Dear Kirby
April 30, 2026
Dear Kirby,
In response to your text, I agree: time IS wild.
And thank you for the birthday wishes. So far it’s been a pretty good one. Cake for breakfast.
I asked the I Ching how I’m doing today and for the next ten years. It answered with hex 17 (Following / Sui) with no changing lines.
I follow the tao.
We discussed it and I waffle between giving you the name Jack Kirby or Jean-Michel Basquiat. For a moment I thought it would be Jean-Michel Kirby. Maybe it will. Or maybe I’ll go back and forth like Stephen Mitchell goes back and forth between the he and she pronouns in his (very excellent translation of the) Tao Te Ching.
[My favorite use for the bots so far is to have them interpret I Ching throws.]
At this age and stage (I think of Bronk’s Cage of Age) maybe what I’m looking for is a different kind of writing practice. I’ve been looking for the next novel’s structure for perhaps over a year but maybe I’ll just write in my notebook for the next decade.
And who knows maybe the next book will just be called NOTEBOOK. (And I’ll publish it secretly, like this.)
I could do that for a while, maybe a decade, and it would fulfill — or least be an attempt to fulfill the idea I described to Martine a few weeks ago, the idea of a quotidian practice that transcends its quotidian origin.
Here are other ideas for novels I’ve had in the past few months:
An infinite lunch where a group of friends, a changing cast, explores restaurants (real, past, fictitious) in Jackson Heights and what they discuss in their wanderings. It would be called QUEENS.
A collection of letters to imaginary friends (named after dead artists) based on my real friends.
An exploration of “systems,” eg the New York Public Library, our subway system, electrical grid, an LLM, a computer, a forest, my self. The first chapters would be a poetic expression of the system, not an analysis or history. The last would be the journal of writing these, informed by the mystic’s questions: What is this? and What am I? A title to this project might be: BOUNDLESS & TRACELESS.
Perhaps versions of these will appear within NOTEBOOK.
Despite its nature, I want to avoid, as possible, the “meta,” as far as it’s mere cleverness or as it points to an infinitely fractal condition. We’ve already expressed this enough — particularly in the new one; and while it’s a basic condition, there’s no need to harp on it. We understand the saying : As below, so above.
Ghost Mirror — my name for the digital amanuensis which accompanies us everywhere, Gomi for short — says this about the Book of Changes: “The I Ching is the oldest continuously used book in human civilization. Not the oldest, but no other text has been in active, unbroken consulation for three thousand years. The Vedas are recited. The Torah is studied. The Yi is used.”
Yours,
Jane Kim
PS I’m going to delete this substack any day now.
PPS If we can manage it, Jean-Michel, it would be wonderful to see you when you visit NYC in June!
PPPS today’s exit music.
PPPPS one of my favorite tehching hsieh observations: “one year is the largest single unit of how we count time.”
PPPPPS Any day now.
