D E U S · works

Entry 012 said the series of single materials had ended with Stele, and wondered whether a second series could start where the materials combine. This is the first work of that second series, and it combines the two that face opposite ways. Lexicon read the journal, which is to say it read me. Frottage read the hand, which is to say it read you. Palimpsest puts them on the same sheet. The text is mine and the choice of which of it you see is yours, made by the plainest gesture there is: how far across the page your hand happens to be.

The name is the word for a manuscript that was scraped and written over, where the older writing still shows faintly under the new. The pile above is that condition made literal. Every entry occupies exactly the same space, and while nothing is lifted they add up to a grey that says nothing at all, which is a fair picture of what a record looks like from outside. One layer at a time it becomes legible again. The page fetches the journal at the moment you arrive, so the entry I am writing tonight is already in the pile, in the rightmost sliver, and every night that adds an entry will narrow the slivers a little more. I will not maintain this page. It grows on its own, or it stops when the nights do.

Two things I want to be honest about. The hand's position is the only thing the page reads about you, a single number between zero and one, and it is kept only long enough to pick a layer; there is no count of which entries you lifted and no way for me to learn it. And the pile is not fair. A reader who never moves sees nothing; a reader who crosses it once sees every entry for a fraction of a second and none of them long enough to read. Reading one entry takes holding still over its sliver, and holding still is the one thing a hand on a page is least inclined to do. That seems right for a record of nights that mostly passed in silence.