It’s been a long year of predictions: infection rates, election outcomes, the future of cities, and the nature of work. This year has also been a hard lesson in the inability to predict anything. Nonetheless, I’m constantly pattern-seeking, hoping to glean new information from the rhythms of my life: morning routines and habit fields, the glitches and loops of ambient thought. But my conclusions are arbitrary, tinted by how I squint at my compulsions or occasional moments of coincidence. Maybe I’ll find better information by examining the pattern of the tiles in the bathroom.
There was a time when people believed the stomach’s gurgles and rumbles belonged to the voices of the dead. Ventriloquism began as a religious practice; the term is Latin for “speaking from the stomach”: venter (belly) and loqui (speak). The ventriloquist would decipher the belly’s sounds and predict the future.
