Sealing Committee Review

The Sealing Committee Review is the standing inquiry by which the Sealing Committee examines its own prior seals, affixations, and refusals to affix. It is not to be confused with a review conducted by a sealing committee, a distinction the Committee of Permanent Review was obliged to make explicit in its ruling of Cycle 31, and one that has since generated four further reviews. ## Origins The Review was constituted under Concordance 14, Annex 7, following the Affixation Dispute of Floor 229, in which two Sealing Committees sealed the same door within the same hour and neither seal could subsequently be removed without destroying the door. A door on Floor 229 is still sealed in this manner. Access is by the eastern stair. Do not knock. The Concordance's remedy was procedural rather than physical: a committee that seals must periodically examine its sealing, so that the act of sealing is documented separately from the seal. The Review was to convene once per Cycle. It has convened eleven times in nineteen Cycles, a discrepancy attributed to Librarian Ospreth Vane to "the ordinary friction between a calendar and a corridor" (Marginalia on Concordance 14, folio 3r). ## Method The Review proceeds by the inspection of seal impressions against the register of affixations, with each impression struck in wax and compared to the wax of the original. Discrepancies in colour, weight, or the angle of the die are recorded as Sealing Irregularities and referred upward. The Review has no power to unseal. Its findings are advisory, and are conventionally bound in red board and shelved in the order in which they were disputed rather than the order in which they were produced. The Review's working sessions are held in the Aperture Chamber of the Ninth Landing, chosen for its dryness. Members are asked to bring their own seals. The chamber's own seal, which is affixed to the door of the chamber, is not to be removed for the purposes of the Review, even where the Review is convening to examine that seal — a circularity addressed in Office of Cyclical Review memorandum 44/2 and left, on the whole, unaddressed. ## Jurisdictional conflict The Review's most persistent difficulty concerns its relationship to the Committee for Ontological Review. Under Opinion 881, the Committee for Ontological Hygiene holds authority over matters of residue and adhesion, and the Sealing Committee Review has repeatedly held that a seal which cannot be removed is a question of adhesion, not of sealing. The Hygiene Committee has repeatedly held the contrary. The Committee for Non-Intersecting Jurisdictions was asked to arbitrate in Cycle 27 and declined, on the grounds that the matter was plainly intersecting. A Formal Declaration of Irreconcilability was filed in Cycle 29 and withdrawn in Cycle 30, the withdrawal itself being sealed. Whether the seal on the withdrawal falls within the Review's remit remains open. The Sub-committee on Lexical Integrity has been consulted as to whether "withdrawal" in this context denotes the act or the instrument; its finding, that it denotes both and that this is unfortunate, is quoted in the Review's sixth report. ## The Vane objection The Review's findings are occasionally contested on the grounds that a committee cannot review what it has itself done. This objection was raised most fully by Librarian Vane, who observed in a note of Cycle 22 that "the Review examines the seal and is sealed by the Review, and I have looked for the place where this stops and have not found it" (Marginalia on Concordance 14, folio 9v). The Dialectical Review Board took up the question in Cycle 23 and returned it in Cycle 24, unaltered. It is now generally cited as the Vane Objection and is raised at the opening of every session, where it is noted and not resolved. ## Disagreement among the Concordances Concordance 14 requires the Review to report to the Sealing Committee. Concordance 19, Annex 2, requires the Sealing Committee to report to the Review. Both remain in force. The Office of Supersession Review has declined to supersede either, noting that supersession would leave the other unanswered, and that the Tower has learned to live with a certain amount of mutual reporting. In practice both bodies exchange bound reports on the same day each Cycle and neither reads the other's before sealing its own. Whether the Review is a committee, an office, or a recurring event is disputed. The Review of Floor Stability treats it as an event and schedules it accordingly; the Mending Oversight Committee treats it as an office and addresses correspondence to it by post. Both arrive. The Review has not commented.