I go to the office. It’s on the [redacted] floor. The perimeter is entirely glass. Outside, the air is clear. In one direction the ocean glimmers, in another, cirrocumulus pocks delicately wander over Jersey. In between, the screaming disorientation of Manhattan from the detachment of the crane’s eye level. The arterial frenzy of movement ticks over under the light, peacefully. “True concentration is a free act in light and in peace,” I think. I have already been tripped up twice today by thinking, when one must act, with instinct and out of heart. Thinking off-gasses hesitation, second-guessing, reticence. One becomes lost in one’s own hedging. One must think less. One must sever one’s own head, and carry it for the duration of the tightrope-walk.1
I wonder if any of the following ever really fool anyone: burnt orange; 12g earlobe spikes; slim-cut chinos; Clinique Chubby Sticks lip balm; the long-term maintenance of a breakfast regime consisting purely of oatmeal; “sports earbuds”; off-white; skin fades on dorsal-cervical fat; “wrinkle free” shirts; sneakers with thick gum soles; sneakers with inset wedge heels; the teasing and bouffant of dark hair to disguise the gleam of skull.
I’m waved into a meeting room. I’m shushed. Voices burble from a hidden speaker. “They don’t know you’re here, and I don’t want to introduce you yet.” I sit. I listen.
I try out my method of diagnosing an individual’s authority. If the phrases, questions, and cast of thought evident from a person’s speech are optimistic and focused on growth, the person is very rich and senior in level; if they are closed, pessimistic, inside-baseball to a fault, they are wedded to their myopic, self-limited technicalities, their provincialism of attainable aspirations. The more senior people sometimes speak with a strain of delusion, both of insulation and of fabulism. I am three-for-three so far today.
On a different afternoon, the air is raucous with warmth and glare. Two long cloud-spires mimic fish skeletons. Of Bruno’s forty nine planetary Images, Saturn has two with a fish, the Moon one.
I’m still writing these for you. I’m more certain than ever they’ll never be read. Nothing about the void emboldens. Each day I think the vacuum can only extract so much, and yet each day more is revealed.
I reread Meditations on the Tarot often.