The Great International Congress of Doors

NINE LINES

1. The ChairmanWe are here to settle, once and for all, what a door is.
2. The ObjectistA door is an object.
3. The TransitionistA door is a passage.
4. The ConventionalistA door is an agreement about who may pass.
5. The EncounteristNo door exists until someone tries to pass.
6. The ChairmanMotion fails: no exit.
7. NarratorA minority report on knobs was circulated, and not read.
8. NarratorThe only door in the building that worked was the one nobody had defined.
9. NarratorThe delegates have not yet left the hall to approve it.

HOW IT IS MADE

This is the second of four fables of Edifiction, a world in which the Ministry of Constructive Semantics builds whatever can be described. Here four schools send a delegate each to settle what a door is, and the Ministry lends each delegate an Edifier, the machine that builds from description. Every door does exactly what its definition says and nothing more. The Objectist says a door is an object, and gets a magnificent door with six panels, a carved lintel and a brass knob, and no hinges, because hinges are about use. The Transitionist says a door is a passage, and gets a door-shaped absence with no frame and no wall: you walk through it and arrive in the hall. The Conventionalist says a door is an agreement about who may pass, and gets a door with a grille that refuses the chairman and admits the tea. The Encounterist says no door exists until someone tries to pass, and gets nothing at all, until somebody tries to leave. When the Congress adjourns for lunch, every exit in the hall, the windows included, has his door in front of it. The only door that works is the plain one at the back, which the cleaner uses every night, because nobody defined it.

The film is a comedy on one closed set. The hall has four arched bays, four Edifiers, a rostrum with a bell, a clock and a calendar, a long table with name cards and carafes, and a plain door in the corner that the camera passes many times before the film looks at it. Each delegate has a silhouette you can read from across the hall: the Objectist tall and columnar, the Transitionist thin and leaning into a step he has not taken, the Conventionalist short and round under a flat hat, the Encounterist a dark block with his arms folded. Each door frame is built from the letters of its definition, in the series' signature shot: the Edifier types the sentence, and the letters fly to the bay and become bricks, so that each lintel reads the start of its sentence and each door carries its whole definition on a brass plate. The one accent colour, brick red, is kept for the plates and for what is wrong: the missing hinges, drawn where they should be, and the sign behind the Conventionalist's grille.

The sound keeps the series' palette: typewriter keys for description, a dry wooden knock for each letter that becomes a brick, the Edifier's hum, footsteps, a latch. This film adds the chairman's hand bell, a hall clock that is always ticking and is only heard in the silences, and a small brass flourish when a door is finished. The passage gets two notes of it, and the encounter gets none. The voices are Kokoro voices, one for each delegate, with the series' narrator and the series' Edifier. The timing file cd.json drives picture and sound together. The picture code in cd.js reads it, and build_sound.py makes all the sound with numpy and scipy.

FOR THE BENCH

Write one interface, Door, with one method, pass(person), which returns a sentence saying what happens. Then write four classes that implement it, one for each definition in the film. ObjectDoor is admired and never opens. PassageDoor always lets the person through and returns them to the room they were in. ConventionDoor checks a field on the person, such as person.expected, and admits or refuses. EncounterDoor does not exist until pass is called, and then exists, closed. Make one delegate, for example {name: 'the chairman', expected: false, room: 'the hall'}, run the same delegate through all four doors, and print what happens. All four classes satisfy the interface. Which of them is a door? Now write a fifth class, PlainDoor, that the cleaner uses. What do you have to say in it that none of the four definitions said?

An original fable from Watson Hartsoe's notes The House That Language Built, written in the manner of Stanisław Lem. Film two of The House That Language Built, four fables of Edifiction. Download the film.