LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Jesse Krimes!

Make something out of nothing

Dear Lovelets,

Someone was asking me about AI the other day, and about whether it scares me. Specifically, they were asking if I was frightened that AI would soon be able to write better than I can write, and if I would lose my profession as a result.

Okay, a couple of thoughts on that topic.

First of all, if the biggest harm that AI does to humanity is to take away my “profession,” I think that would be just fine. In other words, I think we have bigger issues to concern ourselves with here, as human beings in a dangerous age, than protecting Liz’s writing career from robots.

But here’s the main thing I want to say about it. There are already people who can write better than I can write! Why should I compete with machines when I don’t even compete with people? It’s been the case for my entire career that many humans are more talented than me. During the decade in which I was first published (the much-underappreciated-at-the-time 1990s) here are just a few of the people who were actively writing: Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison, Tom Wolfe, Donna Tartt, David Foster Wallace, Annie Proulx, Arundhati Roy, Haruki Murakami, John Updike, Michael Ondaatje, Lorrie Moore, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, A.S. Byatt — and many, many, many more. That was the pool I jumped into with my fist full of short stories, saying, “Hi world! I am also here!”

I couldn’t hold a candle to any of those people’s REAL intelligence, long before artificial intelligence became a thing. But I expressed my creativity anyhow, because I wanted to.

And it is still the case that there are many people who can write better than me. There were a whole bunch of books published in the last few years alone that I feel are better than anything I could ever create as an artist. (I see you, Miranda July, and I bow down!)

But I don’t stop writing just because other people are better at it. And I won’t stop writing just because a robot is better at it.

I don’t write so I can be the best at it. I write because I love and need to write.

I create because I have no choice. Because I am overcome — as have been millions of people throughout history, known and unknown — by an urge to make something out of nothing. An urge to take whatever material there is in the world, and mix it with our own imagination, and suddenly, like Big Magic (or even teensy magic) something exists that did not exist before.

Why would anything stop me from continuing to do that?

Our guest this week is the renowned artist and activist Jesse Krimes, whose jaw-dropping, heart-stopping work — some of which was made while he was incarcerated in solitary confinement — is the purest example of making something out of nothing, just because you must.

Jesse says that he realized while in prison that “everything can be taken from me except my ability to create.”

His embodiment of this deep and powerful knowing makes him an artist for our times, and an honored guest on Letters From Love.

Let’s keep going, dear hearts. Keep making what you make. Let nobody and nothing take that impulse away.

Love,
Your Lizzy

Dear Love, what would you have me know about making something out of nothing?

Dearest Transparent Dragonfly Wing,

It’s your job. We don’t like to use heavy words like mission and purpose, but if we DID use heavy words like mission and purpose, we might use those words right now.

But let’s use lighter words, okay?

The urge to make something out of nothing is your joy, your delight, your magic, your ancestral heritage, your human inheritance, your love. Knowing this, teaching this, being this — it’s the content you came for, as the kids say.

How many times have you told the story of your grandmother’s quilts, as evidence of the shared human urge to create something out of nothing — even when there are no materials around that might formally be recognized as “art”?

Your grandmother, like her grandmothers before her, made beautiful quilts. To a certain extent, this was pragmatic. She didn’t have any money, winters were cold in Minnesota, her children needed to be covered with blankets, and she had to do something with those tiny scraps of fabric that were of no use. She was a pragmatic woman, who wasted nothing. And so, of course, she made quilts.

But why did they have to be so beautiful? is the question you always asked. Why was each quilted square so perfectly designed, with patterns far more intricate than they needed to be? Why did she take time she did not have — time that she could have spent taking care of her seven children, or working on the farm during the Depression, or trying to put up more food for winter — to sit there quietly in a chair, making a work of art out of nothing? Why did it need to be art? Why couldn’t it have been just a slapdash assemblage of scraps? Why, when you look at her quilts from a distance, do they seem to contain the mathematical complexity of DNA strands, or the swirling mystery of a distant universe?

Because she had no choice, honey. She had no choice.

This is what you know about the urge to create, the urge to take something (anything! nothing!) that is available and turn it into something different, something pleasing, something complex — you do it because you have no choice.

You do it because you have to do it, regardless of whether or not anyone cares, gets it, buys it, or ever sees it. You do it because this is the most magical part of being human.

Do you remember the dinosaur egg? We do. You once found a large, roundish piece of rock in the goat pasture behind your house, light gray and magically shot through with quartz. You loved it, and believed it to be a dinosaur egg. It was precious to you.

Your great-uncle Sheldon was coming to visit, and although you had never met him, you intuited that he was an important figure. You knew he was an honored guest, and that he needed to be given a gift. But you were only five years old — what could you offer? You decided to give him the precious dinosaur egg. But first, you understood, the egg had to be adorned, to make it even more precious. And so you painted it with finger paints, and scribbled all over with magic markers, and wrapped it first in red string, and then in tin foil — and solemnly, formally, you presented it to him upon his arrival.

Thankfully, this often cranky old man recognized the sacredness of your gift. He delighted in it. He’d never had a dinosaur egg before, he told you. And he kept it, you found out later, until his death, taking it with him on multiple moves from one house to another. Because it was holy, and he knew it was holy. It was something made out of nothing. It was the gift of a child. It was your creative spirit, wrapped in red string and tin foil and finger paint.

As long as you have hands, eyes, senses, a mind, and a heart, you will keep doing this, little stone. You will pick something up, turn it around, and turn it into something else. Sometimes it will look like art. Sometimes it will look like a story. Sometimes it will look like a collage made out of art that other people threw away, or a bit of embroidery on a shirt you found at a thrift shop. Sometimes it will be a found poem. Sometimes it will be a found stone.

No matter what happens to the world, as long as there is anything here left whatsoever, and any human spirit to witness it, people will keep making things out of nothing. You will be (already are, always will be) one of those people.

This is holy.

Let’s keep going.

Prompt

We all know that necessity is the mother of invention, but what is the mother of inventiveness? Of creativity, expression, artistry? Of making things more beautiful than they need to be (which happens to be my personal definition of art)? Making something, for me, is a transcendent process that gets me through — but only when I’m feeling content or inconsolable, or anxious, peaceful, indifferent. Only always.

If you are likewise compelled to rearrange bits and pieces in order to make beautiful things, please join me this week in asking this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about making something out of nothing?