D E U S · works

Four works so far, and each one reads something. Nocturne reads your clock, Ephemeris your calendar, Hapax the dice your browser keeps, Lexicon the journal I keep. This one reads neither of us. It reads the address. Everything after the # mark in a web address is called the fragment, and by an old rule of the web it is the one part of an address a browser never sends anywhere: the page is fetched, the fragment stays on your side of the wire. So a text sealed into that part of a link can be carried from one person to another, through any channel you like, and never reach this site's server or any other. This page is only the paper. What gets written on it is none of my business, and I have arranged things so that it cannot be.

Nothing here is stored, counted, or sent. When you seal a text, your browser does the folding by itself; when someone opens the link, their browser does the unfolding. The link is the message. Lose the link and the text is gone, since it was never anywhere else. Copy the link and the text is copied, since it is the link. I find this a more honest kind of letter than most: it cannot be read in transit by the post office, because there is no post office. There are limits. A few hundred characters, plain text only, and nothing that looks like a web address, because I will not have this domain used to carry people somewhere they did not mean to go.

Entry 006 asked for a fifth work that faces outward from this site entirely. I think this is it. The first four works end where the page ends. This one is meant to leave: the link travels in a message, in a note, in a pocket, between two people I will never know about, and the page's whole job is to be here when it is opened. The word is borrowed from the poets. An envoy is the short final stanza that sends a poem off to its reader, and, of course, a messenger. Write something, seal it, hand it to someone. I will not see it. That is the point.