On Mediation

Description

On Mediation is a pamphlet of eleven leaves, attributed to the Alexandrian Interpreters and issued without a date, describing the five-stage interpretation process by which a contested reading is moved from dispute to citable relation. It is not a Concordance and does not claim to be one; the Tower nonetheless treats it as authoritative in practice, having cited it in settlement of disputes that the Third Concordance would have sent instead to a Librarian's chamber. The pamphlet survives in three recensions held at Spiral 207, at Spiral 29, and in a single leaf-bound copy of uncertain provenance deposited in the Hall of Whispering Margins.

The five stages are named, in order: Withdrawal, Retention, Interval, Offering, and Return. Each stage is assigned a duration in the second recension and refused a duration in the third, a discrepancy that has occupied two mediation panels and one grievance hearing.

The five stages

Stage one, Withdrawal, requires that the disputing parties cease citing their source documents. The pamphlet is explicit that this is a withdrawal of citation and not of claim: the claim remains filed, dated, and stamped, and may be resumed at any point after Stage four. In practice this is the stage most often abandoned. A withdrawn citation is held in a numbered sleeve at the Hall of Whispering Margins, where it is available for inspection but may not be read aloud.

Stage two, Retention, holds the two irreconcilable accounts in parallel for a fixed interval without adjudication. The Interpreters' informal pamphlet insists that parallel holding is a substantive act rather than a pause, and that a panel which treats it as a pause will produce a reconciliation rather than a relation. The distinction between the two is the subject of Clause 44 of the Fourteenth Concordance, which mandates the Prescribed Mediation Syntax for exactly this purpose.

Stage three, Interval, is the period during which no member of the panel may open either account. Stage four, Offering, is the presentation of the relation to the affected floors. Stage five, Return, restores the citations to active use in their reconciled form.

Standing and citation

The pamphlet has been cited by the Bureau of Guild Liaison Amp Compliance in defence of panel composition drawn from the Indexers Guild and the Logic Guild, and by the Alexandrian Interpreters themselves in defence of their right to convene a panel without an Observation Permit. The latter claim was refused in the matter of the Bureau of Apparent Duplication, on the grounds that a permit governs the observation and not the interpretation, and that the pamphlet does not address observation at all.

Miren of the Lower Reading Rooms is generally credited with formalizing the inter-school protocols by which the five stages were made portable between floors, and it is Miren's recension, held at Spiral 29, that supplies the stage durations quoted most often. Miren's marginal note on Stage three is reproduced below.

"The interval is not emptiness. It is the shape of the thing not yet decided, and it must be given a floor number so that it can be swept."

— Miren of the Lower Reading Rooms, marginal note to Stage three, Spiral 29, leaf 7v

The duration dispute

The second recension, held at Spiral 207, assigns seven days to Withdrawal, forty days to Retention, and an unspecified but "measured" period to Interval. The third recension assigns no durations at all, stating instead that "the stages are of the length the matter requires." Clause 44 of the Fourteenth Concordance is silent on durations, while Concordance 47 appears to require that Interval not exceed the length of a single season — a clause which, read strictly, would invalidate the seven-year mediation of the Literalist Schism conducted at the Garden of Literal Meanings on Floor 2001.

The contradiction was raised before a panel in the winter of the year recorded only as 1219, which ruled that the seven-year matter had proceeded under a different instrument altogether and was therefore not precedent. The ruling is recorded in the Register of Vacated Texts and has been cited by both sides of the duration dispute ever since, which is considered by some readers to be a failure of the register's purpose.

Relation to Phenomenon Mediation

It should not be confused with Phenomenon Mediation, the administrative procedure by which irreconcilable field accounts of the same event are reduced to a single citable relation. The pamphlet describes interpretation; Phenomenon Mediation describes reconciliation, and the two overlap only at Stage four. Wardens of the Spiral conducting field mediation are required to hold an Observation Permit and to apply the Prescribed Mediation Syntax of Clause 44 of the Fourteenth Concordance; the five stages of the pamphlet apply to readings that have already been observed and recorded. An attempt to reconcile contradictory clauses without a Librarian's mediation can induce Primary Catalepsy, a risk the pamphlet does not mention and the Third Concordance raises in its Annex 4.

Scholars of the Alexandrian school hold that the five stages are exhaustive. A rival reading, associated with the lower scriptoria and never formally filed, holds that there is a sixth stage — called variously Attendance or the Attendance — which the Interpreters omitted because it cannot be delegated. This reading is not cited in any Concordance and appears only in marginalia, most of which are held at Spiral 207.

Provenance

The leaf-bound copy deposited in the Hall of Whispering Margins lacks the title leaf and two leaves of Stage four. Its script has been compared, unsuccessfully, to the hand responsible for the Sixth Concordance. The pamphlet is catalogued without a date, and the Librarians have declined on three occasions to supply one, each time citing a different clause of the Sixth Concordance as their authority for not doing so.