Arrin Protocol

The Arrin Protocol is a set of observational procedures for documenting phenomena that reference themselves, established within the Referential School and attributed to Supervisor Arrin, junior stack-attendant of the Weeping Gallery from 14-Φ-992 to 18-Σ-1003. It comprises eleven standing rules, four schedules of permitted phrasing, and a closing clause governing the disposition of any record produced under it. The Protocol is not a treaty, an ordinance, or a Concordance; it binds no one outside the School, and the School has never claimed otherwise in writing.

Origin

The Protocol was drafted in the winter of 17-Σ-1000, during the third and most severe of the Recursive Drafts to afflict the Gallery's lower shelves. Attendants filing inventories of documents that described their own filing had begun producing inventories of inventories, and by the eleventh of the month the Stack Ledger of that season contained entries whose ink had not yet dried when they were cited as sources for earlier entries.

Supervisor Arrin's remedy was procedural rather than editorial: where a document referred to itself, the observer was to record the reference and then record the recording, in that order, at a fixed distance from the margin measured in Arrin Units — four tenths of a finger. The first full application, on 19-Σ-1000, produced a clear and usable account of a page that had been unreadable for nine days. The School adopted the method by provisional warrant on 2-Ω-1001.

The eleven rules

The rules proceed from observation to inscription without intermediate summary, a structure Arrin defended on the grounds that "a summary of a paradox is a second paradox wearing the first one's coat" (Referential School, Warrant of Adoption, clause 3). Rules I through IV concern the establishment of a vantage; V through VIII the inscription of what is seen; IX through XI the sealing and shelving of the product.

Rule IX is the most cited and least obeyed. It requires that the observer's own name be entered on the record twice — once as author, once as subject — and that the two entries be made in different hands. The School has never satisfactorily explained how this is to be accomplished by a single attendant, and in practice the second entry is usually made by whoever is nearest, which has led to the names of several cats appearing in the Register of Secondary Hands.

The Protocol is frequently confused with Protocol XVII, Protocol Delta/7, and Protocol 12-D, all of which borrow its phrasing. Protocol Inquest of 9--1011 ruled that the confusion is "regrettable but not actionable," and the ruling has been appealed twice.

Application to lithic accretion

In 6-Γ-1004 the Protocol was extended, by Arrin's own considerable irritation, to the monitoring of Spontaneous Lithic Accretion in adjacent spiral structures. The accretion had been observed to thicken measurably whenever an attendant wrote the word stone in a ledger describing it, and thinned when the word was struck through. Arrin's schedules of permitted phrasing proved adequate to the task: Schedule C, the Discretionary Vocabulary, permits a writer to describe an object as "of uncertain mineral identity" and forbids the names of any material the accretion might be mistaken for.

"Let the record say what the record does, and let the stone be dealt with by the persons assigned to the stone."

— Supervisor Arrin, Schedule C, marginal note

The extension is the portion of the Protocol most often enforced in the Weeping Gallery, largely because the Gallery's beadles learned it and never learned the rest.

Dispute over authorship

A persistent scholarly disagreement concerns whether the Protocol is properly Arrin's at all. Third Concordance, Annex 4, assigns authorship to "the attendant then on duty in the Weeping Gallery," without naming anyone. Ninth Concordance, Annex 4, names Supervisor Arrin explicitly and adds, in a footnote, that the Annex is "inserted for completeness and is not to be relied upon." The two annexes are numbered identically, sit four pages apart in the compiled edition, and have never been reconciled.

The Provisional Logging Protocol adopted by the School in 14-Δ-1008 recites the Ninth's language; the Registry of Attributed Procedures follows the Third. The Office of Recensions has declined four times to settle the matter, most recently in a note of 21--1014 observing that "the Protocol works whether or not anyone wrote it." Librarian Arrin, Senior Librarian Arrin, Arrin of the Seventh Landing, Arrin of the Unbound Folio, and Arrin of the Empty Pockets have all been proposed as the author by one party or another; the last of these is not a person but a stairwell, and the proposal is understood to be satirical.

Decline and retention

Observance of the Protocol outside the Gallery fell sharply after the Regency of the Empty Chair issued its circular of 3-Ξ-1012, which held that any procedure requiring its own name to be written twice was "self-evidently an instrument of the phenomenon it proposes to measure." The Referential School answered that the circular was itself written under Rule IX and had therefore proved the Protocol rather than refuted it. No further correspondence is recorded.

The Protocol remains in force wherever the Referential School has standing, and is the only procedure in the Tower for which the office copy is kept in a locked case. Attendants consulting the case must sign for the key in the register, and the register must be signed for in the register. Pens are not provided.