Excerpt
Excerpted from The Meaning in the Making by Sean Tucker. Copyright © 2021 Rocky Nook. Reprinted with permission from Rocky Nook. New York, NY. All rights reserved.
It’s blue hour, and the final glow of the day is fading fast
I’m lying with my skinny nine-year-old frame on the flat of my back in a wide, sandy riverbed staring up at the inky purple sky as stars fast flare into view. The sand still holds the warmth of the day while a cool breeze begins to blow overhead. There is an earthy, spicy smell in the air and the sound of crickets ring all around.
In this remote corner of Africa, in the middle of the Botswanan bushveld, there are no city lights to steal from the stars so they begin to blaze against the black of night.
First, the brighter stars, then smaller ones hove into view, and soon countless pinpricks of light of various intensities and colours make themselves known.
Directly over my head, I can see the Milky Way smeared across the heavens, a great band of light, and as my eyes adjust it separates into a million tiny luminescent pinpricks, the dark trees overhanging the river like an organic black frame of spidery shadows.
I would usually give a casual upward glance at the night sky, and with unseeing familiarity consider it, as most of humankind always has, like a great sheet spread above.
A firmament.
However, not this night.
Days before, in school, we had been shown a picture of our galaxy as a spinning disc made up of a multitude of stars in infinite space, our little planet positioned on one of its spiralling arms. Our teacher told us that that is what we see when we look up into the night sky and see the Milky Way, that we are in fact looking from our position on one of its limbs into the rotating centre of its colossal disc.
Lying there, looking up, I suddenly recall that fact, and what was a peaceful minute of childlike contemplation turns into a moment of absolute terror.
I feel like I’m falling, tumbling into the infinite.
I’m no longer lying on the still-warm sand of a dry river bed, looking up at the firmament of the night sky; now I’m lying pinned to a spinning ball of rock, looking down, not up, into the plane of our galaxy, with its billion suns, as it whirls its way at breakneck speed through unending space, and I feel as if whatever force holds me in place may let go at any second, and if it does, I will be released to fall into endless nothingness.
It scares the hell out of me, but I stay with it.
It’s also utterly exhilarating.
My heart is pounding in my chest at the enormity of the thought—of the fact.
There is a pull to that same nothingness as well, a beckoning.
It takes considerable courage, but I slowly stretch out my arms and legs, forming a star shape on the ground, in an act of letting go, of releasing myself to fall.
What gave me the courage to stretch out my arms in the face of that gaping void was Order:
The Order which holds the Chaos at bay.
This moment I’ve described is burned into my memory because it was the first time I can remember feeling those two things in such a palpable fashion: the Chaos and the Order.
The Chaos of the abyss in front of me and the Order that held me firm to this rock, as it has every day before and since.
At that moment, I realised how powerful that Order is—the proof being that it could give a nine-year-old such courage in the face of such a big truth. I had faith in that Order and believed it would hold me in place even as I stared it in the face.
But it was also the moment I stopped naively trusting in the permanence of that Order. I questioned it for the first time. I played with the idea that our planet could slow its spin and
that gravity could fail. I imagined that day, millions of years hence, when the sun would expand to swallow us up (another “fun” fact our teacher had gifted a class of nine-year-olds that week). It was a moment when I realised it could all fail, and Chaos could take over.
Things could change. Things will change.
It’s not really important for our purposes here, what you attribute that Order to. Whether it’s some “higher power” with religious structures built around it or just the immutable laws of nature. Either way, in our most awake and aware moments, we are in equal measure wonderstruck and terrified by the way things seem to just work, without our assistance, and often without our understanding. Ironically, I think it’s this fascination that first drives both priests and scientists into their respective careers.
But even as we attempt to examine and explain the Order, whether analytically or spiritually, we also know Chaos is out there, and we know deep down it will ultimately win.
If you come from a religious tradition, you likely subscribe to some kind of vision of Armageddon, or Apocalypse, or Ragnarok. It’s the historical mystics, who predated the scientific
method, reminding us through countless stories told to millions of listeners in hundreds of cultures, that this Order won’t last. Things will ultimately move toward Chaos.
If you’re a scientist, you believe in Entropy. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that, left to its own devices, the universe and all things will move into greater states of dis-Order over time.
But that’s the point; we human beings don’t leave anything to their own devices. We control, we influence, we change, we bend and even break, and at our very best, we create.
And that’s what we’re here to talk about.
Fashioning and forming.
Moulding and forging.
Making.
Creating.
Let’s start by trying to answer the question, “Why are human beings such creative creatures?” Why are we compelled to make?
My humbly offered answer to that impossibly large question is that we make because we are constantly trying to pull Order from Chaos.
I think we collectively intuited, long before science gave us the language, which way the universe is bending, and every act of creation on our part is in defiance of Entropy. Every time we pick up a paintbrush and choose complementary hues to apply to the canvas, or arrange elements through our camera viewfinders to create a pleasing composition, or press fingers into wet clay to wrestle form from a shapeless lump, we are bending things back toward Order and wrestling them from Chaos.
Even as I sit here now furiously typing away on this keyboard, every “click” and every “clack” feels like a tiny battle won, bending the universe imperceptibly away from disorder and toward life.
I don’t know about you, but the days I make something are the days that leave me feeling the most fulfilled and that lead to nights of the most peaceful sleep.
We are driven to create because it comforts us in the face of impending disorder. We know that no matter how much we make, we cannot ultimately turn the tide, but we can make things to help us make sense of life. We can make things to ward off the darkness.
It’s why cavemen painted their walls with scenes from their daily lives, and in the case of the works discovered at Lascaux dating back some 20,000 years, even used the very contours of the rock to render their images three-dimensional.
They daubed depictions of animals, humans, and even abstract symbols onto the walls in beautiful detail, perhaps to feel more in control of the chaotic forces that dictated the direction of their lives.
It’s why ancient Mesopotamians carved the Epic of Gilgamesh into tablets 4,000 years ago. They created stories to address the great questions, and attempt to describe the things they didn’t understand. Why are we here? Why is life so full of pain and hardship? What do we do with the time we are given? What are our limits? How do we face our own mortality?
It’s why Bronze Age humans erected stone circles 5,000 years ago. Experts are still arguing about the exact reasons they spent huge amounts of time and energy to cut colossal stones, hauling them across the landscape in order to upend them in circles. All we have are theories, but I think it’s safe to say from the way these structures are often aligned astronomically, that this was some form of tangible expression of the way they saw the universe and their place in it. Perhaps more than that, it made them feel more in control of the reality they found themselves in.
Of course, these structures could have also had religious significance, but even then, what is worship, ritual, and sacrifice if not an attempt to first personalize those forces that bring rains to crops, or an end to sickness, and then bargain with them to work in our favour?
To bargain with Chaos and bring Order.
These historical acts of making weren’t just about interior decorating, or architecture, or having something to read in the bathroom. Creating helped these peoples deal with and describe a world in which they felt that heady mix of competent and completely powerless, and in that regard, precious little has changed. We are still making things to communicate what we intuit to others, to pull answers from questions, and Order from Chaos.
But this is where art differs from science and religion because, in their own ways, each of the latter seeks to formulate Order in certain terms.
Science is trying to wrestle Order from Chaos through rigorous examination and testing, looking for patterns and attempting to explain them through the prism of the rules we have established to date.
But what about everything we can’t explain scientifically?
Well, for many, this is where religion steps in and seeks to explain the mysteries we haven’t formalised in scientific laws. Similarly, each religious branch tries to answer all the great “why” questions through their own particular lenses, and then most attempt to codify Order into our lives by giving us the “rules for living in an orderly fashion.”
However, science is a long way off in answering all the questions we have, and for most, religion is too prescriptive and limiting. So what do we do with our human experience?
How do we share what we intuit about “life, the universe, and everything” when we don’t have scientific proofs or religious doctrine to support what we believe we’ve seen, felt, or experienced?
We make.
And we hope that those who experience what we’ve made will feel the truth of what we’ve shared resonate and hum within them as well. We might not even be able to put clearly into neat, descriptive prose what we’ve shared, but that’s the beauty of art; it’s not a medium that requires certainty.
As human beings, we’re trying to describe what we collectively know, to create a sense of “safety in numbers” as we stare into the void together. When we reach the end of our traditional descriptive powers, it’s time to weave collective meaning from poetry, painting, writing, dancing, photographing, filmmaking, storytelling, building, singing, animating, designing, baking, performing, printing, carving, sewing, sculpting, and a million other ways we daily create life out of Chaos and share it with each other for comfort.
Of course, if art is our attempt to pull Order from Chaos in the small ways we can, ultimately it’s as useless as trying to plug leaks in a failing dam with our fingers. In the long run, we will fail in our attempts to hold Chaos back. Skip forward to the end of our collective story, flick through the pages to the final chapter of time, and we lose this battle. But there is something wonderfully human in the knowingly futile attempt, and no better way I can think of to spend a life.
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