I’ve been reading this book, What It’s Like to Go to War, by Karl Marlantes. In it he writes about the power of destruction, the way the immediate act of destroying something-whether it is another person, yourself, or an object - feels really good, really powerful, and it got me to thinking about the relationship between destruction and creation, and how the two are really very closely related. Creation, too, is very powerful and the feeling it arouses, much like destruction, is quite transcendent. Can creation come without destruction? Are they equally powerful forces?
So, I did a little research on creation and destruction and came upon an article that discussed how in basic, everyday human life and living, much like what happens in the universe, entropy (disorder) grows. Information comes in through our senses and builds and grows until we can no longer take it and we need to do something with all of this chaotic information or else we will naturally just explode (like a star). If we don’t do something about it problems arise, and most often these problems surface as a means to control the entropy that has built over the years. People begin to starve themselves, cut themselves (literally and figuratively), poison themselves (drugs, too much food), take their anger out on others, etc… all just to try and control the chaos that is building within them. All of these destructive things are really, at the source, just a means to try to release and therefore improve our capacity for independence, for personal power, for that feeling of transcendence that each and every one of us seeks.
So, in my opinion, destruction is not a bad thing. It is a natural part of existence and a precursor to creation. Something cannot be created from nothing. We need the destruction, the broken bits and pieces, so that we can pick them up and use them to create something new. These broken bits will attract one another and collide in a coherent pattern and something new and better will be created from it. But we do have to be aware of when we are in a mode of destruction in order to let it go and move on and create from it. When we do that, the results are really quite remarkable.
We have to be open to creation in whatever form it manifests, and we need to not be so busy with the bread and circuses of life to recognize the need to create. Creation, which is often overlooked, has the same intoxicating effect as destruction it’s just that it takes much longer.
I’m a very creative person and I enjoy every minute of it. I think it clears my head and sets me straight. There is nothing that makes me feel more alive than stepping back from a painting that I created or rereading an awesome paragraph that I wrote. It is a feeling of transcendence, that same feeling I imagine one has when they are in the throes of intense destruction.
