Practical Artisans is a life project that has many explorations and expressions in it, and has the desire for reality and living as close an approximation to that reality, at its core. My practical makings via Practical Artisans, therefore attempt to get beyond symbols, narratives (like the catch cries of ‘sustainability’), identities, techno-utopia fixes and other barriers that keep us from confronting the realities of complex life, living, our challenges here and ahead.
The human world, at least the western contemporary consumer one I have experience with, operates at a distance to and denial of, life’s realities of complexity, determinism (cause and effect), Laws of Thermodynamics, finiteness of planet earth – this distance or denial of life itself – effects of human psychologies that are biologically and culturally determimed. Determinism – everything that happens is determined by that which preceded it. The mechanical and cause and effect workings of my circular sock machine can not be denied, and yet in terms of human life, cause and effect is denied every day. It catches up in the end.
I do not accept the myriad narratives and stories humans tell themselves, a make believe world, I think (as others have written also) fabricated in the human brain to ‘cope’ with one’s own and our species insignificance in a meaningless universe. Passed on generation to generation. Decay and death await – reality – and for human consciousness it seems that is just too much to bear.
Richard Feynman beautifully describes in the video below, ‘when you doubt and ask, it gets a little harder to believe’. And it also creates the possibility for so much more.