Survival is Insufficient - Revisited
How to answer the question "Are you a creative person?"
Welcome to The Embassy!
We hope to be an Island of Faith, Humanity and Grace For Understanding Our Strange World. I'm Mike Sherman and I’ll look at culture and faith and their intersections and how that informs our stance in the world.
This week we are revisiting a dispatch from way back. Because of the different holiday schedule, I made a couple of Christmas themed posts and podcasts that skipped over a podcast episode I did with Chris about God’s care for creation. That podcast episode from last week drops this week while I send this piece out. Next week, we’ll get back on our regular rhythm of a dispatch one week and a podcast that follows. I’m revisiting this piece because a couple of things brought this to mind over the last few weeks.
This week, we will take a look at:
Creativity
Take
“Are you a creative person?”
That is a question I have been asked from time to time - and I don’t think I am unique in hearing that question. I often don’t know exactly how to answer. This newsletter is probably the most creative thing I have done - if you take the usual meaning of the word. I am not artistically skilled. I haven’t written a novel, or even a short story (apart from a school assignment). I can’t sing well. But I think I am creative, just not in the artistically talented sort of way. I think I am creative in a way that is (or should be) common to humanity.
Creativity - in solving a problem, sharing an insight with a friend, making a home - is part of what it means to live as someone created in the image of God. Being able to understand and appreciate the deep meaning of a story or a poem or painting or even joke takes some level of creativity (among other things).
J.R.R. Tolkien was one of the people who called himself (and us) subcreators. We create as image bearers and so reflect God’s creativity to the world.
So, yes. That is the answer to the question - and it should be the answer for all of us. The real question is: How is your creativity manifested in your life and in the world?
View -
Survival is Insufficient
One of the novels I have most enjoyed over the last couple of years is Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. It has the interesting stance of a story set in a post-pandemic world but written shortly before our pandemic. Even though the book doesn’t have a motto, per se, if you read the book, you likely would say that the motto of the story is the motto of the traveling company of Shakespearian performers at the center of story.
All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.
— Station Eleven
One of the main characters in this world even has this phrase - Survival is Insufficient - tattooed on her arm - a reminder to her through all the horrible things that survival in that world entails. And because they know that difficult realities are bound up with survival in that world, they know that survival is insufficient - there must be more. Survival, by itself, is insufficient.
As poetic and literary as that phrase is, it is not unexpected that we find it in an influential literary work - that eventually is made into a limited streaming series (Station Eleven on HBO). Less expected is the original use of the phrase and the original referent for the art. The novel and the Traveling Symphony allude to Shakespeare’s perseverance through the bubonic plague. But it (knowingly or not) quotes directly from, of all places, Star Trek: Voyager:
COMMANDER CHAKOTAY: There's a difference between surviving and living. They'll survive in the Collective, but they won't really be alive. You know that better than any of us.
SEVEN OF NINE: There is no alternative.
CHAKOTAY: How long would they survive if the Doctor deactivated this interlink network you created?
SEVEN: A month at most.
CHAKOTAY: A month as an individual, or a lifetime as a drone. Which option would you choose?
SEVEN: Survival is insufficient.
—Star Trek: Voyager (S6:E2, “Survival Instinct”)
Survival is insufficient because we are human. We were made for more than mere survival. We were made for love, meaning, beauty, joy, and creativity.
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. Genesis 1:27
This is one of the reasons culture interests me. It is a container or a pathway for meaning, love, beauty, joy, and creativity - or it can be. It is an expression of the image of God in us - however well or poorly that image is represented. This truth - that we are made in God’s image, that survival is insufficient - should inform our stance in the world and our view of what life is and should be.
One of the things Station Eleven does well is bounce back and forth between the pre- and post-pandemic worlds, showing us mostly what is similar, stripped away from all familiar circumstance. One of the characters looks back on his pre-pandemic life, outwardly successful and lucrative, and remembers a conversation he had with someone he was interviewing:
“But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think - this will maybe sound weird - it's like the corporate world's full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I've had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia's no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts."
"I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite --"
"I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that."
"You don't think he likes his job, then."
"Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realises it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
High-functioning sleepwalkers. The thing about that phrase is - we know what it means, it is not a familiar phrase, but a familiar concept. It might describe people we know or, at times, it might describe even our own life. It might name something about an outwardly successful life that has been a little too focused on the outwardly successful part. It isn’t that he or she doesn’t like their job, it is they don’t realize it - they never ask themselves the question, among a number of other questions they don’t ask themselves. It might describe a life that is successful, but uncreative in the image-of-God sense.
Success is insufficient because we are human. We were made for more than mere success. We were made for love, meaning, beauty, joy, and creativity.
It might take something like a pandemic for some of us to ask the question - do I like my job? It might take something like a war for some of us to ask the question - do I find beauty in my life? It might take something like a tragedy closer to home for some of us to ask the question - do I need to act in a way to make a difference in the world. Do I experience joy? Meaning? Survival is insufficient. Success is insufficient. Comfort is insufficient. Safety is insufficient. We were made for more - to create beauty and joy and meaning in our family, in our relationships, in our lives.
How do we create beauty and joy and meaning in our lives? That is a big question and it is best answered in another essay or in a few other essays. But I can name something that is hiding from those high functioning sleepwalkers - agency.
“They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
They spend all their lives waiting for something good to happen or something bad to stop happening. Or they spend all their lives explaining why nothing can change or blaming circumstance or … you know what I am saying, I think. We all have been there.
I said before that culture is a container or pathway for meaning, love, beauty, joy, and creativity. The challenge is to live in this time and place and culture in a way that reflects meaning, love, beauty, joy, and creativity. Which is to say, in my reckoning, to live in a way, with God’s help, that reflects the image of God well, or at least a little better. It means, in the midst of profession and pandemic and parenthood and all the other priorities, to stop waiting for our lives to begin.
So let’s not settle for what is insufficient. Let’s begin or begin again.
Link(s)
This week’s link is about survival and art in the middle of the plague - not this plague, the Bubonic Plague in the Middle Ages.
This bonus link is about transhumanism, which is related in my mind in a complicated way - and I’ll definitely revisit this topic later. What is creativity and what is humanity are related questions, this article is more about the second question and the Shakespeare article above is a little more about the first.
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