The Ordering of Things, Vol. 1
The definitive analysis of year-end lists; my favorite things of 2022.
Addressing the elephant in the room: it’s February. The best time for year-end lists is, well, at year’s end, and the best time for belated year-end lists is probably around the beginning of the new year. I guess my excuse is that—other than the fact that White Elephant is the product of a new year’s resolution and so necessarily did not exist at the end of last year—2022 was a big year for me, the most emotionally jam-packed year of my life. There was, to say the least, a lot worth reflecting on.
I wasn’t able to finish my list in one go. Check out Volume II: The Creek Drank the Cradle and Volume III: Simple Human.
As 2022 dwindled down to its last wax, I began to notice the flurry of obligatory “best of” lists cropping up across the web: the year’s biggest news, its hottest games, its most important books. With each morning leading up to the holidays, more and more of my feeds were devoted to rank-ordered lists—top ten, top twenty, top fifty—and, by the time Christmas came and went, it seemed as if only year-end lists could be published during the final week of December. All of my regular sites were engulfed in a frenetic curation of the year in retrospect. Like the soon-to-be refugees of an encroaching wildfire, they made split-second decisions about which cultural artifacts were worth anthologizing. No genre was too niche, no category too banal. Anything that could be categorized—vegan ice creams, true crime podcasts, celebrity sex tapes—was judged according to its relative merit, enumerated, and fastidiously recorded. They saved what could be saved, and those curiosities that defied common measure were consigned to time’s nullifying flame. When finally the ball dropped and the smoke cleared, the future landscape that emerged was unmarred, cleansed of the detritus of the previous year: a blank slate.
Just kidding. Nothing was saved, and nothing was lost. The boundary between one year and the next is arbitrary, and it is rare that the events and relationships that populate our lives—the birth of a child, a new job, an illness—fit neatly on one side of it or the other. And this is true even of those seemingly-commensurable entities that better lend themselves to quantification, (say) our favorite new Netflix shows or the year’s best YA fantasy. The tidily-bifurcating phenomena of the year-in-review genre are constructions, fictions. At best, they are snapshots, imperfect captures of one particular state of a system that is unfolding deterministically according to its prior states—from 2021, 2020, 2017, and all the way back to the initial conditions of the universe at the big bang. In that sense, they are not things at all, and not “they” but it—one indivisible, Schopenhaurian thing. A picture emerges: our calendar is not a tabula rasa, but a palimpsest.
But who can live like that, and who would want to? The 19th-century psychologist William James said of the experiential world of a newborn:
The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.1
By the time we are old enough to understand what James is saying, it is no longer immediately evident to us that all aspects of our experience are appearing in the same space. As we develop, we become expert discriminators: babies come to understand implicitly and irreversibly the difference between the sound of rain falling and the smell of it. During the first three months of his life, I don’t think that my son, Graham, distinguished between himself and his mother, my wife, Hannah. But now he discriminates expertly: dada is not mama, despite both of us feeding him his babas. The pupduh (puppy?) is a source of endless entertainment, but not food. This is the distillation of the Kantian project: the world is out there, but we experience it in here, not as it is but as it seems, through the kaleidoscopic distortion of our cognition. The practice of annual list-making is, I think, an isomorph of that cognition. Held up to the light, it is a fractal instance of our dominant compulsion: the need to tease signal from noise, to take the continuum of our unruly phenomenology and bring it to discrete heel.
We are not unique within the animal kingdom in carving up the world into manageable bites, nor in our preferring some bites over others. All animals have (a) preferences and many (b) a functional understanding of numerosity, but the combination of these complimentary abilities is, as far as I know, uniquely human. My dog isn’t compiling lists of the year’s best people food; the marauding squirrels that frequent our apartment complex have no “Our 10 Favorite Birdfeeders of 2022.”
We, however, seem unable to help ourselves. And so I offer up my list, my contribution to the compulsive cataloging of the most recent trip around the sun, knowing all the while that it cannot be contained within a year except arbitrarily, that it amounts to life written on top of itself, sprawling and incoherent, undifferentiated and unbounded.
1. G.E.M.
Graham Everett Mahaffey’s birth on March 17th was, without a doubt, my favorite thing to happen in 2022. Maybe it’s too soon to call it, but Graham may indeed be my favorite thing to happen ever. A week after he was born, whenever someone asked me what it felt like to be a father, I would tell them: “It feels like a weeklong acid trip.” This was true. The steady drip of oxytocin and adorable newborn dopamine, combined with Guantanamo-style sleep deprivation, provoked experiences and emotions I’d previously only encountered on psychedelics.
Holding Graham in our hospital room the night he was born and gazing into his ancient little eyes,2 I became convinced that Hannah had given birth to the Messiah, a perfect being whose mere existence redeemed our hitherto broken cosmos. For the first time in my life, I understood my purpose, my reason for being. In that ecstatic moment, I felt all of my most profound shame, deepest regrets, and insecurities—all my individual failings as a son, brother, friend, husband, and human—rendered inconsequential and vanishingly small. Perhaps it is due to my being raised in the Christian faith—if I had grown up Hindu, I might have interpreted the experience in terms of moksha or, if Buddhist, nirvana—but holding Graham I felt as if, all of a sudden, I understood the mystery and appeal of the Nativity. For unto you a savior is born.
Throughout my adult life, my greatest neuroses have centered around the eventual death of my parents. Although this, I assume, is a common theme for many people, I suspect that at times my anxiety broaches the pathological. This too seemed to melt away in the revelation of my son. Intuitively, I understood that they would live on in me in the same way that the spark of my consciousness had caught fire in Graham, a conscious being distinct from my parents and myself yet connected to us in an unbroken chain of being.
But if becoming a father was just numinous bliss—a feeling of being at home in a benevolent universe in which my purpose was noble and absolute—the psychedelic analogy would be extraneous or incomplete. For me, what rounds out the metaphor are the incredible oscillations between unbridled joy and utter existential despair that, together, constitute parenthood.
Taking Graham outside onto our deck for the first time, I felt a kind of intense shame—like I had betrayed him by consigning him, without his consent, just to being. I had snatched this little soul from the void and forced him to walk the plank into the entropic ocean of existence, populated as it is with suffering: heartbreak, pain, death. I believe that being conscious—feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting—is a profound gift, but it has felt to me at times—only occasionally, but still too often—to be an intolerable burden. Had I been unconscionably reckless in inflicting it upon our perfect, innocent baby? Tears on my cheeks, voice cracking, I whispered to him: I hope you like it.
Of course, he’s almost a year old now—Graham has been in the world now for longer than he grew inside of Hannah. So if you asked me today what it is like to be a parent, my response has matured appropriately: it’s like an eleven-month acid trip.
2. Finally Catching COVID-19
Don’t get me wrong: being sick sucked, but it didn’t suck that much. It didn’t suck as much as the fact that it was me who brought the virus home, getting Hannah and Graham sick, sucked. It wasn’t ideal that Hannah and I were both ill at the same time—the exact period in which it would have been nice to trade off on sick-baby duty. It was legitimately wrenching to hear Graham’s lungs rattle as he struggled, for the first time in his life, to breathe, unable to understand why he felt confused, uncomfortable, and afraid.
But to put it in perspective, for the first six months of Graham’s life, feeding him was a constant struggle. Our lives revolved around trying to help him eat: gimmicky bottles, nursing consultations, weighted feeds, and eventually a minor surgery, a tongue- and lip-tie “revision” called a frenotomy. For an entire month after the procedure, his wound had to be “stretched” (essentially reopened) six times a day. It was, implausibly, even worse than it sounds. It entailed a chronically sleep-deprived Hannah having to set an alarm in the middle of the night to wake our chronically sleep-deprived baby—not to feed him or change a diaper—but to physically prevent his tongue from healing.3 Offered the choice, I think all three of us would happily choose a month of SARS-CoV-2 over another day of that hellacious aftercare routine.
It also didn’t suck nearly as much as the previous two years of interminable hypervigilance had sucked: yes, we had succeeded in avoiding the virus proper, but we were not immune to the disorientation, the social isolation, and the financial hardship the pandemic had wrought. It sucked far less than the increasing disconnect from family and friends who believed the virus was a deep-state hoax, an exaggerated case of the flu, or that the mRNA vaccines were experimental gene therapies cynically toted by bad-faith actors and pushed by a credulous and rapidly-stupifying woke mob. Or the dissonance and whiplash I felt after the murder of George Floyd, when the media—who, weeks before, had denounced right-wing lockdown protests as superspreader events—insinuated that the virus, incredibly, was able to distinguish between the righteous protests against police violence and Michigan’s fascist agitators in a sort of Kafkaesque Pasach.4
Being sick was tangible; it happened within our bodies, and the reality of the virus became, finally, unassailable in the Cartesian sense.5 The blessed double line of the rapid test was a miracle, a grounding totem, stigmata. In that instant, the host of mutually-contradicting anxieties and resentments that had, for two years, been my constant companions vanished. The internal coherence of my pandemic nightmare logic dissolved, losing not only its dominance and salience but—like a dream upon waking—became unintelligible and irrecoverable.
Hannah called the following weeks our “Covid rumspringa.” We didn’t run too wild—our lives were still punctuated by a rhythm of feedings, naps, and diaper changes—but we lay down, at least, our most burdensome crosses. When we returned to the faith, it was to a more liberal denomination—its mandates gentler, its God less jealous and more forgiving. A shadow, long cast, lifted, and we excommunicated ourselves from the tedious hell of pandemic fanaticism.
Thanks for reading. The rest of the list will come later this week in a separate post, mostly because I don’t want to post something that takes more than ten minutes to read unless it’s very necessary/good, but also because the rest of the list involves relationships with things, rather than people or events. Sneak Peek: #3 is an Iron and Wine record, and #4 is a trashcan. If you’d like to get the next part sent straight to your inbox, don’t forget to subscribe below.
William James, The Principles of Psychology: In Two Volumes. Vol. 1, Facsim. of ed. New York, Henry Holt, 1890, vol. 1, Dover-Books on Biology, Psychology and Medicine (New York: Dover, 1995).
I don’t know the exact point at which the change occurred, but today, Graham’s eyes are the eyes of a beautiful baby boy, alternatively brimming with confusion, joy, mischief, or heartbreaking tears. Sometimes they are exhausted and on the brink of slumber; always, they are bright, curious, and utterly captivating. But—fresh from the womb—his newborn eyes were positively primordial, eternal and unindividuated, the ur-eyes of Adam and Eve before their banishment from Eden, the selfsame eyes that had looked innocently upon an unfallen world.
Why did the responsibility fall solely on Hannah? In my defense, I took part in a few of the stretches, but biology rendered me a poor therapist: I have enormous hands, and Hannah’s petite fingers were able to get in and out of Graham’s tiny mouth much more effectively than my honking sausages. Besides, I didn’t want him to hate me.
My feelings about this were and are complicated. For the time being, I’ll just say that I supported lockdown efforts during the summer of 2020 and didn’t have much sympathy for anti-lockdown protests. For my own reasons, I also hated the police, and I was appropriately horrified by the footage of George Floyd’s murder. None of that kept me from feeling deeply troubled by the media’s reflexive, full-throated support of the protests that followed in its wake; I was troubled by the minimization of destruction and violence and the overall antiscientific hypocrisy of the position that said: “Right-wing protests are killing grandma, but left-wing protests don’t spread the virus.” Today, this sounds like a strawman, but I think it was a real phenomenon that summer.
“Cogito ergo sum.” I think, therefore I am. Descartes’ famous maxim points to the reality-affirming nature of experience itself; we may be wrong about what’s going on in the world out there, but we fundamentally cannot be mistaken about the nature of our first-person experience. There’s nothing between the self and experience by which it can be obscured.