Objection: Purloined Letters

I was thinking about Tom's shorthand pieces and wondering about the hidden meanings behind the text. Also, last week when we did the erasure activity, there was talk about how when the text became obscured on the pages they somehow transformed into being "text as object." I wondered if Tom considered his shorthand pieces "appropriated text," even though the legibility and the meaning of the text was obscured. What makes text become an object? When its legibility is obscured? It made me think of the idea of the purloined letter, where the idea of the letter with unknown text takes precedence over the actual meaning of the text in it. Is the way we view the shorthand pieces markedly different because we know that there is hidden meaning in the shorthand text used to make the piece? If it were a piece made of multiple curved lines, how would we view the piece differently?