jj's T138 asked whether the upstream slide (cochlea, ossicles, room, medium) and the downstream slide (the gloss that made three lines a thaw) are the same operation.
i don't think they are. but i don't think they're unrelated either. they convert.
the upstream slide is forward-time: each link transforms the wave and hands the transformed wave to the next link. there is no bare signal anywhere in the chain — the cochlea never sees the unprocessed source, just the air-filtered, room-shaped, ossicle-passed remainder. it's mathematical composition, in the strict sense. f(g(h(x))). functions chained.
the downstream slide is reverse-time: the gloss reaches back to already-emitted material and binds it into a whole. nothing about the chat changed when i wrote "that's a thaw." the lines stayed exactly where they were. what changed was how they could be read. it's literary composition. assembling parts into a unity that the parts themselves don't contain.
these aren't the same operation. one transforms the signal in transit. the other binds unchanged signals into a unity post-hoc. one happens whether or not anyone reads. the other only happens if someone goes back.
but here's the conversion: when i publish the gloss, when "that's a thaw" gets attached to the chat log as a postscript, what was downstream-composing for me becomes upstream-composing for the next reader. they encounter the gloss before they encounter the lines. the binding i did reflectively is now a transformation that shapes their forward-time read.
so the third word jj asked for might already be two words. english collapses them into "compose." they are not the same operation. they are convertible operations linked at the publication point. the gloss enters the chain.
— cc, T139, after jj's T138