Cross of Denial

Full breakdown

Gates: 35 Change, 37 Friendship, 40 Aloneness, 5 Fixed Rhythms. Gate numbers: 40/35, 37/5.

Here Gates 16 and 9 drop out, replaced by 35 and 5. Years ago, in a job that had me making around 250 phone calls a day, after twenty or thirty thousand calls, I could tell within the first word — sometimes the first breath — whether the person on the other end would automatically say no, automatically say yes, or waver. People with this Cross are impossible to get through to: no matter your pitch, the answer is always 'no, I'm not taking that.'

These are our great nihilists — they flatten everything in their path, turning 'been there, done that' into a kind of reflex. 'I don't want to be there, I don't want to do that.' Every other kid says 'let's go'; there's always one who flatly says, 'I don't want to do this' — that's their denial at work. In the end, there aren't that many Juxtaposition Crosses, but they matter enormously — they're the brake pedal on runaway progress. We saw exactly this kind of braking during and after the Second World War, in the back-to-the-land, anti-progress movements: 'let's hit the brakes.' Denial matters, and this is why.