Assassins must study art. Today we will focus on painting, but the other arts are also essential to the development of your own arcane art that is simultaneously in full public view and invisible. This is the very movement of art. Drafts and drawings, blocking your movement across a stage and creating shapes or splatches of colour. A sleight-of-hand about what is happening, a misdirection, a play of assumptions. Angles, perspectives, surfaces and depths. Ensembles of figures and the organization of the action, acknowledging the necessity of accident, the contingency at the heart of the best laid plots. These techniques are essential to the effective enactment of our own art, all of which demonstrate themselves in the simple act of painting.

All painting is an infinite micro-scape that gestures toward the whole, which in its turn is always fragmented, torn. It is, finally, a kind of necessary optical illusion. That fissure is our opening. The world, as you all know all too well, is incessantly falling into ruin, which for us is good for business. Very good for business. Yesterday for the first time in the history of the world it rained at the Summit Station, which had been frozen since long before the Assassins arrived on the stage of history. A sea of water crashed from the leaden skies, spattering the ancient snow like midnight’s watered silk moving-in-place. The world is cascading into destruction, so how might we make the best use of these emerging conditions?

Huge flowering weeds have over-run Okagawa ...