When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be

Thought Experiment: Consider, for a moment, the absolute lack of record of almost everyone’s existence prior to the invention of writing. These were people like you and me who lived rich, complex, social lives. Nothing is left of them but the faintest genetic trace. 

How long will it be until you are forgotten? The moment when it’s like you never existed? If you have kids, you’ll certainly be remembered throughout their lifetime. If your kids have kids, you’ll be half remembered by your grandchildren. So that’s, what, another eighty years of memorial existence after your death (if you’re lucky). After that, you’ll be reduced to a record in someone’s file, a leaf on some family tree, a photo in a book no one opens, a series of unviewed images in some internet cloud. Given long enough, even those records will cease to be. By the end of the next century it will be almost as if you never existed. History is overflowing with the billions upon billions of people just like us: those who lived, loved, suffered, died, and were forgotten. 

To exist consciously is to become aware of one’s impermanence. For some, this truth is unthinkably depressing. After all, we matter. How can it all wither away into the annals of insignificance so quickly, our existence devoured by time’s implacable black hole? 

It’s worth noting that ancient and modern cultures resolve this existential dilemma with varying stories about an afterlife. Problem solved. I’m not convinced by such tales. In contrast, I think a lot about non-existence, and I find that meditating on my finite nature, on the impermanence of all things and all people, has been my very salvation. Join me, if you will, on a few (hopefully) related tangents.   

Tangent 1: When my wife was pregnant with our first child, she made me aware of something called a “push present” — this being a gift you give your partner for, well, pushing out a child. (It’s kinda all explained in the name). I never know what to get my wife for holidays or birthdays or anniversaries, so imagine my dread and horror when faced with giving her a gift for bringing life into the world! My wife owns 173 pairs of shoes, 42 purses, and two jewelry boxes filled with all manner of shiny objects. (And on the off chance she reads this, I COUNTED). I just couldn’t think of another thing to get her. 

Tangent 2: In one of his later works, Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche condenses all of his theories on reason and philosophy and religion and art into a figure he calls the “tragic artist.” The tragic artist has rejected the existence of absolute truths, has confronted the nihilistic reality of an objectively meaningless existence, and has overcome that nihilism by passionately embracing his existence and fate in spite of the absurd insignificance of everything. Ironically, it is in his fervent embrace of every moment of his pointless existence that he overcomes the sickness of insignificance and redefines the meaning of his life on his own terms. In Nietzsche’s words: “The tragic artist is no pessimist: he is precisely the one who says YES to everything questionable, even to the terrible.” He triumphs over all futility through the act of self-creation. In this sense, the tragic artist fashions subjective meaning within an ultimately meaningless existence.  

On the one hand, art, as Nietzsche observes, “makes apparent much that is ugly, hard, and questionable in life.” It exposes and confronts our bleak reality. With the same brushstroke, however, the tragic artist creates art full of “courage and freedom of feeling before a powerful enemy, before a sublime calamity, before a problem that arouses dread.” Instead of nihilism, the tragic artist evokes a “triumphant state” through the act of creation, one that glorifies our existence in defiance of the existential truth: that we will live and die and be forgotten in the blink of an eye. Art has no higher purpose than to reflect the inherent tragedy of our existence while simultaneously overcoming that tragedy by conjuring beauty and meaning out of nothing! 

(Back to) Tangent 1: Which brings me to “Write Me a Love Song.” (For those expecting some simple, romantic gesture here, I do apologize). I didn’t want to get my wife just any thing to celebrate the birth of our child. We chose to bring life — a life that was not here before — into existence, and that act of creation felt worthy of a more sacred gift. Diamonds aren’t forever (despite what they tell you), she has more than enough shoes, and another purse would just get tossed in with the others.

In song I tried to capture just how rich our life together is, just how necessary we are to each other in this existence that races toward non-existence. We are here, we’ve brought life into the world, and soon we will return to oblivion. Still, our life together matters — to me, to her, to our children. Each day as a family, we resurrect and renew our fragile and finite love. Our very existence together is a work of art. What else could I do but sing?    

Tangent 3: In light of Nietzsche’s views — which have informed much of my intellectual stumbling for decades — I view songwriting as the primary instrument through which I can define my life as a tragic artist. It’s about far more than streams and follows. (Though, please, stream “Write Me a Love Song,” and share it with a friend!) It’s about accepting those noble truths spoken by the Buddah all those years ago: that I am impermanent, that life is suffering, and that there is no self. And still I sing. And soon my songs (and whatever beauty swims in their musical wake) will have never been. 

Even so, there is no greater sense of purpose I know than creating art, and, by turns, creating myself.