Decree of Occluded Vision

The Decree of Occluded Vision is an administrative instrument of the Decree of Luminous Stewardship family, first sealed in the winter of Year 412 of the Present Recension and revised eleven times thereafter without a corresponding revision of its title. It governs the treatment of sights that have been lawfully removed from view but not from the record — a category the Decree itself defines, in its opening clause, as "the seen that is no longer seen but is nevertheless held." It is the principal authority cited in matters of Occluded Grade classification, and the source of the standing friction between the Annex of Peripheral Vision and the optical holdings of Spiral 490.

Origin and sealing

The Decree was drafted by Steward Elled of the Third Scriptorium, whose grievance against the Ordinances is recorded at unusual length in the margins of the fair copy. Elled had spent nine years attempting to have a shuttered aperture on Spiral 490 formally acknowledged as shut; the Ordinances, as then written, provided only for apertures that were open, apertures that had never been installed, and apertures whose status was pending. A fourth condition — open, but not to be looked through — had no form.

The Decree of Occluded Vision supplied that form. Its first clause establishes that occlusion is an act, not an absence, and therefore requires a signature. Its second requires that every occlusion be registered twice: once at the aperture and once in the personnel record of the officer who ordered it. Elled's own signature appears twice on the surviving instrument, in two different inks, which the Bureau of Static Metrics has declined to explain.

Relationship to the Kairologos

The Decree is closely bound to the daily event known as the Kairologos, during which the primary verification lumens are occluded for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Clause 9 of the Decree holds that the Kairologos is a suspension of vision and not an occlusion of it, on the reasoning that a lumen which is extinguished by schedule has not been occluded but merely persuaded to rest. This distinction is load-bearing: suspensions require no signature, and the Tower therefore performs 1,577 unsigned suspensions each year while the Decree's registrars sit idle for exactly that period daily, by convention, out of respect.

"The registrar shall not sign during the suspension, nor shall the absence of signature be construed as omission, the hour being the Tower's and not the office's."

— Decree of Occluded Vision, Clause 9(b)

The Delta Sequence and the map dispute

Following Directorial Decree 447-Alpha, which commissioned The Delta Sequence Map, the Decree of Occluded Vision was amended to require that every occluded sight on the Map be marked with a symbol distinguishing it from a sight that had simply not yet been surveyed. The amendment did not specify the symbol. Three scriptoria adopted three different marks, and the resulting cartographic dispute consumed the better part of two decades.

The Conditionalist reading, advanced chiefly by Registrar Halven Mour, holds that an unsurveyed sight is itself a species of occlusion — the Tower having chosen not to look — and that one symbol therefore suffices for both. The opposing reading, associated with the Annex of Peripheral Vision, insists that the two are separated by the whole weight of the Decree's second clause and that conflating them would make the Map "a document of guesswork dressed in surveyor's clothing" (Annex of Peripheral Vision, Memorial 14). No resolution has been sealed. Both symbols remain in use on the current edition, often on the same shelf.

Conflicts with the Third Concordance

The Decree's Clause 22 permits the temporary occlusion of any optical instrument upon written application. This sits awkwardly against the Third Concordance (Clause 112, Annex Delta), which provides that the Lens of Unbroken Gaze shall not be turned, cleaned, or occluded. The Librarians have never reconciled the two. The prevailing practice is to treat the Lens as exempt from the Decree by virtue of its name, an argument first made by a junior clerk named Osia Tarn and repeated without improvement ever since.

Attempts to settle the matter by reference to the Obsidian Decree have failed on procedural grounds: The Obsidian Decree Document incorporates the Decree of Occluded Vision only by reference, while The Obsidian Decree — formally ratified as Editorial Decree 7 — reproduces its text with the occlusion clauses struck through and a note reading "see elsewhere." Where elsewhere is has not been recorded. The Decree of Conveyance is frequently cited in these disputes despite having no bearing on them.

Registration and its failures

Occlusions are entered in the Register of Withheld Sight, held on Spiral 490 under the joint custody of the Annex of Peripheral Vision and the Atrium of Unseen Lineages. The Register's failure rate is a matter of record. In the winter of Year 468, a registrar sealed forty-one occlusions against a single aperture and then, on discovering the duplication, sealed forty-one corresponding de-occlusions without consulting the aperture's custodian. The custodian, one Beriel Sann, arrived to find the aperture both open and closed according to the Register, and shut it himself, thereby creating a forty-second occlusion that no document authorizes and no one has been willing to remove.

Holders of the Occluded Grade are entitled to inspect the Register but not to correct it. Inspections are conducted in the reading room adjoining the Register, which is lit by a single lumen on a chain; visitors are asked not to look directly at it.

Current standing

The Decree of Occluded Vision remains in force in its eleventh recension. It has outlived the aperture that occasioned it, which was unsealed and rebuilt as a wall in Year 501. The wall is registered as an occlusion. The Decree's defenders note that this is precisely the kind of case it was written for, and its critics note the same thing.