(January 2020. I wrote this in my phone notes while high on the bus to New York. Duncan Horst was hosting a ‘Creative Cauldron’ at the home of the founder of the Blue Man Group, and we were supposed to bring some creative offering. So I wrote this poem about creation, which pretty quickly devolves from a poem into sort of just prose or performance, which I suppose is a statement on creation in its own right. Anyway I like how unpolished it is and had fun performing it. It should be seen as part of the same vibe as ‘On Dreams,’ which I wrote after a similar encounter with Duncan.)

creation

silence.
then yes, and no.
then, miraculously, we said yes in the presence of no, yes even given the strong possibility of no, and spacetime exploded.
the greatness of a yes depends on all the possible nos, which are all, in their own perspectives, possible yeses.
i am convinced that creation is the victory of yes over no.
i am convinced that creation is light, and that more light, more growing, more existence, more muchness is the only conceivable capital G Good.
i am convinced that every time i say yes i grow, and if i say no it is only for the sake of greater yeses.
i am the camel, i am the lion, i am the child.
when i say yes, i die, but a larger me lives. when i say yes i tremble with excitement. when i say yes i am new, as a star is new when it absorbs a meteor.
roethke said “the self persists like a dying star, in sleep, afraid.”
i say “the self expands like a dying star, waking, trembling”
stars do not need to know whether they will collapse or explode, they simply need to know more; all they know is more; all they do is more.
the heavier elements in the universe are necessary, they must be created; i know this because they were created. the creations i can imagine but that do not exist must be created; i know this because i can create them.
we live through the death of stars.
humans are more like stars than they know.
the self is a center of gravity, always exploding with novelty.
because of our social origin, we feel there are rays of purpose that point into our bodies from around us; thus, we need to believe that there are rays of purpose that point out from us into the world. the more our chosen beliefs align with the nature of the physical and social worlds that birthed us, the more real they can feel. whitman said that the law above laws is the law of successions, the law of change the law mocking laws. the universe is always expanding; there is an incessant emergence of novelty as everything smashes into itself; this is the law i would like to emulate; this is my metaphysics of muchness; i choose to believe, with emerson, than good is positive and evil is merely privative; i choose to believe that my life will be the most good if it introduces the most possible novelty into the world, the most new yeses, and i choose to align whatever it is i have that is known as “agency” with this mission for more muchness. i could be wrong about this. but it will be very fun acting as if it is true. there is something about humans that digs novelty. life itself digs novelty.
i realize that this has devolved from a poem to a polemic. this was never a poem this is gospel and outdoor ministry. things get messier the muchier they are.
creation is not the tool of the individual; the individual is the tool of creation. creation involves combination of elements that come from outside you; indeed, it requires recognition that your very body and self is a combination of elements that come from outside you. we are small pieces of god, small pieces of society, small pieces of creation. thus, creation requires a curious mix of pride and humility, understood fluidly. it involves extending your sense of self outward while also focusing your sense of self inward. these are both dimensions of muchness. i am thinking now of joyce’s smithy of the soul. i am thinking now of eliot’s sliver of platinum, the catalyst for a chemical reaction around it. i am thinking now of how disappointing eliot’s personal life was, especially his sex life. i am thinking now about sex and creation. on our level of biological complexity, sex is possibly the best base metaphor and driver of creation. it is, after all, analogous to two stars smashing, producing something new with elements of both.human beings are in a constant process of creation, because we are in constant dialectic with our environment; our environment is infinitely muchier than that of animals, because language is our primary adversity; we are constantly adapting to an environment of language, which is an extremely complex environment. never before has the adaptational process of life been contained so muchly in individual bodies. each individual human being is as informationally much as, perhaps, an entire planet’s diversity of life at an earlier stage. we are in constant dialectic with our environment, as i said; but what is important to pay attention to is not the content, but the change in content. there is a difference between using old adaptations (fins, gills, or old beliefs) that still suffice, and using new adaptations in open, raw response to the recognition that the environment has changed (and in truth, whether we realize it or not, the environment is always changing.) we should assume that we should change more than we perceive that we need to. using old knowledge for new situations is like viewing an individual leaf as an instantiation of a nonexistent concept called “leaf”; intuitions are adaptations in the moment, occurring when you touch the individual, unique leaf, and feel its difference, and feel how it makes you feel, as if you had never seen anything like it. i would like to live my life in a way where i question all my old assumptions, to make way for a constant flow of new intuitions, the raw material for which can be found in old knowledge. i would like my body to be a locus of muchness. i would like to die a supernova.