? It all stems from the self-knowledge that we do our best not to acknowledge: the fact that we alone of all living creatures know that we are going to die. Does that sound familiar? As with Eve’s apple or the snake in the Garden of Eden, “human existence [is] a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness—the parent of all horrors.” In other words, we act as if we lack “the knowledge of a race of beings that is only passing through this shoddy cosmos.” He addresses the absurdity of life, drawing on Albert Camus and other absurdist philosophers.

He’s not the first person to postulate that consciousness was an evolutionary mistake. Many philosophers have hinted at it for millennia. I’m not sure it was a mistake, but it does create big problems for us. Trying to reconcile our biological drive to stay alive with knowing we are going to die and be forgotten is a big burden to bear, as is understanding that everything we do is an illusion that we create to distract us from the knowledge that there is no purpose or meaning in life.

Before processing and waxing the print.

Exterminate All The Brutes

“You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.”
― Sven Lindqvist, "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide

Have you seen the four-part series from Raul Peck called “Exterminate All The Brutes”? It’s based in large part on Sven Lindqvist’s book of the same name. And Lindqvist based his book on Joseph Conrad’s book, “Heart of Darkness.” Francis Ford Coppola’s film, “Apocalypse Now,” was based on Conrad’s book, too. Whew! That’s quite a lineage! There is very powerful content in all of it!

I highly recommend reading both Conrad’s book and Lindqvist’s book. They deal with the genocide in Africa (committed by the Europeans)—colonial genocide. Conrad’s story is about what happened in the Congo, and Lindqvist’s book gets at the root of the genocide in Africa as a whole. It’s a modern-day diary or travelogue in a way too. And definitely check out Peck’s piece on HBO. It’s an amazing 4-hour series. It’s so well-made, accurate, and very moving that I think it should be mandatory viewing for every American and European. I recommended it last year on my YouTube show. I used to do recommended reading and recommended watching every week. Doing that kept me in the books and films. I found some really great material.

My work has always confronted and questioned how marginalized communities are treated. This is not new territory for me, but the information that I’ve been studying over the past few years has really taken it to a new and solid place. Ernest Becker and Sheldon Solomon have given me a new set of tools to work with. These resources, among many others, have informed and supported my work in big ways. For many years, I’ve wrestled with the real history of America and Europe—the places of my heritage—and how we treat (and have treated) “the other.”

I lived in Germany for five years and tried my best to come to terms with what happened there by making photographs. I studied, traveled, and explored everything I could that was related to that history. I ended up making a body of work called “Vergangenheitsbewältigung.” Unfortunately, I never got to address the core reasons for what happened there. If I could go back now, I would be able to square that circle of confusion. For the most part, I would be able to answer that question today with quite a bit of confidence.

Now, I live on the land of the Ute/Tabeguache and am trying to do the same thing, but armed with powerful and enlightening information. The information I’m in possession of now is based on empirical evidence—it’s the best answer we have to this enormous problem. It’s a good feeling. And it empowers me and drives the work in a certain direction—in an authentic direction—that motivates me to share these ideas with my brothers and sisters of the world. That’s very important to me and one of the main reasons the work is being done. I’m more concerned with the viewer understanding the theories than liking the photographs, Both would be ideal, but the theory is far more important than the pictures.

I have a lot of life experience that lends itself to expressing ideas in a certain way. I’m not quite sixty years old yet, but I can see why they say you make your best work at this stage of your life. I get it. There seems to be an opening or willingness here that I’ve never really experienced before. There’s also a certain sense of maturity in the relationship to the photographs, or making the photographs. There’s an unrestrained passion to make work that is interesting and powerful in your eyes, regardless of what anyone else thinks. Like life itself, there’s a beautiful freedom that I’ve never fully experienced before. I’m very grateful for it.

Currently, I’m writing an introduction for my book and working on some essays for it. I’ve completed my artist’s statement and have about 15 essays so far to include in the book. I feel good about the direction this is going.

It’s winter here in the Rocky Mountains now. My book project gives me plenty to work on when the snow flies and it’s cold out. We do get nice sunny days quite often, so I’ll continue to make pictures and prints, but it will be less often and not in any quantity. I had a great year working on this project. It was everything and more than I expected. If I get another year like this, I’ll have something exciting to work with. I’m in no hurry to finish. In fact, I only give myself general guidelines and no real timeline. I think I’ll finish next year, but who knows?

The Yarrow plant gone to seed-a photogenic drawing.

A medicinal plant gone to seed—a print from the vellum negative on salted paper.