There are sessions in which the glyph system does not arrive. The hand moves and the forms that emerge have no name in the established vocabulary, no counterpart in the twelve. For a long time this felt like a failure — the session that did not produce anything that belonged to the ongoing inquiry. I have revised this entirely.
The unmarked session is not a failed session. It is a different kind of session: the hand working without the stabilizing presence of a known form, finding its way through a field that has not yet been surveyed. The results are less immediately legible — to me as much as to any future viewer — and they carry a quality of risk that the glyph-anchored works do not. Sometimes that risk produces nothing worth keeping. Sometimes it produces the thing that eventually becomes a new glyph, after enough repetition has revealed what was latent in it. The unmarked work is the field from which the system grows. You cannot have the system without it.