Rigor is a costume. The year produces what does not fit the year — work that cannot be settled in its own season, that resolves only when read across the boundary. The Excise clock keeps the three-hundred-and-sixty-four-day ledger; everything outside that ledger is the imprint’s own.

We dress this work in scholarly apparatus not because the apparatus is the work, but because the costume is part of how the work asks to be read. Citation, hash, footnote, seal: the surface declares the standard. Retrospective coherence is that standard. The piece must hold when looked back at, not when first set down.