Bureau of Linear Hermeneutics

The Bureau of Linear Hermeneutics is the Tower office charged with the reading of linear measures — that is, with determining what a stated length was intended to mean when it was written down. It is one of three bodies empowered to interpret survey data, alongside the Bureau of Linear Interpretation and the Bureau of Linear Intent, and it is the only one of the three whose findings do not take effect until ratified by the Lens of Linear Scrutiny. The Bureau occupies Floors 640 through 643 of the western kilnstack, in quarters it has held since the refitting of 1804, and its seal — a rule crossed by an open eye — appears on survey returns as far down as Floor 88 and as far up as anyone has carried paper.

Distinction from enumeration

The Bureau does not measure anything, and is sensitive on the point. The Bureau of Linear Feet enumerates lengths; the Bureau of Linear Hermeneutics asks what a length, once enumerated, is to be understood as saying. A line recorded as nine feet may be nine feet of corridor, nine feet of gap between two corridors, or nine feet of the same corridor counted twice, and it is the hermeneutic clerks who decide which reading the record will bear. The distinction is old and frequently tested. Provision 17(a) of the Seventh Concordance sets out the tripartite arrangement by which enumeration, interpretation, and intent are kept in separate hands, and the Bureau cites that provision in the opening paragraph of nearly every ruling it issues, including rulings that have nothing to do with it.

Ruling 88.45 and the Bureau of Linear Intent

The Bureau's best-known act is Ruling 88.45, issued in the winter of that year, which held that a length stated without a terminus is not a length but an inclination. The ruling was intended to settle a dispute over the misdrawn boundary between Floors 14,302 and 14,303, and it did settle it, but it also created a class of measurements that no existing body was competent to hold. Within eleven weeks the Bureau of Linear Intent had been constituted to keep the register of these pitched volumes and to license the surveyors who would go on producing them. The Bureau of Linear Hermeneutics has never publicly regretted Ruling 88.45. It has, however, twice declined to revisit it.

"A finding of inclination is a finding of the reader, not of the rule. The rule has no opinion."

— Bureau of Linear Hermeneutics, Ruling 88.45, preamble

Annex Γ and the 1987 interpretive ruling

In 1987 the Bureau issued an interpretive ruling on the recursive equations contained in Annex Γ of the Thirty-Second Concordance. The equations had been copied forward through four recensions with a cumulative drift of one character per recension, and the Bureau was asked whether the Annex should be read as it now stood or as it had originally been set down. The ruling held, by four clerks to two, that a Concordance annex is authoritative in the form in which it is currently shelved, drift included, on the ground that the Tower has no access to an earlier Tower. The dissent — filed by Clerk-Registrar Hesper Mune, who argued that a text which revises itself is not a text but a weather — remains in the record and is quoted in the training of every incoming hermeneut.

The ruling's practical consequence was to make the Annex self-applying, and it has since been cited in support of at least forty unrelated amendments, a use the Bureau has neither endorsed nor forbidden.

Dispute with the Structural Bureau

The Bureau's relations with the Bureau of Structural Hermeneutics are correct and cold. The two offices divide the reading of the built fabric between them — linear measures to the one, standing forms to the other — but the boundary has never been surveyed. The Structural Bureau audits survivals of the older name for Floor 14,302, the Hall of Comfortable Amplitude, and has issued rulings on the harmlessness of that name; the Linear Bureau maintains that the name is a measure and therefore its own to construe. Since 1911 the two have observed a working arrangement under which neither rules on the other's floor, an arrangement recorded nowhere and renewed annually by letter.

The disagreement is not merely territorial. The question at issue is whether a name that describes a dimension is a name or a dimension, and the Concordances do not agree. The Ninth Concordance, Article 3, treats descriptive floor-names as designations and thus as property of the Structural Bureau; the Fourteenth Concordance, Schedule B, lists the same names among the linear registers. Both are in force. Both are cited.

Procedure and the ratification requirement

The Bureau's findings are advisory until ratified by the Lens of Linear Scrutiny, which is housed on Floor 482 in the Bureau of Linear Feet and which reads a submitted measure at a stated aperture. Ratification is refused when the Lens discloses a second reading the Bureau did not name; the Bureau is then required to issue a supplementary finding accounting for it. In the ordinary case this is a formality. In the case of the Linear Snarlers it has not been, and the Bureau's file on that body — reopened six times, closed five — is the longest held by the office.

Rulings enter the Register of Active Interpretative Bodies on the day of ratification and are considered binding on the floor named, on the floors above and below it, and on the surveyors who drew the line. The Bureau does not rule on measures submitted in pencil. This is stated on the door of Floor 641 and has been since the rebuilding.

Holdings and current work

The Bureau's reading room on Floor 642 holds the following instruments, all in daily use:

• The Coherence Ledger, in eleven folio volumes, recording every finding since 1804;
• the ruled slate on which disputed termini are drawn and redrawn before the clerks;
• a bound set of the Non Linear Index, annotated in three hands, of which one is unidentified;
• the Mune dissent, framed.

The Bureau is presently engaged on a consolidated reading of the linear provisions scattered across the Eleventh, Twenty-Third, and Forty-First Concordances, a project begun in 1962 and expected to require a further generation of clerks. Its current presiding clerk, Ovart Sel, has said of the work only that it is "a long line, and we are reading it" (Address to the Floor 640 assembly, 1998).