In my art making I have gone through stages. Perhaps ‘stage’ is not an apt word, for I do not think that one stage stops cleanly before the next begins. However, I discern several causes that at different stages in my life primarily drive me to create. The earliest was art as an escape into fantasy from a reality I somehow could not accept. So I created my own. Then there was identity building; my focus, instead of on making art, was on being an artist, on presenting a particular self-image to the eyes of others and most especially my own. Nowadays creating is my way to investigate the question of my death and, necessarily, of my life. These driving causes are not something I think up beforehand; I discern them in retrospect.
As a kid being faced with the possibility of my own death––an experience not uncommon, I believe––I had my first taste of existential angst. The only dimension or worldview that was then available to me, the one I was living in and thinking from, was one of a continuous conscious state with differences in colors, as it were: living on earth, a negligible little break called dying, and then existing in either heaven or hell.1
One day it suddenly occurred to my child mind that existing forever, even when it was happily in heaven, was horrifying. Faced with a problem so much bigger than me. My world broke and the next thing I remember was a blackout. Thus began a lifelong journey which I for the moment describe as a journey of reconciling myself with death.
Nearly twenty years after, I discovered a poem printed on a poster to a meeting.2
When I read it I thought, “it’s exactly my question.” To this day this poem speaks to me like none others:
Truly do we live on Earth?
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
Be it jade, it shatters.
Be it gold, it breaks.
Be it quetzal feather, it tears apart.
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
Like a painting, we will be erased.
Like a flower, we will dry up here on earth.
Like plumed vestments of the precious bird,
That precious bird with the agile neck,
We will come to an end.
He goes his way singing, offering flowers.
And his words rain down
Like jade and quetzal plumes.
Is this what pleases the Giver of Life?
Is this the only truth on earth?
from 1491 by Nezahualcoyotl, Aztec poet-king (1402 – 1472)
translated by Charles C. Mann
Why is my investigation in the form of art making? This I do not know. Again, this was unplanned. My childhood journey started with devotion to an unseen higher power I called God. If there was a problem bigger than me, then there was a problem solver bigger than me. As I grew older and the intellect, but mostly pride, developed, and my problem still unsolved, I pursued intellectual knowledge (looking back, knowing intellectually for me included rationalizing involving unexamined postulations.) This course I followed till I felt I came to the limit of reason and found myself in a dead-end. I felt lost, believing myself running out of all available methods, although perhaps it is clear to those who know what would come next. I think it was Ludwig Wittgenstein who said that beyond philosophy is poetry.3
Perhaps I have not deviated too far from my childhood method, because asking personal questions that I feel is beyond my tools to answer, is to me what praying is.
- Of course as a kid I did not describe it this way; I had no concepts of worldview and existential angst. I just felt in serious trouble.
- The meeting in question was an inquiry group called Philosophical Self-Inquiry.
- As this is not an academic paper, it’s not important to cite the accurate source of the idea.