The Pace of Art at the End of the World
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It’s a strange time to be doing anything at all. The news is rife with so much pain, chaos, and incoherence that it’s hard to integrate anything while still trying remain on task with what needs to be done — what can be done. For many people, writers and creatives in particular, I believe it’s challenging to discern where and when to use our voices, but also how and through which medium. I wrote previously that there is something noxious to creativity about rushing to comment on everything that emerges, whether ecologically or in the cultural zeitgeist. I noted the importance of allowing these timely things to settle into something more perennial.
Each moment of our living present is an echo — a loose tether into something from our human past, something more interesting and difficult for us to untangle. But those connections, and really being able to hear where that echo came from, is a much more intuitive and slow-paced process than I think any of us would like to admit or even practice. It causes tremendous anxiety when at once we live in the death throws of an overly complex civilization which demands an urgent response, but at the same time, our “urgent responses” to crises carry so much of the blame for the way our society is currently functioning. Urgent responses to anything create the pendulum which swings back and forth ad infinitum, rocking the very foundation of our world under the weight of its momentum. The pendulum is not tethered to nothing — it is not merely an abstract concept. The cracks and fissures are there for us to see now.
So simultaneously we’re called to respond immediately to everything, yet many of us feel a call to slowness: to following our intuition about what is the most important thing for us to do right now even if that thing will take weeks? Months? Years?1 Is it possible to find equilibrium between action and deliberate slowness?
That is the subject of the podcast we recorded with our friend Daniel Griffith back in December — how to balance these two things at the end of all things.
Additionally, we talk about the value of imagination, and how it has been marginalized in our technocratic society. Another deep cost of our tendency to immediately react to things is that we continue to marginalize imagination, intuition, dreaming — all things that actually matter when it comes to building the world that we want to live in. We cannot create merely in opposition to this world: we need to have time and space and clarity to dream a better world.
I liken it to the way that many people in my generation have very difficult relationships with their parents. Because we’ve grown up in a milieu that sees nothing wrong with cutting off parents forever and never making any effort to resolve their differences, many millennials have done exactly that, declaring that they aim to be “nothing like their parents.” So they raise their children in an unconscious state of opposition — an unstable pendulum swing. It’s not until later that they find they harmed their kids in an equal yet opposite manner. Or if they don’t have kids, they may find themselves struggling to know who they truly are, as they are still living under the influence of their parent — the umbilical cord still firmly attached.
There is a difference between merely identifying a problem and actually living into a better way.2 The children of difficult parents who take the time to understand their parents for their faults and individuate through the trauma will be centered and clarified in a way that those who merely condemn and react in an opposite manner will not.
The point I’m trying to make is that synergy, integration, and balance are important in all earthly endeavors. If we are in a state of opposition at all times, we will not be able to see the world clearly — we will only be able to see it as divided, binary, and with definable enemies. The earth will continue to tremble beneath the thundering pendulum. Finding synergy between the two hemispheres of our mind, as per Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, is the key to holding it all together. Or, in the case of Jeremy Narby’s The Cosmic Serpent, we need to “refocalize” our vision to see two opposing sides at once — only then can we see the full picture.3
Finding that balance between bringing new information in, and allowing that information to go through fermentation, putrefaction, dissolvio, digestion, metabolization — whatever you want to call it — must occur. Like life, creation needs this hot fecundity to grow. Make no mistake, there is no inertia here: this heat, this bubbling and frothing, has movement, and it needs to find the balance between stillness and kinesis. As artists, we are called to hold this tension of the opposites at all times. We are called to carry the paradox with us.
We hope you enjoy this podcast with Daniel Griffith. Be sure to give his Substack, Unshod, a follow.
Never mind the extremely real reality that everyone who wants to make a difference also has to make a living in order to do so and more often than not, those two things are mutually exclusive.
This is a challenging practice, one which requires a lot of grace, patience, and trial to achieve. With our lives in general, we are not yet there — unable to fully walk the talk. Having compassion for ourselves and understanding our limitations can help allow us to excise the shame we may have around not being able to live into our values just yet. As my friend Thomas Doochin told me (a quote from his friend that I’m paraphrasing), “if it took 10,000 years for humans to do this level of damage the biosphere, is it reasonable to assume we can fix it in one generation?” Sometimes planting seeds is all we can do for the moment, and that’s okay, too.
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