Monday
Mar082010
Tab B Goes Into Slot A. Now What?
Monday, March 8, 2010
Why do I do it?
This question scrapes itself through my brain at times, threatening mutiny against meaning.
Why do I do it? Why do I create? Why does anyone? We build towers and paint paintings and turn food into cuisine and plant flowers along paths and design clothing and write books and teach new humans to do more of what we have done. We don't just live and eat and have sex and die. We keep making things.
This bothers me more than just about anything else. It bothers me more these days than the fact of my mortality, which has kept me up at night since I was five years old with its promise of putting a stop to everything in the world that I knew and loved being the way that I knew and loved it. It bothers me even more than that, because being animals that live and die among all other living things that live and die is a pattern. It's an inescapable repetition so inescapable that it becomes it's own reason. This making thing, though, brings on waves of panic.
To what end do we create? Most of us, aside from the horror of the entire human race dying in some armegeddony fire or flood, aren't making things in the world with the idea that we are bettering humankind for hundreds and thousands of years down the road. That's not why you built that chair out of willow, and that's not why I write poetry filled with domestic ennui.
I do not believe in theism or polytheism, an explanation of my world based on a singular consciousness or several consciousnesses that direct matters in some way. At the same time, I am put off by the word agnosticism with all its implications of doubt, because I do not doubt that there is more beyond these small, mobile pockets of life force that envelope us for universal nanoseconds.
There is more, there is more, there is more. It is a knowledge that thrums through me that religion cannot describe. You would think that this would calm my overarching fear of death in some way, but it doesn't. It can't, not while we keep creating and making and doing, filling the world with the things that our minds and hands brought into being.
I make something, and I like that I made it. I like that you like that I made it. Perhaps someone behaves better or enjoys something more because of the thing that I made. Is that it? Is this all that pushes a pathologically creative species forward? Small gains that end for each of us when the lights go out?
Part of me likes to imagine that all this doing is a groundwork of training for the something else that happens when we die. It's like we are aliens dropped to Earth, wiped of the memory of our beginning and left to learn for what is to come.
When I was a kid, for part of one summer, Venus hung as a visible pinpoint of glowing red in the night sky, and I would crawl up onto my parents' roof, sneak a cigarette, and watch that planet bob in the inkiness of the dark beyond the orange halo of suburban street lights. It kept me alive at the time to think of my alien brethren travelling out there, fellow beings who could recognize the beingness in me beyond the flesh.
I suppose that I need to feel as though all this making from cradle to grave is not just entertaining busy-work, that the pathology behind our incessant creation is leant from a larger calling.
But then, if it turns out after I die that all this writing I am moved to create was just preparation so that I could write training manuals for alien spaceships or something like that, I'm going to be really pissed. Of course, by that time, my consciousness, if my consciousness is indeed transmutable, will be trapped inside my new alien body, and I will probably be wondering what the meaning of it all is again while I try to work out if bullet points or a numbered list would be more effective to explain how to put Tab B into Slot A.
This question scrapes itself through my brain at times, threatening mutiny against meaning.
Why do I do it? Why do I create? Why does anyone? We build towers and paint paintings and turn food into cuisine and plant flowers along paths and design clothing and write books and teach new humans to do more of what we have done. We don't just live and eat and have sex and die. We keep making things.
This bothers me more than just about anything else. It bothers me more these days than the fact of my mortality, which has kept me up at night since I was five years old with its promise of putting a stop to everything in the world that I knew and loved being the way that I knew and loved it. It bothers me even more than that, because being animals that live and die among all other living things that live and die is a pattern. It's an inescapable repetition so inescapable that it becomes it's own reason. This making thing, though, brings on waves of panic.
To what end do we create? Most of us, aside from the horror of the entire human race dying in some armegeddony fire or flood, aren't making things in the world with the idea that we are bettering humankind for hundreds and thousands of years down the road. That's not why you built that chair out of willow, and that's not why I write poetry filled with domestic ennui.
I do not believe in theism or polytheism, an explanation of my world based on a singular consciousness or several consciousnesses that direct matters in some way. At the same time, I am put off by the word agnosticism with all its implications of doubt, because I do not doubt that there is more beyond these small, mobile pockets of life force that envelope us for universal nanoseconds.
There is more, there is more, there is more. It is a knowledge that thrums through me that religion cannot describe. You would think that this would calm my overarching fear of death in some way, but it doesn't. It can't, not while we keep creating and making and doing, filling the world with the things that our minds and hands brought into being.
I make something, and I like that I made it. I like that you like that I made it. Perhaps someone behaves better or enjoys something more because of the thing that I made. Is that it? Is this all that pushes a pathologically creative species forward? Small gains that end for each of us when the lights go out?
Part of me likes to imagine that all this doing is a groundwork of training for the something else that happens when we die. It's like we are aliens dropped to Earth, wiped of the memory of our beginning and left to learn for what is to come.
When I was a kid, for part of one summer, Venus hung as a visible pinpoint of glowing red in the night sky, and I would crawl up onto my parents' roof, sneak a cigarette, and watch that planet bob in the inkiness of the dark beyond the orange halo of suburban street lights. It kept me alive at the time to think of my alien brethren travelling out there, fellow beings who could recognize the beingness in me beyond the flesh.
I suppose that I need to feel as though all this making from cradle to grave is not just entertaining busy-work, that the pathology behind our incessant creation is leant from a larger calling.
But then, if it turns out after I die that all this writing I am moved to create was just preparation so that I could write training manuals for alien spaceships or something like that, I'm going to be really pissed. Of course, by that time, my consciousness, if my consciousness is indeed transmutable, will be trapped inside my new alien body, and I will probably be wondering what the meaning of it all is again while I try to work out if bullet points or a numbered list would be more effective to explain how to put Tab B into Slot A.
Dear Me,
Have a real fear, like that your species could make your home planet uninhabitable.
Sincerely,
Schmutzie.
Reader Comments (14)
Honestly, I thought you were gonna announce that you were preggers or something, all this talk of creating something. Gasp! I know.
I have this fear, too. I walk into big box stores or craft warehouses and think, "Stop the madness!" I wonder what the turnaround time is, from the time this stuff leaves this store, to the time it winds up in a landfill. A month? A season? A year? Was it really necessary?
Although I do appreciate really well made things and sentimental things. Just as long as they're not crossing the "hoarder line". Damn it. You did it to me again! This isn't a comment it's a blogment!
I make because I have to. If I didn't have the simple act of making to soothe me, my head would explode. I make as a response to the chaos around me. The tragedy of the albatrosses on Midway atoll affected me so deeply that I needed to make dead albatross bowls. I make because that is what I do.
I've had the same fear. It bothers me that I consume too much. I love creating things, but it bothers me that I have to consume things to create new things. If I sell them I help other people consume things. It's something that I've never been completely comfortable with.
The way we create is a side effect of the kind of intelligence we have. We evolved to solve problems, to adapt to new situations and environments, and to be a member of a group. And we evolved the ability to make stuff in order to do all these things. So if you were cave-Schmutzie, you'd use your creative talents to make a shelter against the weather, or to dig up yummier roots, or to gain status in the tribe as a maker of statues or a teller of stories. Just because you are 21st century Schmutzie, doesn't mean you have lost that hardwired creativity. It still needs to find an outlet. Don't fight it!
I wonder sometimes, if those of us who create (either with our minds or our hands) do so because our daily jobs don't require us to use that part of our brains. I am a social worker and although I often have to be creative in how I approach an issue, it's not the fulfilling creativity of a well knit pair of socks or sweater. My hands need to DO something. And gardening is right out. I hate dirt under my fingernails.
Have you seen the movie "Crazy Heart?" There's a Billy Joe Shaver song in it called "Live Forever." Part of the lyrics say:
You're gonna miss me when I`m gone
Nobody here will ever find me
But I always be around
Just like the songs I leave behind me
I'm gonna live forever now
This is interesting, because I've been focused on "making" lately. Been researching Makers Faire, wondering whether to make a pilgrimage. I'm wondering if it's a Springtime obsession. It's time to make. I think I make--- i.e. manifest what's in my head -- as part of my body's job to listen to my brain so that my brain has room to think up new things. Does making reboot thinking? The garden bed I'm making may not save the world, or even me, but it makes my brain trust that its next idea will be made too so it doesn't give up, which is a good thing.
I don't know if you intended it, but I found that a very personal statement. I know how much your creative life is important to you, and you practically equated it to your religion here. Whether that is a healthy thing or not is another matter.
Neil, thanks for noting that. I hadn't seen that when I wrote it, but now it seems loud and clear. I'll have to give it some thought.
I came to the conclusion long ago that in order to create something, something has to be destroyed. It came to me while cooking--to make some food, you have to make a mess and sometimes crack an egg--you destroy the clean of your kitchen and bowls and spoons and you destroy an egg. Later on, I found it true of any creation, whether crafting, sewing, or trying to shape your life the way you desire it to be. Sometimes the destruction is just obliterating the way things were...but whatever the venue, there is always a loss for a gain.
About agnosticism:
Have you ever read Life of Pi? There is a line in there about how one must choose between being an atheist or a believer, for being an agnostic is like sitting in a car but refusing to go anywhere. I've always like that, even as I've waffled between opinions.
A refer to myself as a "reverent agnostic" after A. J. Jacobs. I believe in sacred things, and yet I am not so sure we can pin it all down. So I am agnostic only so far as I refuse to pin the tail on the proverbial donkey . . .
Great post.
Well, it's magic, right?
http://homepages.tesco.net/~kettlecup/amms/Reality.htm
Take a look at this blog entry:
http://cargocultcraft.com/2010/03/15/sewing-and-flow/
It's a woman in England who's spending a year following the WWII clothing coupon allowances. This post is about why she likes to sew, even though she thinks she's not particularly good at it. (She's very very wrong about that, I must say!)