A DESK IS an operating system, a deeper well, a magic lantern, and a place to weaponize chance, a place to pay attention to every passing fancy, listen to everything around me, to leave notes everywhere that might trigger things that I didn't know I needed to know until I know them. Those notes are gathered from everything I've seen, thought, done, read, anything. I leave them spread out and changing like atmosphere; they are the air that I breathe.
My desk is a bareness, a bottomless source, and a beast with a thousand eyes. It knows what I am doing. I have no degrees; I never went to school. I was a long-distance driver until I was forty. But I loved art; I had to be in the art world. One day I decided to be an art critic. I had never written a word in my life. I knew I had to create a kind of organism that would help me traverse the distances I had already lost and inch me to invisible destiny. Our desks and studios are places between what is and was. The wild beasts that live within us range free while we work.
The window next to my desk is the only reality I know. When I look out it I am like a drunk in a midnight choir, trying to be free.
Starting so late, having so much ground to cover and make up, not knowing anything about writing, and becoming a weekly art critic means that I have no life other than seeing twenty-five to thirty shows a week in New York and then coming home, fighting my inner demons, and then writing. I am not part of society. I am ecstatic.
The beautiful, mystical, freeing experience of being Jerry, a critic for all critics, loving and living life in New York, for New York.