the Coming To Terms With edition

NF, One L
​Issue #22

​1. When you photograph your daughter and her pal less as a goofy snapshot and more subconsciously expecting someone to wheel up in a Mercedes and cut you a check for it, because you’re an artist, man.

2. And then ten years later she's a junior in college and that fancy doll is lost or landfill, and in many ways you're now in the periphery of her life more than the star of yours, just out of frame and waiting for your next expository line, if only because you retain a visceral sense of your own mercenary interior worldview at that same age, and so it all feels at least organic and to some degree even pleasant, this parental double-exposure and lessening of self.

3. Which is the moment when you begin to view the increasingly grim cultural and political future, more in terms of how it will affect your child and her friends after your return to the secular molecularism that we call death, instead of what you need to do right now to address the world around you, which, in the end, has revealed itself to be mostly un-addressable.

4. In 1625, Leibniz and Newton and Huygens and Hook, on the backs of Kepler and Descartes and Spinoza and Bruno, on the wings of Caravaggio and El Greco and Cervantes and Artemisia Gentileschi, all were intensely aware of the endless things they did not and would not ever know, while still imbued with the sense of perching on the forward edge of technology and human development, and to various degrees believing at some point a monumental discovery would be made, revealing the god at the heart of the matter of us all.

5. For Isaac Newton it was the "Philosophical Mercury", an element that contained all others, ordained by the divine, the fluid and quixotic axis upon which a knowable world spun.

6. Well, now it's 600 years later and mercury turns out to be a beguiling form of poison that eventually killed or at least drove all the early alchemists mad, and we are really no closer (the case could plausibly be made for further away) from any encompassing truths. Bruno was burned at the stake by the Catholic Church for insisting that stars were just other suns like ours, and Caravaggio was murdered after a little freelance murder, and possibly cannibalism, of his own. Things on the whole did not work out well for the most brilliant minds of that temporally Baroque moment, as should be expected, since only an inflexibly concrete mind and certainty of opinion afford a sense of, even if entirely deluded, happiness.

7. Which is to say, happiness (as opposed to a pleasingly hot-bathed laudanum-tinged acceptance) is a contrivance, because it is only achievable through the willfully ignorant rationalization of suffering, which is always a derivative of inequality in every possible context, and so to be happy is to jettison the inconvenient evidence of its cost.

8. Another word for inconvenient evidence is “faith”.

8.5 (As the world's lowest-paid rhetorician, I am aware that rhetoric is an expression of what I believe to be important enough that others need be made aware of, in order to define their own level of import. Which is a fancy way of saying that I do not embrace the evils of evangelism, since a reader's belief is irrelevant, while their understanding a reflection of my ability, or lack thereof, to clearly communicate.)

9. And yet I find, at the cusp of 56, to be full of faith and a modicum of happiness, at least of the variety and at the definition of my choosing. I am faithful that my daughter’s mere existence, conceptually and in actuality, is its own dogma. It is incontrovertibly true that she sits in the same room with me, in the vacuum of my neurology and perceptive abilities, and that is its own religion. It does not require an explanation. There are no explanations. There is no substance. There is no self. As far as you could fly a ship into the observable universe, you could fly a ship into your tiniest component parts, and they are all just quantum bits, the same ones the entire universe is formed of, and all the same age, presuming the latest presumption is accurate, we are, the sum of us, the mass of us, the strings of quanta that comprise us, 13.8 billion years old.

10. Following this line of thought, it’s hard to wake up on August 11th, 2025, look around, and ruminate on what 13.8 billion years has wrought. Except if you believe as I do, that time is not a linear narrative, but a contiguous dimensionality interwoven with space and gravity and light, in which case August 11th, 2025 is, has been, and always will be, in such a way that the pretension of alteration is pure narcissism.
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11. On the other hand, no one can ever take our narcissism away from us, so might as well enjoy the absurd dramaturgy of it all. My daughter’s neck, which I have just kissed, and which she has just deigned to receive, smells like bread and soap and pure, expanding vitality. All the rest is noise.