A Kind of Apotheosis

There's a certain tyranny to clarity you don't get from delusion or obfuscation. Clarity deals in a harsh starkness, a limited palette of colors but boldly drawn, garish even, refusing to be interpreted back into obscurity. Doubt, on its face, absent the Manichean binaries of irreducible Knowing, is inherently more egalitarian, inclusive. If only because it prompts the unsure to turn to her neighbor and ask in earnest: "I'm fucked if I know. What do you think?"

You know who knows for sure how things work and what they want? Fascists, that's who. Force everything to pass through a lens that only sees in the shapes of USEFUL and FOR IMMEDIATE LIQUIDATION and the whole world seems pretty fucking graspable. With that surety underpinning a whole epistemological system, any dithering over decision-making or the attendant consequences immediately becomes an obvious waste of time, probably the work of state enemies trying to at best delay and at worst subvert. The endless committees of wondering democracies seize in terminal deadlock while the fascists get the trains moving (or at least insist you believe they are).

Not everyone who claims certainty is automatically a fascist, of course. They could also be insane. Or very strongly religious, a distinction whose differences extend mostly into the realm of tax exemption. This is almost too obvious to comment on, of course. The clarity implied by a suicide bomb vest, if not for the wearer at least for the assembler, needs little other elaboration.

I've heard smart people I know say, sometimes scathingly but more often with an earnest touch of sincerity, that they envy the religious, the bigoted, the unlettered their certainty. Unfortunately I've never been able to agree. It's easy to project or imagine an amount of solace or relief in seeing a 0-or-1 world, but I'm not certain a life of unexamined confidence is worth the (lack of) effort. Sometimes the point of everything is lying in a slowly warming puddle of freshly rained second-guessing, when everything around is made slick and unsafe, clay sodden into sucking, tracking mud. Sometimes you're stuck there, getting dirtier and pruney, marinating in the washed-off effluvia of oil and grime, not daring to move, preferring the unsafe inertia of stillness to the unsafe violence of any-old-action. And sometimes the sun machetes its way through the cloud cover and, amidst all the chaos and low darkness, you're guided to your feet by crepuscular rays and the implied seraphim, for a flurry of doing in what you know is a momentary break in a cycle of fear and confusion.

Sometimes you have to let science back you up on this. Sometimes the cat is both dead and alive at the same time.

The value of wonder is in the wondering. As I get older, I'm forced to confront that there will be less to wonder about, both because there's so much now that I know compared to the former, stupider versions of myself and/or because there's simply less time to get around to all the wondering that needs doing.

This evening my middle child graduated from high school. It wasn't a surprise. It's been literally 18 years coming, and I'm happy to say the endgame was never in doubt.

Two of the three engines of whirring chaos and quantum uncertainty now have been shut down. That's two I've happily lost to the early vestiges of on-time onset adultism. As they age out, I lose some of the scramble, the improv, the creaking jury-rigged jalopy shedding parts as it weaves on and off the unpaved and unpaveable track, in all directions but also inexorably forward.

More and more I'm finding myself on my own, with fewer friends and fewer options than I had when I started this parenting thing, like you do. I know some of you will be screaming "well, when they're all gone, you'll have ALL the options!" but really, over the years I've somewhat forgotten how to be interested in me,* out of some combination of dedication and cowardice. There are flashes when the future seems simplified to the point of automation, of routine, of gripping, terrifying clarity, and worse, a clarity without purpose.

None of this is meant to be worrying. I'm taking steps. I've been reaching out to acquaintances, old and more recent, to reestablish lines of connection and communication. To find challenge in other people and to understand, through their eyes, what value and direction I should be seeing with my own. And I'm happy to say it's already working. It's a scary thing to ask someone else to look at you and tell you what they see. But the more they share, the less I seem to know which, if you've been paying attention at all, you'll know is what I've been after all along.


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*This will come as a shock and/or laugh line for people I've dated.