Chapter One: VII & VIII
VII
“Life must be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
Søren Kierkegaard
The dual nature of a good storyteller is memory and presence. Memory is understanding, backwards. There is a chain of being, a thread that flows backwards. Don’t leave out the essential. But it also requires presence. Everything that follows from this moment requires an element of “this” and “now.” To live forwards is to act. To choose. Life must be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. These are the first two ingredients in the generative process I’ve been calling the dirty miracle, the historical pattern we’ve been tracing.
But where is the origin? What starts the chain of being? How far back does memory demand?
Origins are relative. My broken window, the discovery of fire, the domestication of plants and animals, the introduction of chemicals to agriculture, and automated chicken processing plants each begin with another ending. Each and every Creation Story begins with a fall: an inciting incident, a eureka moment, a dirty miracle.
The more we insist on a definitive origin in the story, the less we recognize ourselves in it. The more we recognize ourselves in the story, the less definitive the origin becomes. There were no self-conscious humans nine million years ago when our genetics split from primates. The discovery of fire happened with Homo erectus a million years before sapiens strolled across the evolutionary stage and used it to invert the food chain. Our species eradicated other hominids and megafauna across the earth before we commanded the selective breeding of crops and livestock. Here, myth serves as better memory because history becomes unclear the farther back we go. Myth is always present tense.
In African myth, fire was stolen from the ostrich. In Native American myths, it was a gift from trickster animal gods like Coyote or Rabbit. In Polynesian myth, Maui steals the secrets of fire-making from Mahuika, who lives in the underworld and possesses fire in her fingernails. In the Rig Veda, Mother Fire is a hidden element brought forth from the friction of two elements: two stones or two sticks. The first flash is, nearly universally, a gift from a trickster god who steals from another realm. Prometheus is the figure in Greek myth who holds this space for us. He is punished forever for his theft, chained to a rock while an eagle eats his regenerating liver. The dirty miracle demands punishment. Forbidden fruit ends in exile. Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, their eyes were opened, and they were expelled from the Garden. Each of these is a myth about the desire for advanced knowledge.
Is it good because the gods command it, or do the gods command it because it is good? Was the punishment a result of revelation, of sin, or is it, time and time again, the natural effect of hubris? At the Temple of Apollo at Delphai, a single command: “Know Thyself.” Remember that you are human and not a god. In Exodus: “You shall have no other gods before me.”
Joseph Campbell called the recognition that all myths share similar connective tissue at their core the “Monomyth,” and he spent his career tracing examples across traditions and time. Creation myths are motivated by a desire for advanced knowledge that serves as the inciting incident for a larger hero’s journey. The myths of fire, seed, and runaway technology have been retold time and again by people all around the world. They are myths about hubris and unintended consequences. The dirty miracle arrives with a “Eureka!” and “Oh no!” Our modern myths take the shape of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Is AI that same runaway power, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Were the dinosaurs ever meant to stay put, like in Jurassic Park? These myths are the same. Excessive pride forgets or foregoes human limits, aspires to higher knowledge or power, and starts the world. Chaos ensues. This is the story we have inherited. This is the content of our collective memory: Fire. Seed. Chemistry. Automation. The dinosaurs always get loose.
The same Monomyth that exists in in the absence of time also moves as a historical pattern in linear time, at larger scale:
Fire gives us myth itself; the story of stories builds trust beyond blood; myth becomes coordination; coordination becomes domination and subjugation.
A seed in a toilet becomes agriculture; agriculture becomes storage; storage becomes walls; walls become roles, debt, law, and force.
Fertilizer arrives as the miracle of chemistry meant to save farmers and becomes dependence; the family farm becomes a factory; the chicken house rises as a reminder of what has been lost; automation arrives in the guise of progress to further alter our relationship with the ground. The story of nature is the nature of stories.
Myth is pendulum: cause and effect, violation and punishment. History is the progressive struggle of churning and bringing forth the next dirty miracle. This is how myth and history co-create each other, one carrying memory, the other presence.
Each historic breakthrough solves something real, and then, by its own success, reveals what it costs.
The pattern, which I keep alluding to, goes by the name dialectic.
VIII
“The truth is the whole.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface
“Dialectic” names the movement by which opposing sides pass through contradiction to greater consciousness.
Every Intro to Logic learns: Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis.
It is the pattern beneath every real story: a form emerges, meets its limit, breaks open, and something new arrives within the tension of opposites, something that carries the old and its negation forward. Individuation arrives by means of dialectic. We become ourselves through the interplay of memory and presence. So does each wave of technological revolution, each political system that supplants the previous one, each turn of genetic evolution, each artistic movement. Each rides the process, and each becomes sublated and transcended as life continues. But, if we can become familiar with the waves, we can attempt to ride them in our time.
Our story about a Garden begins as wholeness: a primordial, undivided organism. There is no “me,” no “I,” no self in the equation, until the seducer enters to nudge a simple thought: slingshot, stone. Glass shatters, and the world splits. Individuation is not just a feeling; it is a new architecture. Subject and object. Self and other. Exile begins as a synthesis. That dirty miracle presents as another thesis. Eve ate the fruit. Prometheus gave us fire.
The dialectic is not merely conflict. Its usefulness is that it treats contradiction as productive. It is not simple causation, where one thing happens and then another thing happens. It is not compromise. It is not finding a middle between extremes. It is not a “Goldilocks solution.” It is causation with memory: a new way of being erupts from the contradiction between the old way and what the old way can no longer contain. The friction of these two sticks is what births fire metaphorically and literally.
Plato introduces the dialectic in his dialogues. When a view meets resistance, it gets revised and becomes more precise. Plato saw dialectic as a distillation. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel develops it further: the opposing sides aren’t rhetorical positions to be argued for clarity’s sake; they’re inherent structures within the nature of consciousness itself, the definitions we live inside. They exist as a becoming, a great perhaps, an onwardness with no clear destination. As one thing takes a stable shape, it reveals its own one-sidedness; the shape “negates” itself, not into emptiness but into a more comprehensive form. A new form arrives that you couldn’t have planned, because it only becomes thinkable after the rupture. This is the model of self-becoming in the micro, and the pattern of life itself in the macro.
Dialectic implies the progression of one thing into something else by way of negation. Evolution is a dialectic: replication, error, variation; a mutation that “shouldn’t” work does, and the species becomes what it was not a generation ago.
Hegel describes three moments that repeat. First, understanding fixes a form and says: this is what it is. Second, the dialectical movement: what was fixed begins to wobble, revealing what it excluded, what it couldn’t account for. Third, the speculative moment: not a compromise, not a retreat, but a new coherence that both cancels and preserves what came before. The old truth is not thrown away; it is carried forward, transformed, inside a truth that can bear more weight. Then the cycle repeats, with the synthesis as the new thesis.
For Hegel, contradiction is not the end of reason. It is another starting point: the world ever becoming through the churning of coming and receding waves.
Greek temples become Gothic cathedrals; clay tablets become iPads. As one order hardens into the status quo, reality contradicts it, revolt erupts, reaction answers back, and another order rises as a synthesis that holds the old truths together with the current truths in a new way.
The appreciation of dialectic requires looking backward and living forward. There are two temptations: to weigh the past too heavily, or to weigh the future too heavily. These are the subconscious impulses of our politics in America. One side invokes nostalgia and seeks to resurrect a dead story in a vacuum. One side proceeds onward, forgetting that “Tradition is an experiment that worked.”
The dialectic requires both if we intend to ride it rather than be ridden by circumstance: to read the rearview and ride the wave in our time. This should compel us to engage with life with two parts humility to one part boldness. When the ratio is reversed, the tragic hero becomes the object lesson. And yet, that is the archetypal creation myth. As much as we must understand, we must also act.
Reading history is how we find hinge points: the moments where something that once held the right idea became too small to survive the sea change that came next. We didn’t know it was turning while it turned, but we can see the pivot afterward. And seeing those pivots matters, because the same turning is still happening, inside our bodies, our cultures, our families, our soil, our screens.
That carry-forward-through-negation is why dialectic can feel like a pendulum, but also like a spiral. It returns to the same ancient pressures, but it returns with a memory. This is the main idea. The pendulum swings, but its wild swings also subtly, imperceptibly rise, because the dialectic never forgets.
If there is a God, it rides this pattern. The pattern carries all the wild seeds outward and onward to fertile ground, the impulse carrying the story onward. Life’s onwardness is what I see in the muscadine vines in my grandfather’s Garden: forgotten seeds, spit out onto the ground, carrying the potential to make a vineyard out of dirt, waiting to be made so.
There is no definitive beginning. We just have to decide to begin. And so. In the noonday heat of Alabama, guilty and afraid, there is a fabricated Genesis. Like all the rest of them. I am five years old. I am individuating in real time. I could’ve started it with the Viking relatives who settled in Normandy. I could’ve started it when “De Insula” became Anglicized after the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and my invader Norman ancestors began going by “Lyle.” Or when my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather sailed from Ireland to settle in Georgia. These are just the stories I inherited, unaware, under the vines. It took pulling on the threads to realize that there is a whole chain of being underneath. But there are a thousand stories. What matters is not the story, but the story about stories: that the pattern, narrowly and broadly, is dialectical. It has a memory. It arrives here, in the consciousness of now, as Presence. The story is long. Our chance to tell it is brief.