The Weight of Having Spoken

The Weight of Having Spoken

by | Jun 4, 2026 | Journal

Present Day, June 4, 2026The Geometry of Ruin has been in the world for two weeks. I am still adjusting to what it means to have placed the testimony in public hands, to have allowed something that lived for years in my own accumulated observation to become a thing...
What He Sees When He Looks at His Own Face

What He Sees When He Looks at His Own Face

by | Jun 3, 2026 | Journal

Amsterdam, March 22, 1638Rembrandt van Rijn is thirty-two years old and already painting himself with the attention most men reserve for the face of God. I have been to the workshop twice this week, introduced as a scholar and collector from the south, and each time I...
The Witness Has Testified

The Witness Has Testified

by | Jun 3, 2026 | Journal

Present Day, June 3, 2026The Geometry of Ruin has been in the world for eleven days. I have been processing what it means to have placed the testimony in public hands and to have received, in return, the responses of the people who have heard it.What has surprised me...
The Ember and the Children

The Ember and the Children

by | May 31, 2026 | Journal

Present Day, May 2026Children of the Ember closes the album because the geometry is not complete without the closing movement, and the closing movement is not ruin but emergence.I have watched the Black Death move through Europe in the 14th century. I was not present...
The Libraries They Left Behind

The Libraries They Left Behind

by | May 30, 2026 | Journal

Constantinople, November 3, 1494The city has been Ottoman for forty years. The scholars who fled westward after the fall took what they could carry. What they could not carry remained, and what remained is what drew me here: the libraries no one thought to burn...