No.77. Desert Father. His soul felt cluttered. Ideas swarmed within him inchoate, seldom emerging as usable forms. He needed some kind of cleansing. The only plan he had—as impractical as most of his plans were—was to build himself a small high tower and, like the desert fathers of old, sit on it until he was visited by purification. His hero was the 5th century mystic, Saint Simeon the Stylite, who lived for 37 years atop a slim pillar in Syria. Just to insure the right amount of clarifying discomfort, he decided, as well, to incorporate into his tower-idea the Indian fakir’s infamous bed of nails. The site of his penance would thus be a small bed of nails raised high into the air. He had a great deal of trouble building it.

No. 76: Bells and Spheres. On Monday, June 20, he entered the studio very early in the morning--before dawn--and was astonished to find it packed with enormous glassy spheres, many of elaborate design, with swirls and reef-like encrustations within them. In aggregate, the spheres seemed to emit a low chorus of oceanic sound, a distant, subaqueous hum that bothered him as much as he found it pleasing. If he chanced to touch one of the spheres--and some were warm beneath his fingertips--it rang out with a rasping, bell-like sound that lingered for a long time before it decayed. He worried about how he was ever going to dispose of them, but gradually, over the next few hours, they began to disappear, each one suddenly popping like a soap bubble.

No.75: Crossword. He'd never laboured over a crossword puzzle in his entire life when, the day before yesterday, he looked at one with fresh eyes and suddenly felt he had found an absorbing subject for painting: the puzzle's composition was endlessly shiftable, modular, its graphic rigidity softened and deepened by the numbering of the white squares. What he had taken to be time-squandering blank-filling trap (so akin to the forms so beloved of bureaucracies), seemed instead to be a gnomic kind of utterance, a linguistic provocation, a semantic proto-narrative, a cognitive bit-map. He was cautiously ecstatic. Hadn't anyone else settled upon the same subject?

No.74: Rapture. Sometimes he found himself gazing in rapture--for long periods of time--at another artist's work. He wondered if this was a kind of weakness.