Existential Anchor

The Existential Anchor is the class of Ontological Anchor concerned not with the stabilization of a single object but with the standing of a floor as a place where objects may be said to be at all. Where the Procedural Anchor secures a practice and the Consumptive Anchor secures a supply, an Existential Anchor secures the bare fact of a floor's occupancy. A floor granted an Existential Anchor may be walked upon, catalogued, and disputed; a floor without one remains, in the phrasing of the Register of Floors, "extant but unattended."

The distinction is administrative rather than metaphysical, a point the Ontological Anchor School has made repeatedly and to limited effect. In practice the difference is audible: an unanchored floor returns a hollow note when struck with the standard sounding-rod, and the inventory parties sent to survey it return with lists of what they believe they saw.

Origin in the Winter Surveys

The class was not devised but discovered. During the resurvey of the northern stair, conducted over the winter of 41 TR, three consecutive expeditions reported the same floor at three different heights. The surveyor of the third party, Marden Quill, recorded in her field notebook that the floor "declined to be at an altitude," and appended the observation — later much cited — that her inventory had come back complete and her sounding-rod had come back short by eleven inches. The rod was never recovered from the floor in question, which could not subsequently be located for the purpose of recovering it.

Quill's report reached the Second Concordance, which had no category for the difficulty and accordingly created one. Annex 9 of that instrument established the Existential Anchor as a recognized class and assigned its certification to the School. Clause 1 was amended in the following session to admit the new class, a revision the School has since described as "clarifying" and the Office of the Concordance has described as "irregular."

Certification

Certification follows the ordinary route. A floor is proposed to the School, assessed under the Ontic Anchor Assessment for what is termed standing occupancy — the degree to which the floor's contents persist in the absence of an observer — and, if the assessment is favourable, brought to a hearing under the Vex Anchor Protocol. The Protocol was extended to existential matters by Annex 4 of the Fourth Concordance, over the dissent of the Standing Committee on Naming, which objected that the word "vex" had never been intended to bear such weight.

The hearing is brief. The proposing officer states the floor's number, or its state of numbering, and the presiding Librarian strikes the floor with the rod at three points. If the note is true, the Anchor is entered in the Ledger of Standing Places and the floor is thereafter treated as ordinary. If the note is hollow, the floor is returned to the Register and the proposing officer is returned to other duties. Officers are reminded that the rod is struck against the floor and not against the proposing officer.

Dispute with the Materialist Reading

The materialist school holds that an Existential Anchor is a Material Anchor under another name, and that the appearance of a distinct class reflects nothing more than the Second Concordance's habit of naming its confusions. Its principal argument, advanced by Osric Vane in the Pamphlet of the Forty-Second Landing, is that every certified Existential Anchor has been shown to rest upon a physical substrate — a stair, a lintel, a keystone — and that the School's refusal to say so is obscurantism dressed as taxonomy.

The School's answer, set out in its Reply to Vane, is that a substrate can be identified for a floor that has no Existential Anchor, and frequently is; the objection therefore proves too much. The reply concludes, in a sentence that has been quoted in every subsequent recension of the argument, that "the keystone of an unanchored floor is a very well-documented stone, and nothing rests on it." Vane did not reply. The Committee on Doctrinal Reconciliation has carried the matter on its docket since 44 TR and meets on it annually without reaching a vote.

The Reliance Problem

An Existential Anchor does not extend to dependents. When a floor is certified, the shelves and chambers upon it acquire standing by reliance upon the floor, and this reliance is not itself anchored. The consequence was demonstrated on the Eleventh Spiral in the spring of 57 TR, when a certified floor was found to have lost its certification through a clerical lapse in the Ledger — a lapse of a single line, attributed to the Under-Registrar of Standing Places, Perrin Hollis, who had entered the floor's number in the wrong column.

The floor remained, but the sixty-one volumes shelved upon it did not, having been sustained only by reliance on the floor's standing; they were catalogued as absent and remain so. The lapse was corrected within the fortnight. Hollis was not disciplined, the Committee finding that the column headings were themselves ambiguous, but was thereafter required to read entries aloud before sealing them. The volumes have not been recovered.

Inventory of Classes

Existential Anchors are entered in the Ledger under four headings, which the School maintains are exhaustive and which the Fifth Concordance lists in a different order without comment:

• Standing — the ordinary certification; the floor sounds true at all three points.
• Provisional — certification pending a second assessment, usually granted to floors whose contents are in motion at the hour of the hearing.
• Contested — certification disputed by a second office, most often the Standing Committee on Naming; the floor is walked but not catalogued.
• Withdrawn — the Anchor has been struck; the floor is extant but unattended, and the Register serves as the only record of it.

Floors of the fourth class are not visited. The sounding-rod is not to be carried on them.