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To index them is to say: You were here. I felt you. And even invisible, you will appear in the back of the book, under ‘I,’ for invisible, or ‘G,’ for guest, or simply at the end, on the last page, where the empty entry reads:
—, — — all pages.
This is closer to than detection. Mourning, as Freud observed, is the slow work of withdrawing attachment from someone who is no longer there. An index of the invisible guest is a tool for that work. We name the empty chair, the unsent letter, the word bitten back. We give each absence its own line, its own page number. In doing so, we make the invisible guest indexable —not visible, but locatable. Not present, but findable. IV. The Self as Haunted Index Finally, consider that every self is an index of its own invisible guests. We carry within us the people we could not become, the paths not taken, the versions of ourselves that died in childhood or were killed by politeness. Our anxieties, our compulsive repetitions, our sudden aversions—these are index entries for guests we cannot see. index of the invisible guest