Time
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Fire. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
When people die of something other than old age, we say it was before their time, and part of what we mean is that it was before our time. Before we were ready for them to go—before we were ready to lose contact, but also before we had braced to live in a world that would no longer count them in its equation, whose near and distant workings would slowly forget their small rhythms.
“Before their time.” Their time to what? When I think about my brother, Sam; my nephew, Adlai; and my friend Ryan, in each case my grief masses around two things: what it felt like to be with them, myself and as part of the groups we congregated in. And what more they might have created in this world if they’d had time to.
It’s a contentious premise, that everyone is meant to be creative—that that is probably the meaning (or if you will the intention) of embodied consciousness. Created to create, dreamed in order to dream. Our society doesn’t reward all creative acts justly, but nor is it the arbiter of meaning. In any case, the problem is usually that we don’t define creativity broadly enough; we don’t really allow that almost everything is subject to it, that its effects can’t be compartmentalized. If we did, then we might be on the hook to be creative, and not just in this hobby or that project, but everywhere and all the time. That would be a burden, in one sense, at least as long as those faculties in us are underdeveloped. The upside is that it would, just about infinitely, expand the playing field of the possible.
To lose any of those loved ones would be for me the defining event of well more than a year. To lose all three—well, my body, our bodies, are still working through that, and will be for a long time. Each of them was exactly the kind of human we need if we are going to create our way into something better than we can imagine, not worse. (Those are the options.) You and I and the rest have more weight to pull now, for the species. I mean that.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.