The Lore of the World

Field Notes for a Child’s Codex

May 01, 2025

Art for *The Intrinsic Perspective* is by Alexander Naughton

When you become a new parent, you must re-explain the world, and therefore see it afresh yourself.

A child starts with only ancestral memories of archetypes: mother, air, warmth, danger. But none of the specifics. For them, life is like beginning to read some grand fantasy trilogy, one filled with lore and histories and intricate maps.

Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real. And it is a parent’s job to tell the lore of this world, and help the child fill up their codex of reality one entry at a time.

Here are a few of the thousands of entries they must make.

Teeth

Your teeth mash your food, and you swallow that food down the tube of your esophagus, which goes to the way-station of your stomach, then the further tube of your intestines, where the nutrients are sucked out. The whole long gut finds its terminus at your anus, where you poop out the remains. In this, the core of your body is like a coiled worm, with its base desires of greed and selfishness, around which has grown up all the accoutrements of consciousness and civilization. Most of the struggle of growing up will be choosing which entity to act like: the internal worm, or the human being encasing it.

The portal to the internal worm is the blocks of your teeth, set in arcs ringing your mouth. These innocuous things, which make up your smile, and so allow you to show happiness, will actually cause you great pain. In two ways. The first is that to gain teeth is to become independent, for they sever your need of mother’s milk, and to be independent is a type of pain. The second is quite literal, in that they must burst through your gums, a slow tectonic event like a rising mountain range. The pain will keep you awake at night. One day those baby teeth fall out, only for the process to repeat. Secretly, a new set of adult teeth will have been formed in your jaw via mineral deposition; it is as if your body is the earth’s mantle, and can secrete a kind of white rock. During this metamorphosis, your baby teeth will first become wiggly, then loose, and eventually drop, bloody, onto floors and pillows and held-out palms. This is somehow satisfying.

The mode of teeth is surprise, for they like making an appearance—in your pink gums, in the flash of a smile, but also in culture too. You’ll stumble across them in odd places, like when you read The Hobbit and come to the riddle Bilbo poses Gollum:

Thirty white horses on a red hill. First they champ, then they stamp, then they stand still.

But if teeth are white horses, they’re statues of them, eternal, yet breakable and irreparable. Since we only get one extra set of teeth, we treat them with care. We brush our teeth every day, with bristles attached to a stick. Upon the bristles we squirt something called toothpaste, a slimy soap-like substance you must learn to spit out. Eventually, you will become addicted to this. You will not be able to sleep unless your teeth feel clean and brushed and newly made, as if a pristine set had just burst from your gums once again. This strange compulsion will linger your whole life.

Whales

These are monstrous creatures, bigger than a dragon, that live in the pelagic depths of the ocean. We go on boats to watch them, and they watch us in turn. Unlike a fish, they cannot breathe underwater, but must come up for air, and so are creatures split between realms. Even the perception of a whale is divided in twain; eyes on either side of its immensely broad head, it must view the world in two halves, always. So too is the brain of the whale split in ways ours are not. When they dream their cetacean dreams, they do so uni-hemispherically, in that one half of their brain sleeps as the other remains awake, so as to keep them bobbing above water. Often whales can be observed resting languidly on the surface with one eye open, the other closed, for just this reason.

Baleen whales, like humpbacks, blue whales, and fin whales, sing in the ocean deeps with vocalizations that can range miles. Why they sing we do not know. Meanwhile, the toothed whales, like sperm whales and orcas, talk in clicks and whistles. This too, we do not understand, nor know how complex what they’re saying is.

I remember when I told you that whales sing in the deep waters and you cackled with joy. I played you a recording of whale song on YouTube.

After a while you asked: “Are whales real?”

“Yes, whales are real.”

“But dragons are not real.”

“No, dragons are not real.”

“But whales really sing in the deep?”

“Yes, whales really sing in the deep.”

There are things about whales you must wait to learn. Our relationship with them is… complex.

Some whales have hated us for our sins against their race. The most vengeful whale was Porphyrios, who bent his bulk and mind to the purpose of sinking ships off the coastal waters of Constantinople, in the 6th century. This “purple boy” (for that is what “Porphyrios” means), was likely a sperm whale, for only sperm whales and orcas ever become dedicated man-killers, and sperm whales can look, when their dark gray flesh is seen roiling in a frenzy of waves, a dark purple. Emperor Justinian I, his arch-nemesis, could never capture him, even as Porphyrios terrorized the shipping lanes of the empire for fifty years, sinking merchant vessels and warships alike. His ultimate number of victims is unknown, but given the wide berth sailors gave of his regular haunts, and the dreams Justinian I had of the whale’s maw as he sweated through the royal sheets, it must have numbered in the dozens of ships and hundreds of sailors.

Porphyrios, as playful as all whales, met his demise frolicking with dolphins. He ventured too far into the mouth of the Sakarya River, and was beached. There, a local mob descended upon him, as vengeful and hateful as he had been. At first they hacked at him with knives and axes, but could not kill him, so great was his bulk. Becoming more organized, the mob dragged him up onto the beach with ropes and wagons, and on the sand he died by a thousand cuts, his huge eyes surveying what must have seemed an army of Lilliputians surrounding him, excising bit after bit of him, even cannibalizing his own massive body in front of him, until he finally, mercifully, perished.

It is hard to blame Porphyrios. We have been the aggressor for centuries. We used to hunt whales, indeed, an entire industry of men with harpoons grew up—the subject of great literature, you’ll learn—but we stopped, or most of us stopped, for whales are simply too majestic, and our use for them has passed. One day technology will enable us to talk to them, and the first thing they will ask is: “Why?”

We’ll have to sheepishly explain that, for a while, our whole civilization was lit by their oil, their internal juices. Our cities blazed with whale, and for a century they played, unknowingly, the role of a fleshy Prometheus, sacrificing themselves over and over on the rock for us. Horrific, yes, but darkly beautiful. Whales were the light by which we saw.

Germs

These are much smaller than whales. So small you can’t see them. They’re everywhere, though. They linger maliciously on door handles and inside nostrils. They make you sick, because it turns out being sick is when something is growing inside of you. When the fruit goes bad on the countertop, it is in an advanced stage of this—something else has grown and eaten it from the inside out.

For a long time we didn't know about germs. Sickness was mysterious because the cause is so tiny. The person who first saw germs under a microscope (which is a way to see tiny things, one that had to be invented), dubbed them “animalcules,” which means “little animals.”

The mood of germs is paranoia. You’ll notice your parents are strange about germs. Much like my grandmother’s generation was about money. After my grandmother died—your great grandmother—no one could find the jewelry. She had stitched it all into clothes, and the clothes had been thrown out or donated. That's what happens when you live through the Great Depression. My generation, in turn, has unopened boxes of N95s and squirts antibacterial hand spray on everyone’s palms too much. One day, if you’re lucky, you’ll laugh at our paranoia too.

When you get sick, and so must lie amid pillows and listen to audio books, you often have a fever, because your body is trying to burn away the animalcules trying to grow inside you. The growth of these evil seeds is also combated by other animalcules, good ones, for you secretly possess an army of soldiers called “white blood cells.” It’s an army whom you’ll never meet, and who have no commander, but this internal regiment patrols your arteries tirelessly. They stand guard over your insides in an internal trench warfare. As is true of many things, you as a child have no need to thank them for this selfless act. The fact that you exist is thanks enough.

Music on the radio

The air is abuzz with things called radio waves. You can't see them, but they're there. They’re almost like shouts, although at a frequency you can't hear, and in a medium that’s not sound but rather electromagnetism. These waves can be picked up by radios, which you can buy at a store, or come installed in a car. Radio waves are sent by massive towers, which you have assuredly seen out the car window while being chauffeured around. Somewhere in a nearby town or city, there is a person in a room called a DJ, who works for a radio station. That person selects music. They must pay for the rights to this music, buying it either from the artists who created it, or from the conglomerates who already bought those rights. After being chosen, the music is then piped into the radio towers, which amplify and broadcast the signal, filling the air with encoded notation. Unknowingly, your life has been surrounded by invisible music. And car commercials.

Your parents often sing along to the radio. At first, this will delight you. One day, without having been aware of the change, you’ll feel annoyance as your parents croon: