Portraits of my brother, Adam, and my niece, Selma, shot on film in Gaborone, Botswana in January, 2024.
The Truth About the World /
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
What a novel. Unlike anything I have ever read.
Being conscious and being human /
“I live in hazard and infinity. The cosmos stretches around me, meadow on meadow of galaxies, reach on reach of dark space, steppes of stars, oceanic darkness and light. There is no amenable god in it, no particular concern or particular mercy. Yet everywhere I see a living balance, a rippling tension, an enormous yet mysterious simplicity, an endless breathing of light. And I comprehend that being is understanding that I must exist in hazard but that the whole is not in hazard. Seeing and knowing this is being conscious; accepting it is being human.”
Meaning, truth, beauty, and goodness /
“The cosmos that gave birth to us has always been open to becoming more. Through the human mind the universe anticipates an inexhaustible meaning and truth. Through our aesthetic restlessness the universe is now opening itself to an endless beauty. And through our moral sensitivity it is awakening to an infinite goodness. What faith adds to this cosmic stirring is a trust that meaning, truth, beauty, and goodness are everlasting. And if they are everlasting, then we can be assured that our responses to them not only matter, but that they matter forever.”
