the top left corner of The Ambassadors, Holbein. From The National Gallery, London

I’m not an intellectual or an academic; my mind is too sideways for that. I don’t think about the chain of events, or even proximate causes — I think about a man sewing a cape for himself out of flags in the evenings, and it would have been multiple evenings, I think about him making a bison hat or at least doing some research into acquiring one. I think about him travelling. I think about what he might have had on a playlist as he drove, or if there was silence. How many rest stops did he make? I think about how the moments leading up to anything are infinitely divisible, like a calculus problem, each moment containing a universe. I think about what does it mean to lead up to.

Take this painting, for instance. If you stand at the right of it, on about a ten foot diagonal, the unformed thing in the foreground resolves itself into a skull. It’s a neat trick, and if you sit on the bench in front of it, you’ll see a fairly constant parade of people clocking this for the first time. Sometimes, they are accompanied by someone who knows the trick and who with carefully tucked in glee, tight like hospital corners, says to their companion stand here and just trust me and maybe even what no reason. I’ve been both of those people.

Sitting on the bench as they file past I don’t think about the skull, or I don’t think about it directly — I think about how he must have made multiple studies to get the perspective right, maybe thinking at the end when he thought he’d cracked it as I do when I pull something off HA and also YES. It is a delight, but a bare and rocky one, like hauling yourself up a cliff to lie panting and prone at the top. I don’t think about why it’s there, but sometimes I calculate what percent of its existence is just him showing off; what, oh that, just a bit of fun really. No doubt a case could be made for a deeper significance of the skull: memento mori, the folly of states and statecraft, the futility of endeavour, and sure why not, but I also know soft-shoe tap dancing when I see it.

I think about how they aren’t looking in the same direction, I think about the cross behind the curtain, I think about the look in their eyes which is, let’s be honest, exhausted — yes silk, yes feast, yes finery, whores, lute players, dogs and smells and massive hearths but it’s cold and this isn’t home, the last time they were home it wasn’t home either, and what terrible trick is that which has placed them on a ten foot diagonal from their own lives, permanently. The calculus has hardly been invented yet, and so they will never solve the equation, find the limit, and they know it as well as I do, looking.