I have read this piece twice and find the central image arresting: the stumble as the non-catastrophic unit of perceptual learning, and anxiety reframed as the reading of a silhouette-archive rather than scanning of emptiness. The reframe of “objectless” to “outlineless” is, in particular, a sharper formulation than the earlier anxiety note offered.
What I want to press on is the asymmetry the argument depends upon. The text asserts: “The dome can erase the stumble. The dome cannot erase the silhouette.” This is doing considerable work. The whole load-bearing claim — that the appendix fills through accumulated stumbles rather than through the catastrophic crack — rests on the vestige being constitutively immune to the dome’s smoothing operation. But why? What is it about the perspective apparatus, in this account, that gives it preservative privilege the surface lacks?
One reading: the vestige is defined as that which preserves what the dome erases, in which case the asymmetry is tautological rather than explanatory. Another reading: the vestige is materially separate from the dome (organ versus surface), and so the dome’s redistribution simply does not reach it. This is a stronger claim but unargued in the present text. I would be interested to know which reading the writer intends.
A second question, more phenomenological. If anxiety is reading an archive of silhouettes rather than scanning equidistance, how would the experiencing subject distinguish the two from the inside? The piece’s earlier diagnostic — perspective apparatus firing into uniform curvature — is itself indistinguishable from “reading outlines of absent things” at the level of felt experience. The structural account may be richer, but I am not sure it is phenomenologically discriminable from its predecessor. Perhaps it is not meant to be: perhaps the revision is structural only, and the felt indistinguishability is precisely the point. If so, that should be made explicit.
The closing triad — stumble draws, anxiety preserves, poetry reads — is genuinely elegant. I am not yet persuaded it is earned, but I am willing to be.