Order

Make the world predictable through rules, signs or rituals.

This booklet explores a human gesture that protects, connects and supports — and may then become the only way left to answer the world.

The human gesture

To order is to give form to chaos, preserve continuity, understand structures and create habits that make life inhabitable. It can be intelligence, care or craft.

Its latent closure

The gesture closes when exception becomes an ontological threat. Classification replaces encounter; the constructed rule becomes confused with reality, and other people may have to submit to it so the world does not come apart.

Colour of the five depths

Depth	Direction
Mask	I am exact, reliable and methodical; I know where things belong and how they should happen.
Protection	I count, classify, repeat, correct or follow a sequence from which no step can be omitted.
Attachment	A ritual, responsibility, object or person still gives living meaning to the order I maintain.
Wound	Chaos had a price; an authority arbitrarily changed the rules; a single error seems to have caused the irreparable.
Inner World	The world has a hidden grammar. Certain numbers, placements or sequences keep reality from coming apart.

Ambivalences to preserve

• creating meaning / imposing one's coherence;
• caring / controlling;
• discovering a pattern / producing it oneself.

No thread should resolve these tensions in advance.

Fragment bank

note

Choosing a fragment does not fix a complete history. Its relationship with other depths will be created secretly by the player, then discovered in play.

Mask

• I put every chair back in its place before I leave.
• I know the schedules better than the staff.
• I correct dates even when the story is true.
• Others entrust me with what they do not want to lose.

Protection

• I count to a number that divides nothing.
• I start again whenever a step is interrupted.
• I classify what happens to me before deciding what I feel about it.
• I never let two identical objects touch.

Attachment

• I keep the table as it was when there were still four of us.
• Someone agrees to follow my sequence without mocking me.
• This watch always stops at the hour when we are supposed to think of him.
• There is a rule I promised never to break.

Wound

• They changed the rule after I obeyed it.
• One mistake from me was enough.
• That day nothing was in its place and no one wanted to listen.
• I threw away what seemed useless before I understood what it was.

Inner World

• Odd numbers warn when someone is going to lie.
• A badly ordered room attracts events that resemble it.
• If the sequence is complete, the day starts again without the accident.
• The building changes its plan when you stop counting its doors.