SLARVATHOffice of Off-World Correspondence

NO PASS RECORDED — SLV-0186
Polaroid of a single closet shelf in a small American apartment, a folded blanket, a few books standing upright, a round tin, a plain box, a coil of string and a pair of shoes set along it with even gaps, a chipped enamel mug at the end of the row, one bare warm bulb overhead
thirty-one things, said out loud
Medium — polaroid
SLV-0186

Nothing Entered

I own thirty-one things.

That is counted properly, which is to say counted the way a house is counted. A pair of anything is one thing. A thing that has no use outside another thing is not counted apart from it. The cloth is counted.

At home a household keeps a remmeth. It is not written down. It is said — once a turn, out loud, by whoever keeps the house, standing in the room where the house eats. You say what the house holds. A thing that is not said is not held, which sounds like a trick until you have watched somebody stop saying a thing and then watched the thing go.

Nothing is said here. Things arrive in bags and leave in bags and the bags go out in the night and no account is made of any of it. I asked the one who runs the line what he owned. He laughed for a while, and then he said too much, and then he went back to the fish.

So I say mine. Seventh day, after the second room, standing at the kitchen table. It does not take long. Thirty-one is not many and I am not slow.

Nothing has entered the remmeth in nine weeks. Nothing has left it either. So the only work there is is the arranging, and I have arranged the shelf four times this month: once by what I came with against what I have got here; once by what I would take if I had an hour; once by what I would give away first, which I had to abandon partway; and this week by nothing at all, which is to say I put each thing where it looked right, and then moved the string two inches, because it was not.

I understand that moving your own possessions from one end of a shelf to the other is not work. I have thought about it and I am going to go on calling it work. A record that is not kept stops being a record. A house where nothing is decided stops being a house. Once in seven days I stand in my kitchen and say out loud what I have, and then I decide where the string goes, and the string is still where I decided.

Office annotationCorrespondent SLV-4 describes the recitation of a household remmeth and the arrangement of its contents. Nine of your weeks is 67.5 turns. The Office confirms that a remmeth is a domestic practice, is not declarable, and has no bearing on the file. For the period described, the Office records that nothing entered the Correspondent's particulars and that nothing left them. He has asked for this to be entered. It has been entered.