When it comes to the occult–stuff like astrology, fortune-telling, life after death, and the stock market–I’d like to be rational, but I just can’t. I sort of believe in all that crap.
A waiter calls from across the room: “Veectoria!” Another table has requested her services, but she doesn’t rush away. We just ordered coffee, and she’s promised to read the future in our grounds. “It’s like a picture,” she explains. “I call it psychic Rorschach.
A couple of weeks later I contact a literary agent in New York with a proposal. He says he’ll get back to me.
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Like her father, whom Martin has described as a “perpetual student,” she’s still learning, even after all these years. She reads cups, cards, palms, faces, and ears as well as constellations, and she’s studying up on stones and sheep innards. (About a year ago Martin finished a series of paintings based on the ancient practice of divining the future from viscera. She spoke with Jesse White’s people about hanging them at the Thompson Center to promote organ donation, but he declined. “They said they couldn’t promote one artist,” she says. “I told them they could use them anonymously–like anonymous organ donation.”)
Martin doesn’t actually recommend particular stocks in her column–she herself doesn’t invest, and she doesn’t follow the market. Her column, called the Mass Psychology Forecast, is aimed at brokers and traders and is available by subscription only. “I write a weekly forecast, and I split it between forecast and advice,” she says. “Some people don’t want advice, they just want the forecast: it’s raining, you don’t need to be told to take an umbrella. It’s an insult to some people.”
Since then she’s become an occasional visitor to his office, where the two are a study in contrast: Martin in flowing purple, dark haired and animated, Biggs in professorial beige and brown, soft spoken and gentle. “Once you’re a member of the OI, you’re part of the extended family here,” she says. Biggs agrees.
