No. 172. I Am the Dwarf of Myself. These days, when he painted, he felt the presence beside him of another being. But it was no doppelganger, no mere double he felt there. It was, rather--and more disturbingly--an obnoxious, dwarfish version of himself, a creature like him in every way but pathetically small and, as he saw it, annoyingly ineffectual. He remembered a phrase from Nietzsche (he thought it was from Nietzsche) : "I am the dwarf of myself." This dispiriting little creature was assuredly far from Nietzsche's vigorous, terrifying Ubermensch; this little fellow was pure Undermensch! Annoyed at failing to find the dwarf-of-myself mention in Nietzsche, he came across something else instead. It was from Thus Spake Zarathustra: "Stop dwarf !" I said. "It is I or you! But I am the stronger of us two--you do not know my abysmal thought, that you could not bear."

No. 171: Floater. Perhaps emboldened by her ambitious neighbour's titanic wrestlings with impossible sculptural projects, Abigail, the landscape painter whose studio was right next door, decided to try her own hand at sculpture--and was mighty pleased with the result She was so pleased, in fact, that she called her friend, a potter named Docile Limoge, to come over for a look. Docile was predictably impressed. He's very big, isn't he!" she whispered to Abigail--as if the figure were somehow sentient enough to overhear her. "He is," said Abigail, "but he's also very light. He's carved from balsa wood. It's almost as if he 's not there." "He seems there enough to me," whispered Docile, trying not to stare at the impassive figure--who was wearing bathing trunks and appeared to be bobbing on water in a red floatation device--even though Abigail had merely suspended him from the studio ceiling with transparent fishing line. "I think he turned out pretty well," Abigail told her friend. "I think so too," agreed Docile. "Are you going to make another one?" Abigail told her she was. "Maybe you should make him nude next time," said Docile wistfully.

No. 170. Icebreaker. It had grown very hot in the past few days and and as a result, he felt compelled to turn on the air-conditioner in his studio. Dismayed at how cold it got and how quickly (he hated air conditioning), he then ordered the delivery of an enormous block of ice and--his hands freezing all the while--proceeded to carve a hefty ice sculpture--a battleship. He found it ruefully amusing that despite the cold (he could sometimes see his breath), the damned ship began to melt anyhow, its edges inexorably softening and its stalwart contours rounding and beginning to drip. After an hour of this humiliation--for so he saw it--he decided to make what he could of the situation, breaking off a shard of the starboard bow and plopping it into a tall gin and tonic--which he then carried outside into the sunlight.

No. 169. The Dunciad Ascendency. Deeply disturbed by society's relentless and dispiriting Dumbing Down, he repaired, a month ago, to his studio--which he was beginning to regard as part oasis, part outpost and part fortress--and, for several hectic weeks, laboured on this giant painted photo-mural. The thing was ornate, overworked and teeming with desperate if extraneous incident. He had built it as an elaborate shrine to stupidity. It's main objective, pictorially speaking, was to provide a kind of altar (hopefully a pyre) upon which was positioned an elaborately wrought Dunce's Cap, the essential, if archaic, symbol of vicious vacuity, wilful ignorance, intellectual depletion and moral emptiness. What was he to do with it? Nothing, he supposed. There was nobody to show it to. Tomorrow morning, he would begin taking it apart.