michael-dean-k/

To focus on the sensual transience of a moment is to surrender to human hardware; it has many expressions, from peaceful acceptance to orgiastic nihilism. The alternative, to accept your end state now, as the ghost of tales told about, is the less embodying but more accurate view of life. It's the species-wide, view-from-the-moon view. If you shift from human time to cosmic time, you are more code than body. For a short-time you live in your own skull, but for much, much longer, you can live in many skulls as a lesser or greater legend.

Now that I have a child, I feel my self de-centered, and ready to shift from eros to logos. This stems from a weird thought: that my daughter is not only an independent being, but in many significant ways, she is me. She is the clone of my wife and I. Growing up, you see yourself as wholly different and unique from your parents and grandparents, but now I can't help but see us all as instances of the same code, changing through an evolving circumstance, but reinforcing through inter-generational dynamics. A familial lineage is the same genetic source, looping and mutating in place.

For me, becoming a parent is a slow-process of re-identifying from a singular self to the entire chain, forward and back. What comes with that is a new desire to live into the tales you want to be told, because that is your inevitable end. And if you can design your self and life into a tale that then helps the blooming of your children, letting them experience life's pleasures to the fullest, well then you've achieved the original goal, because they are you.