On a social media post about an estate sale of works by a deceased artist, one person commented something like if they had not achieved a sustainable income and/or fame from their art by the time of their death, they would have everything burn. This person seemed angry that the deceased artist, who clearly had a long and successful enough career, wasn’t alive to reap the benefits of the final sale of his estate. Well, few deceased people benefit from the sale of their estates. That’s true for everyone, artists, plumbers, or dog walkers. Anyway, this person was incandescent in their rage.

I was prompted to respond, but as I typed away I realised it was the wrong forum. I didn’t want to argue with a stranger who is entitled to their view.  Yet I wanted to think and write about art and death and what we leave or refuse to leave behind. Probably as I have reasons to contemplate death and the point of it all right now. Also, this month for the first time ever, art I made sold for actual money (for charity – I didn’t make anything). I’m extremely happy about this turn of events.

Therefore, here are my thoughts.

Burning everything seems like a statement to the art world / culture / people around you. More of a ‘stuff you all’ than anything else. Maybe for some that’s justified. It kinda says you never understood me, you never deserved me so you don’t get to have any of or by me in death. For some artists it may also reflect the personality and so destruction reflects themselves better than any future, post death gallery retrospective would. It also requires a big enough backlog for a spectacle like a fire. It’s performative or it didn’t happen. Or something.

Anyway, despite the allure of a massive display of epic proportions as my worldly goods are sent off with me, Viking style at my death, it won’t be like that. Bylaws. Cost. The environment. And who’ll be responsible are some reasons. But also I like making things. Destroying things is sometimes necessary but making is my jam, not breaking things.

But as to what happens to my writing and art, even if I never make much money, even if few people appreciate my stories, poetry or art, even if I never approach close to minor fame status (which is not a goal btw), I hope something by me survives me. The point is I don’t want the things I made deliberately destroyed, not because any of it is good (or bad, or average) but because destruction is easy and inevitable but making things is perhaps natural but it takes time and effort and, so does survival.

After witnessing the utter and deliberately malicious destruction of everything that makes up a society (human beings, nature, and all they made and built) via social media, it feels off to demand the future destruction of my effects, however humble, even as a joyous celebration or as a kind of revenge.

Countless multitudes lived and disappeared into the utterly unknown, and I know that’s my destiny too but there is no need to rush towards oblivion, it’ll happen soon enough. Nothing lasts forever, but it’s surprising how soon the vanishing happens. Writing published online within 10 years has already disappeared into the ether. Things I made and wanted to keep were lost along the way. Everything is ephemeral eventually.

Historians understand the past through famous great works as well as through broken chamber pots, discarded task lists, slave quarters, mansions, and middens: anything can be evidence. Even the old bits and bobs of my life, should anything survive.

I accept I’m not particularly important in the scheme of things. Yet I am here and one day I will not be and if the only way to learn something of me is through official records, then these dates and locations will mean very little without context. My dates are not much of a story. It will be far more interesting to discover something of me via the things I wrote and made: the context I make of myself.

So to the future, I say, although I am gone, come find me anyway. Come find me through the expressions of myself. If you want to, if somehow you are intrigued by slight traces of me, follow them, and find me by raking through the detritus of the words and pictures I made; come see me through whatever is left of the tiny windows I allowed into my imagination.

Why?

Are not the things people like me create as worthy of surviving into the future as any random item that survives? Are any of us at least as worthy of remembrance or conjecture as the infamously terrible people of any era?

Telling it how it is

As a word person I like the word tell. Tell is a communication word, a story word, a word to interpret tiny unconscious actions and attributes that give away thinking, and also an artificial mound of accumulated and stratified debris of a settlement at a site over time. My accumulated achievements, my drawing, my creative outputs are a tell, and my tell, and tell their own story. Dig it all up if you can find the low hillock of my minimal achievements.

If I have a wish it’s that the future may know more people of the past for the beautiful, clever, thoughtful, wise, ridiculous, entertaining or practical things they made and left behind. I want them to know we tried in a world which features powerful people who mainly concern themselves with profiting from delivering death and destruction with hateful joy in their hearts.

Let us leave knowledge instead of ruin, let us have natural tells instead of ashy pyres, let the future know us for our loves and our average days, rather than our tragedies, for what we created or preserved instead of what we destroyed. Let us live in a world that values, fosters, and recalls poets and artisans, dancers and singers, storytellers, gardeners, photographers, musicians and weavers, clay throwers, cake decorators, and carers, and the keepers of places, and of times gone by, and enables such people to flourish as they live, and pass on their skills and histories because they enhance and celebrate us, all of us.

Thus my refrain: find me future humans, find me in what’s left of my words, my images, in traces of my deeds. I invite you to contemplate the mysteries of who I was because you’ll never really know me, not this mind, not this body, not the ways in which I struggle and the ways I thrive, and how I live. And yet, I want you to know that I did live for a while, and while I lived I created. Of it all, future humans, make of it what you will.