It’s late. I’m on the [redacted] floor. The sun is rising. The estuary gleams as if molten. In pinks and oranges the clouds roll over the rocketing glare-beams. I see [redacted] sitting at a table, back to the door, facing the dawn, eating a bagel, alone. I retrieve my coffee soundlessly and leave.
Late in the morning I leave the room. There is a phone alarm sounding somewhere deep on the other side of the area, muffled by layers and distance. The sound batters around the soundproofing like a trapped moth. The steady EKG of the void.
Lately I am rereading snatches from Life with Picasso. In one of many passages that recreate Picasso’s disquisitive monologue, Gilot ventriloquizes Picasso as saying,
“My thought moves rapidly and since my hand obeys so fast, in a day’s work I can give myself the satisfaction of having said almost what I wanted to say before I was disturbed and had to abandon that thought. Then, being obliged to take up another thought the next day, I leave things as they are, as thoughts that came to me too quickly, which I left too quickly and which I really ought to go back to and do more work on. But I rarely get a chance to go back. Sometimes it might take me six months to work over that thought in order to reach its exact weight.”
I wonder if “working over the thought” is the addition mass via shaping, in a sort of inversion of the sculptor’s dilemma. I consider often the methods of testing, pasting, swatching, mapping, erasing, blocking, sketching-in, scrubbing-out, the light each shines down different branches of the future’s possible pathways. I wonder if there is a heft to the thing when it’s finished. I may know. I wonder if I will ever finish a thought.
The late stepmother of the [redacted] used to beat her, she is saying. She adored her father. “But his wife was an absolute bitch. Zucchini always remind me of her. She used to force-feed me. I can’t even smell it. I’m getting some soup instead.” She lurches away. We stare in silence. She return with soup. “And now I can’t even taste the beef in this soup. They tell me it’s beef. I don’t know, I just don’t know.”
Later, the other analyst is telling me about himself. He points toward the building where he used to work. It’s below us and farther away. “A lot of bad memories down there,” he laughs.
The late style of many business directors is to order, to issue demands, to settle their weight more firmly on what they know best, to refuse any sign of intervention that goes direct and does not work through others. Others, once the decision has been made to be game, take on a freewheeling, nearly manic alacrity. I am teaching a director to use a clicker to control a presentation. We are laughing, in hysterics, at how stupid the whole thing is. Thank goodness I won’t be there, I think. “You’ll be missed,” the director says.