A Great and Tiny Immiracle

Cabinet 2 (for Erin Mallory Long) from The Four Cabinets (2013)

When I was a young boy, 13 or 14, and living in Bolivia, I took a camping trip with my scout troop up from my home in Calacoto, a bit down the mountain from La Paz, and traveled up further to the Altiplano (literally, the high plains), where we camped and slept upon its perfect flatness under an infinite sky only more infinite at night. I did not realize it at the time, but that first night under the weight of the weightless universe I began to lose my belief in god.
We camped near a small bosque of trees, which must have been eucalyptus because I recall no other type of tree in Bolivia, except down into the vertical depths of the Yungas, where Bolivia proved to us it was tropical country. Yet all around those high plains trees, the world was merely flat.
Late that night, I lay awake in my sleeping bag, tentless, and I stared up into the darkness. Living in Manhattan now, I yearn to see that kind of darkness again—one where I can perceive the real blackness so I can also see the complex and turning array of stars it holds for us to see. But on that night, all I saw was a raven void, and I lay on the ground, my entire body except for my head exposed, and I realized the universe was impossible, that there was no possible explanation to explain why anything existed.
I vaguely understood the big bang theory, and I had spent my entire life up to that beginning of my teens learning that god created everything around us, but I could not believe any of it. I concluded I could say god had created the world, but I realized there was then no way for a god to be created. (Six or seven years later, at Vanderbilt, I phrased it this way: Theogony recapitulates cosmogony.)
Because this thought was so horrific, I promised myself never to reveal it to another human being. I vowed I would not force others to have to face the literal horror I saw that night and continued to face over and over as the inexplicability of existence itself burrowed back into my mind. I kept that promise for at least a couple of decades.
I am now much older, though not any wiser, but I have learned to allow space in my mind for the reality of the unknowable. I sit a little uneasy next to it, but I make do, and I proceed into my life like a fiend trying to prove he exists by creating as much as he can while he can still take in a breath.
Yet most of my creations--my poems and essays and talks and jokes and artworks--are not as important to me as my most essential creations: my two children, whom I helped create, though I did not bear the physical burden of their creation. I believe I raised them well: they are smart and funny and intense and hardworking, and I love them.
One's children, however, also create, and one of mine, my daughter, is now creating a human in her body (as she phrases it). This new generation of my family—for this child will be the first child on either side of the family—will move me to a new tier in my life and prepare me for my end.
But that neither interests nor worries me. What this slow movement toward the birth of a grandchild does is fill me with a happiness so great I almost burst when I read the news. (My daughter is of our current era, so she did not call me with the news—she texted me.) Once I heard the news and saw the blurry sonogram, I smiled so hard my face hurt, but no pain could alleviate my joy.
The world may be dark, and darkening, but there remain opportunities for joy and small purchases from which we can illuminate the darkness and understand why we are here. Or, at least, we can see what we might valuably do while we are here.
(first released on 19 September 2019 via TinyLetter)
ecr. l'inf.