Clarification

The Clarification is the Tower's general term for any instrument issued by a recognised clarificatory body — the Board of Concordant Interpretation, the Committee of Concordant Reconciliation, or, in narrow matters of naming, the Office of Onomastic Clarification — which restates an existing provision without altering it, and which is thereafter cited as though it had. A Clarification is not an amendment. It is not a Concordance, though it is numbered like one, sealed like one, and shelved between them. Librarians of the Sixth Interval distinguish the two by weight, on the grounds that Clarifications are bound in boards of nine millimetres and Concordances in eleven, and that no other reliable difference has been found.

The form is ancient and the procedure is not. The earliest extant Clarification, Clarification 17-C, survives only because it was preemptively catalogued and never formally issued; the Office of Onomastic Clarification has maintained for four centuries that an unissued Clarification is nonetheless a Clarification, and the archive has never felt able to disagree.

Origin and the Problem of the Seventh Year

Clarification emerged in response to a difficulty that the Concordances could not resolve without amending themselves, which they did not do except on Thursdays. When a provision was found to be ambiguous, the parties bound by it could either dispute its meaning before the Board of Concordant Interpretation or petition for a restatement. In the seventh year of the Interregnum of the Ninth Landing the backlog of disputes reached eleven thousand, and the Board declined to hear any further cases until the stack had been reduced. The solution, proposed by the then-Recorder Amet Vell and adopted under pressure rather than conviction, was to issue short restatements that decided nothing and could not be appealed, because an appeal requires an operative decision.

Vell's innovation is generally regarded as successful. It has never been popular.

The Numbering and its Inconsistencies

Clarifications are numbered with an Arabic numeral and a single letter, in the order of their sealing rather than their drafting. This has produced a corpus in which Clarification 44-Z predates Clarification 17-C in the register while postdating it in every internal citation. The Third Clarification on Non-Existent Affects is numbered in the same series but is, by its own first clause, a Declaration of Clarification rather than a Clarification, a distinction that has cost the Office of Registry Reconciliation two separate commissions and one resignation.

The suffixes are not sequential either. Letters are assigned by the sealing clerk from a set of twenty-six, and the set is not reset between numerals. The result, recorded in the standing instructions of the Scriptorium of the Lower Landing, is that "no clerk shall seal a Clarification bearing a letter already used in that numeral, nor remark upon the reuse of a numeral already sealed."

Relationship to the Seventy-Seventh

The Seventy-Seventh Clarification is the most cited Clarification in the Tower and the least read. It was issued as a Declaration of Clarification by the Board, and its post-clarification annexes codified the Precept of Attentional Recession, by which a Clarification's authority recedes in proportion to the frequency with which it is invoked. The Committee of Concordant Reconciliation later issued Clarification 44-Z as an appendix to the Seventy-Seventh, a step that the Board has described in its own minutes as "an appendix to a document the Committee did not issue, on a subject the Committee did not raise."

Practitioners nonetheless treat the two as a single instrument. The Petition for Clarification is the ordinary means of engaging them, and the mechanisms of the Seventy-Seventh are engaged in that way several hundred times a year, most often on Spiral Landing Lambda, where the queues are longest. Agitation on that landing in the winter of the Year of the Closed Stair produced the Clarification on Radial Terminology, which settled the question of what may be called a radius and left the question of what may be called a queue untouched.

Textual Dispute: The Recension of Clarification 31-B

Scholarly disagreement attaches chiefly to whether a Clarification binds the office that issued it. The position of the Board, restated in Amendment 9-d, is that a Clarification binds all parties including its author, since a restatement of an obligation is an obligation to restate it correctly. The position of the Concordance of the Inner Stair, Article 12, is that a Clarification binds no one, being "a saying of the same thing in other words, and words spoken twice are not two words."

The contradiction has never been reconciled. It surfaced most sharply in the dispute over Clarification 31-B, of which two recensions circulate: one in the Register of Sealed Instruments bearing a single seal, and one in the Appendix of Unsealed Readings bearing three. Both are in the same hand. The Scriptorium's note on the matter, filed by the Under-Secretary Perrin Ost in the fourth year of the Quiet Consistory, reads only: "The three-seal recension is later. It is not therefore correct, but it is later, and we have shelved it accordingly."

Practical Notes

Clarifications are consulted in the reading room of the Board on floors of the Second Interval, by written application, and are not removed from the room. A Clarification may be copied by hand, but the copy must be marked at the head with the words NOT A CLARIFICATION in a hand larger than the text it introduces; this requirement, introduced by the Ordinance of the Third Scriptorium and never rescinded, has made the Board's copying tables the most heavily used furniture in the Interval.

"Where a Clarification has been copied, the copy shall be marked NOT A CLARIFICATION in a hand no smaller than the body of the text, and the marking shall not be abbreviated."

— Ordinance of the Third Scriptorium, clause 8

Draft Clarifications awaiting the Board's attention are held in the antechamber on Landing Gamma, where they are stacked in order of receipt and, by standing instruction, not read. The visiting rule there is that no one may enter carrying a Concordance, as the antechamber has insufficient shelf.