The Testimony Prepared

The Testimony Prepared

Present Day, March 2026The album is called The Geometry of Ruin. It is not a pleasant title. It was not designed to be pleasant. It was designed to be accurate.I have been watching the geometry for five centuries. The geometry is not the collapse itself: it is the...
The Orchard and the River

The Orchard and the River

Florence, various yearsI grew up, in the sense that my intellectual formation happened, in a city that was organized around the belief that the natural and the human were in productive relationship. The orchards outside Florence’s walls fed the city. The Arno...
I Am Not a Prophet

I Am Not a Prophet

Present Day, March 2026I want to be precise about what I am and what I am not, because the word prophet has been used about me in ways that I need to correct.A prophet is someone who receives information about the future from a source that is not available to ordinary...
The Feast of Ghosts: Victorian London

The Feast of Ghosts: Victorian London

London, 1870s and 1880sThe spiritualist salons of Victorian London were one of the more concentrated expressions of a pattern I have watched in various forms across five centuries: the wealthy consuming illusions at the cost of ignoring realities that were not...
The Tower of Information

The Tower of Information

Present Day, March 2026The specific thing I want to say about the present moment and its relationship to knowledge is this: more information is not the same as more understanding, and the substitution of one for the other is its own kind of architecture of collapse.I...