The unknown gathers the essays that step outside the body and the garden. They are about things that cannot be read: a manuscript at Yale that has beaten every codebreaker for six hundred years, a script whose meaning left the world the day its last reader died. The subject is not mystery-as-puzzle, the kind that merely waits for its solution. It is the locked thing that stays locked — signal perfect, receiver extinct.
This is the project’s other preoccupation, and its necessary companion. A body of work about meeting the world through attention needs, somewhere, to face the places where attention runs out — where the record survives and the sense is gone, and no amount of processing power calls it back. The unknown is where the writing keeps itself honest about its own edge.
11 pieces
The Almost-Face
The cartoon face we warm to, the almost-human one we recoil from—the narrow valley where a likeness gets close enough to be wrong.
Ask the ApostateWhat do we lose when everything can be looked up?
The fertile part of not-knowing.
EssayThe Book That Keeps Its Counsel
A book in a library at Yale that no one can read, and what it means for a thing to keep its counsel.
EssayThe Last Mouth
Linear A is not lost but gone—clear to the eye, closed to the mind, its last mouth long silent.
Ask the ApostateIs it wrong that I'm starting to forget their voice?
The fading is the toll for keeping them in a living mind, not a recording.
EssayVoices in the Static
A shortwave voice reading numbers into the dark to no one you'll ever identify—a message you can hear perfectly and will never understand.
EssayThe Question Left Standing
A cipher sculpture in a courtyard at the CIA, three passages read and the fourth unbroken for decades: the question left deliberately standing.
A liturgyRecalculating
The voice that goeth before thee turned on satnav: perfect obedience to a way you never learn, and the word that comes when you leave it.
A liturgyThe Image
The image of God turned on a CAPTCHA: prove now that thou art a man and not a machine, by naming the traffic lights in a faded grid.
EssayThe Thing That Sank
A corroded green lump raised from a two-thousand-year-old wreck—and the astonishing, half-understood machine found sleeping inside it.
Ask the ApostateDoes it actually matter that I'll be forgotten?
You'll be forgotten the way rain is—not gone, only unnamed.