Mortal Art

I met the poet James Arthur at the Sewanee Writers Conference in 2014. No way he remembers me. But I remember him. And last night I was reading from Arthur’s first book, Charms Against Lightning, to my daughter Hazel until this couplet stopped us cold.  

We are, and then we aren’t;

that’s the mortal art.

The art of design is partly an attempt to access the ineffable, as what cannot be readily expressed must embody a rarified truth.

This is the basic problem of metaphysics. It’s also the basic problem of being alive. As sentient meat capable of conceptualizing our absence, how can we show what cannot be known? How do we communicate what cannot be expressed?

Koans in Zen Buddhism are meditative instruments deployed to circumvent the mind and negate its thinking, as in “Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth.”

If nothing is the fundamental condition for something, what then is nothing—the basis of something as distinct from nothing? The paradox is the point.

Koans, like great design, break us of sense-making—cognitive structures imposed on structureless, senseless experiences—and into our senses: the momentary truths that contextualize our brief, confounding lives. 

/

My father kept his memories of the Vietnam War on a slide projector. Two-by-two cardboard frames of the photographs he had taken on his tours of duty, early 1966 to late 1967.

Cannons too long and dulled by mud and smoke caught in the aperture. Guns at the doors of the helicopters, the arms of the blades heaving wetly in the heat. Sandbags and wire. The bed where he slept beneath the ground, a rifle hung at the head. A young ARVN officer and his wife, small and smiling. 

The monkeys he shot. Buffalos in the grass. A prisoner in a cage and another roped to a tree. His squad squatted in the red dirt of a firebase. Every face a question you didn’t want answered, and my father standing in his youth: wiry and sinister and strong. 

On May 4, 1970, National Guardsmen shot 13 students on the campus of Kent State University. By then, my father had been promoted to Major. 14 years of decorated service. West Point graduate. Special Forces. 18 months fighting in the highlands of Vietnam. 

He dropped acid in the weeks after the killings at Kent State and went AWOL in Kansas, drifting upward through the Midwest and into Canada with my mother. 

Two years later, they arrived in the Pacific Northwest. I was born in Seattle. We moved to Bremerton and then Portland. Somewhere in there, my father found God, and he became, for the second time in his life, a Christian. 

The VA scalped the first of my father’s sarcoma from the sole of his left foot, a contusion the size of a racket ball. Apart from US soldiers like my father, four million Vietnamese civilians were exposed to Agent Orange during the American War. Dioxin systematically mainlined in the highlands, poisoning the soil and water tables and birthing generations of disease and disfigurations. 

My father collapses sometimes because he never drinks enough water, and he’s tired no matter how much he sleeps, and sometimes we have to go to the ER because it appears he might be dying, which of course he is, and when we get lucky, we get a room, when most patients are triaged in the hall–exposed, raw: human bodies fractured across the fractals of pain. 

I’ll never be comfortable with how comfortable my father can look in the narrows of a hospital bed. IV stuck into his arm. Flesh atop his head freckled and badly dented beneath the lights. His intermittent napping. Here. Not here. Liminal.

/

I met my wife on a New Years trip to Waldport, Oregon, after years living out of the country. 

At the time, each of us was entangled in the barbwire of other lovers. Her wires were sharper than mine. And when she walked through the door of the beach house that evening with her boyfriend, also my friend, I made the sound our youngest makes after upending a plate of mac, cheese, and peas onto the floor. Unh-no. 

The writer Steve Almond says love “is a process built by the will and the intelligence and the heart.” He also says that stories arise from “desire placed into doubt.” Or the problem between the magic of desire and the instability of magic.

“The true work of love,” writes Almond, “resides in sticking with the process [will, intelligence, heart], especially in those moments, and eras, when desire is forced to coexist with doubt.” Which is, I believe, always the case. 

Life desires life. To be alive is to coexist with death. Coexisting with death means magically, willfully thinking your way through moments and eras of unmitigated doubt, when the thought of you—the people you love, the work you do—won’t survive the dark.

/

How can we show what cannot be known? How do we communicate what cannot be expressed?

My wife helps deliver babies for a living. She’s really good at what she does. Her unit is elite. But elite is no charm against lightning. Situations spiral. Emergent becomes emergency. And there is no amount of training or skill that can save every life every time.

Nurses see a lot. Practicing a mortal art in real-time. The shockingly indiscriminate injustice of tragedy. The miracles only a body in a tailspin of crisis can pull. 

And sometimes, standing with her in our kitchen after a shift, I can sense the liminal vapors of harrowing travel unfurl from her shoulders—the faraway aura of neither here nor there. Working at the edge of life. The precipice of becoming and unbecoming. Doing and undoing. 

Never once have I heard her question the value of her profession. Value is inherent to the act. Meaning is stitched into the talents of care. “You’re boatmen,” I said one night after too many glasses of wine. “Ferrying life into this realm from wherever it is we come from.” She laughed, took a sip, and rolled her bright chestnut eyes. But she did not disagree.

/

This is the part where I draw attention back to the craft of design as an act and talent of care. A ferrying between realms. But that would be bullshit.

I often sell our job as sense-making precisely because many businesses must invent, sustain, and sell the necessity of their existence to a market that could give two fucks less.

This is especially true in premium markets where a product or service is a luxury of affluence, which in itself is a struggle to create and sustain meaning in the face of decadence and vapidity.

So when companies hedge investing in the truth of what they do and its amplification, blending into the background of culture like so much white noise filling a sleeping ear, I struggle to understand it as anything other than a lack of attention and urgency in what is always a collapsing bubble of time.

/

Design is sense-making. 

However, as stated earlier, great design works like a koan. It breaks us of sense-making and into our senses. Architectures of light and shadow, altering the shapes of experience. A meditative vibration, wholly felt. As loud or quiet as daybreak. 

Branding threads sense-making and sense-breaking. 

Verbal brand design sets the cognitive foundation: defining and managing direction, meaning, and purpose. 

Visual brand design is a substantive and scalable system crafted to shape, maintain, and evolve a brand’s identity. 

Together, they create a rational framework by which the world can understand what you do and why it matters. 

This is sense-making. 

Sense-breaking is in the audacity of beauty and surprise. 

Sense-breaking punctuates the highly structured and reasoned system of meaning. The indelible vibrancy that lives, and is actually alive, inside the form and function of your brand. Of which design, like life, is the binding paradox that communicates even as it confounds.

Which is, I guess, why I love what we do. 

It is an audacious and mortal art that encapsulates a singular and indefatigable truth about the business of capital. 

It is part of what every founder must embody as they wade into the rivers of risk, weighed upon by fear, hope, and gratitude. 

That business, in all its forms, must mean more—must be more—than a material return.