A Story

Picture This

513/1,000ths of a Thought

By James Hauck

     I had already put a lot of thought into the writing of a story that would be 513 words in length and contain in some fashion or other the words “privilege,” “licentious,” “impeccable,” “model,” “system,” “diverse,” “lexicon,” “excited,” and “dance,” when as I was sitting in the Members Lounge of the Art Institute of Chicago the other day, I quite suddenly happened to notice for the first time, having just taken a comfortable seat on one of the many couches — one I hadn’t sat on before I’d arrived on this particular visit — that I could see through a small round window placed high in the far wall the top floors of the Willis Tower, previously named the Sears Tower, where I had had the privilege of taking, several years previously, a series of classes based on the mystical and geometric schema called the Enneagram that in its original incarnation was used only as a dynamic device for demonstrating the interactions of the nine major and numerous minor personality types by arranged them around a nine pointed geometric device — not the licentious black magical sigil that some later commentators had mistakenly and unfoundedly tried to make it out to be — which probably had been developed over the years by medieval Middle Eastern Islamic scholars and later expanded in predictive power by the mysterious magus named G. I. Gurdjieff, that series of informal classes being freely offered by one of the principals of an investment bankers organization that then occupied one and a half floors of said tower back when it was still being leased out to the Sears Roebuck Corporation, being a gentleman who had somehow, unfortunately to my way of thinking never revealing his impeccable core methodology, been over the course of many years developing a way to model with the dynamic mechanics of this ancient system such diverse aspects of the world, a veritable lexicon of the categories of knowledge, such as, the Arabic numbering system, the nine major personality types, the amino acid series, the universe’s excited dance of cosmological constants, and diverse other fields of study that have occupied countless numbers of the world’s brightest and most inventive scientists and philosophers since time immemorial in trying to align such diverse streams of data without ever really tying up all the loose ends or even providing much of an integrated insight into which direction the proper course of study might lie or whether an entirely new paradigm could lead to a more fruitful outcome, perhaps even consolidation of the four major forces which are currently believed to explain the cumulative operation of Nature herself, especially as these appear to be only partially explained at the present time, for instance by the fact that we haven’t nailed down seventy percent of the mass in the universe or ninety percent of the energy, although the Einsteinian formulation such that E, which is energy, is equal to m, which is mass, times the speed of light, c, which has been raised to the second power has covered the bases for lo these many years.