Maybe We're Not Made of Star Stuff

I haven't created a single piece of art in nearly a year, and only a few in the months prior. There's been no motivation, no care, no point in making anything. Of course I am still disciplined so I've forced myself to focus and make the attempt, but it is clear that either my health conditions have rendered me inoperable or my situation has eliminated all desire.

There is no want to create beautiful things. The world is ugly. People are ugly. Why bring beauty into an ugly existence? What a cruel thing to do. Cruel to the beautiful to bring it into an ugly world. Cruel to the rest of us to confront the glaring reality that other things could have been beautiful. Instead we may be in the darkest, ugliest timeline.


Have you taken the time to truly examine something beautiful? To appreciate the creation and maintenance of that beauty? But the sadness that always accompanies beauty, because nothing lasts forever. The tragedy is that any beauty is temporary, then forgotten. We are a world of continuous loss.

Also, there is no need to create ugly things. There is enough ugly around us, obviously. Besides, it is similar to the death of satire (e.g. reality these days is more absurd than the most clever satire). Why bother making something ugly when everything else is SO much more monstrous? Just take a picture (or a screenshot), it'll last longer.

Personally, I could never dream to create anything as ugly as a single post from the Twitter account of the President of the United States. And I could never create something beautiful enough to justify its existence. Even if I miraculously made something that others could like, what do I care? No one would truly appreciate it. I could write a manifesto with every painting and people would still read into it incorrectly. Or I'd paint something that was a parody of Disney Intellectual Property and my work would get eliminated (yes, it has happened to me with my Cybernetic Puffin "Borg Porg" painting).

People tell me I should use my pain to create art. That was why I painted in the past. But the pain doesn't want out anymore. It only needs release when I am a functional adult and would like to remain that way. Now I am burning from the inside out.

The picture in the article is a piece I created several years ago. I went through a phase where I was creating art with reused materials. The star was made of hundreds of computer keyboard keys that I painted yellow and black. Art that is made to look like a star that is made of keyboard keys that is made of former star stuff.

I was in Target last week, and they were marketing a t-shirt to girls that said 'We are made of stars." This terrible bastardization of a great quote is such a great example of how doomed and ugly we are. Carl Sagan said that:

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.”

That quote is a scientific fact, twisted to mean the exact fucking opposite on a goddamned t-shirt aimed at girls. Saying that we are "full of stars" is not just wrong because I am being pedantic. I quite hope that everyone realizes that we don't have intact stars bopping around our bodies. Rather the shirt loses the delicate sweetness and existential value of Sagan's words. It is boastful instead of introspective. It is claiming greatness without earning it. It is taking a thought full of wonder and awe but twisting it into innate superiority.

And I don't know about you, but I've about had fucking enough of people claiming things like they are made of stars. Because I'm not seeing a lot of star people, and my standards are LOW. Maybe Sagan was wrong, or maybe he should have said we're all full of "star garbage."