On Making and Unmaking
“To Build Winged Shoes, or Autophagy?”
It’s the 1st of December as I’m writing this. The world looks ever more uncertain, seeing parts of my family is ill-advised (to say the least), and we’re approaching the season where people make New Year’s Resolutions — and all of the excitement and disappoint that setting them might bring. There’s something about this point in time that’s got me sentimental and reflective about certain points of my life, and there is so much doom and gloom in my feed that looking back brings a nice ray of positivity in to something so abysmal. I’m choosing today to reflection on a part of my writing life.
Between 2015 and 2018, I was a writer. That isn’t to say that I had grand bylines with my name, but I was writing and writing everyday, and accumulated some very minor bylines. There is one article I wrote in 2016 in particular that’s been coming to mind lately — it’s shown up in conversations with a friend an colleague and it’s been coming up as I’ve been thinking about the trajectory of my life. The article is called The Shoes I Travel In, and in it I reflect on the following lyric from the rapper Ian Bavitz, known better as Aesop Rock.
Final answer “not to be”, “not to be” is right!
Next question — to build winged shoes or autophagy — from the song Leisureforce
Near the end of the article I concluded:
The indifferent world will see that I feel my weaknesses, and for days, even weeks, I will be defeated and insignificant. I will stray from my conviction to live passionately. But, over time, I will remember the progress I had made and, even if I am reluctant, will lace on Hermes’ shoes once more.
It was Shakespeare who made us question whether it was nobler to brave the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or to chose death. The decision between being and not being is in accepting the myriad mini-pains that life pushes onto us. Death is the rejection of them. This is the gist of “to be, or not to be”. Aesop Rock cut through the noise, and, without further explanation, chose “not to be”, to brave the tribulations no more, at least in this lyrical sense. He posits instead another question, “to build winged shoes or autophagy”. To spend your life building “winged shoes” as Hephaestus did when he made the Talaria — Hermes's winged sandals — or to wither away by your own undoing.
This is the tension of making and unmaking. Each day we encountered an implicit decision: to spend time building your metaphorical Talaria, or to spend the time withering away. When I wrote the article in 2016, I insisted that it could only be one or the other, not both. The rest of this article will delve into the false duality I imposed on myself.
Of Making and Unmaking
There is no making without unmaking they are opposites of a spectrum, they are the creative and destructive forces that we see in every day life, that alchemists saw as a fundamental part of their pursuit — the very essence of any creative pursuit. They are also in constant flow with one another; there can be no one without the other. In fact, they coexist. Therefore, you cannot build your winged shoes without allowing the autophagous self some space to graze. And that is what’s different between then and now.
It’s a nuance, I know. But, it’s an important one to me. To allow for both is to abandon the dangerous vision that people have of self-discipline, where we must do something every single day or else we’re a failure. It’s to accept the complexity of life into your self-making, knowing that the emergent qualities of that making are wholly unknown and impossible to know. (It is also accepting that those emergent factors can very well be detrimental). But, it is exactly this emergent quality of life that brings us excitement, brings us joy. To accept that life is a process of making, and accept that part of life is being unmade by your own hands, is a act of liberation. Liberation from harmful self-expectations, liberation from perfection, liberation from the uncaring world that has no concern for your plans. In this there is much power, in this there is much fear. But it beats the everyday banality, doesn’t it?
It’s the 1st of December as I’m writing this, and the world is being made and unmade. And I am being made and unmade with every word I write, with every thought, with every dream and nightmare. I am here and as long as I am here, I accept the liberation that the tension between these two concepts bring.