Description

Description is the general term under which the Tower classes every written act by which a subject is made known to the archive. It is a genus, not a document: a Description may be a single line chalked on a stair-riser, a ratified Phenomenological Description of several hundred leaves, or a marginal correction in a hand nobody has identified. What unites the class is not length or authority but direction — a Description always runs from the Tower toward its subject, and never the reverse. Self-Description, which runs the other way, is filed separately and is the source of a durable quarrel between the Office of Procedural Calibration and the Registry of Forms, the latter holding that anything a subject says about itself is evidence and the former holding that it is testimony, "and testimony is not description until it has been taken down by somebody with a desk" (Fourth Concordance, Annex 2).

The Four Registers

Descriptions are kept in four registers, distinguished by who is permitted to amend them and at what cost. The plain register holds working descriptions made in the field: inventories, sketches, counts of doors. The ratified register holds those descriptions that have passed through a codified methodology — in practice, those composed under The Protocol of Resonant Description or its predecessor procedure, the Initial Containment Amp Description. The disputed register holds descriptions whose subject has been shown to be an Ambiguous Referent, and the held register holds everything sequestered under a Concordance that has since been amended out of force, which is most of them.

Movement between registers is common and downward. One description of the landing on 4,106 was ratified in the spring, disputed by midsummer, and by the following winter had been copied twice into the plain register by clerks who preferred the earlier wording. The Cataloguing office has never regarded this as an error. "A description demoted is a description consulted," runs the annotation in the office's standing book (Cataloguing Protocol, Clause 11).

The Winter of the Second Recension

The modern administration of description dates from the events of a winter now remembered only as the Second Recension, when the accumulated descriptions of a single floor were found to disagree with one another on the number of its stairwells. There were, by the ratified register, four. The plain register held two. The floor itself, when walked, offered three, of which one led nowhere and was therefore struck from the count by the surveyor, Surveyor Alne Marrow, over the objection of every clerk who had already written the figure down.

The dispute would have been settled by citation, as such disputes usually are, had the two governing Concordances not said opposite things. The Second Concordance holds that "where descriptions conflict, the earliest ratified is to be preferred, being nearest in time to the subject as found" (Annex 7). The Ninth Concordance, written some years later and evidently in a different temper, holds that "the later description subsumes the earlier, which is retained only as a record of what was wrongly thought" (Annex 1). Applied together, the two rules make every description simultaneously preferred and superseded.

"It is not the business of this Office to say whether a thing was four stairwells or three. It is the business of this Office to say what was written, when, by whom, and upon what authority — and to keep saying it after everybody has stopped caring."

— Office of Procedural Calibration, Memorandum on the Second Recension

Description and Drafting

Description is frequently confused with Ontological Drafting, and the confusion is not confined to junior staff. Description records what is; drafting proposes what might be recorded and therefore, by the Tower's peculiar logic, what might be. The distinction was drawn sharply in the Fifth Concordance, Annex 9, which forbids the two practices from sharing a desk, a lamp, or a supply cupboard. The prohibition is observed intermittently, and the Doctrine of Incompletability notes with approval that no description has ever been finished, a fact the drafters cite constantly and the describers resent.

Objections

A persistent minority position, associated with the cataloguer Ovin Tarr and never formally withdrawn, holds that description is not a genre at all but a symptom of the archive's refusal to admit that certain subjects will not hold still. Tarr's complaint, filed against the Map 1 Initial Containment Amp Description, argued that the object of a description is created by the describing and that the archive should accordingly describe fewer things and count the ones it has more often. The complaint was rejected on the ground that it was itself a description. Tarr was reassigned to the counting stations and is understood to have found the work congenial.

Practical Notes

Descriptions are entered in ink on the recto only. Erasures are not permitted; an amended description stands beside its predecessor, and a reader wishing to know the current position must read both and decide. Clerks are reminded that a description of a description is a legitimate holding but must be entered on a separate floor, and that the practice of describing one's own desk is not a description of anything in the Tower's sense and will be returned.