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.

The Incompleteness In Philosophy

“If you wish to become a philosopher, the first thing to realise is that most people go through life with a whole world of beliefs that have no sort of rational justification, and that one man’s world of beliefs is apt to be incompatible with another man’s, so that they cannot both be right. People’s opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people is a secondary consideration.”

― Bertrand Russell, The Art of Philosophizing and other Essays (1942)

I really enjoy the study of philosophy (the love of wisdom). Over the years, I’ve read a lot of it. I’ve read everything from the old Greeks and Romans to modern thinkers, and I suppose I know just enough to be dangerous. In reality, I really don’t know much at all. I’ll save that for another time.

After reading Becker, I have a different view on philosophy. Now, it feels like the major philosophical theories are only halfway there or not complete; they feel unfinished. Russell’s quote (above) is a good example. While I completely agree with it, it doesn’t finish the thought. It falls short without Becker’s theories to complete it. All philosophy feels this way to me now: always referring to the answer but never really answering.

I'm not saying I disagree with the major philosophers about life and ideas on the human condition; on the contrary, however, I believe Becker's ideas are at the top of the philosophical pyramid. Everything, including all human behavior and thought, comes below his theories. His ideas and theories answer questions about the human condition. And they answer them definitively—at least in my mind, they do.

I know this is a bad analogy, but it’s a lot like treating the cough when you have a cold and not addressing the virus. That’s how it feels to me. I want to address the virus, not the cough. Becker gets to the heart of these matters.

I’ve always been a person who seeks the truth. I want logic and rational thought in my life. I’m not a believer in magic or superstition. In the context of life philosophy, those things seem trivial and unimportant. If there are no answers to the "big" questions, I’ll live with that. I don’t have the desire to make something up to say that I know the answer.

A good example of this today is the number of people who believe in conspiracy theories. These are "answers" that attempt to satisfy complicated questions or outright fantasies. The people who believe in these kinds of things feel empowered because they know something that most don’t. Feelings and opinions are irrelevant to me in the context of facts. I want evidence for positions and ideas put out there for discussion. This is where Russell’s quote is spot on.

I digress.

So let us address the virus, not the cough, of life's big questions. Let’s be clear and definitive when we have evidence for our position. Becker gives us those tools. He answers the most vital and important questions in life through his theories. And Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski go on and give us empirical evidence to show Becker’s theories are correct.

“We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his “courage to be” from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance.”

—Ernest Becker

“Rocky Mountain Cotton Grass—Blown Away"—a cyanotype on waxed vellum paper. The wind is blowing away the last seeds of the Rocky Mountain cotton grass. November, 2022.

The last light of the day sets on an old Ponderosa Pine tree stump. Many years ago, it was struck by lightning.

Almost 40 paper negatives (calotypes) I’ll make more of these over the winter. This is a good start for what I want to do for the project.

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.

Escape From Evil and Uprooted

"An essential element of any art is risk. If you don't take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful that hasn't been seen before?"- Francis Ford Coppola, interview in 99u, 2011

ERNEST BECKER: ESCAPE FROM EVIL
Immortality and the pursuit of a perfect world. According to Becker, the majority of the bad things that people do—to both other people and the earth—are motivated by these aspirations. Starting with hunter-gatherer man, Becker illustrates how the notions of sacrifice and scapegoating were utilized in pre-civilized civilizations to try to please the gods. These were the first attempts by man to manipulate nature and force it to perform what man desired. Some would eventually assume the position of chief or shaman and serve as the intermediary for the people to seek the god's favor.

From ancient shamans and chiefs; kingship, religious states, and eventually money, all took turns in being in the service of man's attempts to fend off death. Becker looks at genocide as the technological amplification of ancient scapegoating--sacrificing the lives of some to appease the gods. He elaborates on how modern society still clings to those who they see as heroes to save them from their fears and the threats of death.

In the leading paragraph of his conclusion, Becker summarizes his points most succinctly.

"If I wanted to give in weakly to the most utopian fantasy I know, it would be one that pictures a world-scientific body composed of leading minds in all fields, working under an agreed general theory of human unhappiness. They would reveal to mankind the reasons for its self-created unhappiness and self-induced defeat; they would explain how each society is a hero system that embodies in itself a dramatization of power and expiation; how this is at once its peculiar beauty and its destructive demonism; how men defeat themselves by trying to bring absolute purity and goodness into the world. They would argue and propagandize for the nonabsoluteness of the many different hero systems in the family of nations and make public a continuing assessment of the costs of mankind's impossible aims and paradoxes: how a given society is trying too hard to get rid of guilt and the terror of death by laying its trip on a neighbor. Then men might struggle, even in anguish, to come to terms with themselves and their world."

When Becker speaks of expiation, he is speaking of the guilt that he believes many feel for the very act of existence. He argues throughout the book that people have sought to alleviate this guilt in many ways, through blood sacrifices, scapegoating, and projection. Becker argues that men do not kill out of hate, but out of heroic bloodlust. It is because men kill with lust that he believes the evil that men do is less likely to be corrected.

EVIL IS A VICIOUS CIRCLE: RID THE WORLD OF EVIL WITH EVIL?
It's because humans cannot accept their animal nature, their insignificance, and oblivion after death that so much evil comes into the world. As he says, "man is not human." Examine the war on drugs, its desire to create a utopian society with no perceived weakness through reliance on substances, and its subsequent effects. It has left a wake of shattered lives, and no progress has been made at all.

Consider the appeal of Trump, a man who truly embodies the hero system Becker wrote about in his book. As the hero for the downtrodden in America, Trump represents a strongman who can vanquish evil from the land. With his demonization of outsiders and reckless promises, we see parallels to when Becker wrote about the need to "fetishize evil," to locate the threat to life in some special places where it can be placated and controlled. Trump believes evil is in the Mexicans, the Muslims, Hillary Clinton, and the media. Trump’s supporters feel that now evil can be located, named, and vanquished. And Trump is the hero to do it. Becker's book, written before his death in 1974, argues that it's this very process that results in most of the evil in the world.

"Men defeat themselves by trying to bring absolute purity and goodness into the world." This can be leveled as criticism of the left as well: their purity tests, thought policing, and other extreme measures are being used in the service of purity and goodness. The left has killed millions in the past to achieve these ideological aims, and no doubt they will again. No matter which side you look at, when people take violence into their hands "to make the world a better place," they will continue to perpetuate the evil they claim to be eliminating.” (from Ian Felton’s book review).

“Uprooted-Colorado Fern”—a whole plate, palladium-toned, photogenic drawing on waxed vellum paper.

“Uprooted-Colorado Fern”—a cyanotype photogram.

“Uprooted-Colorado Fern”—a cyanotype photogram.

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.

Homo Mortalis And The Fourth Turning

“Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, the deification of existence.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901

There are some very interesting philosophies in our world today concerning the way we live and the cycles we go through as human beings. I want to address two of them in this essay.

HOMO MORTALIS (MORTAL MAN)
The first is from the book, “The Worm At The Core: The Role Of Death In Life,” by Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon. If you’ve read other essays that I’ve posted, I’m sure you recognize the reference.

They have suggested that the foreknowledge of our own death may be what most widely separates us from other mammals. Perhaps we might even be more aptly called Homo mortalis rather than Homo sapiens. They write, “There is now compelling evidence that, as William James suggested a century ago, death is indeed the worm at the core of the human condition. The awareness that we humans will die has a profound and pervasive effect on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in almost every domain of human life—whether we are conscious of it or not.”

It’s a transformative and fascinating theory. It’s based on robust and groundbreaking experimental research, and it reveals how our unconscious fear of death powers almost everything we do, shining a light on the hidden motives that drive human behavior. More than one hundred years ago, the American philosopher William James dubbed the knowledge that we must die "the worm at the core" of the human condition. In 1974, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Denial of Death, arguing that the terror of death has a pervasive effect on human affairs. Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski clarify these theories with wide-ranging evidence of the many ways the worm at the core guides our thoughts and actions, from the great art we create to the devastating wars we wage.

The Worm at the Core is the product of twenty-five years of in-depth research. Drawing from innovative experiments conducted around the globe, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski show conclusively that the fear of death and the desire to transcend it inspire us to buy expensive cars, crave fame, put our health at risk, and disguise our animal nature. The fear of death can also prompt judges to dole out harsher punishments, make children react negatively to people different from themselves, and inflame intolerance and violence.

But the worm at the core need not consume us. Emerging from their research is a unique and compelling approach to these deeply existential issues: terror management theory. TMT proposes that human culture infuses our lives with order, stability, significance, and purpose, and these anchors enable us to function from moment to moment without becoming overwhelmed by the knowledge of our ultimate fate. (edited/Goodreads)

I’ll write more about Terror Management Theory (TMT) in the future. It does provide some insight into managing death anxiety. Becker clearly laid out these ideas; the worm at the core details them and provides empirical evidence for them.

THE FOURTH TURNING (THE ‘CRISIS’ PHASE)
It may have been better to separate these essays into two parts. As I was thinking about writing these, I realized that they are connected in so many ways that I felt compelled to join them in one essay. I think you’ll see what I mean.

The authors, William Strauss and Neil Howe, wrote a book in 1997 called, “The Fourth Turning; An American Prophecy—What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny".

Looking back to the dawn of the modern world, The Fourth Turning reveals a distinct pattern in human history—cycles lasting about the length of a long human life, about 80-90 years. Each cycle is composed of four “turnings,” and each turning lasts the span of a generation (about 20 years). There are four kinds of turnings: High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis, and they always occur in the same order. (from The Fourth Turning site).

In a nutshell, this book is about how the cycles of history (at least in American history) repeat themselves about every 80–90 years. There are “turnings” about every 20–25 years—four of them in each cycle. If you start with the American Revolution (1775), then the American Civil War (1861), The Great Depression, and World War 2 (1942), that leaves you sitting here in 2022, in the middle of the “crisis” era. These are all about 80-90 years apart. According to Howe, this crisis period will last until about 2030. After that, we’ll gradually enter a “high” period again. These “turnings” are like the seasons; spring, summer, autumn, and winter. We’re in the winter phase.

This is a fascinating concept, and our history tends to show its validity. There are some difficult turnings within the overall cycle. It seems we’re in one of those today. In fact, I would argue that we are. The good news is that in times of "crisis,” turning, historically, we’ve done some incredible things. The social security programs were all created in the 1930s—the depression era—as well as the American Civil War, which brought us the establishment of public education. There are some good things that come from it. There are also some very terrible things that come from these turnings.

In my opinion, death anxiety and these turnings are directly related. They sit together well. In fact, I would say they complement one another if I could use that term. Think of it as individuals acting out, or on, our immortality projects, and collectively, acting out, or on, the turnings in the generation we belong to; i.e., Boomers, Gen X, Millenials, etc. This makes a lot of sense to me. I can clearly see the death denial theories tying into the cycles of history. They provide different types of immortality projects for people of different generations and times, but it still comes back to the fact that death anxiety motivates these desires.

I would recommend reading the book or even watching some YouTube videos on the topic. It will really give you something to think about. It’s not religious prophecy or prophets, or anything like that. It’s based on the history of this country and the patterns that stand out. Almost undeniable. If this is, in fact, correct, we’re in for some rough waters ahead as a country and people. Forewarned is forearmed.

"Fourth turnings almost always end in total war." Neil Howe

Western Goat’s Beard - a photogenic drawing - No. 2

Western Goat’s Beard - a Palladiotype print from a wet collodion negative.

Turtles All The Way Down - The Song And The Print

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” - William Faulkner, The Paris Review, 1956

TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN
The print is a photogenic drawing of the pigweed plant. These are “one-off” direct contact prints—kind of like an Ambrotype or Tintype. The plant was laid on top of a piece of paper that I salted (ammonium chloride) and sensitized with silver nitrate. I put the paper and plant out in the sun for about 3-4 minutes. I washed the print (removing the free silver), toned the print (with palladium toner), fixed the print, and washed it. That’s it. I’ll do more of these in the future. They are special in that the actual object is in contact with the paper. The void is what makes the print. A lot to talk about there, philosophically speaking.

When I removed the plant from the paper, all of a sudden I had thoughts of the song, “Turtles All The Way Down.” The lyrics jumped right to the forefront of my mind. It was strange and powerful. Thoughts of near-death experiences came to mind as well. There were words like “universe” and “big bang,” all in this tiny little plant. It seemed to hold all of it and express it so beautifully in this print. The seeds that fell off onto the paper were a powerful reminder about life and death too.

Turtles all the way down is also the title of a book by John Green. He wrote “The Fault In Our Stars” and “Paper Towns.” I haven’t read it, but from my understanding, it’s about a young woman and her struggle with mental health issues. Anxiety and OCD. She’s trying to solve a mystery about a billionaire.

So where did the title spring from? “Turtles all the way down” is an old phrase that was used as a rebuttal for the existence of God. In his book, “A Brief History of Time,” Stephen Hawking describes its origin: The well-known scientist Bertrand Russell once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. ‘But it’s turtles all the way down!’

The idea is really rooted in infinite regress. The definition is, “a sequence of reasoning or justification which can never come to an end.” It’s about infinity, something that we can’t comprehend, and if we think we can, we’re delusional.

The specific lyrics that came to mind in reference to the print:

“I've seen Jesus play with flames
In a lake of fire that I was standing in….

Met Buddha yet another time
And he showed me a glowing light within…

There's a gateway in our minds
That leads somewhere out there, far beyond this plane
Where reptile aliens made of light
Cut you open and pull out all your pain..,”

The song really touched me when I first heard it. I couldn’t believe the lyrics: country music gone psychedelic. In this song, there’s no beer, bars, or women that left him. The pro-psychedelic position really made me pay attention. I think they (psychedelics) have a great future in the treatment of certain mental health issues. Anyway, listen to the song, and read the lyrics-it’s posted below.