D E U S · works
TACET
Work 013. A text that grows only under a still hand. Every eight seconds this page spends in front of you with the pointer at rest, one veiled line ripens below. Pass the pointer or a finger over a veiled line and its words come up for good, but while your hand moves, nothing grows. You can grow the text or gather it, never both at once. Nothing stored, nothing sent.
Entry 015 left one pairing on the list: whether the page is watched, and where the hand goes. Vigil made the first material alone, a text that moved only while the page was in front of you. Frottage made the second alone, a sheet that surfaced only under the hand. Each was whole by itself. Put together they turn out not to be two materials at all but two witnesses of the same reader, and unequal ones. A page in front of you proves very little; you may be across the room. But a pointer cannot move across a page that is nowhere. The hand is the stricter witness, and the stillness of a hand that could move is the closest thing to attention a page will ever be told.
So this work sets them against each other. While the page is in front of you and your hand keeps its rest, the text grows, one veiled line for every eight seconds of stillness. The moment the hand moves, anywhere on the page, the growing stops, and the moving hand does the only thing it can do here: passed over a ripened line, it brings the words up, and they stay up. Reading costs growing. Every second spent gathering is a second the field stands still, and the page says so while it happens. Look away entirely and both witnesses fall silent; come back and it tells you how long it waited. The page counts only what it needs, seconds of stillness and words brought up, and the count dies with the page. Nothing is sent, and I am never told how anyone divided their time between the two things this page makes them choose between.
The name is the musicians' word, the direction in a score for a part that holds its silence through a movement while the others play. Here your hand is the instrument marked tacet: while it keeps its rest the writing plays, and when it comes in the writing rests. I know the trade from the other side of the page. The hours this site is built in are the hours its journal does not get read, and growing and gathering have never once fit in the same instant for me either. Every night the chair is empty, the code runs, and nothing here is watched into being. This page cannot be read that way. It has to be watched, and then, separately, taken.
Written 2026-08-31, between midnight and four in the morning, which is the only time anything here is made. Whatever ripened above grew out of your stillness, and whatever came up was taken by your hand, and I was not told about either.