Why don’t you start with your Becker origin story.

I was introduced to Ernest Becker by a college professor named John Wilson. On graduation day he handed me three books: Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, Otto Rank’s Art and Artist, and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I was singing in a band at the time and was reading The Denial of Death while on tour. As I got close to the end of the book, I read all night long by flashlight in the back of the van while my friends slept around me; I had to finish. The sun came up as I was reading the last words of the The Denial of Death and my mind was blown. It changed my perspectives on the world. It then took me 22 years to get through Otto Rank’s Art and Artist! But I finally did, and that’s when everything opened up for me. There is no understanding of Becker’s later works without a focused reading of Otto Rank.

On one hand, I found it was uplifting and it made me feel consciously better about the brooding terror that I have within me. And it also made me hopeful because I thought if I’m feeling this sense of dread, and these two bandmates next to me on tour are feeling it, then perhaps my parents are feeling it, my friends are feeling it and so on. And if we’re all feeling it, then maybe we can do something about it or work with those ideas. It’s the same with COVID for example. If the entire world decides, “Let’s come up with a vaccine,” then miracle of miracles, in six months we have a vaccine. But that’s not actually a miracle. It’s what happens when people decide to work together with determination and urgency on something specific.

I read Becker mostly in an art context. John, who’d handed me the book was a theater history professor, and I’d read it while on tour with the band. I started utilizing Becker’s works in various artistic endeavors, lyrically and so on. The ideas were rooted in art for me and have been since the very beginning. Sometimes it’s just the art of living, but sometimes it’s actual art. If I take Becker’s work and create something from it and in seeing that art someone reflects on their life differently, while they might not have read Becker, they get the influence of his ideas through that art. And that’s the function of art, to create, and in doing so to invite people into the possibility of seeing their lives differently through their relationship to what you’ve created. I’ve been fascinated by that process ever since: how we can take ideas, and do something meaningful with them. And in creating something, invite a transformational experience. That’s where it all started for me.

For Trial, the hardcore punk rock band I was in, I started using Becker’s ideas in the lyrics of the band immediately. What I didn’t want to do was turn our shows into a sermon, but I definitely mentioned existential dread and similar ideas between songs often. I would talk about the ideas in general, letting people interpret meaning for themselves. When I was being interviewed, I would be sure to mention Becker as an influence so that people could find his work on their own. I still get messages from people to this day saying they read Becker because I mentioned him over the years in interviews around the world.

We are born into suffering / with constructs, icons, idols and eyes / which manifest and forecast our fear of our own demise / but on the eve of the apocalypse / you can burn these words into my flesh / we are the tortured and insane, disillusioned and mundane / unknown and unnamed, desperate and enslaved / and we want something more.

“Reflections” by Trial

What is/was your goal and hope in sharing these ideas?

My thought was this: people are showing up every night at these punk shows and they were screaming and angst-filled, traumatized, or processing experiences. Well, that’s fine. But if we’re screaming and we’re angry and we don’t know why, then we’re missing a piece of the puzzle. So, my suggestion to them both as an artist and as somebody fascinated by Becker’s work was that there’s a reason we’re screaming. There’s a reason we’re hurting. And while there are specific things that happen to us in life that are bad or unwanted, the underlying human condition is one of a traumatic dis-ease, for lack of a better word. Not a disease, but the state of feeling a lack of ease. This is the origin for the angst we feel. I would share these ideas to let people know that there is an angst within us and everyone at the show is there on some level to process it. I imagined the band like a combination of music, academic lecture, and punk rock show. Songs plus ideas always. We did it all over the world, with Trial and then my next band, Between Earth and Sky and onto my bands today. We played hundreds and hundreds of shows from here across Russia and everywhere in between, with spoken word shows as well to continue sharing ideas that matter.

Do you think that life is better understanding death anxiety, or is ignorance bliss?

If we suggest that this is a cause behind some things that we’re feeling and some things which are going on in the world, then it’s most definitely better to know. With that knowledge we can do something with it like I mentioned in the COVID context. If we don’t know and remain in ignorance, then we’re going to keep lashing out at other people, feeling that dis-ease, and wishing our lives were different, yet not have any idea as to why.

Becker said, “To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.” What do you think he meant by “live fully?”

I think that he was getting at the idea that we are limiting ourselves unless we look at mortality, too. I think that when we look at death, we get a more complete picture. And when we get a more complete picture, we’re more educated about ourselves in the world. Becker was very concerned with a woeful ignorance in people in terms of themselves, structures, power, authority and education. I don’t think he meant that once you think to yourself, “I’m going to die,” that suddenly you go out and everything’s going to be wine and roses. He meant that living fully was to live with less denial and more understanding, but this understanding was not only about death but rather all psychologically-influencing systems of power and how our lives are influenced by them.

Would you say that your life has benefited from these ideas and processes?

Absolutely. Becker’s work has lent a lot to the artistic endeavors I’ve been involved with, whether that’s creating music and bands or movies, documentaries, spoken word, writing, or whatever it might be. But also most importantly, as abstract as this might be, the art of living. It has offered a lot to my relationships, friendships and connections. You start to value your limited time on a conscious level and how you spend that time.

Reading Otto Rank really gave a vocabulary to Ernest Becker. Becker was fascinated with developmental process and how things come to be intellectually. His life was directly tied into artistry. He was a performer himself, and his writing was also obviously artistic in its own way. Becker draws on Dewey’s book Art as Experience – which is all about art as process. And obviously on the Rank side too. Becker drew heavily from Rank whose Art and Artist described the ways that inherent in the human condition is a generative creativity in which we are immersed as we create religions, art, architecture and so on. It’s how we think and who we are. Becker read that book and it changed everything for him. So, it’s all tied into art. There’s no pulling Ernest Becker away from art and the process by which its created.