Kingdom Theory
On the compulsive taking of pictures, unjustifiable optimism, and the dark side of paternal love.
Happy New Year. This essay was prompted by Hannah, who told me I should write about the act of and motivation for incessant picture-taking. It’s something I’d already wanted to write about, but more from the angle of what it might be like to grow up inundated with images of oneself—to, as a toddler ending her day, watch a video of herself from that same day. Maybe it’s a big deal; maybe not. Anyway, that’s not what this piece is about. Enjoy, and my intention—my resolution—is to try and keep up something a little bit more like this rhythm for publication in 2024. In the next week or two, expect also Elephemera #3, long-delayed but surely much anticipated. As ever, I am grateful to my brother for the excellent title illustration, and to you, for reading.
The oldest picture on my phone is a blurry shot of Hannah laughing. From the year we met, 2014, a decade ago. In it, she looks like a little girl; in a sense, she was one—twenty-three years old, a beautiful baby. A few years later: there we both are, second-serving honeymooners, a day, two days in London. I have a beard. It’s obscene, it’s disgusting, and what a waste—patches of pubes, haphazardly plastered over handsome youth. Wasted, as they say, on the young, but I forgive him, because now he is dead, poor devil, and his needs are dead man’s needs: amnesty, indemnity, grace. To be held gently in memory, recalled not as he was, not even as he saw himself, but as he wished to be seen. Only for a moment. Don’t dally: nothing to be done for him now.
Every third picture is of a dog or a cat, half of whom are also now dead, and pictures of my parents, who are not yet. And permutations, too, of the now-dead and not-yet: one of mom with my dog when he was still a puppy, before he became a diabetic baby-biter; there’s my dad with Pepper, Hannah’s sweet girl, on his lap. 2018, two years before she got sick—a little over a week with her, ten days of navigating pandemic veterinary care, and then, like that, poof, she was gone.
Lighter fare—dozens of shots of meals (also gone for good, but who cares?) that I’d made back when we were vegan and, for some reason, thought warranted immortality. Here are the plant-based pizzas I cooked on my wedding day; a Beyond Burger from when they first came out, still new, with homemade brioche and tempeh bacon; later, my from-scratch ramen phase. The food shots are especially compromised, for some reason, by the terrible lighting in our apartment: grotesquely bright, inquisitorial where it is light and dark to the point of hazard where it is not. Unappetizing.
May, 2020. Surreal shots of Hannah watering her pandemic garden in the backyard of her mom’s house, slender in a white confetti skirt and rust-red tank top. How embarrassing: there’s me, trying to lose weight, and every seven days, a picture or three of my doughy reflection in the bathroom mirror, stubborn flesh receding in fits and starts. Utility pics: menus, phone numbers, insurance cards. There’s a series of screenshots from when I was playing Subnautica on my Playstation 4—recipes, virtual blueprints for virtual tools, to better survive the virtual depths.
Onward, onward, here we go—July 2021, pandemic summer the second. Hannah again, different backyard, blue sundress. Visiting friends, playing with their new puppy, Buddy, a yellow lab. There are five of Hannah, but none capture her eyes. She’s sitting on the ground, beatific gaze trained on the floppy bundle in her lap, so the camera catches only lids. Is it just in hindsight that she looks… radiant? Full breasts, milky complexion—even a sort of halo, a corona emanating, I suppose, from the second soul igniting within her. All wrong: the photo is a faithless likeness, because it depicts her as looking pregnant, but I'm sure that—when I took it—she did not. That’s pictures for you. They represent imperfectly, the lying operators, always adding or subtracting. Be grateful when you can spot the deceit, when you don’t get sucked in by the illusion.
The next photo is from the day after—the test itself, a deep pink line parallel to its telltale pale shadow. Then it’s Hannah, Hannah, Hannah. At first, she looks less conspicuously pregnant than she did with Buddy, with the halo. Soon, though, sporting a small but detectable bump, if you’re looking for it. I swipe, and her belly grows like a customer who, seeking satisfaction, is meek and timid at first, and then—still polite—raises their voice just a tad: “Excuse me! Could I please get some help over here?” The customer-belly gets progressively more assertive, more annoyed, and finally—swollen and taut as a drumskin—becomes irate, shouting for attention, demanding resolution.
And there he is: little Graham! The down of his scalp is slicked with birth’s wetness, and his cheeks jaundiced yellow, but his appendages are pink, little curling Michelin arms instinctively seeking Hannah’s bared breast, his toothless mouth her nipple. Then, before he’s even been swaddled, he’s squinting beneath a heat lamp while nurses get his stats: weight length etcetera. Hannah, unfettered exhaustion, utter peace. Leaky-eyed me, holding my son, kissing his forehead.
This relatively brief series of photos demarcates a change in my photography habits, a bifurcation. Most obviously, there is a significant uptick in quantity—I go from taking, perhaps, a dozen pictures a month to hundreds of them, edging toward a thousand in some particularly trigger-happy weeks. But the subject changes, too. No more dog, no more cat, no more food. Gone are love handles in the mirror and sucked-in-gut. A birth certificate instead of a menu. (More insurance paperwork; some things never change.)
There are not many pictures of Hannah by herself after this. Rather, it’s Hannah and Graham, Graham and Hannah. This is good: by looking more or less like herself throughout, Hannah validates the timestamps on the photos, anchors them to time and place. Graham is unreliable. He changes by the swipe, from photo to photo, a newborn and a toddler on the same day. It gives the impression of a timelapse video, a glacier collapsing in stop-motion, of months condensed into minutes.
I am struck by the unexpected isomorphism between my camera-roll schism and the phenomenological experience of time passing before and after becoming a father. The time dilation of the pandemic years notwithstanding, before my son was born, time moved—well, always too quickly, so not as I thought it ought—but the flow of time functioned predictably, linearly. Time conformed to my intuitions about it; in other words, hours felt like hours, weeks as weeks, and so on.
In the fullness of time, the professor who taught me Kant and Nietzsche was given to saying, and I liked the phrase. It conjured images of blushing apples as they ripened, a full moon, breasts heavy with milk. An idiom of exclusively positive connotation, as I understood it. In the fullness of time, life’s brute and irresoluble mysteries—death, for starters, evil, suffering, even the deets on God—would dissolve into exquisite punchlines, cathartic and comprehending, neutered of sting. Yes: knotty, snarled, fraying history will, in the fullness of time, unravel, dissipating like a dream upon waking.
Perhaps there is no trait that better enhances the human organism’s fitness than this: the limitless capacity for beneficent self-deception, that dumb and inextinguishable hope that springeth eternal; future-facing optimism, the certainty that the waxing moon will reveal her orb and with it call the tides home. The unerring faith that the branch-bound apple will inevitably surrender its sweetness. Kingdom theory: Kingdom Come, the Kingdom on Earth, a horizon imminent and culminating.
An empirically unjustifiable hypothesis, very well, but necessary nevertheless. How else to go on? What other balm in a world of interminable oscillation? What other flame in the wilderness between poles? How else can we interpret our existence as anything other than unconsolidated meaninglessness, a Kafquaesque sentence? Faith, unsubstantiated, baseless: how else to render tolerable our internment, evade the torments of our wardens, those semantically barren twins, Tautology and Contradiction?
But swipe, look, swipe: the fullness of time is its bursting. I have been a glutton at time’s table, gorging myself for thirty-six years, swallowing whole, spitting fishbones, watermelon seeds. It’s too much, and it comes up, hot acid forcing open my contracting esophagus with the sheer volume of undigested, bilious time. Look, swipe, look: time-puke all over, read dregs like tea leaves. What do you see? A petri dish of abortive infinities, mating and reproducing in finite volume, Malthusian, unsustainable? Or lightlines, recursive and spiraling, that fall out of space, to dust returned? Or water, moments leaking inexorably through clutching, cupped hands, spilled, squandered?
Too many moments in the day. In a vessel so inadequate as mine, they cannot be contained.
The original iPhone was released in 2007. It had a five-megapixel camera; the top-tier model had a paltry sixteen gigabytes of storage. I didn’t jump on the bandwagon until the iPhone 4 was released in 2010. My mom bought it for me; we drove to Portland in the snow to get it. A decade and change later, I am on, I think, my fourth iPhone, an 11 that I picked out in late 2019 or early 2020. It has three lenses: a standard and superwide lens on the back and a fixed-focus lens on the front for selfies and video calls. As of this writing, the newest model, the iPhone 15, has a forty-eight-megapixel main lens, with additional ultra-wide and telephoto lenses clocking in at twelve megapixels each.
It will not escape the savvy reader that our phones can now take pictures with resolutions almost an order of magnitude greater than the original iPhone’s toy camera. And present-day storage capacities are virtually incommensurable with the ur-iPhone; it would take four just to store the apps on my 11 (which they could not even run). With cloud storage, there is no upper ceiling to the data that can be retained; one is limited only by what one can afford.1 And so we can store more pictures, and each is laden with tens of millions more bits of information than those taken a mere ten years ago. Whether you call this progress will depend: do you suppose yourself the one righteous man, ark-builder, sea-of-information swimmer? Rising with the tide? Or are you one of the proximal unworthy, useless fingernails splinter-scrabbling against hull, in up to the ankles, waist, neck? Or everyone else: caught unawares, drowning in the flood?
Before you answer, there’s something you should know. A five-megapixel camera isn’t five megapixels. Not really. Or at least it won’t create an image with five million pixels. This is because, in order to translate photons into a visual, pixel-based representation, the camera requires a baseline, a foundation. The computer needs to ‘know’ about the world outside the frame, something about its color and its light. To obtain this knowledge, the apparatus employs its outermost photoreceptors, the border-dwellers and boundary straddlers. Those liminal pixels between, if you will, the object and the symbol themselves become the information that the act of translation requires. In so doing, however, they are lost. Simulacrum and sacrifice; they are the no-shade-sitting grandparent tree-planters, the pyramid erectors who dropped dead hauling foundation stones, the last mortal generation. Just outside the frame of every picture: the world lost forever. Necessarily. And the higher the resolution, the steeper the toll.
So. I am a drowner, but was not always. In the fall of 2011, I enrolled in Public Speaking at Portland Community College. It was a prerequisite for my transfer degree. The inaugural attempt was a failure—I didn’t pass—but I remember the first and only speech I delivered. The assignment was (something like) ‘teach the class about a hobby’. Texas Hold ‘Em, rock climbing, whatever. At the time, I was enamored with a then-little-known photography-app-cum-social-media-platform, newly emerged, called Instagram.
I wrote a speech. I delivered it, projecting my phone onto a pulldown screen and demonstrating the app’s (at the time) illiterate communion; I said, maybe, “We might not know the Chinese word for dog, but we recognize the image of a dog wherever we see one, from wherever it hails.” Picture worth a thousand, or something. An old lie, practically as old as the original—you will not surely die—but I believed it. Look: even back then, I wasn’t some kind of silicon utopian or LTE apostle; I was no gospel-spreader. Maybe you don’t remember, but that technology could save us then was not a theoretical conceit; it was the necessary consequence of Kingdom theory, a prediction like General Relativity’s black holes. Salvation was necessary, followed logically, cock-a-doodle-doo, little chicken dinos crowing the sun up, hatched out of natural selection.
I don’t have the speech now—a casualty of time’s fullness—but probably, it’s for the best. I suspect it would have aged poorly. Instagram is, of course, now a cesspool, an actual sewage pit. It’s addictive, and there’s a fairly well-established correlation between time spent on the platform and depression, amongst teenage girls especially. But even if kids weren’t seppukuing themselves over it, at best, Instagram is a waste of time, an effective vehicle in which to escape the present moment, a platform populated by idiots parroting bad ideas, mercifully abridged into shitty slideshows.2 These days, I log in once or twice a year by accident.
Since I no longer share my photos—at least not publicly or on any social media platform—what am I doing when I take picture after picture? That is the question that inspired this essay—sorry about the scenic route. In its writing, I have uncovered an answer. At the surface level, and most charitably to myself, it’s simple: I want to remember it all. My immobile son, swaddled and sleeping; tentative crawling, first taste of lemon; overconfident toddling, words and then sentences spilling out over his milk teeth. From that angle, my camera is a prosthesis, a security blanket failsafe against the certainty of fallible, faithless memory.
But it is more than that, worse than that. I recognize in myself the desire—the impulse, at least—to withdraw from my perfect son, to recoil from anything as precious and as pure. Not the bitter jealousy—the hatred of the good—that drove covetous Cain to slay his brother, no. More like Adam’s last brain-hanging evening in Eden, the forbidden fruit a rock in his gut, naked, hiding from God. When Graham falls asleep in my arms, or when he sings without so much as the flicker of self-consciousness, I am exposed. Or he’ll be crying, in the grip of real grief, and through his sobbing, snotty, hysteria, repeating, “It’s all gone” or “No the end” and I don’t know what he’s talking about. Because he can’t know, can he? The way time recedes, how it recoils from my grasping. No—he’s too young, must be, but the uncanniness prostrates me, naked and ashamed. And so I hide.
My love for Graham is not like any of the other great loves of my life. When I fell in love with his mother, for instance, I felt waves of euphoria almost indistinguishable from an MDMA peak, as stupifying as morphine. This could sometimes be interrupted and, without notice, replaced by despair—that I had committed some irreparable wrong, that she would know me and be repelled. That she would fall in love with someone else.3 But the emotions were distinct, mutually exclusive. I could feel only one at a time. With Hannah, I encountered an unfamiliar soul, newness—novel love, which is magnetic and enchanting.
This is not what loving my son is like at all. Encountering Graham was the sudden shock of the unexpected familiar, the possession by an ancient and terrible love, primordial, original. How to explain? A syllogism woken into, from before hydrogen froze out of plasma, etched in an elementary particle. The first line: all fathers are murderers. I will not debase you by reciting its undeniable second premise, its dreadful conclusion. But it is sound; though I have not yet killed, perhaps never will, love of son is the world-destroyer. For it I would throw the first stone, kill, hunt consciousness to extinction, extinguish the universe, would only that it preserve him for another day, another hour. And because it is infinite, that which is finite can never tip the scales against it; such is its bleak asymmetry.
It is a horrible thing, this geas. Because no son wishes so depraved an inheritance. Yet it is his, nevertheless, and mine, because I believe it binds all fathers to its will, and so we whither from its poison, become lead to contain its unimaginable wrath. It is a love neither euphoric nor despairing; here, it is honey’s sweetness on the lips, truly, but excruciating in the mouth, as caramel when it cement-clings to cavities, sugar-shock on rotten molars.
It is too much. So, as my cup runneth over, moments with nowhere to go, I pretend to catch them there, collect and save, to distill from them the waxing moon, and imagine that it will be there for me one day, soon, perhaps, or far in the future, but with perfect, unwaning fidelity, identical, the thing itself. And when the Kingdom comes, I will dwell in it with my son and savor the sweetness of a fruit that never turns. Because I know it: that in the fullness of time, all shall be saved.
The appearance of infinite digital space is a compelling fiction. Data is not stored in an ethereal ‘cloud’ but in vast, hundred-acre compounds across millions of hard drives. So much data transfer requires an incredible amount of energy and generates an incredible amount of heat. There is no such thing as a free lunch; cloud computing is, if not a primary contributor to climate change, a non-negligible variable that will only worsen as it approaches universal adoption or its asymptote.
But also, different strokes and all that.
Probably, I thought then, a handsome and muscle-bound client whose body she would find irresistible.
So, now you are aware
I heard recently, from a new father, that a little expressed secret of the onset of fatherhood, is the immediate and complete loss of “love” for your pets.
It is like a candle sitting in front of a sun, is how I interpreted it. And if the candle ever dared to illuminate a space reserved for the sun’s radiance? The candle would be extinguished with prejudice.
And this blowing out of the old scale is why it’s impossible to communicate certain ideas from one state to the other, pre-fatherhood to fatherhood. How do you explain daylight to someone who has never stepped out of their cave?
Anyways, whatever. Good article.