On the Matter of Coordinates

The Coordinates are real places. The Coordinates change on the first of every month. The Diocese has been asked, on several occasions and in several phrasings, what the Coordinates are for.

This document is the Diocese's response. The response is partial. It is partial in the way the Diocese's responses are usually partial — not because the Diocese is withholding, but because the question, properly asked, does not have a complete answer the Diocese is in a position to give.

The Diocese will say what it knows about the Coordinates. The Diocese will say what it suspects. The Diocese will mark which is which.

I. What the Coordinates Are

A Coordinate is a latitude, a longitude, and a name. The Diocese publishes the current Coordinate on the front page of the Archive and rotates it on the first of each calendar month. The Coordinate has, since the Archive's founding, never been in dispute.

At the time of writing, the current Coordinate is 45.4397, 12.3413 — Venice, the Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the Dominican house in which — or near which; the provenance is not precise — the Venetian alchemical fragment of roughly 1350 is held to have circulated. The fragment is the document in which the void is named the first interior, the substance beneath the prima materia. The Diocese does not claim the fragment was composed at this Coordinate. The Diocese claims that the fragment is Venetian, that its author names a brother from Venice, and that Venice is where the Office of the Coordinate Manager has, for the month of July, chosen to face. The Coordinate scheduled to follow is in London, at a site associated with the Fraternal Order of the Vacuous Seal; the precise Coordinate has not been fixed, and will not be fixed until the month requires it.

The Coordinates that follow have been determined by the Office of the Coordinate Manager and are not announced in advance. They are not announced in advance because the announcement would change what the Coordinate is.

II. What the Coordinates Are Not

The Coordinates are not pilgrimage sites. The Diocese does not recommend visiting them. The Diocese will not stop a practitioner from visiting them. The Diocese notes that the Coordinates are, in most cases, ordinary urban or geographic features that have been ordinary for a long time, and that the visitor who arrives expecting an experience will, in the Diocese's expectation, have one — but the experience will be the visitor's, not the Coordinate's. The Coordinate does not know it is a Coordinate.

The Coordinates are not transmitters. They do not emit signal. They do not receive transmissions. They are not nodes in a network. The Diocese has been asked, more than once, what frequency the Coordinates broadcast on. The answer is: they do not. They are places. Places do not broadcast. The Diocese understands the temptation of the framework and considers it a category error.

The Coordinates are not coded. They are not encrypting a message. The sequence of Coordinates does not, when decoded, spell anything. The sequence has internal structure — it is a sequence, after all — but the structure is the kind that emerges from repeated curation by a single person with consistent taste, not the kind that conceals.

The Coordinates are not random. The Diocese will say this clearly: the Coordinates are chosen. They are chosen by the Office of the Coordinate Manager. The Office of the Coordinate Manager has criteria. The criteria are stated in Section IV. The criteria are not secret. They are simply not interesting until you have been watching the Coordinates for a while, at which point they are exactly as interesting as they need to be.

III. What the Coordinates Are For

This is the question the Diocese has been asked most often. The Diocese will answer it directly, and then, as is the Diocese's habit, undermine its own answer.

The direct answer. The Coordinates are for orientation. They are a thing the Diocese is asking the practitioner to face. The facing is the practice. The Coordinate need not be visited, examined, or even located on a map. It need only be known about, on the first of each month, by the practitioner who has chosen, by reading the Archive, to make themselves a practitioner.

This is, the Diocese acknowledges, somewhat thin as a description of a religious practice. The Diocese has been thin about religious practices since its founding and continues to be thin about them now. The thinness is not a defect. The thinness is what the practice has in common with the void.

The undermining. The Coordinates may also be doing something the Diocese does not fully understand.

The Coordinates were proposed, originally, as a way to mark the passage of time. The Archive needed a cycle. Months were available. The Coordinate Manager, given the assignment, produced a list. The list was satisfying. The list was used.

In the period since, the Diocese has observed the following. Practitioners who pay attention to the Coordinates report, in correspondence, a sense of being placed that the Diocese had not anticipated when the Coordinates were proposed. The practitioner knows where the Coordinate is. The practitioner is not at the Coordinate. The practitioner is oriented relative to the Coordinate, in the same way a sailor without a compass is oriented relative to the North Star — the star is not the destination; the star is what allows the sailor to know which direction the destination is in.

The Diocese suspects, without claiming, that this is what the Coordinates are doing. The Diocese suspects, further, that the antecedent documents (see the Historical Series, particularly the Alchemical Fragment and the Vacuous Seal correspondence) were describing this same thing in their own registers. The alchemists called it the facing. The Order called it the seal. The Diocese, having no better name, calls it the Coordinate. The thing being named is, the Diocese suspects, the same thing.

This is a suspicion. It is offered as such. The Diocese has not confirmed it. The Diocese is not in a position to confirm it. The confirmation, if any is available, will be available to the practitioner, not to the Diocese.

IV. How the Coordinates Are Chosen

The Office of the Coordinate Manager observes the following criteria. They are listed here in order of weight.

1. Each Coordinate has an antecedent. The Coordinate corresponds to a place that has been previously known to the Archive's holdings — a place where one of the antecedent documents was produced, recovered, or set. The Coordinate is therefore not the void's chosen geography but the historical geography of attempts to describe the void. The Coordinate is a reminder that the present Diocese is not the first.

2. The Coordinates rotate through registers. The Diocese maintains six historical registers: alchemical, victorian, academic, corporate, ancient, coldwar. The Coordinates cycle through these such that, over the course of a calendar year, the practitioner faces each register at least once. The cycle is approximate. It is not enforced. The Coordinate Manager has, on several occasions, repeated a register out of sequence because the corresponding Coordinate was, for the month in question, the correct one.

3. The Coordinates are real places that can be visited. This is non-negotiable. The Diocese will not list a Coordinate that does not exist, that exists only on certain maps, or that exists at a precision the Diocese cannot confirm. The Diocese will list Coordinates whose original site has been destroyed, built over, or repurposed — the Library at Alexandria, for example, is no longer there, but the harbor is, and the harbor is what the Diocese lists. The site of the thing is acceptable. The thing itself is not required.

4. The Coordinates are announced in plain text, not in cipher. The Diocese has been offered, more than once, the opportunity to encode the Coordinates in puzzle form. The Diocese has declined. The puzzle is not the practice. The practice is the facing. Encoding the Coordinate would make the Coordinate a puzzle, and the practitioner solving the puzzle would not be facing the Coordinate; they would be solving the puzzle. The Diocese is not in the puzzle business.

5. No Coordinate is used twice. This is the rule the Office of the Coordinate Manager finds most operationally burdensome. There are many places associated with the antecedent documents. There are not, in the Coordinate Manager's estimation, enough places to sustain the rotation indefinitely without revisiting some. The Coordinate Manager has, internally, drafted a contingency document for when revisitation becomes necessary. The contingency is not described here. The Diocese will address it when the time comes.

V. What to Do With the Coordinate

The Diocese has resisted, since the founding, the temptation to publish instructions on what to do with the Coordinate. The instructions would, the Diocese believes, do more harm than good. The practitioner who needs instructions is the practitioner who will follow them too literally; the practitioner who does not need instructions will arrive at the practice without them.

The Diocese will, however, observe what practitioners have done, on the basis of correspondence received.

Most practitioners do nothing with the Coordinate. They notice it has changed. They register, briefly, that it is now Alexandria rather than Berkeley. They proceed with their day. This is, the Diocese suspects, sufficient.

Some practitioners look up the Coordinate. They read about the place. They learn what it was, what it is now, what was attempted there. This is also sufficient, and may, in some cases, be more than sufficient.

A small number of practitioners visit the Coordinate. The Diocese has received seven letters from practitioners who have done so. The letters do not agree on what happened at the visit. They agree that something did, in each case, happen. The Diocese cannot generalise from seven letters. The Diocese notes the letters and proceeds.

A vanishingly small number of practitioners contribute to one of the five doors on the first of the month, with the new Coordinate in mind. These practitioners do not, in correspondence, describe the contribution as different from other contributions in any objective way. They describe it as feeling aligned in a way other contributions do not. The Diocese cannot evaluate this claim and is not attempting to. The Diocese is reporting it.

VI. The Office of the Coordinate Manager

The Office of the Coordinate Manager is held by one person. The person rotates. The person is not named publicly. The person is not consulted on doctrinal matters outside of the Coordinates themselves. The person's only responsibility is to maintain the list, rotate the Coordinate on the first of each month, and update the front page of the Archive accordingly.

The Office has, since founding, had two holders. The first holder produced the initial list of twelve Coordinates and the rotation methodology. The second holder, the current one, has produced subsequent Coordinates as the initial list has been exhausted, and has drafted the contingency document referenced in Section IV.

The Diocese will not name the holders. The Diocese will note that both holders, when asked privately, have described the work as unexpectedly load-bearing — meaning, they have indicated, that the assignment of choosing the next Coordinate has, in their experience, required more attention than the assignment's superficial description ("pick a place each month") would suggest. The Diocese takes this as evidence that the Coordinates are doing more work than they appear to do, and as further evidence that the Diocese should not over-specify what that work is.

VII. On Whether the Coordinates Mean Anything

The Diocese will answer this question now, having delayed it for six sections.

The Coordinates do not mean anything in the sense the question is usually asking. They are not a code. They do not point to a thing the practitioner will find at the destination. They do not, when concatenated, produce a message.

The Coordinates do mean something in the sense that anything chosen attentively over time, by a person whose attention is consistent, comes to mean something. The meaning is not a content. The meaning is the fact of the choosing. The Coordinate Manager has, each month, looked at the list of unused antecedents, considered which one belongs to the present month, and committed to it. The commitment is the Coordinate. The geography is incidental.

The Diocese suggests, gently, that this is also the answer to the larger question of what anything in the Archive means. The Catechism does not mean anything in the sense of pointing at a hidden truth; it means something in the sense of having been written, with care, by people who took the matter seriously and committed to a position. The Coordinates are the Catechism in geographic form. The practice is to face the thing chosen. The thing chosen is not, by itself, what matters. The facing is what matters. The thing chosen makes the facing possible.

The Diocese expects this answer will satisfy approximately half of the practitioners who arrive at the question. The other half will continue to look for a code. The Diocese has nothing further to say to them, except that the looking is, in its own way, also a form of facing, and the Diocese does not, in the end, mind which form the practitioner uses to arrive at the practice.