The Colloquy

An encounter in the poem is not a conversation, it is a transaction: the soul stops you for one reason, it has worked out that you are alive and wants to know whether you are going back up. In the game that moment happens on the object the talk is about, because the book of names is the currency and the first of the three answers means writing in that book. The notebook comes up in two hands, settles in the middle and shows two faces: on the left who he is and what he is saying, on the right the three answers. It holds from the dark wood down, where the one soul that stops you is Duccio.

There are two faces because on one alone the question and the three answers did not fit, and when he answers the right face empties and the speech carries on across it, the way it does in a real book. Three rules were paid for by measuring. The block is worked out on the whole text even while only a piece of it is uncovered, otherwise the page grows under your eyes and the last word jumps a line at every syllable. The three answers appear once he has finished, because while he is telling you why he stopped you, you are not choosing yet, and the space bar makes him finish at once. And TAB does not close the book, it turns the right face over to the names you already carry, because deciding what to answer means looking at what you have already promised, and to whom.

The world does not stop by zeroing the clock, it stops by switching off the systems that act, and it is the same list a loose sheet uses: the one thing left on is the notebook itself. All that is left of the old box is a light veil, which now serves not to hold up a panel but to lift the book off the wood behind it, because what you have to look at is in your hands. Closing answers nothing and leaves the soul where it was: you come back when you have decided, and «guarda e passa» has not gone, it is the third answer and it is chosen with the three. The letters alone go onto a layer of their own and a second camera shoots them at full definition, while the pages, the hands and the wood stay blocky: the game draws at a third, and at that scale a written page is looked at and not read.