the meaning of assembly
It’s what Mark Manson calls the ‘Uncomfortable Truth’. That moment when we are confronted with the sheer uselessness of our being. Faced with the fact that there is no grand purpose. No overarching narrative. No higher meaning. Everything we are. Everyone who’s ever been. Everything that ever has or will ever happen is irrelevant. Inconsequential. Infinitesimal.
What’s the point of a pointless endeavor? What does it avail us to devote our efforts to anything?
Because its what we do. We make things. We make meaning. It's what we're best at. Our most human of human traits.
Things matter because you say they do. Because you care. Because they mean something to you.
It's art. It's beauty. It's grace. It's faith. It's creativity.
We take the raw materials of the cluster-fuck we were given and we make something fierce and gorgeous with it. Something that snarls at the darkness and the futility. Something that dances with abandon in the rain.
Meaning is something that you can't find. It's not something that will ever find you.
Meaning is a work of craft and assembly. It's something that must be made. And you are the only one that can make it.
P.S. Recently
Taylor Walters asked me a superb question about ‘composition’. A superb question that I am superbly unqualified to answer, but I enjoyed over-thinking it. I made a video for my paid subscribers in a haphazard attempt to answer it. You can watch a small clip below, and you can find the full video here.P.P.S. ICAD - Day 290 - 292 - all the collages featured in this newsletter are available for purchase here
This is one poked hard at the papercut I have in my finger from doing a lot of shredding of confidential information I had gathered from my day job. I sat there, feeding it into the metal jaws and wondered ‘what was the point?’ and ‘will anyone care’. That’s the kind of existential crisis I have quite regularly.
Much more productively, my papercut was poked by a thorn from the bushes in my hedge as I was planting little box plants to fill the gaps. I could see the point of that.
So powerful! Fierce and gorgeous- that IS what I feel when I read and see your creations.