Pillarist Concordance (Provisional)

The Pillarist Concordance (Provisional) is the instrument under which the discipline of Pillar Mapping is conducted in the Tower, issued in provisional form and never ratified in any other. It assigns the whole of Pillar Mapping to the Order of Cartographic Resonance and prescribes the approved methodologies by which a pillar is located, measured, recorded, and thereafter acknowledged to be a pillar. The word Provisional in its title is not a mark of incompleteness; it is a jurisdictional designation, and its consequences are described below.

Copies are held at the Reading Desk of the Seventeenth Landing and in the locked annex behind it. The Annex is opened on the second and fourth mornings of each ten-day, and no food is permitted inside it.

Scope and Status

The Concordance governs Pillar Mapping alone. It does not govern stairwells, which fall under the ordinary Concordances, nor floor-naming, which by longstanding arrangement belongs to the Office of Floor Names and is not to be disturbed by anyone holding a plumb-line. Its authority derives from the general law of provisional instruments: under Concordance 0, a document issued provisionally retains full operative force for as long as its provisional state endures, which in the case of the Pillarist Concordance has been since its issuance and is expected to continue.

The practical effect is that the Concordance binds. Appeals against it must be lodged provisionally, in the provisional register, on provisional forms, and are heard by a panel whose own appointment is provisional — a recursion the Registry of Provisional Holdings has twice declined to resolve, on the grounds that resolution is not within its clause.

Approved Methodologies

The Concordance recognizes four methods of Pillar Mapping, in descending order of ceremonial weight: direct sighting from a floor of known number; triangulation from two floors of known number; inference from the wear patterns of a stairwell's newel; and, failing all three, consultation of the Index of Standing Pillars, which is complete but has not been consulted successfully since a fire on the landing where it is kept.

Each method requires the mapper to record the pillar's diameter to the quarter-inch, its orientation to the nearest Roman numeral, and the exact wording of any inscription, including errors. Errors are not corrected. A correction entered by a later mapper is entered as a separate pillar, and where the two are reconciled the reconciliation is itself entered as a third. The resulting proliferation of pillars along the principal stair is well documented and is the reason the Order discourages walking its length with a notebook.

"A pillar measured twice is two pillars. A pillar measured three times is a pillar, a question, and a pillar."

— Pillarist Concordance, Method IV, marginal annotation in the hand of the Recorder of the Ninth Landing

Conflict with the Instruments of Provisional Classification

The Concordance's relation to the general provisional law is contested. Concordance 4 provides by Article III that any document assigning a discipline to a body must be ratified within forty days of issuance or the assignment lapses. The Pillarist Concordance has never been ratified within forty days, and the Order continues to map. The Order's position, set out in a Memorial of 8 Winter, is that the Concordance is not a document assigning a discipline but a record of a discipline already assigned, the assignment having been made elsewhere and since lost; and further that the forty-day period does not run against a document that has no final day from which to count.

Against this, the Provisional Cataloguers' Guild observes that Concordance 17 governs the Admittance Rate for provisional holdings and that the Concordance's continued operation unratified inflates that rate, since every pillar mapped under it must be admitted to the Registry of Provisional Holdings under Clause 4. The Guild's steward at the time, an officer who signs only as the Third Steward, is reported to have said that the Order "maps pillars the way a man fills a room with furniture to avoid admitting the room is empty" — a remark the Order has not answered in writing, and which is preserved in the Guild's minutes with the note received in silence.

Concordance 4 is also said to contradict Concordance 7 on the quorum required to resolve a provisional status. The Pillarist Concordance does not take a side. It provides only that a pillar whose status is disputed shall remain a pillar pending dispute, and that the dispute shall be recorded on the pillar's own survey sheet and not on a separate folio.

Incidents

In the winter of the year the Seventeenth Concordance was amended, a mapping party of the Order attempted the full circuit of the Thirty-Fourth Stair and returned having located one hundred and nine pillars, of which seventy-one were the same pillar. The error was traced to Method II, triangulation, which had been applied from two floors neither of which possessed a known number — the party having assumed that numbers were sequential. They are not. The incident produced the Provisional Clarification now bound into every third copy, forbidding triangulation from any floor whose number has not been verified against the Roll of Verified Numbers within the mapper's own lifetime.

A lesser incident is preserved chiefly in gossip. Archivist-Provisional Isadora Vane and the then Recorder of the Ninth disagreed for eleven years over whether a pillar may be mapped from a floor one has not yet reached; the Recorder held that it may, since the pillar is standing regardless, and Vane held that it may not, since the mapper has not stood. Neither position was ever recorded in the Concordance. Both are quoted in the Order's Commentary on Method, facing pages, in the same type.

Recensions

Three recensions of the Concordance are known. The first lacks Method IV entirely and ends mid-sentence at the word provided. The second contains Method IV but omits the Order's name, naming instead the Bureau of Vertical Records, a body that does not exist and to which no correspondence has ever been returned. The third, in use, restores the Order and carries the marginalia; it is the only recension with an index, and the index is wrong after the letter P.

No recension is marked as superseding any other. The Order's practice is to carry all three, and to resolve conflicts between them by seniority of the copy held, the senior copy being whichever was opened first on the day in question.