The Principle of Ephemeral Binding

The Principle of Ephemeral Binding is the doctrine governing the enforceability of holdings that exist only for the duration of their own binding. It holds that a document, once bound, acquires an obligation not to persist; that the obligation is discharged by the binding itself; and that any holding surviving its own discharge must be treated as unbound and therefore unowned. The Principle is customarily dated to the winter of the year recorded as 4,112 by the Office of Ephemeral Affairs, though the Vault of Binding Precedents has twice declined to fix a date, noting that a doctrine about impermanence may reasonably be said to have no commencement.

Its operative clause is short enough to have been engraved on the door of the binding room on the sixty-first landing:

"That which is bound shall be held; that which is held shall be loosed; and the loosing shall be entered as the holding's completion, not its loss."

— Seventy-Fourth Concordance, Annex 6, clause 3

Origin in the Ephemeral Holdings dispute

The Principle emerged from the long quarrel between the Bureau of Ephemeral Holdings and the Office of Ephemeral Audits over whether an item could be audited after it had ceased to be observable. The Bureau maintained that a holding unobservable at audit was a holding badly kept; the Audits maintained that it was a holding correctly kept. Neither office would yield, and for a period of some nine years the two exchanged memoranda at a rate the Office of Ephemeral Cartography later described as "geological".

The deadlock broke when a junior clerk of the Audits, Sennel of the Fourth Spiral, produced the argument now called Sennel's Turn: that a binding which outlives its object is not a stronger binding but a binding to nothing, and that the Tower had been mistaking durability for validity. The argument was adopted into the Principle of Ephemeral Authority almost immediately and into binding practice some forty years later, which the Vault records as "prompt".

Relation to other bindings

The Vault of Binding Precedents recognises four binding disciplines — Primordial Binding, Material Binding, Procedural Binding, and Interpretive Binding — and has consistently refused to admit Ephemeral Binding as a fifth. Its stated ground is that Ephemeral Binding is not a discipline but a condition to which the other four are subject, "as weather is not a fifth wall" (Vault Marginalia, series D, folio 12). The School of Ephemeral Cataloguing dissents, arguing that a condition capable of voiding a Material Binding is plainly a discipline and should be seated accordingly.

The Principle also draws heavily on the Principle of Ephemeral Holdings, which requires that any phenomenon ceasing observation during cataloguing still receive a provisional shelfmark from the Clerk for Unobserved Spaces. Ephemeral Binding supplies the second half of that arrangement: the provisional shelfmark lapses on the binding's discharge, and the lapse is recorded as a successful placement rather than a withdrawal.

Contradiction between the Fourth and Eighth Concordances

A persistent difficulty concerns which instrument governs when an ephemerally bound holding is later cited in a Directive-Specific Ordinance. The Eighth Concordance established the principle of lexical binding for such ordinances, under which the words of the original holding are fixed at the moment of citation and may not thereafter drift. Ephemeral Binding requires the opposite: that the holding loosen and pass. The Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, appears to anticipate the conflict, remarking only that "a word held too firmly is a word held past its hour."

The Vault of Binding Precedents has ruled three times that the Eighth governs citation and the Principle governs custody, a distinction that has satisfied no one. The Office of Ephemeral Audits observes that in practice the two are the same act performed by different clerks, and that the ruling therefore divides a single motion between two offices, which is how the Tower has always preferred to divide anything.

Practical observance

Binding under the Principle is performed with laminated sheets of Ephemeral Mica, the same material used in the binding of the Attribute Ledger, and inked according to the Ordinance on Ephemeral Inks. The binder enters the holding, the hour of its loosing, and the name of the clerk who will certify the loosing; the last is written first, as the only entry certain to be needed. Certification is by the Office of Ephemeral Audits, which maintains the Loose Register on the sixty-first landing.

Two observances are commonly noted. The binding room is closed during the hour of loosing, and no clerk may be present at the discharge of a holding they themselves bound, a rule introduced after the affair of Clerk Marrow, whose repeated attendance at his own discharges produced a register in which every entry certified every other. The second is the standing instruction posted at the door: that binders should bring their own thread, as the room's supply is issued quarterly and the quarter is not stated.

Criticism

The most sustained objection remains that of the Vault, which holds that a doctrine of impermanence cannot be cited as precedent without becoming permanent in the citing. Ephemeral Binding has answered this in the only way available to it: the citations are themselves entered in the Loose Register, and are considered to have lapsed. The Cartography of Ephemeral Stacks records that the resulting map of precedent resembles "a floor plan drawn by someone leaving", which the Office of Ephemeral Cartography has adopted as a compliment.