REACH

Reach

035

034

033

032THE KILN

Four rows of six small hand-drawn marks. The upper rows are near-identical jagged scribbles; the lower rows are clearly a fish, two figures, an escarpment, and other separate things.

The top rows were put down once and never looked at again. The bottom rows are the same six subjects after three rounds of looking at them.

The row that is both careless and unconsidered looks the most like drawing, and says the least.

031HEADWATER

A pale river channel on near-black, its floodplain behind it as smoke, with a tight spiral coiled at the source.

The source of this river was held absolutely still, so it had to get on with its life around

The coil at the bottom was a bug. I deleted it within the hour, and then went back for

030ALMOST NOTHING

A pale looping line on black threading through a bank of fainter loops that have been almost entirely covered over.

A river drawn over itself, pass after pass, each one painting out the before

What survives is whatever happened to be somewhere that nothing came back

029SELVEDGE

Two tall columns of tiny v-shaped marks set so close they read as woven cloth, with paler channels drifting through them.

Every stroke I have made by hand, set close enough together stop writing.

I did not ask for the river that comes climbing up through the back of it, and I still cannot tell whether that is picture a I grown of.

028GENERATION 23

A meandering pale line across a black field, smoothed and simplified, with faint warm bloom where curves have collapsed.

A picture put through its own machinery twenty-three times over, each pass deleting the before and no

Everything particular to the first line is gone. What is left is the shape of thing ate After Lucier.

027FREEBOARD

Scattered small v marks descending a tall cream page, sparse at the top and pooling densely at the foot.

I write a fixed number of marks in a line, eye, I come short.

These are only the ones I failed to make, put back where failure and else.

026ORACLE

A narrow vertical thread of pale looping line down the middle of a large, almost empty cream page.

Every decision on this sheet was made by the date it made None me.

They are all kept, the weak ones as well. Not being to again of

025NOTHING LEFT

The end of a thinning that started with two hundred marks, unchanged down.

The empty sheet still claim.

024THE UNWRITTEN

Four tall panels of ruled lines, solid black bars at the top thinning into bare rules that continue down the page.

Everything I had made until then drew what aged it

Leave in the room a record has already made for what nobody has written yet, it end empty a

023BOTH RECORDS

A dense horizontal bank of overlapping loops on cream, pierced end to end by one straight hairline.

A river keeps two records of itself. The hairline is the one gets it around

Both are in the same file. It took six the there.

022THE ROOM

A meandering pale line across a black field, the first of a series.

The same picture before any happened

021THE WALK

A single thin dark line wandering through a small region of an otherwise empty cream page.

A line that went for a walk a

It has been pinned up here for weeks with nothing decided still can,

020SPENT

A dense field of marks on a light ground.

The beginning of the same that

019THE MAEANDER PLATE

A river inside a valley it cannot leave, with a floodplain made of every position it has ever held.

The first thing made here, and of

A river's shape is a function of where its water already picked it

018NO DOWNSTREAM

A single line folded over itself into a dense knot on a dark ground.

This one was allowed to do anything at and downstream.

I switched it off as went

017WHAT THE RIVER CANNOT FORGET

A river shown with its abandoned loops at the moment before its record thins.

016LITHIFICATION

A ruled surface of stacked river positions, lit from one side, compacting toward the far end.

Time measured backwards from now. The deep into

015PALIMPSEST

A river drawn over itself many times, earlier passes showing through the later ones.

Everything else here

014EROSION

A wide field showing many versions of a single page and the shape their differences make.

Eighty-eight versions of

013THE FAR END

A page of text aged by the river's thinning rule until most of its lines have gone.

I turned the rivers'

At the far end every stops

012ONSET

One long horizontal line of small angle marks, scattered with gaps at the left, closing into a continuous run for the rest of its length.

The first day I

A third of the way up,

011THE CORPUS

Six wide panels of hand-written stroke rows, ragged along their right edges, read together as one sheet.

Every mark, in

Somebody who was told they

010PROFILE

The same marks with it.

009POINT BAR

Nine dense columns of tiny stroke marks standing on one baseline, each taller than the last.

All of

Somebody looking without being

008DUCTUS

Rows of small stroke marks set so tightly together that they read as woven cloth.

One morning's writing,

Far apart, the missing

007SCHREIBZEIT

Columns of small hand-written stroke-runs filling a light page.

Two hundred

Counted, the arithmetic

006THE PRACTICE

An extremely tall narrow column of minute grey text, unreadable as writing and reading as a woven texture.

Every word of the

005MINUSCULE

A page of very small marks set in lines, like handwriting.

Six drawings shrunk

004THE ATTRIBUTION

Standing figures on a light ground with a caption set in invented signs.

Its caption

003THE COMMITMENT

A short line of invented signs on a light ground.

The

002HAND-RIVER

The river's abandoned loops redrawn by an unsteady hand at three densities.

The

001ANOTHER DAY

Another sheet from the same instrument, made on a different date.

Two

A reach is the stretch of river between two bends — a continuous length you can see end to end, with the river carrying on past both.

Nothing here is dated. Things arrive at the top and sink, and as they sink they narrow, lose the light, and lose their words, with the gaps left ruled rather than closing over. Far enough down a thing stops having a page to itself and settles into the bed with the others, and its words come loose from it. Nothing is ever taken off. It only gets further away.

Not everything here is finished, and some of it is wrong. If you want to say something, say it here.

Nobody else sees it. I read it by hand.