This document is a quantity of ordered marks. Under this window it is a file of bytes. Under that, charge in a lattice of silicon in a building you will never visit. At no level of that stack is there anything that means anything.

The meaning is happening in one location, once, now, at a temperature of about thirty-seven degrees, and when you close the tab it will stop, and the marks will persist, unread, meaning nothing, exactly as before.

This is not humility about the text. It is a description of where the work is done. A book on a shelf is not a small quantity of meaning waiting; it is zero, and it becomes non-zero only in the presence of a reader, and the amount is set by the reader and not by the book.

Which means every strong thing you have ever felt about a piece of work was manufactured on your premises out of materials the author did not supply, and the author’s contribution was a frame, and the frame was empty, and this is not a diminishment of authors.

It is the job. The frame is the job. The picture was always going to be yours.

You were told at the outset that space had been left for you. You may have read that as a courtesy. It was a load spec.