first and form: the name

You are not one self. This is not tragedy. It's more like the weather.

These questions are a practice in self-inquiry: the unguarded yet thoughtful answer discloses something interior (அகம்) — a subject, the grammatical I, a formulation of truth.

To the degree you're able, forget that you ever responded to the questionnaire. Return after a period of time to answer the questions again. The earlier responses seemingly belong to a different person…

Infer the harder truth: the one who answers is provisional. Other versions of self come and go through life. The questionnaire keeps their record — numerous is the I, oneself emerging from others in succession that bears one name.

Find who sleeps.

what is a formulation of truth?

The site serves a sequence of prompts. Call them questions; or think of them as discrete invitations: here, a pause. With each question asked, in that moment, what wells up within requires a language user — you — to translate the past from memory, describing it in language that revivifies it in the present response you, the writer, compose.

Sometimes those fragments congeal into something coherent — or not — amid still other fragments that remain… well, fragmented. Partial. Defiant, in fact, in how unbothered to be coherent some of the fragments may be.

Mistaken would one be to suppose these sketches in word bear little or no meaning to any reader beyond the writer who translated them from their own recollection of a past, in reflex response to a prompt. A question:

vividhā racanā: variegated composition

I envision this website as an instrument to focus attention: not a test, but a mechanic for rendering the past legible in the present. The questionnaire captures a selfie taken from within — subject and archive colluding — so that a single moment may be compared, placed beside, felt through an other. Reproducibility does not diminish aura; the site's structure redistributes it, letting echoes be heard in different rooms.