I’ve come to think that it is all about entropy.
As a child of the Space Age, I long ago learned about the Big Bang, about how the entire universe and everything in it expanded out of an infinitesimally small point, a perfect singularity, around 14 billion years ago and has been accelerating apart ever since, moving inexorably into ever greater dispersion, disorganization, disarray, dissolution, and dissipation. Current thinking is that the universe will simply keep expanding and expanding, getting ever colder and darker until every star goes out and every last quantum measure of energy has been used up. At some point, trillions upon trillions of years in the future, the Heat Death of the Universe will occur.
But that cosmic sense of entropy — that the fundamental and natural state of the universe and everything in it is to come apart and move inexorably toward decay — is just a backdrop for my personal concerns. I am dealing with entropy all day every day, it seems, in every aspect of my life. I find myself dumping ever increasing amounts of energy and effort into all of the systems in my life in a desperate effort to just keep things the way they are, to stave off the inevitable decline for as long as possible.
Perhaps this realization is the very definition of being middle-aged, but I am seeing this problem everywhere I turn. In its most mundane form, I long ago gave up on home *improvement* projects and struggle instead to just to keep up with home *maintenance,* to keep our house form falling apart. In like manner, I am no longer trying to get in better condition, better mental or physical shape, but rather work hard every day just to keep my health where it is now. I have to content myself with *spiritual* maintenance as well, feeling as though my once powerful connection to that realm is also now slipping inevitably away. And the same holds true for my various relationships with others: I find that it takes ever increasing, sometimes frightening investments of time and energy just to keep my friendships and intimacies functioning where they are, and I despair when I think of what it would take to *improve* them at this point.
But this is where art comes in. Jim Corder, one of the professors in my PhD program, said that written texts like essays and poems are incredible gifts of time, that writers invest gargantuan amounts of time and energy in building these tiny packages, condensing and cramming vast swaths of time down into these gifts which readers get to open and expand and revel in over and over again. The same is true of recorded music and sculpture and painting and drawing and other arts, too, of course.
But what I am thinking this evening is that poetry and prose and music and visual arts also miraculously halt entropy in their tiny portions of the universe. Creative people synthesize thought and feeling and matter and energy into stable forms that defy the endless dissolution of the universe, at least for a little while. [It's kind of a cosmic "Fuck you!" if you think about it, which I really like.] Such defiance and defeat of entropy — however temporary — is heroic, frankly, and more than enough. And when creative people share these little victories with their readers and listeners and viewers, they stop the relentless decay of the universe for them as well, for as long as these beneficiaries care to attend.
There is, then, a cosmic and existential significance in making and sharing your work. You might think that a given song fails at some level, that your execution somehow did not live up to your conception, that your technique falters at some point, that your metaphors are trite or your melody is flat or your singing is pitchy or whatever — and you’d be right, of course, because nothing is ever perfect. But every poem you write, painting you paint, drawing you draw, song you write and sing and record, however flawed, is a slam-dunk, in-your-face victory over entropy, over the most basic and powerful and inevitable forces at work in the universe. Your art makes you a super-hero, my friend.