The Gravity of the Soul: Reclaiming the "Unidentified Sediment"

The creative force concealed within the human recesses—that impulse of “being compelled to bring something into existence” which everyone has experienced—is a phenomenon as profoundly mysterious as it is bottomlessly fascinating. While this issue has been brought into reactionary focus recently due to the rise of AI, one must ask: have the proponents of this discourse ever fundamentally thought through what human creativity actually is? In fact, it feels as though they fail to understand that the rise of AI is merely a passing current of the times. Facing the fact in real life that one’s own creative power was, after all, replaceable, and only then frantically shouting about “human creativity,” is nothing more than a lack of preparation. This is something that anyone with the resilient resolve to survive as a creator in this turbulent era already knows.

However, creativity does not possess a definition common to all; its colors, depths, and range differ vastly among individuals. Yet, based on my personal rule of thumb and my observation of gazing into the deep layers of Japanese culture—which relates to my own origins—there is one thing I can say with absolute conviction.

That is: human expression never radicalizes in a state of saturated happiness or within the complete tranquility of being domesticated by a system. Those who are filled, regardless of the content, can only sing songs that affirm the status quo. Their words do not vibrate the air; they can only comfortably stroke the surface of the moment. On the other hand, for me, and for those who truly attempt to confront the world, what lies at the source of creativity? If I were to verbalize that core—that force like magmatic, turbid pent-up energy—it is “Rage.”

However, the “Rage” I speak of is absolutely not the momentary explosion of anger tied to the desire for validation or victim mentality that is rampant on social media timelines daily, nor is it the hysterical venting of emotions that seeks to spread mental illness across generations. The Rage I refer to possesses physical mass; it is heavy in specific gravity, high in depth, a “history” itself that has sedimented at the bottom of the gut over a long period, turning cold and hard. To put it another way, it is the historical destiny one takes on regardless of one’s will the moment one is born; as one grows and the skin is peeled away by friction with the world, shedding blood, it is that which begins to boil quietly, yet certainly, at the very bottom. Are you aware of this Rage or not? I believe the vitality of human life actually has its origins here.

Therefore, every creator requires the resolve to take on a profound history that essentially transcends the framework of the small ego, and that becomes the one and only starting point for creation.

This world, which we continue to believe is the real and call reality without doubt while engaging in complex daily interactions, is in fact nothing more than a “fiction of reality = social system.” In the process of realizing this fiction and struggling to over-adapt to it, we have self-alienated the raw reality that ought to exist into a manageable form convenient for the system. As a result, society has certainly strengthened a uniform tendency toward standardization, and simultaneously, the human self has also been alienated and unified to fit those specifications, processed into replaceable parts.

However, does that perspective not beautify the modern human and the modern world too much, justifying its own harmfulness? In fact, if we gaze coldly at that process, what we exist amidst is a violent selection. Emotions that do not fit the singular unification, noise that does not adapt to the system, thoughts without economic rationality, desires that are not clean and innocent, or things deemed as impurity such as death, disease, and filth—these have been actively cast out as useless, discarded, ignored, and callously trampled upon.

But, just as people in developed nations are suffering backlash for underestimating nature as a controllable resource, all those things that were treated as “never having happened” have certainly not vanished. Even if we act out tranquility as if the crisis has passed on the surface of the world’s play, the excluded things are always, certainly, there. They exist in a place outside our field of vision, becoming something turbid and unidentified, mercilessly breaching the borderline of the domain separated from our consciousness/unconsciousness, and continuing to pile up in the abyss of the bottom. This unidentified sediment is the true identity of Rage, but if we change the perspective, it is the substance of anxiety itself. Anxiety as a substance possesses the destructive power to constantly shake human existence from its foundation and collapse our footing. And it does so extremely quietly, like a subterranean water vein, drowned out by the noise of daily life.