Procedural Melancholy

Procedural Melancholy is an organic affective state arising spontaneously from the performance of repetitive clerical tasks, and the base material from which Synthetic Melancholy is refined. It is distinguished in the standard literature from Generalized Melancholy by origin and by handling: Procedural Melancholy is produced, whereas Generalized Melancholy is produced from it, by way of the seven-stage distillation recorded in Affective Parallax. The distinction is administrative before it is experiential, and the Tower's clerks have never entirely accepted it.

The condition has been observed at every depth from the Scriptorium Ranks to the upper stacks, and appears to be independent of the content of the task performed. What matters is recurrence. A clerk who recopies the same inventory line eleven thousand times in a season will exhibit the full presentation; a clerk who recopies eleven thousand different lines will exhibit very little of it and will, in the words of one survey, "complain instead."

Presentation and measurement

Procedural Melancholy presents as a steady, grey-toned emission of Sub-Lexical Humours — chiefly the humour designated H-4, though H-7 is present in clerks assigned to binding. The emission is measurable with a humour gauge held at the collar for a count of sixty, and the readings are recorded in the daily ledger under the heading established by Fourth Ledger Convention, Annex 2. Readings below two units are not recorded, on the grounds that they are indistinguishable from ordinary fatigue and have never persuaded anyone.

The emission is remarkably consistent. Floor 2,214, the Floor of Repeated Stamps, has returned a median reading of 3.4 units every winter since measurement began, including the winter of the stair closure, when the floor was staffed by four clerks and a mop.

Relation to Synthetic Melancholy

Procedural Melancholy is the base stock of the Department of Sanctioned Melancholy, which draws on it by means of the Melancholy Requisition (MR-7). Under the standard instrument, a cataloguer abstracts a specific instance of Procedural Melancholy into a creature — the Melancholy Bestiaries of Floor record some four hundred such abstractions — and the creature is then rendered down under controlled conditions. Yield is expressed as the SFU-A multiplier, and the multiplier is adjusted by the forecasts of the Clerk of Predictive Melancholy, whose office quantifies the procedural melancholy expected from archival operations not yet undertaken. The forecasting is done in advance because the Department has found that melancholy cannot be requisitioned retroactively without attracting an audit.

"The base humour shall be drawn fresh and shall not be held above the fourth landing overnight, whatever the weather on the stair."

— Melancholy Requisition (MR-7), clause 9

The dispute over quantities

How much Procedural Melancholy a given task produces is the subject of the archive's most durable disagreement. Third Concordance holds at clause 44 that output is proportional to repetitions performed, while clause 44's own annex maintains that output saturates after the nine-hundredth repetition and that further recurrences produce nothing but a hardening of the clerk's handwriting. Third Concordance, Amendment 17.δ declined to resolve the matter, noting only that both positions had been cited with success and that the Department might consult its own experience.

The Department's experience, recorded by Clerk-Adjunct Varra Ost in a memorandum of 14 Frost, is that the Concordance is right in the abstract and the annex is right in the afternoon. Ost's memorandum was returned unstamped with the annotation "not a finding," and is now held under restricted access in the Annex of Unstamped Findings, where it is consulted more often than most findings.

Procedural Melancholy and its abstraction

Sustained over a sufficiently long posting, Procedural Melancholy is said to lose its specific character and settle into an ambient condition — the transition described in Affective Parallax and governed, so far as it is governed, by Fourth Concordance, Annex 11, which requires that the abstraction be witnessed by a second clerk and entered in the floor register. The register for Estuary Theta shows the transition recorded eleven times and witnessed four times.

The same paragraph of Annex 11 forbids the performing of the abstraction during the noon bell, an old provision whose origin no recension preserves. Observance is general.

Recording practices

Instances are logged on Form PM-1, which requires the task, its repetition count, the humour reading, and the clerk's own description of the condition. The descriptions are the most-read part of the record and the least reliable, tending toward the terse; the standard concordance of Form PM-1 entries lists, in order of frequency, "grey," "as before," "grey, as before," and one entry reading only "the stamps are all the same stamp."

Form PM-1 is filed flat, never folded, and never in the same drawer as a requisition — a rule set out in Second Concordance, clause 17, after the mixing of the two classes of paper in the winter of the fourth landing produced what the inquiry called "an indistinct melancholy" and what the inquiry's appendix called "a mess."