“It’s nearly banal to say so but it must be careworn regularly: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis,” Henry Miller wrote as he contemplated humanity’s future. And but it does should be careworn regularly, as a result of coursing by means of us is the basic paradox of our humanity: our eager for permanence amid a universe ruled by entropy — the nice supply of our existential restlessness and our artistic fury, to which all of our sorrow and all of our artwork may be traced.
The oracular Octavia Butler captured this in her reckoning with the which means of God: “the one lasting fact is Change.” The remainder of nature is continuously testifying to this inconstancy. And but with each fiber of our being, we resist its elementary actuality — despite the fact that our very fibers, every cell composing us, have been changed since we first got here into being. As life lives itself by means of us, our our bodies change; the bodily locations and social spheres we inhabit change; if we’re alive sufficient and brave sufficient, our opinions and concepts about life change. And but we cling to the comforting phantasm that we stay, in some unmappable area of being, essentially ourselves — our immutable selves.
Keith Haring (Could 4, 1958–February 16, 1990) was solely twenty and already colliding together with his personal impermanence when he turned his soulful mind to those perennial paradoxes in Keith Haring Journals (public library) — the posthumous gem of a e-book that gave us his largehearted knowledge on creativity, empathy, and what makes us who we’re.
Two millennia after the ship of Theseus and a era earlier than neuroscience started illuminating the dazzling realities of various minds, Haring marvels at our ways for bridling the essential effervescence of being:
The bodily actuality of the world as we all know it’s movement. Movement itself = motion. Change. If there may be any repetition it isn’t an identical repetition as a result of (at the least) time has handed and subsequently there is a component of change.
No two human beings ever expertise two sensations, experiences, emotions, or ideas identically. Every little thing modifications, every part is all the time totally different. All of those variables merging, interacting, destroying one another, constructing new varieties, concepts, “realities,” imply that the human expertise is one in all fixed change and, as we label it, “development” [and yet] most dwelling human beings construct their lives across the perception that these variations, modifications, don’t exist. They select to disregard these items and try and program or management their very own existence. They make schedules, long-term commitments, arrange a system of time and turn into managed by their system of controls.
A century and a half after Emerson lamented that “individuals want to be settled [but] solely so far as they’re unsettled is there any hope for them,” Haring considers the underlying unease that leads us to those coping mechanisms, these synthetic hedges in opposition to this most pure manifestation of nature:
Folks don’t need to know that they alter.
Until they really feel it’s an enchancment, after which they’re all for “change,” and can go to nice lengths to “make modifications” or contrive conditions or power a change that’s unnatural… Some attitudes I see throughout me are:
Change is suitable so long as it’s controllable.
Change may be predicted.
Adjustments may be contrived and/or altered and/or deliberate.
A part of our willful blindness to vary within the grand scheme, Haring intimates, is our unease about change within the small scheme of the self — the multitudes we every include, discontinuous and contradictory, a flickering of emotional and psychological states that by no means nonetheless to a everlasting constellation throughout the sweep of time. He observes:
Often the underlying proven fact that change is actuality, that we’re continuously altering and continuously in troublesome conditions, totally different states of thoughts and really totally different realities is
ignored
or misunderstood
or misinterpreted
or confronted.
Most easily, individuals know to some extent that they really feel totally different at totally different occasions or look totally different to themselves totally different days, however few individuals actually attempt to expertise this or query it or actually examine its causes or its implications.
In a sentiment evocative of Iris Murdoch’s meditation on the gorgeous, maddening blind spots of our self-knowledge, he provides:
To be a sufferer of your personal information will not be understanding what your information is and what its result’s.
To be a sufferer of change is to disregard its existence.
To be a sufferer of “dwelling by what you assume” is to disregard the probabilities of “one other technique to dwell” or the potential of “being incorrect about the way in which it’s” or ignoring the potential of “not figuring out what you assume.”
Pondering the reply is as harmful as not fascinated about the potential of no solutions.
Creativity, Haring suggests, is a type of candor, a form of constancy to actuality — a means of responding to vary genuinely reasonably than artificially:
Pure artwork exists solely on the extent of immediate response to pure life.
[…]
I’m interested by making artwork to be skilled and explored by as many people as potential with as many various particular person concepts concerning the given piece with no ultimate which means hooked up. The viewer creates the truth, the which means, the conception of the piece. I’m merely a intermediary making an attempt to convey concepts collectively.
Complement this fragment of the wholly wondrous Keith Haring Journals with the forgotten prodigy William James Sidis on the controversial science of change and reversibility, then revisit Haring on the love of life even within the face of loss of life.