Axis 11 of twelve · COS
Does one physics govern the whole? Take the two most distant elements in the work — tonally, formally, narratively, conceptually. Do they obey the same law? A high score means yes, and the wider the range covered, the stronger the achievement. Narrowness is not coherence.
Floored at 7.0. A work that contradicts itself structurally cannot be canon-forming.
1754 works · floor · the rubric
Dante Alighieri · Literature
9.7 · Tier V
The two most distant elements obey one law. The devils’ farce that ends “And he had made a trumpet of his rump” (Inf. XXI) and the Trinity of Par. XXXIII share a universe whose Hell was made by “the primal Love” (Inf. III). Weight draws all to Lucifer, love all to the point of light, and the counts in the Italian move one way as the poem climbs: weeping (pianto, pianti, every form of piangere and every word in lagrim-) 70, 52, 12; light (luce, luci, lume, lumi) 11, 44, 143. The strain is in the exceptions: Cato, a pagan suicide, guards the mountain; Ripheus the Trojan is in Heaven; Virgil is not. The poem makes inscrutability part of its law, “hold yourselves restrained / In judging” (Par. XX): a limit declared, not solved.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements, the fugue’s lament and the Presto’s whisper on the bridge. One law governs them, and its unit is the semitone. The fugue’s sforzando falls on A, a semitone above the dominant, G sharp. The first join steps by a semitone, from C sharp to D. The fugue’s subject circles its tonic by semitone and major third. Every movement sits on the sharp side; D, the one tonic outside the home scale, is reached by the semitone. The tension is in the comic movements, whose material is less audibly bound to the fugue’s: there the law holds by key and join more than by theme.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Aria’s ornamented sarabande and the Quodlibet’s street songs, or the lament of Var. 25 and the bravura of Var. 29. One law governs them all: the same bass, with the same cadences at the same places, under every surface, and the G minor variations keep the plan with the harmony turned to the minor. The range is the widest a keyboard work of its century holds: dance and church style, court overture and folk song, grief and joke, strict canon and free display. The canon ladder is a second law, the halves a third. The axis stops short of the top only where a free variation could change groups unnoticed.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The range runs from Fyodor’s jokes about von Sohn to the Legend, from Herzenstube’s pound of nuts to Ivan in the witness box, from the devil’s malt extract to a child’s funeral. One law holds them: belief is not compelled by proof. The narrator states it in the first book, “Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith” (Pt. I, Bk. I, ch. 5); the devil restates it, “proofs are no help to believing” (Pt. IV, Bk. XI, ch. 9); the court convicts on a chain with no link that holds; Kolya’s question is answered “Certainly” (Epilogue, ch. 3), without proof. A second law, instigation and consent, joins Kolya’s goose to the murder. Held from the top by the narrator’s aside on socialism, which speaks as authority where the book elsewhere tests, and by the elder’s ideal peasant, whom the Mokroe crowd only partly tests.
John Milton · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The two most distant elements obey one law. Satan’s programme, “out of good still to find means of evil” (I.165), and Adam’s last wonder, “That all this good of evil shall produce” (XII.470), are joined by a law stated halfway: “his evil / Thou usest, and from thence createst more good” (VII.615–616). One physics governs the whole, “one first matter all” (V.472): it lets angels eat, bleed once they have sinned (VI.332), and feel pain “Till now not known” (VI.432). Even the war’s comedy obeys it, since pride makes the proud ridiculous. The law strains twice: spirits that “limb themselves” (VI.352) are crushed in their armour (VI.656), and allegorical Sin and Death share ground with literal persons.
Aeschylus · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The two most distant elements are the Nurse’s comic memory of the infant Orestes, “laundress and nurse had the same function” (Cho. 760), and the Furies’ Binding Song, “a spell to bind the soul” (Eum. 332). They obey one law. The Nurse measures what killing costs a household, and the Furies are that cost made into a power. One principle governs all three plays: the doer suffers. The third play changes the law’s instrument without breaking the law: the Furies keep their office and their honour. The strain is in register and argument. The trial turns tragedy towards civic pageant, and Apollo’s embryology is thin, perhaps on purpose, since the verdict comes from an equal vote and is completed by persuasion: a declared seam.
Marcel Proust · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
One law: desire makes its object, contact empties it, habit numbs both, and only involuntary memory and art give back what was lived. Love obeys it: Swann gives years to a woman “who was not in my style!” (Un amour de Swann). So do snobbery, which Legrandin cannot see in himself; names, as the duchess shrinks in the church to a red face; places, as Balbec waits behind its name; and groups, as the Verdurins’ life, once “genuine”, becomes “the nethermost circle of Dante” when they shut Swann out (Un amour de Swann). The most distant elements obey it: Vinteuil’s sonata, and the friend who offers to spit on his photograph and later restores his septet. Held below the top by the narrator’s breaches of his own point of view and by the continuity lapses of the unrevised volumes.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.3 · Tier V
The two most distant elements are the crowd’s “Barrabam!” and the hushed “Mein Jesu, gute Nacht!”, and one law governs them: every sound belongs either to the story or to the answer to it, and the answer is always a voice that might be the listener’s. The chorale after the crowd’s shout takes its guilt onto the believer; the farewell answers the burial. The law holds from secco speech and two-bar shouts to da capo aria, chorale fantasia and a sarabande-like close. The string halo is a law kept until it is broken, at “Eli, Eli”, and the break is the meaning. The strain is in the arias’ idiom, near opera and the dance, and in Picander’s sweetness beside the Gospel’s plainness.
Sailendra · Architecture
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: a fishmonger’s stall with its hell beneath it, and the empty central stupa at the summit. They obey one law: a graded ascent, clockwise and upward, from acts through forms to the formless, on a plan that turns square into circle and a section that turns a hill into a point. The same law governs the small things: the Buddhas change gesture by one rule; the lattices change from diamond to square in one step as the summit nears; the relief series are set in the order of the path. The range is as wide as any on the bench, from the kitchen to nirvana, and it holds. What resists: the bare processional platform, where the encasement broke the plan’s rhythm; the mixed sources and hands of the Jataka layer; and the abruptness of the change from square to round, the law’s own statement, but a seam.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Hall of Supreme Harmony on its marble terrace and a servants’ court in the north-east corner; or the Meridian Gate and a pavilion in the Imperial Garden. They obey one law: axis and symmetry; the bay module; the courtyard enclosed and turned inward; roof form, tile colour, bracket sets and the number of ridge beasts graded by rank. The same grammar governs the greatest hall and the smallest, and the Qing rebuilt within it. The range is wide (state ritual, administration, the dynasty’s family, worship, scholarship, storage and gardens), and the law holds across all of it, because it is a graded law, made to hold a range by degree. What resists is small: the gardens, where the law loosens by design, and the Qing compounds of the north-east, which keep the grammar but bend the plan.
Homer · Literature
9.6 · Tier V
The two most distant elements are the battle of the gods and Priam at Achilles’ knees. In the first, Zeus laughs for joy to see the gods come to blows (21.389–390), and Hera boxes Artemis’ ears with her own bow (21.489–492). One law governs both, and Achilles states it: the gods have spun the thread for mortals “that they should live in pain; and themselves are sorrowless” (24.525–526). The gods’ comedy is the measure of mortal weight. What does not hold is in the roster. Pylaemenes, killed at 5.576, follows his son’s body “shedding tears” at 13.658; Schedius dies as son of Perimedes (15.515) and again as son of Iphitus (17.306). Zeus’ will and fate are left unreconciled (16.431–461).
Homer · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements, the Cyclops’ cave and the swineherd’s hut. They obey one law, the reception of the stranger. The Cyclops scorns Zeus, the strangers’ god, and eats his guests (IX.266–280); the swineherd kills two of his pigs for a beggar (XIV.72–79); the suitors die because they honoured no one who came to them (XXII.413–416). Zeus’s opening principle governs the companions at Thrinacia and the suitors at the feast, and both are warned. The law carries strains the poem leaves standing. Poseidon’s grudge is personal, and the Phaeacians’ ship is turned to stone for their hospitality (XIII.159–164). The feud ends by decree: “And o’er the past Oblivion stretch her wing” (XXIV.485).
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The two most distant elements, the Fool’s riddle of “why a snail has a house” (1.5) and Cordelia dead in Lear’s arms, obey one law: the contest over nature, named forty-nine times, from “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” (1.2) and “Hear, Nature, hear!” (1.4) to the question of 3.6. The two theologies, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods” (4.1) and “The gods are just” (5.3), are held under that law. The plot is less strict: Kent is forty-eight (1.4) to Lear’s “Fourscore and upward” (4.7), and Albany fights a French army while granting its cause (5.1). In this text Kent’s speech in 3.1 joins two versions, and the seam shows.
James Joyce · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The most distant elements are Telemachus’ naturalist morning and Circe’s hallucination, or Ithaca’s catechism and Penelope’s flood: the widest range on this desk. One law holds across them. Whatever the style, the day’s facts persist. The cloud over the sun is seen by Stephen (Telemachus, 1) and by Bloom (Calypso, 4) at the same moment. The lemon soap bought in Lotus Eaters is still in Bloom’s pocket in Circe. Every phantasm there is made of what the day has contained: Rudy, the potato, Plumtree, the macintosh. The tension is the arranger. From Aeolus on, an intelligence belonging to no character imposes forms the realist law does not explain. It holds as a second law, not a proved one.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.4 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the sailors’ C major shouts that end Act I, and Isolde’s “unbewußt, / höchste Lust!”
“unconscious, highest bliss!” in B major. One law governs them. Every diatonic, square, loud thing in the work is Day, and every chromatic, suspended thing is Night; the law is their opposition, and it holds from the first scene’s song against Isolde’s silence to the last ship against the transfiguration. The frame of C, A flat and B is one argument. The strain is Marke’s monologue, which gives the Day a music of such sympathy that some hear a second law. The range is narrower than the Ninth’s, with no comedy and no crowd after Act I, and narrowness is not coherence.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.3 · Tier V
The two most distant elements, the opening’s empty fifths and the Turkish march, obey one law. B flat is the first movement’s second key, the Adagio’s home, the march’s key, and the pitch that clashes with D minor in the finale’s opening fanfare. The opening’s falling fourths and fifths return in the scherzo’s falling octaves. The half-step slide from the A major of “vor Gott” to B flat turns the cherub’s chord into a soldier’s tread, “wie ein Held zum Siegen” (“as a hero to victory”). The strain is the change of medium, which Spohr heard as a break. The recitative announces the break and so makes it law, at a cost.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the king and queen in the mirror at the back, and the dog under Nicolasito’s foot at the front. They obey one law. Everything in the room is a body in one light and one air, ranked by where it stands against that light, not by how it is painted: royals, dwarfs, maids, a dog and the painter are made by one hand and one touch. The range runs from the reflected sovereigns to the animal, from the brightest point to the darkest, and holds. The mirror’s optics resist only if it shows the royal couple in the viewer’s place, and even then the law is the picture’s. Held below the top because the range is wide in rank and narrow in kind.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The two most distant elements are the Confiteor, five voices over a Gregorian chant in a style two centuries old, and the Laudamus te, a soprano with solo violin in the newest Dresden manner. One law governs them. By key: D major with trumpets is the key of glory, and eleven choruses of praise and affirmation stand in it; B minor is the key of petition; the one flat key, the Agnus Dei’s G minor, is the furthest point, from which the Dona nobis returns. By synthesis: every style is admitted on one condition, that it serve its clause, so brilliance and austerity are the same obedience. The strain: the range is wide enough that the ear can hear an anthology, and the law holds by key and text more than by shared material.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the first movement’s C minor storm and the finale’s C major march with trombones and piccolo, or the Andante’s graceful A flat and the scherzo’s ghostly basses. One law governs them. Its rhythm is the opening cell, three short and a long, which drives the first movement, sounds in the horns’ theme of the scherzo, returns in the Andante’s fanfares and in the finale’s figures. Its tonality is C minor overcome by C major, enacted twice, at the transition and again after the recall, and the recall is the law made audible. The range is wide: dread, lyric grace, a fugato, a ghost, a march. Held below the top where the Andante obeys a gentler law than the rest.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the heart pillar, under the floor and seen by no one, and the Uji Bridge, crossed by every pilgrim. Both are cypress, both are renewed in the same cycle, and both serve one passage, from the town to the kami. Or take two clocks: the meal set before the kami every day at the Gekū, and the sanctuary rebuilt every twenty years. One law governs both, renewal under purity, the daily and the generational one rhythm at two scales. The law reaches past building into forest, river, rice and craft: the cypress planted now are for sanctuaries a century and more away. Nothing in the work contradicts it. Held below the top because the law governs by exclusion: one register, admitting no contrary, no figure and no terror.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Scherzo’s Presto interruption, a joke in a sonata of this weight, and the Adagio’s grief in F sharp minor; or the Largo’s formlessness and the fugue’s strictest law. One law governs them, the descending third: it is the Scherzo’s motive, the Adagio’s key relation to the whole, the Largo’s chain of keys, and the fugue subject’s first leap, a tenth, folded down. Even the semitone shocks, B minor in the first movement and the Adagio’s distance, are the law extended to its edge, not broken. The range governed is wide for one instrument: fanfare, parody, lament, improvisation and counterpoint. The tension is the Scherzo, which obeys the law of intervals more than the argument, and the licence Beethoven gave for London to reorder the movements.
Béla Bartók · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the fugue’s muted chromatic lament and the finale’s loud diatonic dance in asymmetric metre. One law governs both, and it is stated twice. Thematically, the fugue subject returns in the finale with its semitones widened to whole tones and its compass stretched, so that the dance is the lament opened out. Tonally, the four centres, A, C, F sharp and A, lie on one cycle of minor thirds, and the fugue’s climax on E flat is the fourth point of that cycle, a tritone from A. The range is wide for a half-hour work, from single struck notes to full dance. The tension is in the second movement, whose material is less audibly bound to the subject; there the law is the key plan more than the theme.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the Allegro giocoso’s triangle and the finale’s trombone chorale. One law governs them, and its unit is the third. The first movement’s theme is a chain of thirds; the middle movements stand a major third apart, E and C; the Andante’s church-mode opening is a C major sound on E. The Baroque law of the finale and the sonata law of the first movement meet in the finale’s double reading, so the work’s oldest form and its newest procedure are one argument. The range is wide, church mode, dance, march and chaconne, and the coherence is not narrow. The strain is the third movement, which obeys the key plan more than the work’s tragic temper.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the buffa tune of the first movement and the four long notes of the finale, or the Andante’s muted unease and the coda’s blaze. One law governs them, and the coda states it: everything in this world fits against everything else. The buffa tune is treated contrapuntally in the development, so the comic is already learned; the church’s figure is set to dance rhythms, so the learned is already festive. The range is wide for a classical symphony: church, court, theatre, dance and private feeling. The C minor eruptions obey the law, absorbed in the recapitulations. The tension is the Andante and the Menuetto, which obey the law of the classical symphony more than the law of this work.
Virgil · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The two most distant elements are the regatta’s slapstick, where the Trojans laugh at the helmsman thrown overboard (5.181–182), and Anchises’ world-soul: “This active mind, infus’d thro’ all the space, / Unites and mingles with the mighty mass.” (6.726–727). One law governs both, substitution under fate. Entellus gives Eryx “meliorem animam pro morte Daretis” (5.483); Neptune takes “one life in lieu of many” (5.815); the souls go back to bodies to be spent in history (6.748–751). The theology holds to the end: Juno’s anger is reconciled to fate (12.808–842), and Jupiter sends a Fury from his own throne. The plot is less strict, because unrevised. Palinurus dies two ways (5.835–861, 6.337–362), the prophecy of the tables changes its prophet (3.255–257, 7.122–123), and the seventh summer lasts a year (1.755–756, 5.626).
Sophocles · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
One law governs the whole: what is said means more than the speaker knows, and the meaning comes true. The two most distant elements obey it. The Priest’s opening ranks Oedipus first of men but not equal to the gods (31–34); the outcast at the end is “eti de kai theois / echthrotaton brotōn”
“the mortal most hateful to the gods” (1342–1345). The plot is less strict. Oedipus has never learned how Laius died in all his reign, and the play admits as much (558–568); the survivor who begged to be sent away (758–762) kept silent for years; the robbers’ number is never put to him. The range is narrow: no comedy, one place, one day.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The range is very wide: Feliciano de Silva’s “reason of the unreason” (I.I) against Sancho’s bowels. One law holds most of it: the gap between a text and the world, and how each side explains it. Don Quixote explains it by enchanters, who have “turned these giants into mills” (I.VIII). Sancho explains it by the body and by names: the men who tossed him in a blanket were “Pedro Martinez” and “Tenorio Hernandez” (I.XVIII). The dukes close the gap from the other side, staging the text for its reader until “jokes become realities” (II.XLIX). The strains are real. The book that holds the canon’s demand for probability gathers four lovers at one inn “by a special disposition of Providence” (I.XXXVI), and the day-counts break.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The range is as wide as any: a girl’s dance and a firing squad, a nameless dog and Copernicus. One law holds most of it: the infinitesimal will, real to itself, summed into a motion no one owns. The Rostovs give up their carts to the wounded, and “a quarter of an hour before it had not seemed strange to anyone that the wounded should be left behind” (XI.XVI); the execution has no author. The strains are real. Napoleon is judged by “the standard of good and evil given us by Christ” (XIV.XVIII), and the principle allows it, but he alone is denied the interior that would let the verdict be tested. Kutuzov’s insight is asserted as “national feeling which he possessed in full purity and strength” (XV.V). And a plot that argues against arranged causes runs on coincidence.
Herman Melville · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The range is as wide as any on this desk, and one law, the bond, holds most of it. Queequeg’s “mutual, joint-stock world” (ch. 13) returns as the monkey-rope’s “joint stock company of two” (ch. 72) and the whale-lines that envelop all men (ch. 60); the word-centre falls in “The Line”, and the turn of line that nearly kills Pip (ch. 93) kills Ahab. Ishmael turns idolator by the Golden Rule (ch. 10); Ahab refuses it to the captain who begs, “Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case” (ch. 128). The strain is real: a first-person witness reports what no survivor saw, Ahab’s sleep and Starbuck at the door,, with no licence given.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Lebeziatnikov lecturing on communes and the new marriage (V.1), and Svidrigaïlov putting the revolver to his temple before a man in a copper Achilles helmet: “When you are asked, you just say he was going, he said, to America.” (VI.6). They obey one law. Both are men living a theory to its end, one in farce and one in despair, and the book sets both between Sonia’s faith and Raskolnikov’s experiment. The comedy is never relief from the law; it is the law at low pressure. Chance obeys it too: the narrator calls the Haymarket meeting “the predestined turning-point of his fate” (I.5), and coincidence is the form providence takes in a city. Charged: the Epilogue’s register shifts further than the rest of the book prepares, and there are small slips of time (VI.8).
Murasaki Shikibu · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The two most distant elements, the comedy of Suetsumuhana’s red nose (ch. 6) and Ukifune going out in the night to drown herself (ch. 51), obey one law. Each is a woman measured by a man’s gaze arriving from outside, and each is rendered with the narrator’s double sight, which sees the gaze and its object together. The governing physics is impermanence under karma, seasonal time and the law of substitution, and it holds from the first chapter to the last; the seasons even divide Genji’s estate, a quarter each to spring, summer, autumn and winter (ch. 21). The Uji chapters change the light, colder and more inward, without breaking the law. The plot is less strict: how Takekawa fits the chapters around it is disputed, and the chronology needs commentators’ tables to reconcile.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the wingless angels wrestling the cross through the air in the left lunette, and Charon beating the damned out of his boat at the lower right. They obey one law. Every figure is a body under force, rising or falling in relation to one gesture, in one blue space. Pagan and Christian obey it alike, and Minos sorts the damned as in the poem: “giudica e manda secondo ch’avvinghia”
“Judges, and sends according as he girds him” (Inf. V.6). The range runs from skeletons to Christ, and holds. What resists is the floating space, which has no ground to measure a body against; it is the law of the wall rather than a breach of it, and costs little.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the Porter’s drunken prose on lechery and the equivocator (2.3) and “Tomorrow, and tomorrow” (5.5); or the witches’ cauldron (4.1) and Edward’s healing touch (4.3). One law governs them: “It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood” (3.4), and the double word betrays whoever trusts it. The Porter’s equivocator, who “could not equivocate to heaven” (2.3), is Macbeth’s fate in comic form; Malcolm’s false confession of vice in 4.3 is an equivocation used for good, set against the witches’ for harm; the holy king’s hand answers the witches’ hand. The range is wide, from comic prose to the metaphysical, and it is held. Charged: the Hecate scene runs on another physics, a stage mistress rebuking her servants, with songs, outside the play’s dread; and the providential register of the English scene is looser than the Scottish night.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Stiva’s oysters with Levin (I.10) and Anna under the wheels (VII.31); or Laska on the snipe marsh, thinking “They have chosen a time to talk” (II.15), and Levin’s “bubble-organism” (VIII.9). One law governs them: the body’s appetite and the soul’s truthfulness, and what follows when either lies to the other. Stiva is never punished and never saved; Anna, who will not lie, is destroyed; Levin, who cannot stop thinking, is saved when he stops. The range is wide and held: social comedy at Betsy’s and the Countess Lidia’s, a dog’s senses, the death chamber, the elections, the theology of the bee-house. Charged: the last part turns from shown to argued for several chapters, and Landau’s trance (VII.21–22) is satire cruder than the book elsewhere allows itself.
Sophocles · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
One law governs the whole: human power, however inventive, meets a limit it did not make, in death, in the gods below, in kinship, and whoever will not yield to the limit is broken by it. The Ode states it: “aporos ep’ ouden erchetai”
“Without resource he meets nothing that is to come” (360), Hades the one exception. The two most distant elements obey it. The Guard’s comic report of drawing lots for who must tell the king is ruled by fear of the same power that buries Antigone; and the god of the hymn, called to come and cleanse the city, arrives as catastrophe. The range is wide for one play: comedy, argument, love lyric, prophecy, lament. Charged: the fourth stasimon’s loose tether and the reasoning of 904 to 920.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of the arrest, warders eating breakfast in a lodging house and an inspector in a woman’s bedroom, and the priest’s parable under the dark vault. They obey one law: the court is everywhere, it wants nothing, and every place K. enters opens onto it. The priest gives the law in a sentence, “Das Gericht will nichts von dir”: the court wants nothing of him, and receives him when he comes and dismisses him when he goes. The same physics holds in the lumber room of K.’s own bank, in the attic offices, behind Titorelli’s bed, where a door opens into the court, and in the quarry. The range is wide, from farce and sexual comedy through procedure to theology and death, and nothing in that range breaks the law or needs an exception to it. Held a step below the top because the single vantage narrows the field the law must govern: the world is K.’s, and nothing outside him tests it.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements, the Introduction’s free, rubato woodwind polyphony and the Danse sacrale’s metric violence. One law governs them, and its unit is the cell: short melodic figures of narrow range, repeated and varied by displacement rather than development, layered rather than progressed, stopped rather than concluded. The same law joins the still Mystic Circles to the Evocation’s blocks, and the folk cells to the polychords. The range covered is wide, from near-silence to the full tutti, from rubato to the most rigid pulse. The tension is in the joins. A law of juxtaposition governs by being cut, and at some of the cuts it is asserted rather than shown.
Franz Schubert · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements, the May dream of no. 11 and the drone of no. 24. One law governs them, stated in no. 18: “Mein Herz sieht an dem Himmel / Gemalt sein eig’nes Bild”
“My heart sees its own image painted on the sky.” Every major key is the state the wanderer cannot have: the dream is the major that must break, the drone the minor that cannot. The chorale of no. 21 and the bluster of no. 22 obey it too: both are what he meets when he asks for an end, and both refuse. The tension is Part II’s order, partly Müller’s residue: “Die Post” after “Einsamkeit” obeys the law of images, not of sequence. The range governed is one voice and one season, and narrowness is not coherence.
Euripides · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The two most distant elements are the parodos’ blessing on the initiate, “ō makar”
“O blessed”, and the head of Pentheus in his mother’s hands. They obey one law, the god’s double nature, which he states of himself: “deinotatos, anthrōpoisi d’ ēpiōtatos”
“most terrible, and to men most gentle” (third episode). The comedy of the old men dancing and of the king dressed, fussing with his hem, is the same law at work, and laughter at him is complicity in his death. The god’s harshness at the end is the law carried through, not a contradiction. The range is wide, idyll to butchery to judgment, and coherence holds across it. Charged: the abrupt passage from lament to judgment the lost lines leave, and the snake prophecy, at an angle to the rest.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the stamping C major of the Ländler and the last bars of the Adagissimo, “ersterbend”. One law governs them. It is motivic: the first theme’s falling step and the Adagio’s turn figure are the work’s two cells, and both are in the dances. And it is thinning: every movement but the third ends by coming apart, and the third ends in the violence the others’ thinning is the alternative to. The tonal plan writes the law large: D to D flat, and no return. The strain: the Rondo’s loud close is the one ending that does not obey, and the parody of the inner movements can be heard as a second physics.
Claude Debussy · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Yniold’s chatter on his father’s knee, “une fois... une fois qu’il pleuvait”
“once... once when it was raining”, and the sword at the fountain. One law governs them: violence is spoken quietly or done in the dark, and the music knows more than anyone on stage. It holds from the first line, a man lost in a forest the orchestra has already said he will not leave, to the last scene, a death marked by servants kneeling without a word. The D of the opening and the C♯ of the close are one argument. The strains: the interludes play out at a weight the scenes refuse; the sheep scene is in another colour. The range is one family, one castle, no comedy but a child’s, no crowd, and narrowness is not coherence.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
One law governs: the centre. Take the two most distant elements, the fountain under the tribune and the finial of a minaret at the corner, far above the dome. They obey the same law: the four minarets frame the centre the tribune marks, and everything between, piers, semidomes, drum and dome, steps toward it. Inside and outside agree, which Hagia Sophia’s do not: what the exterior shows is what the interior is. The range is wide, from structure to tile to site, and it holds. What resists: the court, a rectangle with an axial law of its own, its arcade of unequal columns, joined to the hall rather than derived from it; the mihrab apse, which breaks the octagon’s symmetry on one side, for direction; and the galleries and the loge, which keep the law at a lower intensity.
Teotihuacano · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
One physics: fifteen and a half degrees east of north. Take the two most distant elements, the Pyramid of the Sun and a drain under a compound floor at the city’s edge. They obey one orientation, one profile (talud-tablero from the great pyramids to a patio altar), one surface (red lime plaster) and one unit (the walled rectangle, from the Ciudadela to a compound). The range is a city’s: the sacred, the state, the workshop, the foreign quarter, the household. The law held across five centuries of rebuilding. This is not narrow: 100,000 people or more under one rule. What resists: the city has two centres, the Sun’s, early, and the Ciudadela’s crossing, later; the Oaxaca barrio kept its own rites inside the grid; and the burial of the Feathered Serpent is the law turning on one of its own works. Held below the top for the two centres and the accretion.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the social comedy of the dinner, with Tansley’s discomfort and Bankes’s thought that the evening wastes his time, and the empty house of the middle part, where for pages no human mind is present at all. One law governs both: minds make moments of order against a flux that unmakes them. The dinner is that act at its height; the empty house is the flux with no one to resist it; the labour of Mrs McNab and Mrs Bast, and Lily’s picture, are the act begun again. The law covers the comic, Mr Ramsay declaiming “We perished, each alone” on the terrace, as it covers the tragic and the aesthetic, across a range from comedy of manners to cosmic questioning. Charged: the social field is narrow, one family and its guests, and narrowness is not coherence; and the middle part opens a register of cosmic question that the last part quietly lets fall.
Hieronymus Bosch · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
One physics governs the whole: things change scale and change function. Take the most distant elements, the grey globe and the Hell. The exterior’s sphere returns inside, as the glass globe around the centre’s lovers and the bubble beneath the bird-headed prince. Scale gives way throughout: birds as big as men and fruit as houses in the centre, a harp and a lute as racks in the Hell. The monstrous is already in Eden, where creatures crawl from the pool and a cat carries off a rat, so the Hell fulfils the law rather than breaking it. Held from the top by the centre’s comic register, a step in the law or its suspension.
Khmer, under Suryavarman II · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the laterite outer wall at the edge of the moat and the central sanctuary at the summit; or, in the reliefs, the king’s procession and the Churning of the Ocean. They obey one law. Everything is ordered by one axis and four directions, nested by enclosure and rising by stage, with the same mouldings, pillars, false windows with turned balusters and lintel grammar throughout. The procession and the Churning share one composition: long files in lockstep, ordered by rank, hauling toward a centre where a god or a king stands. Court, war, judgment and creation obey one physics of ordered opposition, across a range from water to summit and from battlefield to afterlife. What resists: the workshops’ differing hands; the precinct’s sparse fill; two north-east panels in another hand; and Buddhas on the walled sanctuary’s doors and in the cloister, a second iconography at the summit and on the way, which the law of axis and enclosure still governs.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the flower maidens’ garden and the Good Friday meadow. One law governs them. Both are nature in flower, and the law is that the same thing appears twice, false and true: seduction as a garden that withers when the cross is made, grace as a meadow that blooms because the sinner weeps. Kundry’s two states obey it, laughter and tears, seduction and service, her Act III word “Dienen”, to serve; so do the two ceremonies, and the spear that wounds and heals. The harmonic polarity is the same law in sound. The strain is doctrinal: the Christian rite and the Buddhist economy of rebirth are fused by assertion more than by action, and Kundry’s death without a word ends her line by fiat. The law governs her; the drama does not show its working at the close.
Fan Kuan · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
One physics governs the whole. Take the two most distant elements, the travellers at the foot and the scrub on the summit: one stroke builds both their worlds, so near and far are one substance. One light governs, without cast shadows. One scale law holds, in which a person stands to the mountain as a grain of its texture to its mass, and one order, host peak, attendants, water and people each in place. The mist looks like a break and is not: the far is shown as present rather than receding. The range runs from a mule’s load to the summit of a world, but the register is single, never tested by a contrary mood.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
One physics governs the whole. Take the two furthest elements: Nagg’s music-hall story of the tailor, told for laughs, and Hamm’s chronicle of the begging father, told for damnation. They obey one law. Both are stories told in the shelter to fill the time before the end; both concern a making and its failure, a world against a pair of trousers, a man and a child; both are interrupted and judged by their listeners. The world outside agrees with the dwindling stores within: grey from the window, zero on the thermometer, a sea without gulls, an earth where “There’s no more nature”, and inside, biscuits, painkiller, bicycle wheels and coffins running out. The range runs from slapstick to theology. The one strain is the boy Clov sees at the end, an opening on life outside that the law permits but does not wholly explain.
Ustad Ahmad Lahauri · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the red sandstone gateway at the south and the tomb chamber at the north. They obey one law. Both stand on the axis; both are framed by a great arch in a rectangle; both carry Qur’anic text in black inlay; both are mirrored across the axis. The colour hierarchy, red for what serves and white for the tomb, is part of the law. The garden’s quarters, the plinth’s square, the mausoleum’s chamfered square and the chamber’s octagon are one geometry at four scales. Every element keeps it, and the jawab is required by it, except Shah Jahan’s cenotaph of 1666, set beside hers off the chamber’s centre: one object breaking the symmetry at the heart of a work whose law is symmetry. Held below the top by it, and because the range is narrow: one vocabulary, one material system, one purpose.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the two men in the mirror at the back, smaller than a fingernail, and the pattens on the floor at the front left. They obey one law, and the law is light from one window falling on things painted as exactly at one scale as at another. Everything in the room is made with the same glaze and the same attention, the Passion roundels and the dog, the faces and the oranges. The range is wide for so small a field, from the sacred narrative round the mirror to a pair of shoes on the floor, from the painter’s signature to a dog’s fur, and it holds. What resists is the space: the perspective is gathered rather than single, and the room is a little too steep and too narrow for its contents.
Giovanni Bellini · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the most distant elements: the saint’s face in ecstasy and a small rabbit at a hole in the rock; or the skull on the desk and the town in the blue distance. One law governs them. Everything stands in the same light, from the same quarter, with the same clarity, and everything is attended at the same intensity whatever its rank. The theology and the optics are one law, and it covers the whole range: the near pebble and the far hills, the animal and the saint, the cell and the city. Nothing contradicts it. Held a little below the top because the tonal range is narrow, with no dark and no terror, and a law is easier to keep across a calm field than a turbulent one.
Chantal Akerman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the peeling of potatoes on the first day and the killing on the third. One law governs both: the same fixed frame, the same distance, the same refusal to cut, the same real time. The murder is filmed as the cutlet was, which is why it lands; nothing in the film’s physics is suspended to stage it. The range is the widest one flat allows, from the most banal act a camera can watch to a killing, and from the comedy of the neighbour’s talk of veal at the door to the dread of the last shot, and all of it obeys. Narrowness is not coherence, and the world here is narrow, one flat and a few streets; but the tonal range inside it is wide, and the law holds across all of it.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Christ bound at the back of the hall and the barefoot youth in the street at the front. They obey one law. One perspective governs both halves, one vanishing order, one measured pavement, one rule of volume and stillness by which every figure, sacred or secular, ancient or present, is made. The two lights, which might look like a contradiction, are a law of their own, a sacred light and common daylight within one geometry, each consistent across its own domain. Nothing in the panel stands outside its order, and the range is wide in kind for so small a field: the Passion and the present day, interior and exterior. Held below the top because the field is small and the register single.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the tapestry curtain at the very front, dark, blurred and enormous, and the towns along the map’s far border, tiny and exact. They obey one law: daylight from the left, falling on everything at one temperature, and a focus that softens what is near and sharpens what is far, the same for a cloth, a face and a printed city. The allegory and the room obey the same law. Clio is lit exactly as the mask and the stool are lit, so that the figure of History is also a girl in a studio. The range is wide for one room, from a national map and an imperial emblem to a painter’s stocking, and it holds without a break of register. What resists is small: the painter’s scale against the model is slightly uncertain, and the space between them compressed.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.5 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the Rhinemaidens’ play in the first scene and the Gibichungs’ wedding hall. One law governs them, and it is the gold: stolen from the one, it returns to the one from the other, and the Rhinemaidens are there at both ends. Their lament at the close of Rheingold, “Traulich und treu / ist’s nur in der Tiefe”
“Only in the depths is there trust and truth”, is answered when Brünnhilde gives the ring back. The motivic genealogy carries one physics from Nibelheim to Valhalla to the forest. The tensions are real: the poem was conceived under two philosophies, Feuerbach’s and then Schopenhauer’s, and the two endings Wagner drafted and did not set show he could not say which law the ending obeys.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The tonal range runs from the clowns to the Ghost, and one law holds across it. The gravedigger’s riddle, “the houses he makes last till doomsday” (5.1), and the Ghost’s purgatory obey one physics: rot beneath a surface, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (1.4), and a death that levels it. The plot is less strict: Hamlet is a student bound for Wittenberg (1.2) and thirty by the sexton’s count (5.1); “But two months dead” (1.2) becomes “twice two months” (3.2); “The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1) comes after the Ghost has returned. In this text 4.5 brings on Horatio and gives the lines to a Gentleman: the seam shows.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.5 · Tier V
The two most distant elements, the ancestors’ torpor in the lunettes and God dividing light from darkness at the crown, obey one law. Everything is body, rendered as sculptural mass, within one painted architecture whose cornice, thrones and ribs run unbroken over the vault. The pagan sibyls obey the typological law of the Hebrew prophets: each foresees. The range runs from the inert to the divine, and it holds. Three things resist. Scale changes mid-vault, so the Flood and the Separation of Light seem to obey different physics of size. There is no common viewpoint; each field keeps its own horizon. And the ignudi obey the law of the figure but no iconographic law anyone has stated.
Cao Xueqin · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
One law governs the whole: form is emptiness and emptiness form, the true is false, the dream is a dream. The Taoist Kongkong states it in changing his name: “因空见色，由色生情，传情入色，自色悟空”
“from emptiness he saw form; from form, passion arose; passion was conveyed into form; from form he woke to emptiness” (ch. 1). The two most distant elements, Nüwa’s stone at the foot of the peak and Xifeng’s usury with the maids’ wages, obey it: the realism makes the world solid enough that its loss is felt, and the frame says it was never solid. Liu Laolao’s farce and Qingwen’s death sit in one physics. Breaches lower it: the novel’s calendar does not cohere and the young people’s ages drift, and Qin Keqing’s death leaves the household’s suspicion and Baoyu’s spitting blood without a cause.
Giotto di Bondone · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
The two most distant elements are the flat blue vault with its medallions and the coretti, which open a hole in the wall. They obey one law: the chapel’s surfaces are read as what they show, sky above, stone below, world between. Within the narrative the law is strict and wide: one gravity governs shepherds, priests, angels and the Magdalene; Injustice sits in his gate as Herod sits on his balcony. The Judgment changes physics, its scale dropping from Christ to the apostles to the crowds and its Hell a schematic swarm in an older grammar, so the closing wall is not governed as the walls are. And the vault’s heaven and the walls’ sky are two blues doing two jobs.
Iktinos and Kallikrates · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the south metopes, square fields of high relief, each a single violent combat, Doric; and the frieze, a continuous calm band of low relief, Ionic, in which nobody fights. They obey one law. Both serve the programme’s order, disorder outside and civic order within, each band at its distance from the centre; and every member is structural, the same proportion and refinement governing every course from stylobate to cornice, so the building’s physics is one. The range is wide, from the giants to the cattle-drivers, and it holds. What resists: the building deliberately runs two orders and two kinds of relief, and on the south side older and newer hands stand side by side. The seams show, and the axis is held for them.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Homais and the curé Bournisien arguing, eating and dozing beside Emma’s corpse, and her agony an hour before; or the old farm servant’s medal for a lifetime of service, given amid laughter, and Emma’s ecstasy on the ride. One law governs them: every feeling and every institution in this world is lived through received forms, which shape and betray what is lived through them. Her passion, Homais’s science, the church’s consolation, the state’s honours and Lheureux’s credit obey it equally, and the irony is applied to all, which the prosecutor took for immorality. The range of tone, from farce to agony, is held without a seam. The range of world is narrower: two small towns, Rouen, a château for one night. Narrowness is not coherence, and that, with the opening “nous”, which obeys no law the book keeps, holds the axis where it is.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the landscape through the window behind Christ, still and blue, and Bartholomew rising in alarm at the far left end of the table. They obey one law. Every line of the room runs to one point, every gesture answers one sentence, and one light from the left falls on all. Calm and agitation are one system: the centre is still because the sides move. The space resists a little, the table too short for thirteen and the room true to the eye, not to measurement: accommodations to the law, costing little. The larger limit is range. One room, one instant and twelve temperaments make a field wide in feeling and narrow in kind, and narrowness is not coherence.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements, the catalogue aria and the statue’s demand for repentance. One law governs them: the comic and the terrible in one frame. Leporello witnesses both, his patter beneath the trombones, cowering at the table while his master refuses. The D minor of the overture’s opening and the D major of the close bind the first bar to the last, and dramma giocoso names the law outright. At the ball, three classes and three metres obey one beat until the scream. The strains are real: the scena ultima returns to comedy after the damnation, heard as the law restated or as a break; the Act II middle wanders; Ottavio’s arias stop time.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Aristophanes’ hiccups and the sneezing that cures them, and the sight of the beautiful itself (211a to b). One law governs both: eros as the intermediate, the body and its lack pressing on the soul and the soul reaching past the body. The claim at dawn that one maker should command comedy and tragedy states the law of the whole, and the work obeys it: comic and tragic poet, physician, lover and philosopher stand on one scale of desire. Alcibiades does not break the law; he shows its lower rungs from inside. Held at 9.2 because Eryximachus’ cosmology of opposites harmonised sits loosely in the physics, and because the range, wide in idea, is held within one room and one class.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the bull at the left, still and frontal, and the burning figure at the right, all upward motion. They obey one law. Every form is a flat plane cut by hard contours, in the same three values. Human and animal share one anatomy of pain: the mother and the horse have the same blade for a tongue. Room and street fold into one space by the rule that folds a face into profile and front at once. The range runs from the dead to the witness, from the lamp to the electric light, and it holds. What resists is in two places: the horse’s newsprint texture, a second law used once; and three lights in a space with no single source.
Raphael · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
The two most distant elements are the cynic sprawled alone on the steps with a bowl, and the marble Apollo in its niche above him. They obey one law: one perspective, one pavement, one fall of light, and one standard of the figure. Every gesture belongs to a conversation, and every conversation sits on an orthogonal that runs to the centre. The range is wide in temperament and narrow in kind: one building, one hour, men thinking. Narrowness is not coherence, and that holds the axis. What resists is the added figure: another scale and manner, on the axis the cartoon left open, the only body drawn as mass rather than line. The composition absorbed him; the two who look out break the law of attention by convention.
Emily Brontë · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Lockwood’s comedy of manners in chapter 2, the dogs, the snow, the misread tea table; and the dead Heathcliff at the open lattice in chapter 34, his eyes that will not close. Or the reading lessons of Hareton and Cathy (ch. 32) and the opened coffin (ch. 29). One law governs them: the wildness of the Heights and the order of the Grange are forces that must meet, and what is kept apart returns. The ghosts obey it, the law of inheritance obeys it, the weather obeys it; the restoration at the end is not a softer world but the same one, with the dead let out to the moor and the living let into the house. The range is wide and held: farce, Gothic terror, legal plot, pastoral close. Charged: the second plot leans on contrivance, the forced marriage and the deaths of Edgar and Linton within weeks, that the first never needed.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the siege of the Haitian sugar estate in the 1820s, and Shreve’s joking in the snowbound room at Harvard in 1910. One law governs both: a design that treats people as means will be undone by the people it has made, and every telling of it is shaped by the teller’s need. Sutpen sets his first marriage aside as a mistake in the design; Bon is the mistake returning. Shreve, the outsider with no stake, still invents the love story he needs, and Quentin, who has every stake, cannot bear the conclusion. The range is very wide: frontier founding, Gothic house, war, a Canadian’s comedy, a table of descent. Charged: the appended dates sit uneasily with the narrative in places, and Mr. Compson’s ironic fatalism sometimes runs on a looser law than the rest.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the street farce of 1.1, two men shouting obscenities under a senator’s window at night, and the bed of 5.2. One law governs both. In the first scene Iago works on Brabantio exactly as he will work on Othello, by picture and insinuation, with beasts for images, and Brabantio, like Othello, goes from disbelief to certainty in minutes. The gulling of Roderigo is the comedy of the same mechanism at a lower price. The Turkish war and the marriage obey it too: the storm removes the outward enemy so the inward one can work. The breaches are two. The double time cannot be reconciled on the page, though it cannot be seen in the theatre, and the Clown’s quibbles belong to another play. The range is wide, from farce to the death of a wife, and it is held.
Alban Berg · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the tavern’s vulgar Ländler and polka, and the D minor interlude’s lament. One law governs both. The opera’s world is fixed patterns pressing on the poor, and the dances are those patterns at their most mindless, as the passacaglia is the Doctor’s and the march is the Drum Major’s. The interlude is the one place outside the law, and the law places it: the key is withheld until the composer speaks. The strain is the interlude itself, which can be heard as breaking the work’s physics by stepping into a tonal rhetoric the rest refuses; and the two tavern scenes stretch the law’s range more than they prove it.
James Joyce · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
One law governs the whole: fall and return, in a dreaming mind where any figure may become any other, but only ever into the same five. Take the two most distant elements, the slapstick Waterloo of the Willingdone Museyroom (I.1) and Anna Livia going out to sea (IV). In the first an old general is mocked for half a hat; in the last an old husband is found out, “You’re only a bumpkin.” Both are the father fallen, seen by the young, laughed at and mourned. Butt and the Russian General, the Ondt and the Gracehoper, Patrick and the archdruid are one quarrel. Charged: the dream law is permissive, so coherence comes cheap; and in III.3’s séance and II.3’s broadcasts it is present but idle.
Jean Racine · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
One law governs the whole: what is hidden in the blood comes to the light, and the light kills. Take the two most distant elements: Hippolyte’s gallant avowal to Aricie (II.2), in the idiom of the salon, and the sea monster of V.6, out of archaic myth. They obey the same law: his hidden love, revealed, turns Phèdre to silence; the monster is the hidden curse, spoken, made flesh. Hippolyte’s “Le jour n’est pas plus pur que le fond de mon cœur”
“The day is not purer than the depths of my heart” (IV.2) and Phèdre’s last couplet, restoring the day’s purity by her death, are one figure answered. Gods and psychology are one physics: Venus never appears and is never doubted. Held below the top because the range is narrower than a larger form covers, and the lovers’ gallant register is where the law is felt as the age’s convention.
George Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Mr Brooke at the hustings, pelted, his own words echoed back at him by a puppet (Book V), and Bulstrode at the bedside, holding the key to the cellar and the brandy (ch. 70). One law governs both: each person mistakes their own centre for the world’s, and is answered by the web of other lives. Brooke is saved by his own vagueness; Bulstrode is destroyed by the past his faith absorbed, Lydgate by what he never looked at; Dorothea is saved by what she learns to see. The range is wide and held: farce at the reading of Featherstone’s will, scholarship in the Lowick library, science in Lydgate’s lodging, the dawn at the window. Charged: Ladislaw’s history, Casaubon’s cousin and Bulstrode’s money, works by a coincidence the book elsewhere does not need, and the Garths are shielded from the law the others obey.
George Orwell · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
One law governs the whole: power seeks the mind, and every private thing is either its enemy or its bait. Take the two most distant elements, the Golden Country with its thrush and the cage of rats in Room 101. They obey the same law. The thrush sings unwatched, as Winston believes, in the one place outside the Party’s sight; the rats are the Party’s proof that there is no such place, that “the few cubic centimetres inside your skull” can be found and entered. The law holds across the range: Parsons, denounced by his own child; the paperweight, a world in glass, smashed at the arrest; the enemy changed in the middle of a speech in Hate Week; the diary and the love affair, each turned from refuge to evidence. The proles stand outside the law in the book’s own terms: “Proles and animals are free.” Charged: the Appendix’s past tense sits at an angle to the law of permanence the novel asserts, and the book leaves undecided whether that is breach or design.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the pouffe in chapter I, whose springs rise under Pyotr Ivanovich while the widow weeps, and the light in chapter XII. One law governs both: the body and death will not keep to decorum, and the forms that pretend otherwise are a lie. The springs, the knob of the window frame that bruises his side, the doctors’ manner, the evening at the theatre while he lies dying, and the light all answer to it. The law is wide in range, from social comedy to metaphysical crisis. The end is prepared, not imposed: Gerasim, the son who kisses his hand, the memory of childhood, and the question “не то”, not the right thing, recurring until it is answered. Held from the top by the last hour, which some will read as a change of law, faith entering where the book had been an inquiry.
James Joyce · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
One law governs the whole: the living are held by the dead and by the words that stand in for life, and each attempted escape returns to its point of departure. Take the two most distant elements: the corks flying on the hob in the committee room, “Pok!”, and the snow on the churchyard “where Michael Furey lay buried”. They obey the same law. Parnell, dead since 1891, holds that room as a boy dead at seventeen holds Gretta. The boy at the window in the first story, watching for “the reflection of candles”, returns as Gabriel at the window in the last. The range is wide and held: farce in “Grace”, terror in “Counterparts”, lyric in “Araby”, social comedy at the Misses Morkan’s. One strain is charged: “The Dead” brings a warmth, the aunts’ hospitality and Gabriel’s “Generous tears”, that the verdict of paralysis had not allowed, and its last paragraph leaves undecided whether the law is kept or lifted.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the cloister of 1634–1635, almost a Renaissance court of Tuscan columns, and the upper façade, finished after 1667 by a second hand, which bends back in three concave bays and breaks its own crown with a medallion. Thirty years lie between them, and they obey one law: the corner that will not be a corner, bowed in the cloister, convex on the front; the line that will not break, in cloister, church and façade; and alternation, balusters up and down, openings wide and narrow, bays concave and convex. One physics runs from the street to the dead. Narrowness is not coherence, and the range is a small complex’s, but it is tonal as well as spatial, from the plainest court in Rome to its most restless front. Held below the top because the upper façade pushes the law toward ornament.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
One law governs the whole: war is god, the sun is indifferent, and all things under it are weighed alike. Take the two most distant elements, the child at the scullery fire in Tennessee and the man striking fire from the rock in the epilogue: the child stokes a fire and the man strikes one, under the same sun. The judge’s impossibilities obey it as the historical company does, because the narrator records both with the same flat exactness and never adjudicates: a giant who does not age stands in the world of the dated contracts of Chihuahua. The chronology holds: born in 1833, the kid is forty-five at Fort Griffin in 1878. Two breaches are charged: the kid’s clemency, a moral fact the law does not account for and the book leaves unexplained; and the epilogue’s turn to enclosure, which stands outside the physics of the rest at some cost to its legibility.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Bartolo’s vengeance aria, patter and pomp, and the Countess’s “Dove sono”. One law governs them: everyone in this house wants something, and the day’s clock turns each want into a move. Bartolo’s revenge, sung in buffo bluster, is the plan that brings the trial, and the trial brings the recognition that undoes it; the Countess’s lament ends in her resolve to take Susanna’s place, the move that wins the night. Seria and buffa are not two worlds but two classes in one house, and the music’s register follows rank and feeling, not genre. The whole falls under one day and one set of rooms. The strain is Act IV, where Marcellina argues for a solidarity of women that Figaro’s tirade contradicts without the work taking a side.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the drunken bird of the fifth song and the funeral march of the sixth. One law governs them. Every pleasure in the work is held against death and set beside the earth’s indifference: the drinker asks the bird whether spring has come and does not care; the youths in the pavilion are seen upside down in the water; the lotus girls’ longing is watched from the bank. The keys move outward from A minor and arrive at C, its relative major, so the end is the beginning’s other face. The strain is in the middle: songs three to five obey the law as pictures more than as argument, heard there because the outer songs taught it. The range governed is wide, from terror to wit.
Michelangelo · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the ideal body under real weight, rendered in a single stillness. Take the two most distant elements, the agitated mass of the mantle’s folds and the slack calm of the dead body. They obey the same rule, because the agitation of the cloth is what bears the calm of the body. The two faces are carved to one idealised type and one lowered gaze. The rough base and the polished flesh lie on one gradient of finish. The signature band alone belongs to another law, the maker’s claim breaking into a devotional image, and it is small. Held where it is because narrowness is not coherence: one mood, one moment and two figures are a small range for a law to govern.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole. Take the two most distant elements: the claws of foam over the second boat, near, white and about to fall, and Fuji, far, white and fixed. They obey one law, the same curve and the same reserved white, since the foreground swell is Fuji in water and the mountain’s snow is the wave’s foam at rest. Every form is an arc of one family: wave, swell, hulls, the rowers’ backs, the mountain’s slopes. One light, with no cast shadow; one colour law, two blues and a white with warm neutrals. The range is wide for a page: from a drop of spray to a mountain, from terror to calm. What resists is small: the first boat’s angle to the water, and the cartouche, a flat verbal frame in a field of curves. Held short of the top because the register, for all its two poles, is kept at one pitch.
Andrei Rublev · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the mountain at the upper right and the cup at the centre of the table; or the hard architecture of the house and the soft line of the left angel’s cloak. One law governs them: everything inclines, gently, toward the centre and toward the others, and the inclination is the panel’s physics. The mountain bends toward the central angel as the right angel’s head does; the tree leans; the uprights of the house are the only verticals and stand behind the angel least inclined. The range is narrow in kind, three figures, one table and three emblems, but wide in order, from rock, tree and building to the divine persons and the sacrifice, and the law holds across it. Held below the top because narrowness of cast is not coherence, and the cast is small.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the last trumpet of the sixth movement and the pastoral psalm of the fourth. One law governs them, stated in the first: every grief is answered within its own movement, and every answer is drawn from scripture’s promise, not from the music’s will. The key plan holds it, F to F, rising by a fourth, a third, a semitone, a third and a fourth, a mirror round the step from D to E flat at the centre. The outer movements share word, key and music; chorale and fugue run through all seven. The strain is in the solo writing: the baritone returns in the sixth, and the fifth, added after Bremen, breaks the symmetry of voices.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the dry, staccato E minor chord that opens the work and the still E flat of the coda. One law governs them, and its unit is the third. The opening chord is spaced to sound its third, G, doubled and prominent; the coda’s E flat and the opening’s E are the minor and major thirds of the C on which the work ends. A second law governs the manner: stillness against motion, the fixed figure against the moving voice, in the ostinato of the first movement, the entries of the fugue and the pattern of the coda. The range it governs runs from plea and lament through learned counterpoint and galloping force to hushed hymn. Held below the top because the range is a short work’s range: the law is proved over some twenty-two minutes, not over an evening.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: old Roque’s violence against a prisoner held at the Tuileries (III.1) and the last meeting of Frédéric and Mme Arnoux in her white hair; or the idyll at Fontainebleau and the auction. One law governs them: illusion meets time and is dissolved, without catastrophe, by the ordinary. The bourgeois and the revolutionary, the lover and the speculator, the artist Pellerin and the journalist Hussonnet obey it; nobody in the book is exempt, Dussardier’s faith included, which is killed rather than disproved. The range is wide: comedy, satire, history, idyll, elegy. Charged a little for the satire of the clubs, coarser than the book’s law elsewhere allows, and for the thin end given to Louise Roque.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the face at the centre and the bridge in the far distance at the right. They obey one law. Everything is made of gradation, with no line anywhere, and the same smoke that softens the corners of the mouth softens the far ranges. Flesh and rock, hair and water, the folds of the veil and the windings of the roads are made by one hand and one touch. The range runs from a living face to a world without people, and from the warmth of the foreground to the cold of the distance, and holds. The one point of resistance is the horizons: if the halves are unequal by design, they serve the law, the figure as the hinge of two worlds; if by accident, they are a seam. Held below the top for that question, and because the range, wide in kind, is narrow in number: one figure and one land.
Chola bronze casters · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the serene face at the centre and the dwarf under the foot at the base, or the drum and the fire at the two ends of the upper axis. They obey one law, rhythm in balance. Every part is a counterweight to another, the swung leg to the planted one, the drum to the fire, the raised palm to the pointing hand, the locks flying left against the locks flying right, and the ring encloses it all in one circle whose centre is the dancer’s navel. Nothing stands outside the law: the dwarf is part of the balance, the god’s support as well as his enemy. The range is wide in meaning, from creation to destruction and from ignorance to release, and narrow in kind: one body, one instant, one material. The law governs completely; the narrowness holds it below the top.
Guo Xi · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the boats at the water’s edge in the lower left, and the summit at the top edge. One law holds them. Everything is the one breath of the season moving through the mountain, and every part, rock, water, tree, roof and person, is shown at its station in that movement and in the same ink. The level distance at the left and the high distance up the axis obey one physics of mist and tone. The several viewpoints do not contradict one another; they are the law’s way of letting the eye travel. The range is wide in scale, from a figure on a path to the mountain of the world, and narrow in kind: one landscape, one season, one register.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the vault of foliage and sky at the top, and the dog and fruit at the bottom edge. They obey one law. Everything is a patch of colour laid beside another, modelled by warm against cool, bounded by a searching blue line; nothing is lit by a source, nothing is textured for its material. Flesh is painted as bark, cloth as cloud. The figures lean as the trees lean, so that bodies and architecture share one geometry; the far bank and its figures are painted at the same pitch; and the unfinished passages obey the law as fully as the worked ones, since the law is the method. The range: bodies, trees, water, sky, fruit, an animal, a village across the river; wider than a pond, narrower than a court. Narrowness is not coherence, and the scene is one instant at one temperature, which holds the axis here.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a bridging passage of trees, streets and weather, and JR at the school’s pay phone placing an order with a broker. They obey one law: order runs down into noise, and what holds things together is sold off piece by piece. Gibbs names the law as entropy; the book enacts it in the school, the apartment, the Bast inheritance, Bast’s dwindling commissions and the landscape alike. The range is wide, from slapstick to elegy, from a schoolroom to a foreign mining concession, and the same law holds. Charged: the corporate satire at the top, Governor Cates and the Washington figures, runs on a broader physics of caricature than the teachers and artists in the apartment, and the narrowing of nearly every adult to folly or venality makes part of the coherence a matter of tone.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: human beings reckoned as commodities by a mind that believes itself humane, in a voice that never changes key. Take the two most distant elements, the opening pity for the beggar women and their children and the price of a carcass at the shambles. They obey the same law, and the pamphlet’s knowledge is that they do: the projector’s pity and his butchery are one disposition. The paragraph of other expedients, where the work comes nearest to breaking its law, keeps it, because the remedies are refused in the projector’s own voice and for his own reasons. Held below the highest marks because the range, though wider than its length suggests (the kitchen, the market, the Church’s calendar, the state’s policy), is the range of one voice and one argument, and narrowness is not coherence.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the slaughter pavilion at the precinct’s edge and the central stone of the open altar, or the cypress grove and the coffered dome of the hall. They obey one law. Round and square, the odd numbers of heaven, the axis from south to north, blue for the sky, white for the stair and the sequence of the rite govern each, from the line of the outer wall to the count of balustrade panels and the colour of a tile. Nothing in the precinct contradicts the cosmology it enacts, and the later campaigns of Jiajing and Qianlong tightened the law. The range is wide in kind, calendar, state, agriculture, music, fasting and sacrifice, and narrow in register, one solemn serenity throughout; that narrowness holds it a step from the top.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the prisoners at the barred window at the far right and the Baptist’s blood at the lower left, where the painter signs. They obey one law. Everything in the yard is a body or a stone in one light and one silence, ranked by how much light it gets and how near it stands to the deed; the saint is painted with no more glory than the executioner, the wall in the same brown as the shadows on the bodies. No element is lit for its own sake. The law holds across the institution, labour, the sacred, grief, the powerless witness and the maker himself. Held below the top because the range is wide in kind but the scene is one instant at one temperature.
Claude Debussy · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pianissimo opening over the low B and the fortissimo chorale that ends the third sketch, or the dawn and the storm. One law governs them: everything is transformation of a few cells and nothing returns unchanged, so the chorale of noon can come back as the force of the storm and still be itself. The harmonic law holds too: modal and whole-tone fields reach tonal cadences only at the points of arrival, the noon of the first sketch and the close of the third. The range is wide, from stillness to tempest, from morning colour to violence. The strain is Jeux de vagues, made by the same method but joined to the outer panels more by analysis than by hearing, so the work’s seam is looser there.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the C major prelude, an arpeggio through a progression, and the B minor fugue, four voices on a chromatic subject. One law governs both: tonal harmony under one tuning, in which any pitch can be a tonic and every voice is a line. The C major prelude is that law shown bare, harmony without melody; the B minor fugue presses it to its edge, all twelve pitches in a subject that still has a tonic. Every piece obeys it, across the widest range of any work of its kind: two voices to five, dance to lament, every key. The tension is that the law is the system’s: the pieces are bound to one another by the key plan and the pairing, not by shared material.
Sultan Muhammad · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the king at the summit and a face half hidden in a rock at the painting’s edge. They obey one law: everything in this world is alive and turned toward a centre, and the king and the stone are painted by the same animating hand. The range is very wide, sky, mountain, water, plant, beast, commoner, prince and sovereign, and each is given the same life without losing its rank. The Herat clarity of the figures and the Tabriz turbulence of the ground, two inheritances that might have fought, are reconciled into one physics. Held below the top because at the edges the Turkman grotesques sit a little apart from the painting’s gravity, a joke within the hymn.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole: a moving sky under morning sun, over still water. Take the two most distant elements, the women talking in the shadow at the lower left and the sunlit tower at the upper right. They obey the same law: the women are dark because the cloud is over them, the tower bright because it is not, and the water between carries both. The beads of light fall wherever broken light meets a textured surface, and nowhere else. The clock gives the hour and the light agrees with it. No figure is lit for its own sake, no passage modelled for emphasis. The range is wide in tone and narrow in kind: one view, one minute, one weather. Narrowness is not coherence, and the axis is held for that; within its range the law is total.
Inca, under Pachacuti · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a rubble terrace wall at the foot of the agricultural sector, and the Torreón’s fitted curve round its boulder. They obey one law. Both are the ridge’s own granite, battered inward, set dry, fitted to the rock they stand on, with the same trapezoid wherever there is an opening. Or take the spring’s canal and the Intihuatana: water and stone are both led, not forced. The law can be stated: nothing on the ridge is imposed on it; every wall follows a contour or an outcrop, the grades of masonry are one scale from field to shrine, and the fountains are one scale from the Inca’s door to the last basin. The range is wide, from farming to the solstice, from the retainers’ compounds to the royal house, and it holds. What resists is small: the plurality of shrines, which do not resolve into one axis.
Franz Liszt · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Andante sostenuto’s hymn in F sharp major and the fugato’s scherzando play, or the opening’s falling scales and the Grandioso’s chorale. One law governs them: transformation of the same few motifs, under one sonata form, from one key to its returns. The slow section takes up the Cantando and the Grandioso; the fugato is made of the opening motifs; the close recalls the slow theme and then the opening scales. The range is wide for a solo work: menace, love, prayer, play, triumph and silence. The strain is in the Grandioso and the slow theme, held by key plan and return more than by derivation, and in octave rhetoric that obeys harmony more than the law.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the Adagio’s suspended E major and the Finale’s popular dance. One law governs them, and its unit is the semitone above the centre, answered by a fall back: E major to F minor in the Adagio; C to D flat in the Trio; D flat to C in the last two sounds. Third relations are the law’s other term: E flat for the first movement’s second group and E for the Adagio, each a third from the home C. The range governed is wide, from chorale to street dance. The tension is in the Finale, whose material is less audibly bound to the law than its ending is; there the law holds by key and close more than by theme. Below Op. 131 at 9.6 for it.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements. The Irish courtship with Nora is rustic comedy, a hidden ribbon and a jealous cousin; Bryan’s death is grief past bearing. Both are shot at the same distance and the same tempo under the same narrator’s irony, and the grief is the stronger for being held under the law that held the comedy. That law is the indifference of the picture to the figure in it, told by a voice that already knows the end, and the battlefield, the Prussian barracks, the gaming rooms of Spa and the Lyndon drawing room obey it alike. The range, war, comedy, courtship, crime and grief, makes the coherence an achievement. The seam is the opening of Part I, lighter in texture than anything after it and visible on return.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Alex’s night of violence, set to Rossini and sung to a show tune, and the Ludovico treatment, administered in a clinic by doctors. One law governs them: appetite. Alex wants, and takes; the state wants a result, and takes it from him; the Minister wants a headline and feeds him steak; the writer wants revenge and plays him Beethoven through the floor. Every figure in the film is driven by the same hunger, and the film treats them alike. The music is within the law, since it is the one thing wanted purely and the one thing used as a weapon. Held at the figure by the one element outside it: the chaplain, who alone wants nothing, and is given the argument and no power.
Mohammad Reza Isfahani, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark, narrow, turning passage and the bright crown of the dome; or the pale dome seen from the square at noon and the mihrab at the end of the turned axis. They obey one law: a single field of tile in which structure is drawn as line and surface as light, governing portal, passage, chamber and dome, in one palette of turquoise, blue, buff and white, and one geometry of diminishing radial pattern from the stalactites of the portal to the sunburst of the dome. The offset between square and qibla, which could have broken the building in two, is made part of the law: the turning belongs to it. What bends the law a little: the exterior’s pale dome, unlike the blues within, and the portal facing the city’s axis are two systems reconciled, not one. The range from city to sanctuary is wide, and held.
Anonymous · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The two most distant elements are the prose tale and the storm, and they share more law than first appears. The frame’s words govern the poem: the sons of God of the court (1:6) shout for joy at creation (38:7); Job holds to the integrity his wife and God named (2:3, 2:9; 27:5); the verdict of 42:7 falls on the poem’s speeches. The law is that the audience knows what the speakers do not. The breaks are real: God never mentions the wager; the doubling cuts against the dialogue’s case; Elihu belongs to neither frame nor verdict; and 27:13 puts Zophar’s line of 20:29 in Job’s mouth. Read as damage they charge the axis heavily, read as design less, and the text does not decide.
Ovid · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
One law, change of form that keeps a trait, told by one voice, and the two most distant elements obey it: Lycaon’s wolf, which servat vestigia formae (1.237), and Caesar’s soul made a star (15.845 to 850); so do the farce of Midas and the tragedy of Myrrha. The range is as wide as any in literature, and the fixed apotheoses, with the poet’s indelible name (15.876), stand against Omnia mutantur by design. What holds the axis is a second physics. In Books I to XIV change is mostly the gods’ caprice or punishment; in Book XV Pythagoras makes it natural law, in which nothing is punished and nothing perishes (15.165, 15.252 to 258). The poem sets the two side by side and does not reconcile them.
Plato · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Cephalus at the start, an old man going to sacrifice, who says wealth helps a man die without debt to gods or men, and Er at the end, the soul choosing its next life before the spindle of Necessity. One law governs both: what a life is worth when it is weighed whole, asked first by an old man near death and answered last by the dead. The same law governs city and soul, justice as order; the sun and the cave, the good as source; and the decline of constitutions, disorder in souls becoming disorder in cities. Held below the top by a tension left standing: the book banishes mimetic poetry and is itself mimetic, and may mean the contradiction without showing that it does.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the infant, pale with jealousy at another at the breast (I.7.11), and the rest of the seventh day that has no evening (XIII.35.50 to 36.51). One law governs both: the heart is restless until it rests, and every motion between, appetite, ambition, friendship, philosophy, exegesis, is that restlessness seeking its object. The law holds across a very wide range: a child’s games and a theory of time; a mother’s habit of drinking as a girl (IX.8.18) and formless matter. The last words, “sic, sic accipietur, sic invenietur, sic aperietur”
“so, so will it be received, so found, so opened” (XIII.38.53), close the circle the first sentence opened. Charged: from the tenth book the mode turns from shown to argued for long stretches, and the sense of one physics is strained there, even where the logic is kept.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the hanging right hand, heavy and at rest, and the face, drawn and alert. They obey one law, the body as a counterpoint of rest and tension: right against left, lower body against head, bearing leg against free. Nothing in the figure breaks it. The large head and hands obey a second law, by the usual account the law of the distant view, and in the Tribuna that law shows. Conceived from the front, as the block required, and seen in the round, it obeys the front’s law better than the round’s. And narrowness is not coherence: one figure, one moment and one register are a small range for a law to govern.
Du Fu · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant things in the body: the banquet comedy of “Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup” and the starved son of “Five Hundred Words”; or the courtly praise poems and the conscripts’ ballads; or the good rain at Chengdu that “潤物細無聲”
“moistens things, fine and soundless” and the white-haired weeping at Yueyang. They obey one law: a single observing self, placed exactly in a season, a place and a moment of the state’s history, attending to what is in front of it and answering for it. The joy in rain is the same attention that sees the bones on the road, and the range is very wide. Held back by the verse of petition and flattery, where the law slackens into convention and the self becomes a client.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the march’s last bars, where the theme dies in pieces, and the finale’s Presto, a whirl of triumph on a contredanse. One law governs both: material is unmade and remade. The first movement’s theme is broken and rebuilt; the march’s theme is taken apart into silence; the scherzo rebuilds energy out of a murmur; the finale builds its theme from a bare bass. The key scheme serves the law, E flat, C minor, E flat, E flat, with C and its relations the threat throughout, and the C sharp of the seventh bar returns as a turning point in the recapitulation and coda. The strain is in the finale, where dance, fugue and hymn stand side by side and the law holds less audibly.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant poles: the order, luxury and calm of “L’Invitation au voyage” and the rotting carcass of “Une Charogne”; or the compassion of “Les Petites Vieilles” and the revolt of “Les Litanies de Satan”, “Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!”, “O Satan, take pity on my long misery!”. They obey one law: the double pull toward the ideal and toward the abyss, in a soul for whom boredom is the ground state and beauty is wrung from what decays. “Le Voyage” restates the law at the end, “Une oasis d’horreur dans un désert d’ennui!”, “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!”, and its last line answers “Au lecteur”. The range is wide and the law holds. Held a little lower by “Le Vin”, whose genial or sentimental drinking sits loosely under it.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Estragon’s trousers falling round his ankles as the two try to hang themselves at the end, and Pozzo’s “They give birth astride of a grave” (II). They obey one law: the body fails, time is short, and both facts are funny and terrible at once. The apparent slips are that law at work. The tree comes into leaf overnight; Pozzo goes blind overnight and denies all knowledge of yesterday; the Boy denies he came before. Memory fails everywhere, so the world is consistent in being unconfirmable. The tonal range is real, from farce to elegy to metaphysical terror; the range of the world is not, and narrowness is not coherence. One road, one tree, two days, five men, no history the play will vouch for: a law that governs so little is little tested, and that holds the axis here.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Benjy’s world of sensation without time, and Jason’s world of money and the clock, checking the cotton quotations and chasing his niece down the road. They obey one law: each Compson is ruled by his relation to a past that is lost. Benjy lives inside it, Quentin dies of it, Jason denies it and is robbed by it; Dilsey, outside the law of the family, lives in a time measured by the liturgy, and she alone sees the whole. The law holds across a wide range of register: lyric, tragic, comic, homiletic. Charged: the fourth section changes the book’s narrative physics, from inside minds to an outside view that knows more than any law of the first three permits, and the change is felt as a break as well as a release; and the comedy of Jason’s section sits at a distance from the tragedy, a distance the law covers but does not close.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
9.1 · Tier V
The two most distant elements, the hominids at the waterhole and the room beyond the infinite, obey one law. The camera observes and does not explain, and the monolith arrives with Ligeti’s voices. The match cut binds the ape’s tool to the orbiting machine; the Zarathustra fanfare binds the dawn to the Star Child. The range runs from the comedy of the toilet instructions to the metaphysical, and the cold eye holds both. The tension is the move from engineered realism to the abstraction of the Star Gate, and the film prepares it: the shriek at TMA-1 is where known physics first fails. What resists is the room, with its Louis XVI furniture and lit floor, which obeys the law of the unexplained rather than any law the film has built.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The two most distant elements are the Orfeo toccata under “Deus in adiutorium”
“O God, come to my aid”, and the ten voices of Nisi Dominus intoning one chant. One law governs them, in two clauses. First: the Church’s texts are sung on the Church’s tones, in many voices, with the instruments framing them; the bride’s and the seraphim’s texts are sung free, in few voices, over the organ alone. Second: whatever the manner, the chant is the measure of it. Under that law the toccata is a falsobordone with trumpets and the ten-voice psalm a chant with a crowd, across the widest range in the sacred music of its time. The strain is the one the record names: the four concertos stand outside the heading that promises plainchant, and the law accounts for them only by exempting them from its first clause.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The hostile reader says the Introduction’s love of the city and the tale’s horror at it are two laws, and the poem is split. Take the two most distant elements: the ode’s parade on the Field of Mars, with its prayer for peace with the element, and the corpse on the islet buried for God’s sake. One law governs both: the made order and the natural element are at war, and the human life lives on the line between them, adored by the order when it is a parade and crushed by it when it is a man. The ode is not refuted; it is shown to be true and partial. The flood and the statue obey the same physics: each is an element that does not see the man. The law holds the widest range in the poem, from the founder’s thoughts on the shore to the madman’s whisper on the square, and nothing in the poem stands outside it.
Lucretius · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
One physics governs everything, literally: atoms and void explain the sunbeam and the magnet, the dream and the corpse, desire and the origin of law, the thunderbolt and the plague. Take the two most distant elements, the hymn to Venus that opens the first book and the dead heaped on the pyres at the end of the sixth: both are atoms coming together and falling apart, and the poem means them to be read as one law. The range is as wide as any poem’s. What holds the axis is a strain long noted: a poem that denies that the gods care for us opens with a prayer to a goddess for peace. Venus read as nature’s generative force answers most of it, not all; and the bleak close sits uneasily with the tranquillity the doctrine promises.
William Blake · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Laughing Song, all green woods and laughter, and London’s curse; or Infant Joy, a newborn who names itself joy, and Infant Sorrow, “My mother groand! my father wept. / Into the dangerous world I leapt”. One law governs them, and the title states it: each is true to its state, and each state is seen from the other. The law holds across a wide range, from nursery song to prophecy, from a fly to the starry heavens, from the Thames to the forests of the night. The pairs are not refutations: Innocence is not cancelled by Experience, and The Voice of the Ancient Bard closes the book on a promise of new morning. Charged: To Tirzah, added late, speaks a Christian renunciation of the mother, “Then what have I to do with thee?”, that sits awkwardly with the rest, and some songs of Experience are emblems rather than states.
Chola, under Rajaraja I · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the tower seen from the town, and the miniature pavilions on its tiers, each a small shrine with its own roof. They obey one law. The tower is made of models of itself, tier, pavilion and dome applied at every scale from the parapet to the summit, and the gateways speak the same canon at a lower register. The dance reliefs and paintings carry the Shaiva programme of the sculpture outside, Tripurantaka in both media. The range runs from a dance posture to a mountain, and holds. What resists is the halls, a weaker statement of the law than the tower they serve; the later shrines break it, and are not the makers’.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the Sicilian idyll, Michael courting Apollonia under her father’s eye, and the killing of Carlo in a car on the compound drive. One law governs both: inheritance. The old world gives Michael a wife by its forms and takes her by its feuds; the new world gives him his father’s chair and makes him kill his sister’s husband to keep it. The wedding and the baptism are the same law in sacrament. Every other scene obeys it: every favour is a debt, and every debt is collected. The one strain is the father’s romance, played in a warmer key than the son’s, so that a viewer can hold a heroic law and a tragic one; the last shot settles it. The rear projection breaks the surface, not the law.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Midge’s comedy, the cantilever bra and the stepladder, and the final tower. One law governs them — looking, wanting and falling. Midge’s comedy is about Scottie’s refusal of the woman in front of him, the tragedy’s subject in a lighter key. The documentary San Francisco and the dream obey the same law, because the city is shown as the place the dead still occupy. The range runs from comedy to a necrophilic love story. The ending’s chance, the nun from the dark, is within the law, since the whole film has been governed by an apparition. Two things break it: the animated nightmare, a sequence in another film’s grammar, and the hotel vanishing, the one event the hoax cannot explain.
William Shakespeare · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: everything on the island happens under Prospero’s art, within his afternoon, and everything replays the first usurpation. Take the two most distant elements, Stephano drunk on a butt of sack and singing, and Prospero drowning his book. They obey the same law. The clowns’ plot is the usurpation as farce, the butler made king of the isle as Antonio made himself duke, and it is ended by the same art, the conspirators hunted by spirit hounds in 4.1. The range is wide: slapstick, court intrigue, lyric, masque, theurgy and confession in one structure. What is left open is kept open by law: Antonio never answers the forgiveness, and his silence marks the limit of the art. Charged lightly: Prospero’s sudden disturbance in 4.1, lightly motivated.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Malik · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the unworked rock at the centre and the outer skin of glazed tile under the gilded dome. They obey one law, the centre and its rings. The rock dictates the circle, the circle the drum and dome; the octagon mediates to the outer wall, and the tiles and windows of the exterior take their divisions from its sides. Ornament obeys one law throughout: no image anywhere, vegetation, vessels and writing in gold within, vegetation and writing in tile without. The range runs from bare earth to the jewelled dome of heaven, from the caliph’s year to the Prophet’s ascent. Held below the top because the outer skin, of the sixteenth century and later, speaks another idiom of colour than the Umayyad gold within.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the kitchen in the service floor and the lantern on the dome. They obey one law. The service floor repeats the plan of the floor above; the lantern sits on the axis that passes through the hall’s centre to the crossing of the square’s diagonals. Every element is placed by the same geometry of square, circle, axis and quarter, and nothing contradicts it; even the later frescoes and inscription were fitted to it. The range is wider than one room: work, dwelling, reception, prospect and sky fall under one law. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence, and a house is a small territory where the law is easiest to keep; and because the one place where the law bends, a dome built lower than the geometry asked, is the most visible.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Charlotta eating a cucumber from her pocket in the second act, and Ranevskaya’s grief for the son who drowned in the river beyond the orchard; or Yepikhodov’s squeaking boots and Firs locked in at the end. One law governs both: everyone talks past the thing that is happening, and time and money move regardless. The farce and the elegy are not alternations of tone; they are the same physics seen at different distances. The range is wide, comedy of manners, social prophecy, a portent from the sky, a servant’s death, and it holds. Charged a little: the Passer-by and the string are the two points where the play steps outside its realist law, and although the string is debated, given natural causes and left unresolved, the seam can be felt.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Gaffer’s opinions on Bag End in the first chapter, and the Witch-king at the broken gate of Minas Tirith. One law governs both: the will to dominate corrupts and devours, and the small faithful act, chosen without knowledge of its consequence, is what the world turns on. Saruman’s mills come to the Shire as the Ring came to Frodo; Sam’s refusal of the Ring at the Tower is Galadriel’s refusal in a gardener’s terms; Gollum is spared at the start and finishes the quest at the end. The range is wide and kept, comedy to apocalypse, and the made world of tongues, chronology and ruins is consistent beyond any novel’s need. Charged: Bombadil stands outside the law by design, the early chapters keep traces of the lighter physics of The Hobbit, and the Eagles, though prepared, arrive with the convenience of grace.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Moran’s Sunday at the start of his report, beer with the priest, the omelette, the boy’s lessons and an enema, and Molloy in the ditch at the edge of the forest. They obey one law: everything decays, and every telling is made under orders and undone by the teller; Moran’s order slides by stages into Molloy’s condition. The range is wide, from flatulence to doctrine, from slapstick to dread, and one voice of exactitude about the absurd governs all of it. The small inconsistencies, of dates, seasons, names and Molloy’s uncertain son, are the law at work, not breaches of it: the narrators’ unreliability is the physics. Held below the top because the theological frame of Youdi and Gaber sits a little apart, in a key of satire the rest does not share.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Yvette’s comic song of fraternization and the haggling for a son’s life in the same scene; or the bargaining over a buckle in the first scene and Kattrin’s drumming in the eleventh. One law governs them: everything has a price in war, and whoever will not pay it in money pays in life. Courage’s comedy and her catastrophe obey that law, and so does Kattrin, the one person who acts without a calculation and who therefore dies. Yvette, who sells herself and rises to a colonel’s widow, is the law’s other face. The range is wide and held: farce with the Cook, ecclesiastical satire with the Chaplain, battlefield, peace scare, funeral, lullaby. Charged slightly where the method’s law and the play’s emotion pull apart, as on the roof, whose force exceeds the irony around it; but that tension is contained, not a contradiction.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a girl ascending to heaven with the household linen, and three thousand strikers shot at the railway station and carried to the sea. One law governs both: whatever happens in Macondo is told in one voice with the same certainty, and the town believes the miracle and is made to disbelieve the massacre, which is the book’s politics. A second law, return, governs the comedy and the tragedy alike: the colonel’s fishes, Amaranta weaving her shroud, the names. The range is wide, from the gypsies’ magnets and flying carpet to war, eros, plague, history, prophecy and apocalypse, and it is held. What holds the axis there is the middle and the close. In the fourth and fifth generations the comic hyperbole, the animals that breed at Petra Cotes’s touch and the raffles, runs on a looser physics than the war and the massacre; the North American company is drawn closer to caricature than the rest of the book allows itself; and the last chapters, the sex comedy of the last Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula, change the book’s temper before the end binds it.
Rogier van der Weyden · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gilt tracery in the upper corners, abstract and ornamental, and the tear on the Virgin’s cheek, the most intimate observed thing in the picture. They obey one law: this is a shrine in which real flesh grieves, and everything in it is either the shrine or the flesh, painted with the same hand and the same total attention. The bracketing figures, the parallel bodies and the ladder make one geometry; the colours are balanced across the frieze; the skull at the foot and the cross at the top belong to one frame of meaning. Held below the top because the range is narrow in kind: one event, one emotion, one stage. The coherence is great, but it governs less ground than a picture of a whole world.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: an interlude with no human in it, the sun on the waves at noon, and the close, a tired old man in a restaurant talking to a stranger about his life. One law governs both: the single wave rising out of the sea, breaking and drawn back, as the self rises out of the common life and falls back into it, and the day turning toward dark. The range held under that law is wide: childhood sensation, a schoolboy’s love, sex, grief, empire, work in an office, marriage and a farm, suicide and old age, all in one idiom. Held below the top because the sameness of voice that makes the law also narrows what the book can hold: no speech but this one is heard, and the servants and the boot boy are seen only from outside. Narrowness is not coherence.
Carl Theodor Dreyer · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the first close interrogation, a single face in a white field, and the riot in the square at the end, a crowd broken by soldiers with maces. One law governs both: power presses on whoever it can reach, and the camera stays close enough to the bodies under it that no viewer can stand outside. The riot does to the people of Rouen what the interrogation did to Joan, in the same grammar of faces and fragments. The gentle passages obey it too, the last sacrament and the water given before the fire. The range is real, from a closed room to a city, from cunning to brutality, from fear to calm. The strain lies in the judges, drawn at times in a register of grotesque that the film’s otherwise exact physics does not need.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the king in his robes at the lower left, the one figure the story names, and the cloud at the summit. They obey one law: everything on the panel is a function of the building. The king is there to command it; the masons kneel because they are its labour; the city is its scale, the harbour its supply, the rock its core, the cloud its goal. Even the rowers and the sails are hauling stone. The range runs from a single hand to a geography, from sea to sky, from labour to sovereignty, and it holds. What resists is the foreground group, drawn larger and in a more emblematic manner, a stage in front of a world: the law reaches it by meaning rather than by handling.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Atami night, mahjong tiles and a drunken song through the wall, and the dawn above the harbour after the death. One law governs both: everyone is living their own life, time passes at one speed for all of them, and the camera watches each from one height and one distance. Shige’s meanness and Noriko’s kindness are shot identically; no one is lit as a villain or a saint. The comedy of the cakes, the desk and two drunk fathers delivered by a policeman obeys the same even physics as the grief, and the range between them is wide for so quiet a film. The one strain is the score, warmer than the images, which tells the viewer what to feel where the camera will not. It is small, and it is the only break in the law.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the drinking song’s tavern swagger and the Ave Maria. One law governs them. The opera is a contest of voices for possession of a soul, and every number is a move in it, Iago’s song in the first act and Desdemona’s prayer in the last. The outer tempest Otello outlives in Act I becomes the inner one he cannot. Themes rhyme across the span: the kiss motive, and the jealousy theme of Iago’s warning, which opens Act III. The strain is the Credo. It sets out a metaphysics the drama, built of psychology, never returns to: once Iago has declared death nothing and heaven an old fable, he goes back to being an ensign with a plan, and the action never tests the theology.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs: pattern, reflection and coincidence, and the question whether they mean. Take the two most distant elements: the farce of the Zemblan palace, the king escaping in red wool through a secret passage and over the mountains, and the drowning of Hazel Shade. They obey the same law. Each is a story of a shadow seeking its source, a reflection taken for the real, and each is told through mirrors: the windowpane, the lake, the false azure. Shade’s discovery in the third canto, “plexed artistry” and “a web of sense”, states the law the whole book keeps, and it holds across a range from slapstick to elegy. Held below the top because the question of who wrote what is left undecidable by design, so that some facts of the fiction cannot be settled, and a few seams, among them Kinbote’s knowledge of things he could not have known, read as easily as looseness as design.
William Blake · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The two most distant elements, the soldier’s accusation at Felpham, folded into the Sons of Albion, and Jesus on plate 96 asking Albion whether he could love one who had not died for him, obey one law: the self that accuses against the self that gives itself. Locke’s loom, the Druid sacrifice, Tyburn, Vala’s moral law and the plea of the general good are accusation made into a system; Los’s labour, the addresses’ forgiveness and Albion’s leap into the furnaces are self-giving. The range is as wide as any on the desk. What resists: the persons’ identities shift (Vala, Rahab and Tirzah; the status of Hand); Albion’s body, England and Canaan are mapped onto one another more than once, not always alike; and chapter 2’s order is looser than its frame.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the skeletons inlaid in the floor and the heaven painted in the vault. They obey one law, the chapel’s vertical, which sets death at the bottom and glory at the top and runs the light down between them. The next pair, the Cornaro, solid and at ease, and Teresa, dissolving in vision, obey the law of theatre, audience and scene. The range runs from grave to heaven, portrait to apparition and stone to light, and one design governs it. Three things resist: the relief halls and the boxes are set for views the crossing does not give; the vault’s hand does not match the marble; and for some the talk in the boxes breaks the hush.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the boy in quarantine at Ellis Island, singing alone, and the Senate committee room in Washington. One law governs both. A family facing a power that does not know it exists, the local chief or the state, survives only by becoming such a power. Vito kills during a festa; Michael’s enemies die while the family mourns its mother; a First Communion opens the son’s strand and a Hail Mary closes Fredo’s life. The temperatures differ and the physics does not. The strain is the father’s romance, played in a key the son’s strand denies, so that a viewer can hold two laws, heroic and tragic. The 1941 coda resolves it: a law confirmed only at the end.
Insular · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the canon tables, architecture borrowed from late antique books, and the cat and mice at the foot of the Chi-Rho page. They obey one law. Everything is drawn into the line: architecture becomes interlace, the figure becomes pattern, the animal becomes letter and the letter animal. The Virgin’s chair ends in a beast’s head, the evangelists’ robes are fields of ornament, the initials of the running text are animals bent to the shape of the letter. The range runs from the cosmic cross to the domestic cat, and it holds. What resists is the plurality of hands and models: the portraits and the narrative pictures, from Mediterranean prototypes, sit a little apart from the native ornament, and the unfinished passages show the law incompletely applied.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the light from heaven and the horse’s hoof: they obey one law. Everything is a body under one light from one side; heaven is admitted only as that light, and the miracle is painted by the same rule as a cart-horse’s hide. The range runs from the divine to the animal, from the fallen soldier to the working servant, and nothing breaks the physics. What holds the axis is the kind of range. It is narrow, three figures and a dark, and the law holds partly by exclusion: what might not obey it, Christ, angels, a sky, has been left out. Narrowness is not coherence, and some of this coherence is narrowness.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the most distant elements: the knight’s steel and Death’s rotting flesh, the castle and the lizard. One law governs them: a single light from the left, a single system of engraved line, a single scale of tone from bare paper to the densest cross-hatching, and a single direction of movement against which Death and the Devil are set as drags. The natural, the human and the demonic are cut by one burin, across a wide range: heroic, grotesque, emblematic, observed. Held below the top by a slight seam between the observed horse and the fantastic Devil, joined rather than fused, and by a lower left that reads as an emblem shelf.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the seated apostle in shadow at the bottom edge and God in the gold at the top. They obey one law, which is light. The panel is a single gradient from earth’s shadow to heaven’s gold, every figure taking its value from its place on it, and the Virgin is the one figure who crosses it, in shadow at the knees and lit in the face. The law holds from the earth to the source of light, out through the frame’s stone and into the real light of the apse. What resists is God’s register, where the drawing tightens and the figure seems to come from a more conventional picture, and the apostles’ crowd, louder than the law requires. The work has one movement, which is part of why the law can hold.
Benjamin Britten · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the brass fanfares of the Dies irae and “Let us sleep now”. One law governs them. Every element is either the rite or the witness, and every movement is the meeting or the failure to meet of the two, held over the unresolved interval of the bells. The fanfares are the rite’s terror, which the soldiers answer with “Bugles sang” and the artillery sonnet; the lullaby of the two dead men is the witness at rest, which the rite’s In paradisum at last joins. The Sanctus and the ostinato of the Agnus Dei obey the same law in other means. The strain is at the close: the law that the planes do not hear one another is suspended there, and the score does not settle whether that is its fulfilment or its relaxation.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the dome on its square, repeated at diminishing scale and ordered in rank. The central dome, the semidomes, the corner exedrae, the aisle domes and the domes of the court porticoes are one unit at every scale, and beyond the precinct the cells of the colleges continue it. Take the two most distant elements, the great dome and the smallest portico bay: they plainly obey the same physics. The minarets rank the court by the same logic, taller by the hall and shorter at the far corners; the tombs repeat the domed centralised type in octagon. Worship, assembly, burial and the address to the city fall under the one law. Two seams hold it from the top: the inherited axial section sits a little against the centralising hall, and the interior surface is a restoration, not the first campaign’s single hand.
Georges Seurat · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the sails on the river at the far left, small and bright, and the bustle and top hat of the couple at the right, large and dark. They obey one law, announced on every part of the surface: each thing is made of separate touches of colour, lit by one sun, set off from its neighbour by contrast, placed on a plane parallel to the picture, turned in profile or full face. People, dogs, trees, grass, water, boats and the border itself are made under the same rule. The range is wide for one canvas: classes, ages, animals, the river’s traffic, sun and shade, the foreground and the far bank. What resists: the scale of the figures does not obey the space as strictly as their colour obeys the method, and the earlier brushed layer, where it shows, is of another law.
Built for Fujiwara no Yorimichi · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pebble shore at the water’s edge and the gilt face of the Amida inside the dark hall. They obey one law: the Pure Land seen from this world and then entered. The shore is where the worshipper stands; the water is the lake of the other shore; the island is its palace; the image is its lord; the walls are his descent; the doors are his welcome. The law runs from the outline to the smallest figure: the phoenix shape on the water, the phoenixes on the ridge, the bodhisattvas on clouds. The wings that serve no use obey it. The range, from garden to sculpture and painting, is wide.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the hands of Mary of Cleophas raised to heaven at the top right, and Christ’s fingers on the stone at the bottom left. They obey one law, and the law is the fall. Every figure in the block is a step on one descending diagonal, and the light, falling from the upper left, runs along the same line. The tonal law holds from the brightest flesh to the darkest ground: everything is lit by one source, and everything unlit is lost. The register is one, grave, physical and still, the outcry at the top included, since it begins the same fall. The charge: the range is narrow by design, one event, one group, one ground, and narrowness is not coherence.
Huang Gongwang · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dense central range, the scroll’s greatest mass, and the empty water with the far shore barely marked. They obey one law, the dry brush and the alternation it serves. The range is the stroke laid many times, the far shore the same stroke laid once, the water the stroke withheld. Every form in six metres is built from the same small set of marks, and the forms differ only in density and tone. The range covered is wide for a monochrome: near and far, mass and void, pine and moss, village and empty river. Two things resist. The hand varies between sittings, some passages looser and some more worked, and a careful eye sees the seams; and the figures and buildings follow a plainer law, a shorthand, than the hills around them.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the apex of the stack, towering high in the field, and the far bergs on the horizon at the right, small, level, nearly lost. They obey one law, the law of the plane and the fracture, and the distance between them is the picture’s meaning: the same order near and far. Take the two most distant in kind, the ice and the ship. They obey the same law; the hull’s planks are drawn as slabs among slabs. The sky is the one element outside the law of fracture, open and graded, and it is required as its ground. The range is wide for one canvas, from the floe under the viewer’s feet to the horizon. What resists is the foreground’s looser spread.
Anton Bruckner · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the death clock that ends the first movement and the C major apotheosis that ends the Finale. One law governs them. The coda takes the first movement’s theme, the one that died away in C minor, and sounds it in C major with the others: the end is the beginning transfigured, not replaced. So does the key plan: the Adagio’s D flat sits a semitone above C, the farthest point of the work, and the Finale’s return to C is a descent by a semitone into home. The rustic Scherzo and the Adagio’s prayer share one grammar. The tension is in the Finale’s development, where the law holds by procedure more than by need.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark band of near trees, heavy and close, and the sky at the top, farthest and least material. They obey one law, and the law is the patch. Each zone is built of the same unit, differing only in colour and direction, so that ground, plain, stone and air are made of one stuff. The seams prove it: where the sky touches the ridge, its blue strokes are laid over and into the mountain’s edge, and the contour is a meeting of two kinds of the same stroke rather than a line. The range is wide for one canvas, from near trees to a peak some miles off, from earth to air, from mass to light. What resists: the house blocks in the plain are drawn with a slightly more linear touch, and the heaviness of the near band is not fully one with the sky’s openness. Narrowness is not the source of the coherence; the law holds over the whole visible world of a place.
Jacques Tati · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the grey office in the morning, Hulot waiting in a glass box while a man walks the length of a corridor in silence, and the Royal Garden at three in the morning, a ruin full of dancing. One law governs both: everyone in the frame is equal before the camera, nothing is pointed out, and comedy is found by looking, not delivered. The party’s chaos is as precisely placed as the office’s order. The range is wide, from cold satire to warm carnival, from silence to din, and the law holds across it; the change of temperature is itself planned. The one strain is the American who takes over the restaurant, a broad comic type given more emphasis than any other figure, and a middle hour that sometimes leans on the single gag.
Josquin des Prez · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Kyrie’s long melismatic imitation on three words, and the Credo’s near-syllabic run through 159. One law governs both: every point is a phrase of the one hymn in the one mode, paraphrased into imitation. The chordal Et incarnatus, the reduced inner sections and the hymn revealed in the Agnus obey it too; they vary scoring and texture, not the source. The range is real within the liturgy, from three words to the creed, from a thinned texture to the full four voices, from melisma to declamation. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: the expressive range is a sacred serenity, and the law has less distance to govern than a work that runs from a lament to a street song.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Kyrie’s long melisma on six words and the Credo’s swift declamation on 159. One law governs both: the same voice-leading, the same governed consonance and dissonance, the same principle of the independent singable line, whether the lines move together in chords or apart in imitation. The voice count obeys a law too, thinning and widening with the text. Nothing in the work breaks its physics, and there is no passage in another style. Held below Winterreise and the Goldberg Variations because the range governed is narrow: one register of feeling, one liturgical function, one sound of unaccompanied voices. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure charges it: the distance between the work’s extremes is real in rate and texture, and small in character.
Frédéric Chopin · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: No. 7, a mazurka of sixteen bars in A major, and No. 24, a D minor storm ending in three low Ds; or the chorale of No. 20 and the toccata of No. 16. One law governs them: each prelude takes one figure and one state and holds it to the end, without development and without a second subject. The range it holds is wide: dance, chorale, nocturne, étude, march, recitative, lament. The key cycle is a second law, binding every piece to its place. The law is real, and it is a law of manner more than of material, easier to keep in short pieces than across forty minutes of developing music. Narrowness of unit is not coherence, and the axis stops there.
Chandela builders · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: one small figure on the wall, and the whole temple seen from the field. One law governs both. The temple is built by repetition at diminishing scale: the spire is made of spires, the roofs of tiers that repeat the roof, the wall of projections that repeat the plan, and the figures stand on those projections, each a small body on a larger body. The couples at the junction and the gods on the projections obey one placement, one pose and one carving, and the bare dark cell is the point to which the whole multiplication returns. The range runs from the linga to the crowded world, from darkness to sky. Held from the top because the law is the type’s, kept rigorously, more than this building’s discovery.
Oscar Wilde · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
One physics governs everything, and the play states it: trivial things are treated seriously and serious things trivially. Take the most distant elements: Lady Bracknell’s catechism of income and politics and Miss Prism’s lost three-volume novel; Canon Chasuble’s sermon on the manna in the wilderness, adaptable to any occasion, and Cecily’s diary, in which her engagement, its breaking off and its renewal are already recorded. All obey one law: form precedes and produces the fact. The resolution obeys it too, since the name precedes the man and proves to be his. No scene breaks tone, and no sentiment stands unmocked, the lovers’ last embraces included. Held where it is because the range is narrow, one class, one season, two houses, and narrowness is not coherence.
Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus · Architecture
9.4 · Tier V
The two most distant elements, the ring of light at the crown and the dim aisles behind their colonnades, obey one law. Everything inside is surface without visible weight: veneered piers, screened walls, vaults clad in gold, every plane given light in proportion to its height. The aisles keep the law at a lower intensity. The range is wide, from the structural to the liturgical, from cut stone to gold, and it holds. Three things resist: the cascade east and west against the flat tympana north and south, two laws for two axes joined at the dome; an interior that denies the weight the exterior shows; and the mihrab, set off the axis toward Mecca, with the eight calligraphic roundels, a second direction and idiom on a space whose law is the east axis. The later figural mosaics keep the law of gold surface.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
One law governs the work: striving errs and rises, and love draws it upward. The two most distant elements, the prison and the masquerade, or Auerbach’s cellar and the mountain gorges of the end, obey it: Gretchen returns in the form of her own prayer, the wager’s words return at the death, and Mephisto runs throughout. Narrowness is not the issue; few works range wider. The cost is in the joins of sixty years. In the forest cave and the prose scene Faust thanks or reproaches the sublime spirit for his companion, as if the Earth Spirit had sent Mephisto; the Prologue, written later, sends him from heaven. The pact of service here for service beyond and the wager on the moment are never reconciled, and grace overrides both.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the grisaille Baptist, a painted statue in a niche on the closed exterior, and the Lamb in the open meadow. They obey one law. Everything is a body or a thing under one natural light, and the sacred is made of the world’s matter: stone, flesh, wool and water obey one optics. The range runs from a domestic room to the end of time. What resists is a second law. Above, near life-size figures stand on separate grounds; below is one deep landscape of small figures under a high horizon. Two physics of size and space meet at a hard line, and nothing in the image reconciles them.
Byzantine · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
The two most distant elements are Abraham carrying a calf to a table under a tree and Justinian motionless against gold. They obey one law: everything in the sanctuary is an offering brought into the light of the altar, and everything is the same lit glass. Abel’s lamb, the emperor’s paten and the bishop’s church are one act in three registers, and the hand that accepts below is the hand that crowns above. The range runs from pastoral narrative to a court and a globe. What resists is real: two Christs; two spaces in the panels, a void and a room; the lunettes’ older naturalism and the panels’ flat stillness, two grammars under one roof. The law holds; the physics changes from wall to wall.
Ferdowsi · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
One law governs it: the turning sky gives and withdraws, the glory follows justice, and the world is a fleeting inn. The two most distant elements, the demons of the first age and Yazdegerd hiding in a mill, obey it: the glory leaves Jamshid for his pride, and leaves the last Sasanian because the time has turned, as Rostam son of Farrokhzad reads in the stars. The monotheist frame holds the Zoroastrian kings, who pray to one God. Breaches lower it: Rostam lives through centuries of reigns unremarked; Alexander’s marvels bring the old physics back into the historical age; and the just king of the sermons is never reconciled with the kings who destroy their sons, and may not be meant to be.
Ancient Egyptian, under Khufu · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the planar exterior, the most exact large object of its age, and the rough chamber abandoned in the rock. They largely obey one law, measure and concealment: everything is in cubits and simple ratios, every passage runs at the one slope of 1 in 2, and every room is hidden in a solid whose outside admits nothing. The pit lies on the one straight line from the entrance, at the system’s bottom, and belongs to the descent as the chamber belongs to the ascent. What resists: the entrance some 7 m off the centre line, the well shaft’s wandering, the plan changes if plan changes they are, and a face of 14:11 against passages of 1:2, two slopes that do not quite relate. One physics governs the whole, with the joints showing where the plan moved.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the geography beneath the earth, Tartarus and Pyriphlegethon (111c to 113c), and the logical analysis of opposites and the “more subtle” causes (105b to c). One law governs them: the care of the soul, and its kinship with what does not change, judged by how a life is lived toward its end. Argument, autobiography, myth and death scene each answer it in their own register, and Socrates names the turns himself. Held at 9.0 because the world-denying strand, “en tini phrourāi esmen hoi anthrōpoi”
“we men are in a kind of guard-post” (62b), stands against the tender, embodied scenes in a tension held rather than resolved, and the myth’s cosmology is not reconciled with the physics Socrates says he abandoned.
Virgil · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the threshing floor’s mice and moles (1.181 to 186) and Orpheus among the dead; or the tests for soil and the portents of Caesar’s death. One law governs them: order is made by labour and attention against a nature that slides back, “in peius ruere”, to rush toward the worse (1.200), and every order, the field, the hive, the state, the marriage, can be lost by a single fault of control. The runaway chariot, the plague that unmakes the stock and the backward look of Orpheus are one failure in three orders. The law holds from almanac to myth, and that range is the strength. The seam between manual and epyllion is real, though the ending obeys the law; it holds the figure at 9.0.
Caravaggio · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements, Christ’s thin halo and the old man’s spectacles: both are under the same light. One physics governs the canvas. Everything visible is lit from one side, so the sacred and the ordinary differ only in where they stand. The two laws of costume, timeless robes at the right and Roman dress at the table, are deliberate: the call comes from another time into this one, and the light binds them. Two things resist. The halo obeys no light, a second law kept small. And the space is uncertain: the physics of light holds, the physics of place does not. Narrowness is not coherence, and the range is narrow: one room, one moment, two groups.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements, the faceless squad and the dead man face down in his blood. They obey one law: the light picks out the victims and leaves the killers in shadow, and everything sits on one diagonal from the muskets to the heap of the dead. Prayer and defiance, the friar and the man in white, obey it alike: both exposed, both helpless. The range, from the dead to the city, holds; but it is one scene in one instant, and narrowness is not coherence. What resists is the sky and the city, dark with a theatrical darkness the lantern does not explain, and the man in white, who breaks the physics of size by choice.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
One law governs: the world is a text, a labyrinth or a dream, and the mind that orders it is itself ordered by something it cannot see. Take the two most distant elements: the Library of Babel, an architecture of the cosmos, and “El Sur”, a sick librarian on a train to a general store on the plain where a gaucho throws him a knife. They obey one law. Dahlmann, too, works in a library, and his death may be a dream he is having, a destiny read rather than lived. The range runs from cosmology to the gaucho, from Prague in 1939 to an Irish conspiracy of 1824 and a Babylon of chance, and the law holds across it. Held at this figure because the tonal range is narrow, one ironic and erudite voice throughout, and narrowness is not coherence; the law is tested more in ideas than in persons.
John Milton · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the flower catalogue, “Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies”, and Peter’s “grim wolf with privy paw” devouring the flock. One law governs them: the shepherd’s care, true or false, for what is given into his keeping, whether a flock, a corpse, a gift of song or a church. Pastoral, invective and apocalypse are the same figure at three heights. The procession holds river-god, sea-god and apostle in one pageant, and the poem makes its mixture the subject: each voice brings its answer, and the poem ranks them. Johnson’s objection, that sacred truth is mixed with trifling fiction, holds a little. The step from Camus to Peter is sudden, and the “false surmise” confesses a seam. Held at 9.0 for those two seams.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements, the Benedictus’s long serenity and the battle music of the Agnus Dei. One law governs them: the distance between God and man, and what crosses it. In the Benedictus the divine descends; in the Agnus the human world, at war, cries up. Every movement obeys it. The Kyrie sets the human Christe between two addresses on high; the Gloria opens in heaven and falls to et in terra pax; the Credo moves from God to the man made flesh to the life to come. D frames the whole, and the Credo’s B flat stands at its centre. The strain is the one Adorno named: modal passages, fugues in the old style, operatic recitative and the symphonic idiom stand side by side, and the law is felt more as conviction than as one musical grammar.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Hugh Whitbread choosing a necklace and helping Lady Bruton with her letter, and Septimus watching the dead Evans among the trees. One law governs both: the soul’s privacy against the forces that would convert it, and the moment against the irrevocable hour. The comedy of the luncheon and the madness in the park are the same coercion seen at two distances; the party and the suicide are the same act, an offering, read from two sides. The range is wide and held: social comedy, a marriage, a lost love, a war neurosis, a death, a daughter’s freedom, an old woman’s song. Charged: the narrator’s essay on Proportion and Conversion steps outside the free indirect law the book otherwise keeps and speaks in the author’s own anger, and Kilman is seen from outside with a cruelty the book does not elsewhere allow.
Attar · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comic squabbles of the birds over their excuses, and the last valley, where the self is annihilated; or Ṣanʿān herding swine for a Christian girl, and the doxology’s praise of God. One law governs them: love dissolves the self, and every attachment, low or high, is measured by whether it yields. The beggar who loves a prince and the shaykh who loves a girl obey it; so does the hoopoe’s own authority, which ends at the threshold. The range is wide, court and bazaar, comic and scandalous, erotic and metaphysical, and it is held. Charged: the doxology’s polemic for the first four caliphs and against sectarian quarrel stands outside the poem’s law, and some answers apply the law mechanically.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the assistants’ slapstick in the schoolroom, with the teacher and Gisa, and K. and Frieda waking among the gymnastic bars; and Bürgel’s exposition of the night hearing, the book’s metaphysical summit. One law governs both: every opening is offered in a form K. cannot use, and every closing is his own act as much as the castle’s. The comedy and the dread are one mechanism seen at different speeds. The range is real, eros, a family’s tragedy, farce, administration, a child’s friendship and a metaphysics, and it is held under that law to the last page written. Held below the higher figures on two charges: the draft’s inconsistencies; and the range, though wide, is the range of a single village and its inns, so that the law is tested across kinds of experience more than across a world.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the god’s command to examine, and the care of the soul before everything else (29d to 30b). Socrates states his part of it at the outset, that he will speak plainly and say only what he believes (17b to c), and gives it its form at 29d: “peisomai de mallon tōi theōi ē humin”
“I shall obey the god rather than you”. Take the two most distant elements, the comic trap that ends in Meletus’ mules and the farewell’s hope of questioning Palamedes and Ajax among the dead. They obey the same law: the mission continues past death, and the comedy of the cross-examination is the same act as the eschatology. The old slanders, the soldier’s post, the refusal of pity and the proposed reward are all applications of it. The apparent contradictions a severe reader presses resolve under it: the knowledge disclaimed is of the greatest things, the knowledge claimed (29b) is of what the mission forbids. Held at 9.0 because the range, though it spans comedy and death, is a single speaker’s on a single occasion, and narrowness is not coherence.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: a consciousness that wills against reason to feel itself free, and so humiliates and is humiliated, and takes pleasure in both. Take the two most distant elements, the abstract polemic against the crystal palace and the money pressed into Liza’s hand. They obey one law: the refusal of an order that would make him happy and the refusal of a love that would make him less than sovereign are the same act. The toothache of the first part is the beaver collar of the second, pain enjoyed as proof of existence. The tone runs from philosophical satire through farce, at the dinner, to tragedy, at the end, and holds under one voice. Held at this mark because the range is wide in register but narrow in persons, one consciousness and those it touches, and narrowness is not coherence; and because the law’s limit, the faith that would stand against it, is left unstated.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pale body at the left, lit from the front and all contour, and the black cat at the right, nearly lost in the dark. They obey one law: everything in the room is given by value against value under one flat light, without the graded shadow that would set it in depth. The body is light on light, the servant dark on a light dress, the cat dark on dark. The law is the same for flesh, linen, paper, flower and fur, and it is the picture’s argument, since the light that refuses to idealise the body refuses to hide the transaction. The range is the body, a second woman, an animal, cut flowers, textiles and a room: wide in kind for one bed, narrow in space and time. What resists: the bouquet is painted with a freedom the body is denied, and at the right the law of contrast nearly fails into the ground.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: civilisation is a surface kept up by work, rivets and lies over a darkness that is not in Africa but in those who come there, and in their cities. Take the two most distant elements: the Roman legionary imagined on the Thames in the first pages, and the drawing room at the end, where the Intended mourns in black. Both obey the law. The darkness is at the heart of the empire as of its outpost, and the frame narrator’s last sight of the Thames confirms it. The range is wide for a short book: the comedy of the manager, the brickmaker and the Russian in his motley, the horror, the satire and the lyric are held in one voice. Held at this figure because the law has one blind side, Africa as the screen on which a European darkness is shown, which the book’s own logic invites the reader to question and does not answer.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: Beatrice works on whoever sees her, and what she works is written down. The two most distant elements, the comedy of the screen lady, made “ischermo della veritade” (a screen for the truth, V) because she sat on the line of his gaze, and the ninefold reckoning of a death in Ptolemy’s heavens (XXIX), obey it: everything is the working of her presence or its record, and even the deceit is told for what it cost the greeting. Love walks and laughs as a person and is then said to be “un accidente in sostanza” (an accident in a substance, XXV): the book names its apparent breach and closes it. Charged: the range is narrow, and narrowness is not coherence; and the donna gentile, a real temptation given four sonnets, is undone by one vision of the child in crimson (XXXIX) more quickly than her weight prepares.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Mahood’s farce, the crutches, the household dying in the rotunda, the jar with its menu; and Worm, a being with no voice, no story and no place. Or take the opening questions and the last sentence. One law governs them all: every utterance is provisional, every surrogate is invented, inhabited and disowned, and the voice must continue. Even the contradictions keep that law, since self-contradiction is the book’s physics, not a lapse in it. The range of register is wider than the book’s reputation allows: farce, polemic against the masters, grief, theology, the comedy of a narrator who cannot trust his own grammar. Held here because the world is narrow by design, and narrowness is not coherence: the range lies in register, not in matter.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the skeleton in its tomb and God at the apex of the vault. They obey one law: a single measured space set from the viewer’s eye, and one fall of light. The range is the widest a single image can cover, from the grave to the Godhead, and the wider the range the stronger the achievement. The one strain is real. The vault is seen from below while the sacred figures are seen nearly level and frontally, and God’s footing in the vault is hard to reconcile with the depth the vault builds. It can be read as a second law, the divine exempt from the viewer’s physics, or as a seam. The desk reads it as a law imperfectly stated, and charges it.
Euripides · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the powers of the world, desire and purity, sea and meadow, are not to be refused, and whoever refuses one of them, or tries to master it by speech, is destroyed by it; the gods who are these powers do not love the human beings they move. Take the two most distant elements: the untouched meadow of the first scene and the bull out of the sea; or Aphrodite’s cold opening speech of vengeance and the last exchange, where Hippolytus frees Theseus from blood-guilt. They obey the same law. The meadow is Artemis’ and refused to Cypris; the sea is Poseidon’s and brings the refusal back; and inside that law the only grace is the one human beings give each other. The chorus’s doubt that the gods govern justly is inside the law, not against it, and the range is wide for one play. What holds the axis where it stands is the dispute of father and son, whose forensic and sophistic register argues the law more than it lets it be felt.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the spiral at the centre of the sky, all motion, and the village at the bottom, all rest, in straight strokes and right angles. They obey one law, and the law is the stroke. Every form in the field is made of the same loaded mark, and the forms differ only in the speed and direction the mark is given: fastest in the spiral, slower in the hills, slowest in the houses, upright in the tree. The village is where the current stands still, and that is its meaning, the sleeping world under the moving one. The range is wide for one canvas: from the stars to a lit window, from flame to stone. Two things resist. The village’s drawing is of another kind, contour and fill, as if carried over from a pen drawing. And the band on the horizon is flat where everything else turns.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dandy’s day in the first chapter, the barber, the ballet, the champagne; and Tatiana’s dream, a folk nightmare of a bear and a hut of monsters. One law governs them: each is a life lived through received forms, the fashion and the folk tale, and the narrator’s voice holds both at the same distance, fond and exact. The comic and the fatal obey the same physics: the duel arises from the comedy of manners at the name-day and is carried out by its rules, so that Lensky dies of etiquette. Tatiana’s letter breaks the stanza and her refusal keeps a form she chooses; Onegin learns feeling when the form forbids it. The tone moves from banter to elegy and back within a stanza without breaking. What holds it here are the joints of a book composed over eight years and in several moods: the satiric Petersburg of the first chapter and the grave Tatiana of the eighth are almost different books, the narrator who began as Onegin’s friend ends as Tatiana’s admirer, and the omitted stanzas and the Journey, apart in manner, show the trimmed design.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs: the human being is incomplete between the animal, which lives in the Open, and the angel, which is complete, and that incompletion is the ground both of lament and of the task of saying. Take the two most distant elements: the Fifth’s acrobats on their threadbare carpet in the suburbs of the universe, and the Tenth’s Sphinx and stars. They obey the same law. The acrobats perform a completion they do not possess, and the fair at the edge of the Tenth’s city of pain recalls their fairground before the youth passes beyond it. The law covers the Attic gravestones, the puppet theatre and the gnat. Held off the top because the decade of composition shows: the Third’s river-god of the blood speaks in a register near psychoanalysis that the rest does not share, and the Fifth’s satire stands apart in tone.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Frau Stöhr’s malapropisms at table and the vision in the snow; or the X-ray of Clavdia’s chest that Hans keeps as a keepsake and the field in 1914. One law governs them: life on the mountain is an enchantment of time and death, the body, its sickness and its desire, against the spirit that would either ennoble the sickness or forget it, under a narrator both inside the spell and outside it. Frau Stöhr is the enchantment’s comedy, the loss of sense among the idle sick; the snow is its terror and its single answer. The séance, which might seem a lapse into the occult, obeys it as the extreme of the mountain’s commerce with death, bringing back the dead cousin in his uniform. The war, arriving as “Der Donnerschlag”, is not a break in the physics but its consequence. Held at 9.0 because Peeperkorn arrives late in a different key, almost allegory; because the séance strains the realism the book otherwise keeps; and because the irony sometimes keeps the extremes apart rather than binding them.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comic scene of Paul D and Sethe at the carnival, and the voice from the hold of the ship. One law governs both: the past is a living presence that takes the body, and the only freedom is a love that does not own. The ghost obeys the same law as the history. The baby’s spite in 124, Beloved’s flesh, Paul D’s tobacco tin, the clipping, the red ribbon Stamp Paid pulls from the river: all are the past acting in the present. The range is wide, from comedy and courtship to the Middle Passage. Charged: what Beloved is, ghost or survivor or both, is left unfixed by design, but the shifts between the readings are not always governed, and the resolution of the third part leans on the community’s turn more than the book has prepared.
Jacques-Louis David · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the empty upper wall, all surface and brushwork, and the inscribed crate at the lower right, all hard edge, grain and lettering. They obey one law. The picture plane is held as a wall against which everything is laid flat in a shallow space, like a relief, and one light falls on wall, body and wood alike. Body, tub, crate and void are the horizontals and verticals of one geometry. The range in kind is wide for a single figure: the sacred formula and the documentary letter, the idealised body and the literal knife. One thing resists: the idealised flesh obeys a different rule from the literal writing and wood, the truth of the icon against the truth of the record. The range in figures is narrow, which the axis does not reward.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Addie’s section on words and the body, and Anse’s new teeth and new wife on the last page. Or Vardaman’s fish and the cement setting on Cash’s leg. One law governs them: the living carry the dead for their own purposes, and the word for it, love or duty or a promise, is the cover for the deed. Addie saw it; Anse lives it; the book’s comedy and its tragedy are the same fact seen from two places. The range is wide and held: farce at the drugstore and in Anse’s borrowing, terror at the ford, grief in Vardaman, theology in Whitfield and Cora, madness in Darl. Charged a step: Darl’s clairvoyance, which lets him see what he cannot witness, sits at the edge of the realist physics the rest of the book keeps, and the reader must accept two laws of knowing to accept it.
John Coltrane · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: everything grows from the one figure and is given to the one end, praise. The two most distant elements are Jones’s drum solo opening Pursuance, with no pitch at all, and the rubato recitation of Psalm, with almost no pulse. They obey the same law: each is a single player set apart to do the work of the whole, the body’s labour in one and the spoken prayer in the other. The fanfare and the chant, the hardest playing and the softest, keep to it. The range runs from grandeur to fury to hush, and from strict ostinato to free time. It is real but held within one band’s language and one devotional register: there is no irony, no doubt, no second voice.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: power, from the tsar’s study to the imam’s, turns living men into instruments, and life holds out against it until it is cut down. Take the two most distant elements: Nicholas in Petersburg, remembering a girl he seduced at a masquerade and writing a sentence of the gauntlet on a report, and the thistle in the ploughed field of the frame. They obey the same law: the emperor’s vanity is the plough’s side of it, the weed the other. Shamil’s threat against the hostage son and Nicholas’s sentence on the student are one act in two courts; Avdeev’s village and Sado’s aul are one field seen from two sides. The range runs from imperial satire to lyric elegy, and it is held. Charged: the satire strains the book’s otherwise level justice, so that Nicholas alone is drawn from outside and with contempt.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Kikuchiyo’s drunken clowning in the town and the four mounds above the planting. One law governs both. Every comic scene is about class: the stolen genealogy is a farmer’s son claiming a rank, and the joke and the death are the same claim, made twice. The physics is practical and observed: men eat, plan, dig and are shot, and the camera watches farmers and samurai with the same eye even where the script looks down on the farmers. The range runs from farce to tragedy and from social argument to set piece, and the law holds across it. One strain: the romance in the flowers is shot with a lyricism the rest of the film does not use. The ending absorbs it, since class wins there too.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the matador chorus at Flora’s and “Addio, del passato”. One law reaches both: the world’s gaiety is the frame in which the heroine is consumed, and every festive sound in the work is heard against her. The brindisi toasts pleasure as fleeting, the waltz plays while she coughs, Flora’s divertissement plays before the cards are dealt and the money thrown, and the carnival chorus passes under a dying woman’s window. The “Di quell’amor” theme crosses all three acts and binds the private line. The range governed is a whole social world, a party and a deathbed, comedy and lament. The strain is at Flora’s: the gypsy and matador choruses obey the law by where they stand more than by their music, and their matter is decoration.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the catalogue of fortune-tellers in The Dry Salvages V and the dark dove of the Blitz; or the country dancers of East Coker, “Keeping time, / Keeping the rhythm in their dancing”, and the given moment of illumination. One law holds them: everything in time is either the movement that turns or the still point it turns on, and the poem places each thing by that. The range is wide, country dance and theology, the London Tube and the North Atlantic, a ghost of Dante and a household’s dead, and it is held. The cost is in tone, not law: The Dry Salvages, in an American landscape, wavers between the grand and the slack as the other three do not, and the move from a peacetime first poem to three wartime poems shows a little at the joint.
Sophocles · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Colonus ode’s nightingale and olive, sung in gentleness, and the curse on Polynices, the most savage speech in Sophocles. One law governs both: the sanctity of a place, and of a dying man at the edge of the gods’ power, which blesses those who receive and destroys those who expel. The grove of the Eumenides is that law in one image, since the same goddesses are Furies and Kindly Ones. The old oracle and the new one Ismene brings work by the same physics: the gods who cast him down now raise him up, as she tells him on her arrival. Charged: Creon’s episode, half melodrama, runs to a lower law than the rest, and the praise of Athens, though built in, is at moments a civic hymn more than a dramatic necessity.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of Quilty’s murder, with its slapstick, its piano and its absurd bargaining, and the elegy above the mining town. They obey one law: everything passes through a consciousness that turns experience into art and pays for it, and behind it stands an author whose design turns chance into fate, McFate. Charlotte’s death under a passing car, the coincidences of the road, the clues and the double belong to one physics of pattern, which the book makes both beautiful and suspect. The foreword’s deadpan moralising and Humbert’s lyric are of one world, the parody confirming the voice. The one strain is the afterword: Nabokov’s own voice, insisting on “aesthetic bliss” and denying a moral, stands a little outside a novel that reaches moral recognition through its narrator.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the most distant elements: a ghazal of tavern drunkenness and comic bargaining with a wine seller, and a ghazal of the soul’s ascent through the spheres to the throne; a poem of jealous grief for a missing man, and a poem in which all creation turns round the sun as the dancer turns. They obey one law: love as the force by which the self is undone and remade, with the beloved, at once Shams and the divine, as the sun all things turn on. The law holds across the erotic, the devotional, the comic, the cosmological and the personal, and across three decades. A single law over three thousand poems can be a narrowness, and narrowness is not coherence; but the range here is wide, body, city, music, cosmos and the dead, and the law governs it rather than shutting it out.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: an order that accommodates any eccentricity that still produces copy cannot accommodate the man who prefers not to, and the narrator, its gentlest servant, can neither expel him nor take him in. Take the two most distant elements, the comic portraits of Turkey and Nippers at the opening and the death in the Tombs at the close. They obey the same law: the clerks’ humours are tolerated because they copy, and Bartleby dies because he will not, in a prison that is the same order with the comedy taken away. The grub-man in the Tombs, who takes him for a gentleman forger and offers him dinner, repeats the narrator’s misreading on a lower floor. The coda is in another key, hearsay after the event, and obeys the law by being one more explanation from outside. The range, from comedy to death, is wide for a story of this length.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole: the summons that cannot be answered and the arrival that cannot be completed, received by every figure as ordinary. Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of Dr Bucephalus climbing the court steps, lifting his legs so that the marble rings, and the horror of the boy’s wound with its worms. They obey the same law: a figure out of myth or out of the dark is admitted into an office or a farmhouse, and no one is surprised. The law runs from the comic, in the eleven sons and Odradek, to the political, in Ein altes Blatt, where the nomads eat a live ox before the palace and the emperor watches from a window; from the animal, the jackals and the ape, to the sacred, the Law and the wound. The range is wide for so short a book, and the voice holds across it. Held at 9.0 because the slighter pieces are coherent by narrowness, not by reach.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the world is what the heart makes of it, and the heart that makes everything of one object will be unmade by it. Take the two most distant elements, the spring letters with the well, the children at Wahlheim and Homer, and the December night with the pistols and Ossian. The same law produces both: the idyll and the grave are one gaze turned from expansion to contraction. The snub at Count C.’s obeys it too, the world refusing the self the heart has made. The peasant lad of 1787 is the law at work in another life, and Werther’s plea for him is the law speaking. The editor’s voice is the one element outside the gaze, set exactly where the gaze fails. Held at 9.0 because the range is narrow, one consciousness, one district, one summer and winter, and narrowness is not coherence.
Arnold Schoenberg · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gallows joke of Galgenlied and the warmth of O alter Duft, or the strict palindrome of Der Mondfleck and the parody waltz of Valse de Chopin. One law governs them. The moon is one image through all twenty-one poems; the voice never yields to song, and so holds jest and grief at one distance; the rondel returns in every number; and the harmony admits the triad only as memory. The range is wide, from cabaret to Bach’s devices, from blasphemy to nostalgia, and the law holds across it. The tension is in the closing number, whose near-tonal harmony is either the law’s last turn, the mask set down, or a step outside it; the desk reads the first, without certainty.
Anna Akhmatova · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the prose of the queue in 1957, a stranger’s whisper and the face that had once been hers, and the Passion of Crucifixion, the angels’ chorus and the heavens melted in fire. They obey one law: the woman who stood in line is the woman who stands silent where no one dares to look, and the poet’s work is to hold the plain and the sacred together without lifting one above the other. The law reaches from a lullaby to madness, to death invoked in VIII, “Ты все равно придешь”
(You will come anyway), to a bronze monument at the prison wall, and the range is wide for so short a work. Held at 9.0 because the frame’s late voice, the voice of 1957 and 1961, is calmer than the verse it frames, and the join is visible.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark, enclosed side chapels under the north towers and the open-air altar on the east, facing a crowd on the grass. They obey one law: curved, battered surfaces turned toward a particular light and a particular horizon, each element shaped by what it faces. The same law governs roof and wall, glass and door, spout and basin, inside and out, across a wide range: enclosure and openness, darkness and light, intimate and public worship. No right angle rules, but every curve answers the same question. The shelter and the chaplain’s house are plainer, and are kept low and subordinate, which is a decision within the law. Held at 9.0 because the range, wide as it is, is that of one small building.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Reverend Gwyon’s Mithraic sermon in a Calvinist church in New England, and a cocktail party in a Village apartment where a stranger passes off another’s opinion as his own. They obey one law: where the original is lost, the copy multiplies, and every copy is a misdirected longing for what it imitates. The father’s sun cult is a counterfeit faith, the party a counterfeit society, Wyatt’s paintings a counterfeit devotion that may be the truest thing in the book. The law runs through money, love, art, literature and religion without exception, and the range is very wide, from slapstick to theology. Charged: the third part’s tonal turn, Wyatt’s quiet in Spain set against the farce of the last parties, strains the law at its edge, and some satirical figures obey a looser physics of caricature than Wyatt’s story.
Olivier Messiaen · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the Danse de la fureur, four instruments in unison at full force, and the Louange à l’Éternité, one cello over even chords, infinitely slow. One law governs both. Duration is the unit, not the beat: the Danse’s rhythm is made by adding and mirroring values, the Louange’s by a pulse with no metrical weight. Harmony is colour, not progression, in the modes of limited transposition in both. And both stand outside time’s ordinary motion, one by a fury that does not develop, one by a stasis that does not end. The tension: the Intermède obeys ordinary scherzo time, the one place the law lapses, and the Fouillis’s blocks are joined by cut rather than by law.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs. Light and dark divide the stage, the life and the speech, and every element is placed on one side of the line or crossing it. Take the two most distant elements, the banana farce at the start and the punt elegy at the end: they obey the same law. Both are appetite, bodily and erotic, which the young man thought he could renounce for the dark of his vision, and which the old man still serves, with bananas and a bottle and with the girl he has kept on tape. The voice of each age keeps its own rhythm, and the time scheme, the future setting and the three ages, holds without a slip. Held at 9.0 because narrowness is not coherence: the law governs one man and one room.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bear costume Octave cannot get out of at the fête, and André dead on the grass by the greenhouse. One law governs both: everyone acts by the rules of his station and his reasons, and the rules decide who survives, not anyone’s malice. In the middle of the chaos Robert orders his majordomo, “Corneille! Faites cesser cette comédie!” (“Corneille! Stop this farce!”), and is answered, “Laquelle, Monsieur le marquis?” (“Which one, sir?”): the law spoken aloud. The servants’ house obeys the same physics at a lower pitch, and the two killings, by day and by night, obey one logic of the battue. The range is as wide as any film of its decade. The strain: the more conventional Paris act sits a little apart, and the fête’s knockabout once or twice escapes.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the old woman’s bare leg and the wheel in the dark at the lower left, and the armed Pallas in the light at the back. One law holds them. Everything in the picture is made of the same light and the same paint, and everything in it is a stage in the making of an image, from raw wool to spun thread to woven tapestry to painted myth to the painting that holds all four. The workroom and the alcove differ in light and rank and obey one physics; the myth and the genre scene are one scene. The range is wide. Held at 9.0 because the joint between the rooms, the steps and the ambiguous alcove, is where the law can seem strained, and the enlargement imposes a frame the law did not make.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: what is seen is staged, and every account is the account of an interest. Take the two most distant elements, the gray, suspended opening, all atmosphere and Delano’s mind, and the numbered deposition, all fact and the court’s mind. They obey the same law: the deposition too is a performance of order by those who hold power, and it closes on the master’s silence about what he cannot say. The coda holds the American’s forgetting and the Spaniard’s collapse inside the same physics, and Babo’s silent head is the law’s last instance, the one mind never staged for the reader. The range is wide for the length, Gothic mystery, legal record and philosophical dialogue, and nothing breaks the law. Held at 9.0 because the supplementary items after the deposition loosen the grip a little, recording the aftermath rather than the revolt.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the brick hostels at the precinct’s edge and the chamber at its heart. They obey one law: the same geometry of cut openings, the same layering of wall against sun, the same hierarchy of material, brick for the dwellings and secondary buildings, concrete and marble for the assembly, and the same concentric order from water to wall to ambulatory to centre. Kahn’s served and servant spaces govern here too: the ring serves, the centre is served. The range is wide: housing, offices, prayer, assembly, water and landscape. Held below the top where the record is least sure: interiors finished after Kahn’s death, and a prayer hall commonly reported turned from the geometry toward Mecca, where two laws would meet.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The two most distant elements are the expressionist fights and the flat, close domestic scenes, with the colour home movies and the 1964 frame beside them. One law governs all four: the world is shown at the pitch of Jake’s sensibility, and violence is the same act in the ring, at the dinner table and against the cell wall. The fights are the kitchen quarrels made visible; the home movies are the only record of the marriage he would show. The tonal range is wide, from Joey’s comic banter to the cell, and the comedy is never released from menace. What holds the axis here is the range of the world, not the law: narrowness is not coherence, and part of this coherence is the narrowness of one consciousness.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the star plan on the floor and the spiral against the sky. One law governs both: alternation of concave and convex, and ascent by contraction toward a point. The interior obeys it more strictly than almost any building of its century: one figure governs plan, order, entablature, vault and lantern ring, and every stucco star and cherub is placed by it. The exterior keeps the law of alternation: concave court front, convex lobed drum, stepped roof, concave lantern bays, spiral. What bends it: the outer drum is not the interior’s star, so the two laws meet rather than coincide, and the interior cannot be read from the court; and the lower front belongs to the court’s arcades, a law inherited and adapted rather than made. The range is moderate: one room and its crown, wider than a single figure, narrower than a city or a palace.
Roman, under Vespasian and Titus · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the hypogeum beneath the arena and the attic that carried the awning. They obey one law, the ellipse and its radii. The corridors of the hypogeum follow the arena’s axes; the radial walls carry cavea and stairs alike; the bays, the numbered arches, the zones of seating and the mast sockets of the attic take their places from one division of the ellipse into eighty. The social law is the structural law: the structure that lifts the seats also divides the ranks and their routes. The range runs from underworld to sky, from the condemned to the emperor. Held below the top by the façade, where the orders are a second system laid on the arches, and by the attic, in another idiom.
Machado de Assis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the delirium, a cosmic vision on the scale of all ages, and the account of Marcela kept in contos and months. Both obey one law, that of a dead man who looks at everything, the universe and his own appetites, with the same unillusioned amusement, and finds in each the same indifference and the same vanity. The comic chapters and the deaths, his mother’s and Nhã-loló’s, are held in one tone, and the reader feels no seam when grief is entered in the voice of a joke on punctuation. Humanitism, which could have been a separate satire, is folded into the law: the philosophy of a world in which the stronger dog wins the bone and calls it necessity. Charged because the delirium’s register, once, is visibly higher than the book’s.
Safavid, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a shop arch in the arcade of the square, and the medallion at the apex of the sanctuary dome. They obey one law: the pointed arch in its rectangular frame, repeated at every scale, and every brick surface given over to a glazed skin in which blue governs. The range is wide, market to mihrab. What resists is in three places. The hinge: two axes, two laws of orientation, joined at the vestibule, and from the square the second minarets and the dome stand off the first minarets’ axis, so that the eye sees the join the plan hides. The seam in the skin: mosaic at the door, haft-rangi within, the finest work where the city looks and the quicker work where the congregation prays. And the madrasas and winter halls, plainer, which keep the law more thinly.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the burning ships on the far sea, a catastrophe at the scale of the world, and the lute and songbook of the lovers in the near corner, an intimate pleasure. One law governs both: everything living is under one attack, at every distance and in every register, and nothing in the field is outside it. The comic obeys the law as the dreadful does: the skeleton playing behind the lovers turns their song into his. Even the exception is the law’s, since the one pair not yet looking is about to be taken. The range is very wide for one panel, from a burning world to a game board, from terror to farce, and the law holds across it. Held a tenth below the summit pages for the crowding of the lower band, where the order of reading slackens.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the lower chapel, low, dim and close-columned, and the upper chapel, tall, open and bright. They obey one law. One bay system governs both, one painted and gilt surface covers both, and the lower is the root of the upper, its compression the condition of the upper’s release. The same law runs through the glass: sacred history leading to the crown the building holds, one argument about kingship and the Passion. The structure obeys the programme, the wall giving way to the history. The fifteenth-century rose breaks the idiom in Flamboyant tracery and keeps the law. Held below the top because the register is one, radiant and sacral, and its range is of degree within it.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the late seventh-century Kondō with its cloud brackets, and the Nandaimon, raised centuries later; or the Kondō’s plain frame and the Edo props carved with dragons under its own eaves. They obey one law: timber post and beam on stone podia, tiled roofs on deep eaves, the bay as the unit, the building as the enclosure of an image or a relic. The Western Precinct holds closely to its balanced pair and the Asuka bracket; the Eastern Precinct obeys a related law, Nara bracket sets and the octagon. The range covers some eight centuries, and the law holds across all of it. What resists: the oldest buildings speak a dialect of bracketing nothing later in the complex shares, and the dragon props are ornament of another physics.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Uncle Carl’s farce with candles and wind in the nursery, and Ismael’s locked room, where a death is wished into being. One law governs both, the little world. Everything in the film is play, from the bawdy to the sacred: play is how the Ekdahls survive and how the Jacobis practise their magic, and the bishop’s house is the one place where play is forbidden, which is why it is the place of death. The toy theatre shows the law and Strindberg’s note states it; inside it the real and the supernatural do not contradict. The strain is in the moral weather: the uncles’ comedy is played as sanctioned warmth, and the film’s judgment softens there more than its form admits; and Isak, though given his own age, love, anger and house, stands near the old type of the magical rescuer.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Karol laughing on the rubbish tip, and St Paul’s hymn sung over Julie’s tears. One law covers them. Chance governs all three films; contact comes through an apparatus before it comes face to face, the television, the binoculars and hand signs, the telephone; each protagonist is tested at the bottle bank; each ideal turns against itself before it is redeemed; each film turns on a return from death. The range is three genres, three cities and three photographers, wider than any single film’s, and the law holds across all of it; coherence is weighed by the range it covers, and that is the achievement. What holds the axis at the figure are the strains at the edges: White’s comic physics lets a fortune fall from the sky, and the providence of Red, which saves exactly the trilogy’s couples, is declared at the end.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: what he does cannot be seen, and what is seen is always misread. Take the two most distant elements, the ceremony of the fortieth day with its band, its doctors and its ladies, and the panther in the straw at the end. They obey the same law from opposite sides: in both the crowd gathers to a body on display and takes from it what it can consume, a spectacle of suffering in one, a spectacle of appetite in the other. The deadpan of the chronicle holds unbroken from the first sentence to the burial, and the one shift of register, into his speech, makes the law explicit rather than breaking it. Held at this figure because the range is that of one figure and one trade; the law is complete over a field narrow by design, and narrowness is not coherence.
Simone Martini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dove in its ring of angels at the apex and the flowered floor at the Virgin’s feet; or Gabriel’s flying mantle and the upright Ansanus at the far left. One law holds. Every form is a contour laid on gold, every body a line in a flat field of light, every colour set as inlay. The words obey it, being gold on gold; the vase obeys it; the prophets in their roundels obey it. Nothing in the work contradicts its physics. The range is moderate rather than wide: the law is applied to a calm order of saints and to a moment of alarm, and holds both, which is real. Held at 9.0 rather than higher because the saints obey the law at a lower intensity, so that the edges are consistent but slacker than the centre.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the service floor, a storey of ducts and pipes, and the court open to the sky. They obey one law, Kahn’s distinction of served and servant spaces, read at every scale. The service floor serves the laboratory; the laboratory serves the study’s thought; the blocks serve the court; the court is served by nothing and opens to the horizon. The same law governs the materials: concrete for what bears and endures, teak for what the hand touches, stone for the common ground. Symmetry about the channel governs plan and elevation. The range is real, from mechanical provision to contemplation. Held from the top because the programme is one type and one vocation, and the outer flanks show the law less plainly than the court.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Arnold drunk at his inheritance party, a scene of near farce, and the death on the hillside among the sheep. One law governs both. Every person is seen from the same distance, as an animal would see them, by their acts; every scene is cut to what the donkey or Marie undergoes; nothing is explained, and but for the music nothing is underlined. Gérard’s cruelty and the mother’s tenderness are filmed alike. The comedy of the circus arithmetic and the miser’s talk of money obey the same flat physics as the grief, and the range, from slapstick to Passion, is wide for so austere a film. The strain is the Schubert, a voice from outside the film’s world that tells the viewer where the height is. It is used sparingly, and the law holds, but there it is lent rather than kept.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pale peaks seen through the rock at the upper left, and the Child’s foot at the water’s edge at the lower right. One law holds them. Everything in the grotto, mineral, plant, flesh, infant and angel, is a body found by one light in one darkness, modelled by the same gradation, under one damp air. The divine is under the law of nature: the Child sits on the ground and is lit as the stone is lit; the angel is painted with the same tonal means as a fern. The law governs the composition too: every look and every hand is part of one circuit, apart from the angel’s look out, the law’s one deliberate breach and itself part of it. The range is wide in kind, from geological time to an infant’s finger, and it holds. Held at 9.0 because one register and one instant narrow it.
Henrik Ibsen · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Aunt Julle’s new hat and Tesman’s pleasure in his slippers, which are domestic comedy, and Hedda’s shot to the temple under the General’s portrait. One law governs both: a life that will not live by the rules of the house it is in, and cannot make its own, is ground between respectability and its own contempt. The comedy is not relief from the tragedy but its medium; Tesman’s devotion to the domestic industries of Brabant belongs to the same small world as Brack’s blackmail, and the last line sets the conventional phrase against the act. The range is narrow in setting and wide in tone, from farce to horror in one room. Held off the top because the law is proved over a small field.
Raphael · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Virgin’s face at the top centre, looking out with foreknowledge, and the putti at the foot, chins on their arms, looking up idly. Do they obey one law? They do: every figure is ranked by its nearness to the threshold and turned in relation to the coming forward, the Virgin advancing, the saints kneeling at the sides of the way, the putti at the very ledge, on our side of the vision. Light governs the whole: the curtains frame it, the cherubs are made of it, the saints are lit from it. The range runs from the divine to the playful, from heaven to the ledge, and holds. Held at the gate of the top because the putti’s register is a real strain, a lightness the rest of the picture does not share, even where the law places them.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark, solid hull at the centre, the one made thing, and the pale light breaking far above, the one opening. They obey one law, the vortex: every passage in the field is either drawn round the centre or opened out of it, and the hull and the light are its eye and its edge. Snow, sea, smoke and cloud are made one substance by one handling, which is the coherence of the work and its claim. The mast, the one vertical, is what the turning acts against, and the law makes room for it. Within one storm and one instant the law is complete, from black to white and from solid to vapour. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence, the field is one kind of matter, and the lower left loosens.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the island, bare rock and sea where a woman vanishes in daylight, and the Taormina hotel, a crowded party and a sofa at dawn. One law governs both: people are small in spaces that do not notice them, attention drifts from the absent to the present, and the camera stays where the drama would cut. Search and betrayal are shot with the same distance and patience, and the comedy of the Messina crowd obeys the law of the grief on the rocks: appetite, idle and public, in an indifferent place. The range runs from sea to baroque town to hotel, from mystery to near farce. The one strain is satire: at Messina and with the boy painter the film points at its class rather than watching it.
Mexica · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the face at the top, made of the blood that leaves the body, and the earth deity on the underside, facing down into the ground. One law holds them: everything is doubled, and everything is exchanged, life for death, blood for food, the visible figure for its hidden twin. The paired serpents of the face, the paired claws, the alternating hands and hearts, the two skulls at front and back, the knotted serpents of the belt: every element obeys the logic of pairing and payment, and nothing stands outside it. The range is wide for one figure: the body, the earth, sacrifice, fertility, death. Held at 9.0 because the law is held over a single figure, without a scene, and the back is its weakest instance.
Pallava · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Shiva granting grace to the ascetic at the upper left of the cleft, and the cat in mock penance among mice low on the right, beneath the elephants. One law governs both: every being on the face is placed by its relation to the descent at the centre and answers it in its own manner, reverent, absorbed, playful or comic. The comic is not outside the law; the cat is the law’s shadow, penance without grace. The range is wide, from gods to mice, from the sacred event to the scratch of a hoof, from near-round carving to incision, and nothing contradicts the governing convergence. Held at 9.0 rather than higher because the repeated figures of the upper registers thin the law into pattern in places.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark, heavy backs of the hunters in the left foreground and the white crags at the right of the horizon. They obey one law. Everything stands under the same light, the same cold, the same air. Even the strongest contrast, the orange of the inn fire, obeys: warmth in this world is small and wind-driven, against the season. The range runs from the near body to the far mountain, from labour to play, from the animal to the sacred sign, and it holds. The seam is geographical. The peaks are not of this valley’s country but the world landscape’s convention, the imagined laid over the observed. The tonal unity absorbs them, and the axis stops at 9.0 because the seam is there to be seen.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the god’s open-eyed face and the slack face of a soldier asleep against the staff; or the bare trees and the trees in leaf. One law governs both pairs: a still light and a measured geometry that lay the same pale daylight on the divine and the drowsing, the winter and the spring, so that the opposition is stated inside one order. The two viewpoints, the one apparent breach, are themselves the law: the human is seen from below and the divine level, and that physics is held without contradiction from edge to edge. Nothing in the field slips register. Held below the top because the range is moderate, one scene, one moment, one temperature, and narrowness is not coherence.
David Bowie · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a death met as a performance, the mask held to the last, sounded by one band playing against a composed voice. The two most distant elements obey it. Girl Loves Me, a strut in invented slang, and Lazarus, a slow elegy, are the same man refusing plain speech before his end, once as swagger and once as grief, and both lose time, the missing Monday and the life seen from heaven. Sue, a crime story on a pulse of drum and bass, belongs to the same dark: a death, a note left behind. The same five players sound every track. The law strains where the mood narrows to one nocturnal colour, and at ’Tis a Pity, which obeys it by sound more than by sense.
Prince Hachijō Toshihito and Prince Toshitada · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the New Palace’s raised upper room, made for a retired emperor, and the Shōiken, a rustic tea house at the fields’ edge. They obey one law, and the villa names it. Shin, gyō, sō — formal, semi-formal and informal, after calligraphy — is a graded scale, laid out literally in the paving and applied to every building. Palace and hut are degrees of one system of unpainted timber, paper, plaster and the module, never two styles, across a range from imperial reception to a hut in the fields. What resists is accretion: the New Palace is more ornate than the Old Shoin, the Shōiken’s decorative fittings and the Onrindō’s Buddhist character sit at the law’s edges, and on close inspection the stagger reads as additive.
Molière · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of Du Bois fumbling for a lost note and Alceste’s last couplet; or the marquis admiring their own teeth and fortune and Éliante’s Lucretian speech on the blindness of love. One law governs them: self-love, and the gap between what a person is and how he wishes to be seen. The marquis display it naked; Oronte asks for sincerity and wants praise; Arsinoé covers envy with virtue; Célimène plays every suitor against the others; and Alceste’s demand to be loved for his honesty obeys the same law in its purest form. Even the lawsuit, lost to a rival who lies, and the tribunal over a sonnet are that law in the world’s courts. The range runs from farce to near tragedy, and it is held. Held off the top because Du Bois’s scene leans on the old farce more than the play elsewhere allows.
Salvador Dalí · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the cliffs at the back, a real coast in real light, and the creature at the centre, a thing that exists nowhere. They obey one law, the picture’s premise: everything, real or impossible, is painted with the same clarity, the same light from the same side, the same finish. The dream is not marked off from the waking world; the soft and the hard share one physics of light and differ only in the physics of matter. That is a wide range held by one rule: geology and invention, metal and flesh, a fly and a coastline. Two things resist. The creature is painted with less certainty than everything around it, so the centre obeys the law more weakly than the edges; and the reflective plane is ambiguous in kind, neither sea nor object.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: every relation is a relation of power, and every speech is an act in that economy. Take the two most distant elements, the lovers’ tenderness and Agrippine’s political ledger. They obey the same law: the love is a dynastic threat, and the ledger is a mother’s claim of love. Narcisse’s flattery and Burrhus’s virtue are two currencies in one market. Even the sacred refuge at the end, Junie among the Vestals, is set by the law, as the one place where Néron’s power stops. The range of tone is not wide, with no comedy and no lower world, but within the court the whole spectrum from love to murder is governed by one physics. The one strain is the end, where the people’s killing of Narcisse brings in a force the play has not prepared.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the grandfather clock, drawn in reserve lines with no colour of its own, and Le Luxe II on the wall, a picture in full colour with figures, sea and sky. They obey different rules, and the difference is the one law: what the painter made keeps its colour, and everything else goes into the red. Every object in the room is placed by that law, and none breaks it. The range is moderate: furniture, works of art, a plant, a clock; a studio and nothing outside it, no window onto a world. Narrowness is not coherence, and the law, though total, covers one room and one distinction. That holds the axis at 9.0, where a wider scene under one law would stand higher.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a tram in Vienna, two strangers trading confessions with nothing at stake, and a hotel room in Greece, a married couple saying things meant to wound. One law governs both: people make and test their love in talk, against a clock, and what is said is half performance and half truth. Jesse’s flirting on the tram and his apology at the café are the same move; Celine’s fear of being consumed, stated in the first film, is her charge in the third. The clock is the same law in each: the train, the plane, the night in the hotel. The range, from first meeting to middle-aged marriage, is wide for two people, and the law holds. It loosens only at the lunch table, where other voices state the themes.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the boulder of the hearth, raw and unwaxed, and the red steel casement on an upper floor that opens until its corner is gone. One is the site untouched, the other machine-made. They obey one law: horizontal trays against vertical stone, anchored in rock and opened to the forest, every element either ledge or pier. The law holds from the trellis beams over the drive to the shelf of a desk, and up the hill in the guest house and the stepping canopy of its walk. The colour holds too: sandstone, ochre and red against the green of the trees. The range is wide, for nature and technology, raw and made, fall under one physics. What resists is the territory, one house, and narrowness is not coherence.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the open porch on the west, a vault with no wall, sky and water around it, and the lower service level with its conservation studios and loading bays. They obey one law: the module of vault and channel and its grid, the served room and its servant, light admitted from above or from a court cut from the same grid. The auditorium is a vault, the library lies under vaults, the courts are vaults removed, the porches vaults unenclosed, and the pools and grove are set out on the same lines. The range is moderate, and the law holds throughout. Held below the top: one museum is a limited territory, and the beam that reads as a vault is a small breach between what the law shows and how it works.
PJ Harvey · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: England’s beauty and England’s killing sung in one breath, the tune bright and the matter dead. The two most distant elements obey it. The Last Living Rose, a sour, tender hymn to London, and The Colour of the Earth, a man’s grief for a friend in foreign soil, are the same love of a place and its people, once at home and once on a far hill. The bugles of The Glorious Land and the Cochran shrug of The Words That Maketh Murder are one device, a nation’s sounds turned on its wars. The range, folk waltz, martial drive, hymn, chant and a reggae loop, from England to the trenches and the Aegean, is moderate, and the law never breaks. The tonal range is narrow by design; the coherence is in the law, not the narrowness.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the hymn and trill of the first movement and the finale’s off-tonic, mercurial rondo. One law governs them, and it has two terms, the semitone and the third. The trill is G flat against F, a semitone; G flat is the first foreign key, a major third below the tonic; the Andante stands a minor third above it, in C sharp minor; the finale’s first note, G, is the sixth degree, a third below the tonic, and its pull towards C minor is the music circling home before it enters. Held below the top because the law binds keys more than themes: the finale’s material is less audibly bound to the first movement’s than its keys are.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the proprietor’s talk of weather and the drive from Dallas, and Carla Jean refusing the coin in her mother’s house. One law governs them — the coin. The Coens’ comedy, the deputy’s pride, the trailer-park manager refusing an address, the boys asking about the bone through the arm, is the law in a lighter key: people speak in the forms they have, and the forms do not fit what came. Chigurh’s dread is the same law met head-on. Ed Tom’s bafflement, Ellis’s cats, the two dreams obey it. Held at the figure by one scene that strains it: the Mexicans’ arrival at the El Paso motel, which the law requires and the film cannot show without becoming another film, so it is given as sound and aftermath.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the cantilevered west eave, a structural feat seen from the street, and a single pane of leaded glass, a decorative screen seen from a chair. They obey one law: the long horizontal, interrupted by interlocking rectangles and the pointed figure of the prow. The prow of the living room returns in the angles of the glass; the bands of the brick return in the oak strips of the ceiling; the sliding blocks of the plan return in the stepping of the planters and copings; lamps, table and chairs obey the geometry of the roofs. The law holds from structure to ornament to furniture, a wide range for one house. What bends it: the service wing obeys it more plainly than the main block, and the bedroom floor, set crosswise, interrupts the horizontal it serves.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two farthest elements: the low carport under the building and the top of the research tower, a decade apart in design. They obey one law: the circle and the rounded corner; red brick in bands with glass tubing between; light from above or from the band at the top of the wall; structure as trunk and branch; nothing facing the street. The same law holds in the column head and the desk, in the band of tubing and the tower’s bands, in the curve of the mezzanine and the tower’s round floors. The range is wide, furniture, column, room, court and tower, and the law holds across it and across the decade between the two buildings. Held at 9.0 and not above because the law is narrow in material and figure: one building language applied with great consistency, not many orders reconciled under one rule.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs everything: every image is a photograph painted, grey, and blurred to the distance at which it can be known. Take the two most distant elements: Youth Portrait, a living young woman looking out, softly lit, and Hanged, a body at the edge of visibility. They obey the same law, and the law ranks them: the life is clearer than the death. The range is wide: public and private (Funeral and Cell), persons and objects (Ensslin and the record player), the living and the dead, 1972 and 1977. Nothing breaks it; no canvas is coloured, sharpened, captioned or allegorized. What holds the axis is that the range in kind is narrower than the range in subject: the cycle holds many things in one register, and the register itself never varies.
Fra Angelico · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: measure, stillness, an even light. Take the two most distant elements, the dense dark garden at the left with its fence and trees, and the bare cell window at the right. Both obey the same rule of enclosure and fall under the same light. The angel’s coloured wings and Mary’s plain robe, the most ornamental and the plainest passages, are held in one key of pale colour. The Latin below, which addresses the viewer, obeys the law of the image, which addresses the viewer by placing him in its architecture. The range is not wide, one moment, two figures, one building, one garden, so the figure rests on how complete the law is, not on its breadth. Narrowness is not coherence, and the axis is held at 9.0 for that reason.
Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant parts: the examination room on the ground floor and Madame Dalsace’s sitting room above, or the night-lit courtyard front and a cupboard door in a bathroom. One law governs all: an exposed frame, an industrial material made exact by hand, movement where a wall would be, light admitted and sight withheld. Clinic, salon, bedroom and service stair obey the same physics, and the range is wide, from public to intimate, day to night, structure to hinge, so narrowness is not the source of the coherence. The one tension is the old storey above, which belongs to another law; but the house takes it as its condition, and the frame that carries it states the relation honestly.
Polykleitos the Younger (attributed) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the seats of honour at the front of the lower cavea and the top row of the upper, added later. They obey one law. The circle of the orchestra sets the centre, the concentric rows answer it, and the radial stairways divide the bowl into wedges; in the upper cavea the same rule is extended to a wider ring without a break. The stage building once set a straight line against the curve; it is lost, and what cannot be seen is not credited. The coherence is complete, and the range it governs, ritual centre, crowd and landscape, is wide for a single form, if narrower than in a building of many functions.
Dominikus Zimmermann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the plain whitewashed exterior and the gold and painted sky of the ceiling; or the bright white nave and the deep red and blue choir with the beaten Christ. They obey one law: the visible world is plain and the hidden one radiant, and glory is founded on the Passion it seems to forget. The exterior’s reticence is the condition of the interior’s surprise; the choir’s colour is the nave’s light turned toward its cause. Within, pier, entablature, window, stucco frame and painted sky obey the one rule of dissolving boundaries. The range of feeling is wide, from festal joy to the scourging; the range of kinds of space is narrow, one room and its appendage.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: a single line carrying implied harmony, under a fixed frame of six places. Take the two most distant elements: the open G major Prelude of the first suite, in standard tuning, all arpeggio and resonance, and the C minor Sarabande of the fifth, retuned and stripped of every chord, or the five-string D major of the sixth, in a register the first never reaches. They obey the same law; each makes harmony out of melody, and the frame is identical. The range is wide in key, mode, register and even instrument, and the set is not narrow: processional, courtly, rustic, lament and brilliance. Held below the top because the set coheres partly by repeating a plan.
Wang Ximeng · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the tiny figure of a fisherman on open water near the opening and the crowded blue peaks at the scroll’s height. One law governs both. The realm is a single world of mountain and water, lit by one even light, seen from one travelling height, in one palette, and every human thing in it is small, placed and at peace. The law holds over the whole length and over a wide range of motifs: water, shore, village, mountain, cascade, temple, bridge and road, from the low opening to the summits and back to the low close. Nothing contradicts it, and nothing breaks the peace or the light. It stands at 9.0 and not higher because the range is narrow in register: one season, one weather, one mood, and the law is never tested against storm, night or ruin.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a fragile, particular thing held inside a ruined public space, and gathered slowly into collective force or lost to it. The two most distant elements, the old man’s spoken memory and the full climax of Monheim after it, obey it: his voice the lost commons, Monheim the gathering that answers it. The furthest apart in register, the glockenspiel duet and Deathkamp Drone, obey it too: the small private sound and the world around it. The range runs from street recording to drone and orchestral climax. The law strains on the last side, where Edgyswingsetacid and Moya’s sung fragment sit loosely, and in Static’s middle.
Cistercian builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the church’s high pointed vault, lit by a few openings and resonant, and the cloister’s low, heavy arcade, half open to the sky on sloping ground. They obey one law: cut stone used as mass, opened only where the light or the passage requires, no surface given to anything but the stone and the light. The same law governs the lavabo, the chapter house’s later rib vault, and the belfry’s stone pyramid; even the one Gothic room keeps the economy, so a turn of style does not break the law. Narrowness is not coherence: the range is one community’s life and one material. Within it, the law is exact.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements, the porch and the dome. The porch is trabeated, rectilinear and Greek in grammar: columns, entablature, pediment. The dome is arcuated, curvilinear, Roman concrete. They are two systems set end to end, joined by a block that belongs to neither, and from the side the junction shows as a collision. Inside, one law governs, the circle and its centre, from the floor’s pattern to the oculus; even there the lower order’s sixteen divisions and the dome’s twenty-eight share only four axes. The range is wide, from temple front to cosmos, and the rotunda alone would stand near the top. But one physics is asked of the whole, and the whole is a hybrid.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the hieratic column-figures of the Royal Portal, of about 1150, and the north rose, two generations later. They obey one law. Everything is placed in an order under the Virgin and the Incarnation, from prophet to evangelist and from shop to throne, and every part answers its opposite: Old Law to New, north to south, the Judgment in the west to the altar in the east. The builders of 1194 bound the old front into that law, setting the west rose’s Judgment above its Incarnation lancets. The range is wide, and it holds. What resists: the old front is lower and narrower in scale than the nave, and the seam shows; the workshops do not share one style; the porches, added in mid-campaign, changed the transept fronts; and three later idioms sit on a body under one law: Jehan de Beauce’s Flamboyant spire and choir screen, and the eighteenth century’s marble choir.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Glendower’s Welsh magic and his daughter’s song (1 Henry IV, 3.1), and the Gloucestershire orchard where Shallow orders Davy about a sowing of wheat (2 Henry IV, 5.1 to 5.3). One law governs both: time and its reckoning. Every world in the work keeps accounts, the tavern bill, the King’s debt to the Percys, the thousand pounds Falstaff borrows of Shallow, the Hostess’s suit, and every account comes due. The counterfeit runs the same way in court and tavern. The range is very wide, and the law holds through it. Charged: the prince’s second reformation sits uneasily with the first, as if Shrewsbury had not happened; he is absent from the second part so long that its halves pull at different centres; and the Epilogue speaks from outside the action’s law.
Walt Whitman · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
One law governs: the self contains all, each thing is of equal standing in it, body and soul are one, and death is continuance into the common ground. Take the two most distant elements, the procreant ecstasy of “Children of Adam” and the hermit thrush’s death carol in “Lilacs”, or the barbaric yawp and “A noiseless patient spider”, launching filament into vacancy: they obey one law. The war darkens the optimism of 1855 without breaking its physics, and the poet’s contradictions are taken into the law: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” (§51). The range is very wide. Charged: the late public poems and the rhymed elegy for Lincoln obey another law, conventional and civic, set beside “Lilacs” in the same cluster; and the annexes add a slackened voice rather than a new range.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
One law governs: under drought, every act of love, speech or faith fails to reach its object, and the poem waits for water. Take the two most distant elements: Lil’s friend in the pub, on teeth and pills and the demobilised husband, and the thunder speaking Sanskrit over the Himalaya. They obey one law: the pub’s sterile marriage is a waste land, and the thunder’s first word asks what has been given. The range is extreme, from the music-hall to scripture, from Cleopatra’s barge to a London pub, and it holds. Charged: the law is partly announced rather than enacted, through the notes and through Tiresias’s claim to have suffered all of it before; and the last lines, a run of quotations ending in “Shantih” (433), have struck readers since 1922 as a collapse of the poem’s order as much as its completion, a question the poem leaves open at a cost.
Matthias Grünewald · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the dead Christ of the closed view and the risen body of the first opening. They obey one law, the work’s own: the body is the site on which decay or light acts, and colour states which. The Temptation’s beasts and the Nativity’s light belong to it, and it holds through very different spaces: the hieratic scale of the Crucifixion, the visionary chapel of the Concert, the landscapes of the Visit. What resists is the shrine. Its gilded calm and earlier style obey the physics of the Upper Rhine retable of a generation before, not the painter’s. At the second opening two laws meet and are not made one. The range is wide; the seam is real.
Euripides · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the domestic realism of the opening, a household’s servants talking by the door, and the Sun’s chariot in the sky at the close. They mostly obey one law, Medea’s honour, which governs her from her first cries to her last word to Jason; and her divine descent is named in the play before it is shown. The chorus’s horror and the play’s sympathy are reconciled by the one thing both see: she is right about Jason and wrong about the children, and the play holds both to the end. Charged: Aegeus’ chance arrival obeys a convenience the rest of the play does not, and the chariot asserts an order, the Sun protecting a killer of children, that the play leaves unexamined, either its deepest irony or a seam.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the first morning, a comic and horrible struggle with a body in a dark bedroom, and the last afternoon, the family in a sunlit tram planning a smaller flat. They obey one law: the household lives by labour and use, and what cannot work is first hidden, then resented, then removed, and the household is better for it. The same law governs the chief clerk at the door, the father’s secret savings, the lodgers’ contempt and the charwoman who sweeps the body out. The impossible event submits to it entirely and is never allowed a law of its own, so that the widest strain the book could suffer, between a fantastic premise and a domestic world, never breaks it. The tonal range is wider than the setting: farce, pathos, dread and an idyll. Held below the higher figures because the field the law must govern is narrow, one flat and one family over some months, and narrowness is not coherence.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the battle royal in a Southern hotel, the boys made to fight blindfolded for coins on an electrified rug, and Ras on horseback in the burning streets of Harlem. They obey one law: the Black man is cast in a role written by others, and every role is a blindfold. The law holds across a wide range, naturalist comedy, oratory, nightmare, political satire, the surreal, and the planned shift of style is itself the law’s working. Charged: the Brotherhood, drawn as allegory, runs on a thinner realism than the South or the street, so that its figures obey the law as signs more than as people; and the Epilogue’s affirmation of a “socially responsible role” sits at an angle to the law the book has enforced, that every role so far has been a trap.
Friedrich Hölderlin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The hostile reader says the measured, luminous “Archipelagus” and the shattered juxtapositions of the Folioheft are too far apart for one law to govern both. Take the two most distant elements: the hexameter picture of the Aegean islands after the Persian wars, and the broken last strophes of “Mnemosyne”, with Achilles and Ajax dead and the human being a sign without meaning. One law governs both: the gods’ day has passed, what is left is to remember it and to keep the time of need without false consolation, and the poet’s task is to name and to found what remains. The range is very wide, elegy to hymn to fragment, Greece to Swabia to Bordeaux, and the law holds across it. It does not hold everywhere in the drafts, where some pieces stand without their place in the order.
Orson Welles · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the newsreel parody and Susan’s overdose, the spoon in the glass. One law governs both: the image against the self. The newsreel is the public Kane, made by the industry he made; Susan’s suffering is what the public image was built on, a woman made to sing so that a headline would be true. The breakfast table, the campaign poster, the review Kane finishes against himself and the mirrors at the end obey the same law. The strain is in temperature: the film’s wit and its grief run in different keys, governed by one law but seldom felt in one body. The frame’s own voice, telling the reporter a word explains nothing and then showing the word, is the one place the law bends.
Charles Dickens · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the Megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill in the first chapter and Esther’s last broken words, “even supposing” (chapter 67). One law governs them: everything is connected, no one sees the connexion, and what is neglected returns. The combustion obeys the book’s law, not chemistry’s: the corruption is inborn and consumes from within, as the suit does. Comedy and death share the law; Turveydrop and Jo are both what neglect makes. The range is very wide and it is held. Charged: the private resolution softens the law in Esther’s half, so that the system’s victims, Richard, Jo, Lady Dedlock and Gridley, die while the good are lodged in a second Bleak House. The law bends there.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law: force newly rules the world, and every creature is measured by how it stands to it. Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of Oceanus, a busybody god offering to plead with Zeus and leaving on his winged mount, and the cataclysm that drives Prometheus into the earth. One counsels accommodation to force; the other is force’s answer to a refusal of it. Io, the furthest element in kind, a mortal, a body, a wanderer across the known world, obeys the law too: she is what the power of Zeus does to the weak, and her line leads to the release of the strong. The chorus move from counselling prudence to choosing to share the punishment, inside the same law. The range runs from gods to a cow-horned girl, from comedy to ruin. Held below 9.0 by the Oceanus scene’s tone and the drift of the geography.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs a very wide range: form and meaning, husk and grain, separation and return; every thing is a veil that discloses as it hides. Take the two most distant elements, the bawdy tale of the maidservant, the donkey and the gourd in Book V and Daquqi’s candles in Book III. They obey it together: Rumi says the ribald tale is a figure as the vision is, and its moral, that imitation without knowledge kills, is a law the vision also keeps. Even the argument for free will and the argument for compulsion are each shown as the arguer’s veil. What holds it lower is that the range is wider than the law can always hold. Some bawdy matter sits hard under the same physics as the ascent, Book VI ends unfinished, and the reader is sometimes unsure whether a digression has returned.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the infinite or the total is present in a finite point, a coin, a cellar, a jaguar’s skin, a single night of a man’s life, and in its presence opposites become one, heretic and orthodox, hunter and hunted, Minotaur and Theseus, the immortal and the mortal. Take the two most distant elements: the cosmic vision of “La escritura del dios” and the factory girl of “Emma Zunz” counting her money in a Buenos Aires street. They obey the same law: one act or one moment decides a whole fate, and the truth of it lies under false circumstances. The gaucho stories and the metaphysical ones are one book. Held at this figure because the range, wide in place and time, is narrower in register, one ironic and erudite voice speaking everything, and some of the late pieces repeat the law rather than extend it. Narrowness is not coherence.
Emily Dickinson · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a bird that comes down the walk and bites a worm in halves, and the soul’s journey past the setting sun toward Eternity (J712). One law governs both: the world is seen exactly and is not let in; nature and God alike are known at a distance, at the circumference, and the mind alone measures them by what they withhold. The same law holds the snake of “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” (J986), a “Whip lash / Unbraiding in the Sun” met with “Zero at the Bone”, the breakdown of J280, the theological quarrel of “I know that He exists” (J338) and the erotic “Wild Nights”, and it governs the instability of faith: the contradiction is the law. What holds the axis where it stands is the body’s want of a designed whole. The coy register and the occasional verse lie outside the law the great poems obey, and the personae (child, bride, queen, Nobody, corpse) sometimes change the terms rather than vary them.
Fernando Pessoa · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Narrowness is not coherence, and the body is not narrow: it runs from a shepherd who never kept sheep to factory lamps, pirates, a tobacconist’s shop and Lydia by a river. Take the two most distant elements: Reis beside Lydia, hands unclasped so as to lose nothing, and Campos in the “Ode Triunfal” wishing to be every machine. They obey one law. Each is a stance taken by a consciousness toward the same wound, that thinking separates the self from the world and from itself: Caeiro denies the wound, Reis disciplines it, Campos suffers it. The quarrels of the heteronyms are part of the law, not breaches of it. Held off the top because the law is partly asserted from outside the poems, in Pessoa’s letters and prose about the heteronyms, and because the late Campos and the poems Pessoa signed himself bleed into one another, so that the edges of the system are not always kept.
Juan Rulfo · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: in Comala the dead and the living obey the same physics, and nothing is ever finished, since rancour, debt and desire outlive the body. Take the two most distant elements: Juan Preciado’s first steps down into the heat, guided by a muleteer, and Pedro’s death in his chair at the hands of the same muleteer. Both fall under the law: the son seeks the father and the father’s other son kills him; the town Pedro killed is the town that kills Juan Preciado; the voice that tells both comes from the ground. The impossibilities, a woman who dissolves into mud, souls in the streets, are given in the same plain tone as the deeds of the hacienda. Charged: the second half’s third-person narrator knows what no voice in the graves could know, the frame loosens, and the chronology will not close at a few points.
Giacomo Leopardi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs, and it is stated in development rather than broken by it: a finite being’s desire for an infinite happiness, and a nature that wakes the desire and denies it. Take the two most distant elements. All’Italia (1818) sees the walls and arches of the ancestors, “ma la gloria non vedo”, but I do not see the glory; La ginestra (1836) sets the human race against nature. The first laments a vitality lost to history; the last finds that the loss was nature’s from the start, and turns the civic voice from Italy to mankind. The village Saturday, the moon over Asia and the Aspasia poems obey the same law: illusion lives in expectation and dies in arrival. Held below 9.0: the early canzoni obey the law in matter but not in voice, and the Palinodia’s irony and the Scherzo stand apart in tone.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: “Was”, a farce in which a slave woman is a stake at poker and two old men are chased round a plantation, and “Delta Autumn”, an elegy in a tent in the rain. One law governs both: the land and the blood are one inheritance, and every white McCaslin act, the bet, the chase, the gift, the refusal, is a move in the ledger. “Was” is the ledger seen as comedy by men who will not read it; “Delta Autumn” is the ledger come due. “Pantaloon in Black” obeys the same law from outside the family: the land is still McCaslin and Edmonds land, and the law is the white sheriff’s. Charged a step: the magazine origin of “The Fire and the Hearth” leaves its tone wider than the rest.
James Joyce · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the moocow and “baby tuckoo” on the first page, and the theory of integritas, consonantia, claritas expounded to Lynch on a walk in the last chapter; or the hell sermon and the girl on the strand. One law governs them: the soul’s coming to possess its own language, by taking in and then turning the words it was given. The nursery rhyme and the scholastic proof are two stages of one process, and the sermon’s terror and the strand’s rapture are one capacity for transport, turned from God to art. The book’s undecided irony toward its hero is consistent from the first page to the last and belongs to the law: the narration always speaks in Stephen’s idiom and never steps outside to judge. The range of register is wide and the law holds across it. Charged: narrowness is not coherence, and the range of matter is narrower than the range of style, since everything passes through one mind and the world outside it is admitted only as that mind receives it.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the book: soul and body, mind and history, are bound in an antinomy that only made things, a bird of gold, a poem, a tower, a dance, a child, can for a moment hold, and they hold it only while they are being made. Take the two most distant elements, the stare building in the shot-cracked wall of the tower during the civil war and the golden bird on its bough in Byzantium: both obey it, each a making set against ruin, the natural one fragile and the made one meant to last. The law covers the schoolroom and the philosophers, the bequest of pride and the son’s cradle, Leda and the dead called to a glass of muscatel. Narrowness is not the charge. The charge is that the volume gathers poems written over eight years, and the slight pieces in the middle, the senate squib of “The Three Monuments” among them, sit loosely under it, and the private system now and then imposes its terms where none are needed.
Alessandro Manzoni · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Don Abbondio’s Latin impediments thrown at Renzo to delay a wedding (ch. 2) and the mother of Cecilia at the cart (ch. 34); or Fra Galdino’s tale of the miracle of the walnuts (ch. 3) and the trial of the untori (ch. 32). One law governs them: power presses on the weak, the weak fail from fear as often as from malice, and a grace no one controls works through events that look like accident. The narrator’s single voice keeps comedy, chronicle and pity under that law. Gertrude is the hardest test, and she passes: her damnation follows the same law of small pressures, without grace. Charged: the happy ending sits uneasily beside a plague that kills the good and the bad without distinction, and the book knows it, offering the lovers’ “sugo” as their conclusion rather than proving it. Held a step down for that seam.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the forms of the state, set against Nature. Vere states it, “forms, measured forms, are everything” (ch. XXIII). The two most distant elements obey it: the Handsome Sailor at Liverpool in the opening chapter and the ballad at the close are both the people’s own forms of homage, set against the official ones, the chronicle, the drumhead and the drum that beats to quarters to dissolve a murmur. The range is wide: gun-deck comedy, a metaphysics of depravity, a trial and a sacrament. Charged for the maker’s seams: Vere’s kinsman is “Lord Denton” (ch. V) and later “his cousin Jack Denton” (ch. XVIII); the surgeon’s doubt of Vere’s sanity is raised and never answered; the narrator’s sympathy for Vere sits uncertainly with the irony around him. These are a draft’s undecided points, not a law broken.
George Frideric Handel · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The two most distant elements, the Pifa’s rustic siciliana and the Amen fugue, obey one law, the law of the text: promise kept. Every number is prophecy or its fulfilment, and the music follows the text’s tenses, from expectation in Part I to proclamation in Parts II and III. The key plan bears it, from the E minor of the opening to the D major of the close, with the trumpets held for heaven. French overture, Italian aria, English anthem, German fugue and a Roman shepherds’ tune are made to serve one argument. The strain is in the versions: a law that holds in whichever form a number is sung is a loose law. And the Psalm 2 block, rage and the rod of iron, is bound less tightly than the Passion.
F. Scott Fitzgerald · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the imagination invests an object with more than it can bear, and money decides who survives the investment. Take the two most distant elements, the comic roll of guests in chapter 4 with its absurd names and the Dutch sailors of the coda; or the valley of ashes and the white, wind-filled room at East Egg. They obey the same law: the guests feed on a dream they do not share, the sailors meet the last sight “commensurate to his capacity for wonder” (chapter 9), and the ashes are what the white room’s money burns. The range runs from satire to lyric to melodrama to elegy, and holds. Charged: the plot is enforced by coincidence, Daisy at the wheel of Gatsby’s car killing her husband’s mistress outside the garage of the mistress’s own husband, and the arranger’s hand shows; and the range, wide for its length, is narrower than a long novel’s.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs: in this world things outrank persons and persons become things, so that a coat can be a bride, a general a picture with a hole for a face, a man a function, and rank a soul. Take the two most distant elements: the comic naming at the font and the ghost tearing coats from the shoulders of officials at night. They obey the same law. The child is given no name but his father’s, the dead man is given no justice but a coat, and in both the world’s order fixes what a person may have. The humane passage obeys the law as its exception: the one moment a person is seen. Charged: the ending’s change of key from realist to fantastic has struck many readers as a break, and the last apparition, not clearly Akaky, loosens the law just where the story needs it firmest.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the logic of the apparatus, which is the logic of a faith become a procedure, applied without exception, first to the condemned man and then to the officer, whose sentence, “Sei gerecht!”, be just, is the same law turned on its servant. Take the two most distant elements: the officer’s rapturous recollection of the old days, with the Commandant present and the crowds come to watch, and the soldier and the prisoner laughing as the machine falls apart. They obey the same law: the rite no longer has a congregation, and what was transfiguration in memory is farce in the present. The tonal range, from technical exposition to horror to slapstick, is wide and held. Charged a little for the coda at the harbour, which obeys the law, but slackly.
Donatello · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the living boy’s withdrawn face under the brim at the top, and the dead giant’s face under the foot at the bottom. They obey one law. Both are turned down or away, both half lidded, both outside any exchange with the viewer; the living and the dead are made of the same metal and finished by the same hand, the one polished and the other chased. The sword’s weight answers the stone’s lightness, the hat’s brim the helmet’s, the feather the leg. Nothing in the figure contradicts its law. The range is two bodies, one alive and one dead, youth and age, victor and victim, held in one quiet register, and that range is narrow in kind. Narrowness is not coherence, and the axis stands below the top for it.
Luigi Pirandello · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the backstage comedy of a company complaining about the new play by Pirandello it has to rehearse, and the Little Girl dead in the fountain. They obey one law: every event on that stage is at once a rehearsal and an occurrence, and the play never lets the two be separated. The Actors’ farce of the shop scene and the Mother’s scream belong to the same physics. The ending holds the law to the last: fiction and reality are shouted against each other, and neither prevails. The range is wide, from comic routine to metaphysics to family tragedy, and it is governed. Held a tenth below the high mark only because the Father’s theoretical speeches stand a little outside the law, addressed past the stage to the house as the author’s argument.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: every figure wants the one who wants another, and every act is a demand on someone whose answer depends on a third. Take the two most distant elements, Andromaque’s elegy for Troy in III.8 and Oreste’s hallucination of the Furies in V.5. They obey the same law: the widow’s grief is fidelity to the dead link at the end of the chain, and the madman’s vision is the chain collapsing back on its first link. Politics, motherhood and eros run on the same physics; the embassy’s demand for the child is answered only through the four desires. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: there is no comedy, no low voice, no second plot, nothing that tests the law by being unlike it.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the kneeling son, abject, seen from behind, all browns and torn surfaces, and the elder son, upright, frontal, lit, in red and rich cloth. They obey one law. Every figure is a body emerging from one darkness into one warm light, its rank in the picture given by how much light it holds, and the same loaded hand makes rags and cloak alike. The red runs as one thread from the father to the elder son. The range is wide in feeling, from abjection through mercy to judgement, and narrow in kind: one moment, one interior. What resists is the middle: the seated figure and the faces behind obey a slacker law, thinner in paint and uncertain in place, and the space between the groups does not resolve.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a policeman shot dead in a field, and the long sequence of a couple teasing each other in one room. One law covers both: everything is treated at one temperature, so that a killing and a flirtation weigh the same. The law is the film’s subject as well as its manner, and it holds from the dedication to the last gesture, across a range from road thriller to chamber piece to press conference. The ending keeps it: Michel dies making the faces he made at Patricia in the hotel room, and she closes the film with his gesture. One seam shows, and it holds the figure: jump cut and long take are joined by idea more than by cutting, so the hotel room stands beside the rest as a second grammar.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Pace’s talk about money, and the cemetery where Guido’s dead father complains that his tomb is too low. One law governs both. Everything is Guido’s attention, and everything is spectacle, staged for him or by him: the spa is a show, the cardinal’s audience is a show, the screen tests make his marriage one and the ring makes the dead one. The range runs from slapstick to grief and holds. What resists is the turn at the end, from a law of paralysis to the joy of the ring. The film prepares it through Maurice, the charm and the circus band, but the hero decrees the reversal more than the structure produces it, and some of the middle is mere event.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bandit’s account, a heroic duel of many crossed blades, and the woodcutter’s, the same fight as a terrified scramble in the brush. One law governs both: every account is shaped by what its teller needs to be, and the film shoots each with the same conviction, in the same forest. Comedy, horror, anguish and farce are instances of that law, and the range is wide. The court cannot reach the truth; the gate, where the last witness is examined by his peers, comes closer. The one strain is the coda. The taking of the child and the priest’s restored faith are not governed by the law of self-interest the whole film has shown; they are an exception the film asserts, and they sit outside its physics.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs: what is refused returns in another form, and every element is double. Take the two most distant elements: the Munich cemetery of the first chapter, with its stonemasons’ yards and its Byzantine chapel, and the beach of the last, with the boy at the edge of the water. They obey the same law: each is a threshold where a guide appears and Aschenbach follows. The realism and the myth do not alternate; they are one surface read two ways, so that the barber is a barber and a priest of the god at once. The range is wider than it looks: essay, travelogue, comedy of hotel manners, Platonic dialogue, plague chronicle and dream. Held below 9 because the narrator’s moral turn in the fifth chapter has been read as a change of law rather than an application of it, and that reading has some purchase.
Tintoretto · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dicers at the lower right, absorbed in their game, and the Christ at the top centre. They obey one law. Everything in the picture is ranked by its relation to the cross: by the lines that lead to it, by the light that falls on it, and by whether it looks. The dicers are outside the light and turned from the centre, and that is their place in the law, not an exception to it. The thieves’ crosses lean toward the upright; ropes, ladder and spears are its spokes; the mourners are the one group closed into a shape at its foot. The range is wide, labour, war, grief, nature and the sacred, and the law holds across it. Held below the top because at the outer edges it loosens into general crowd, figures present but not placed in the same tight relation to the centre.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the satin of Dinteville’s sleeve and the skull across the floor. They do not obey the same projection, and that is the law of the picture: everything is exact, and exactness depends on where one stands. The rule governs the whole. The men and the objects obey the first eye, the skull obeys a second, and the crucifix, at the edge, obeys the curtain. The range is wide in kind, heaven and earth on two shelves, the living and the dead, church and court, number and music, and one intelligence rules it. Held below the top because the law is articulated rather than felt: square on, the skull is an alien object in a perfectly ordered room, and the eye has to be told the coherence.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bar at the start, with its grime and a barman’s indifference, and the glasses moving under the daughter’s gaze at the end. One law governs both: the miraculous is real only to those who wait for it, and it lives in the weak. The bar is the brown world without faith; the Zone is the world where inner states have consequences; the daughter, who has never been in the Zone, carries it out. The indirection, the colour and the refusal at the threshold all obey the law, and nothing breaks it. Held below the top because the range is narrower than it looks, three men, one journey, one grave temperature, and narrowness is not coherence.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: everything is connected, and what is made returns as what is thrown away; the private loss and the public system are one shape. Take the two most distant elements, the crowd at the Polo Grounds in 1951 and the epilogue’s Kazakhstan, where waste is destroyed by nuclear blast. They obey the same law: the bomb announced in the first, its waste in the last; the one ball and the one web. The range is very wide, comic monologue to elegy, documentary history to miracle, and the law holds across it. Charged: some threads attach loosely to the law, the Texas Highway Killer and parts of Klara’s art world, and the epilogue’s move into a world of screens and a nun’s afterlife shifts the physics further than the rest prepares.
Laurence Sterne · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the curse of Ernulphus, read aloud entire in the Shandy parlour, and the death of Le Fever. One law governs both: every person acts by the train of his own associations and his hobby-horse, and only sympathy crosses from one to another. Walter’s systems, Toby’s fortifications, Slop’s Catholic learning and Trim’s sermon obey it; so do the narrator’s digressions, which are his hobby-horse. The bawdy and the sentimental are one physics, since the body interrupts the mind in each, and the law holds over a range from obstetric farce to the recording angel. Charged: the seventh volume’s journey through France, which keeps the voice and loosens the law into travelogue; and the ending, whose cock-and-bull close is apt but leaves the book’s chief line, Tristram’s own life, unarrived.
Anonymous (Neolithic and Bronze Age) · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the earthwork of about 3000 BC, a ring of bank and ditch with the dead in it, and the trilithon horseshoe of about 2500 BC, dressed, joined and axial. One law governs both, the circle and its centre, and in time the axis, which the Avenue carries on toward the river. Local sarsen and distant bluestone, the largest stones and the smallest, are set in one concentric order, circle within circle and horseshoe within horseshoe, so that the range is wide and keeps one geometry. What holds the axis: the bluestones’ many resettings, the rectangle of the Station Stones, whose relation to the axis is argued, and the uncertain first place of the Altar Stone show a law revised over fifteen centuries rather than stated once.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the musician at the upper left, eyes raised, playing, and the small dog at the bottom, lapping blood. One law holds them. Everything is laid in the same smouldering touch under the same burning light, and everything is ranked by its attention to the body: the god bending close, the labourer at the leg, the musician turned away into his music, the thinker turned inward, the dogs to the blood. Cruelty and beauty are not set in different registers; that is the law. The range is wide, god, satyr, king, boy, beast, music, butchery and thought. Held below the top because the right side holds the law less firmly than the left: the boy and the great dog obey the composition’s crowding more than its logic.
Miles Davis · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: restraint and room, few chords, a tempo that never hurries, each voice given space. The two most distant elements obey it. “Freddie Freeloader” is a hard-bop blues with Wynton Kelly’s crisp comping, “Flamenco Sketches” a rubato sequence of scales with no fixed length, and the blues is played with the record’s patience. The range of mood and tempo is narrow, one mood and a band of moderate and slow tempos; the range of form is wide: a standard blues, a thirty-two-bar song, a ten-bar cycle, a blues in 6/8 over a vamp, and a form without fixed length. The players change and the law does not.
Jean d'Orbais, Jean le Loup, Gaucher de Reims and Bernard de Soissons · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the antique Visitation, two figures like Roman matrons in heavy drapery, and the Smiling Angel beside a Virgin of a stiffer manner on the same portal; or the chevet of the 1210s and the towers of the fifteenth century. They obey one law. The elevation and the system of the building were held across the masters with a constancy rare in a campaign so long, and the whole reads as one city of stone and figures. The range runs from structure to programme to a single face, and the law covers it. What holds the axis is the façade, where the variety of workshops shows as variety, and the upper parts, which continue the first conception rather than complete it.
Nirvana · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a single voice that holds tenderness and violence in the same breath and keeps each feeling at a distance from its statement. It speaks the abductor’s line flatly, screams the slogan and whispers the outcast’s song. The most distant elements obey it. “Polly” and “Territorial Pissings”, an acoustic murmur and a hardcore thrash, are that voice at its two extremes, and so are “Something in the Way” and “Breed”. Nothing on the record strains the law: one writer, one singer and one trio govern all twelve tracks, and the production holds them in one sound. The range is wider than the genre’s usual. Held below the top: it stays inside one idiom.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Tony’s comedy, the outraged name of Grünlich and her flight from Munich over Permaneder’s word in the night in the sixth part, and the typhus chapter’s cold account of a boy’s death. One law governs both: the family’s will to appear, to keep its name and its form, and what that will costs those who carry it. Tony is its comic servant and Hanno its victim, and both are measured by the family book. The range is wide and held: commercial chronicle; political scene, the revolution of 1848 dispersed by the Consul’s speech in Low German, and old Kröger dying of the chill; pietist satire; the philosophical night; school satire; the music. Charged: the satire of the pastors and of the school is broader than the book elsewhere allows itself, and Christian sometimes plays as farce in a book whose law is tragic irony.
Radiohead · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: a human voice trying to keep its scale inside a system moving too fast. The two most distant elements obey it. The seventh track is the system speaking, a synthetic voice reciting a list; the eleventh, a guitar ballad with the record’s only triumphal chorus, is the fantasy of rescue from it. The glockenspiel lullaby of the tenth track and the recitation of the seventh describe the same quiet life, one as a wish and the other as a specification. The range is wide: satire, love song, horror, lullaby, protest, recitation. The law strains only at the eighth track, which plays the system as broad caricature.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the birth of a galaxy and a boy stealing a slip from a neighbour’s drawer. One law governs both. The film declares it in the opening minutes, nature and grace, and holds it everywhere it looks: the predator spares its prey; the boy chooses cruelty, then asks his brother’s forgiveness. The whisper and the moving camera are constant from the nebulae to the kitchen table, and the range is as wide as cinema has attempted. The cost is the frame. The adult scenes obey a thinner law, and the shore obeys the law of consolation rather than the law of observation the rest of the film has kept. The images of the end of the Earth are joined to the shore by sequence rather than by necessity.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the fable of Elvis as a fallen king that opens Spinning Song, an American pop myth, and the Buddhist parable of Kisa Gotami that closes Hollywood. They obey one law. Every story on the album is a loss told as a vision, and a vision released as knowledge, and the bears, the galleon and the horses fall under it too. Fireflies, spoken where everything else is sung, keeps the law: the voice drops its song exactly where the album’s speakers face distance. The two-part sequence never strains it. But narrowness is not coherence, and the tonal range runs only from slow to hushed to luminous, from the first track to the last.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
One physics: the inner state bends the world, and the world bends the body. Take the two most distant elements, the screaming figure, all curve, and the walkers, all upright. They obey one law, and that is the achievement: the walkers belong to the straight order of railing and road, the figure to the curving order of sky and water, and the law of the picture is the meeting of the two orders at one point, which is the figure. Colour obeys it too: the heat of the sky and the cold of the fjord meet across the same line. Nothing contradicts it. Held below the top because the range the law governs is narrow, one place, one moment, one state, and narrowness is not coherence. The law is complete; the territory it governs is small.
Robert Frank · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the glamour of a Hollywood premiere, a starlet lit in a crowd of blurred faces, and the funeral at St. Helena, mourners standing in the heat beside their cars. They obey one law: an oblique, unconsoled gaze at people held apart from one another inside the nation’s rites, seen from the edge, in passing, without comment. The same law governs a cowboy in New York, a factory line in Detroit, a nurse in Charleston and a family in a car in Texas. The tonal range is wide, from comedy and the absurd to grief, and the territory is a continent’s classes, races, regions and ceremonies; narrowness is not the source of the coherence. Held below the top because a few plates, read singly, are slack where the law has not quite taken hold, and the plan of the whole is felt more than shown.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole, and the range is wide. Take the two farthest elements, the chemistry lesson in a drawing room and the miracle at Ottilie’s bier: both are the working of an attraction the parties neither choose nor understand, read once as nature and once as grace. The garden obeys it, since water redirected by a plan returns as the lake that drowns the child; the inset novella obeys it in reverse; the comedy of Mittler obeys it. The narrator’s irony holds the tonal range together. Held below 9.0 because Luciane’s chapters keep a lighter law of their own for longer than the whole needs, and the sacred close sits at an angle to the natural-philosophical frame, an angle the novel intends but does not quite reconcile.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs from the noon name-day party to the duel: time passes, hope is deferred, and comedy and grief happen in the same breath. Take the two most distant elements, Kulygin’s foolishness and Tuzenbach’s death; both obey the law of the play, which is that the trivial goes on beside the catastrophe and does not know it. Chebutykin’s “Тарарабумбия” (Tararaboomdeay), the music-hall refrain, is that law in one word. The range is wide, farce, romance, social satire on Natasha, metaphysics and grief, and nothing breaks the frame. Charged a little: Solyony’s melodrama, the duel and his threat that a happy rival will be killed, belongs to an older theatre the play elsewhere refuses, though Chekhov keeps the duel offstage to bring it inside.
Vittorio De Sica · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comic Santona, with her queue of clients and her fee, and the last walk into the crowd. One law governs both. Everything in this city has a price and every help comes in its own currency: the pawnshop takes sheets, the church attendance at Mass, the Party Monday’s meeting, the fortune teller a coin, the police a statement. No one is lit as a villain; the thief is as poor as the man he robbed. The comedy of the hall and the seminarians obeys the same indifferent physics as the despair, a wide range for so plain a film. The strain is the score, which takes the side the camera refuses to take.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the march in G major at full force, and the finale’s close in B minor at nothing. One law governs both, and it is the falling line. The second theme of the first movement, the coda’s pizzicato scale, the sighs of the waltz trio and the finale’s lament all fall by step; the march is the one movement that rises, and the finale’s first phrase falls from its height. The march obeys the law as its exception, placed to be undone. D major, the relative key, is the consoling key throughout and is left each time. The range governed is wide: lament, waltz, march, rite. Held below The Living Form because the march can stand alone and is often heard so, and the law that subordinates it is declared only by the next movement.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs: everything in the book is a way of passing the time until death, and nothing can be told that does not end in the teller’s condition. Take the two most distant elements: the Lamberts’ farm, with its pig-killing, its lentils and its seasons in drab realist detail, and the boat at night under a keeper’s hatchet. They obey the same law. Each is a story told to keep from the room, and each slides toward the room’s state, the farm into Sapo’s silence and the asylum into Malone’s own confinement. Malone’s contradictions, lapses and revisions are the law at work, since a failing mind is its premise. The range runs from rural realism to metaphysical farce. Held below the top because the range is still narrow by design, and narrowness is not coherence; and the visitor stands at the edge of the book’s physics without being placed.
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the cold drafting of an inquest and Gull’s vision of a twentieth-century office in the fourteenth chapter; or the tragic book and the comic coda that follows it. One law governs both: time is solid, and what is done in it remains, to be read back by later men, policemen, theorists or authors, who each find in it what they bring. The frame of the two old men on the shore obeys the same law, and so do the notes, which treat the authors’ own book as one more reading of the record. The tone is held from first page to last in Campbell’s single line. Held a tenth below 9.0 because in the middle chapters the speculative law slackens into chronicle, and a few historical figures appear as visits from history rather than as its working.
Béla Tarr · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: two police clerks rewriting Irimiás’s lurid report into bureaucratic phrases, played as dry comedy, and Estike’s death alone in the ruined church. One law governs both: people exist as they are described by those who use them, and no one in this world is helped by being seen. The clerks file the villagers; Irimiás’s speech files Estike as a lesson; the Doctor files everyone in his notebook. The dance, the cattle, the horses in the square and the boarded window obey the same physics of slow time, weather and circling. The range is wide for so even a surface, from farce to the death of a child. The strain is slight: the comic bureaucracy is a sharper register than anything near it.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Peter at the left, bent over the water in the far landscape, and the collector at the right, taking the coin before the building’s sharp edge. They obey one law: one light from the right, one horizon, one ground on which every figure stands and casts its shadow, one measure of the body for apostle, collector and Christ. The three episodes, which an older manner would have set in three panels, are one place under one sky, and the sequence of time is subordinated to the unity of space. The range is wide for one wall, from the lake to the city, the miracle to the counting of a coin. What resists: the order of reading runs against the frieze, and the building’s perspective is more insistent than the landscape’s.
Sophocles · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the lyric lament of the chorus’s entry, Electra as nightingale and Niobe, and the cold irony of the exodos, where Aegisthus is invited to lift the veil and finds his wife. One law governs both: word and deed part, and the play turns on what is said and what is so. The false word kills Orestes for Electra and for Clytemnestra; the true sign, the lock, is disbelieved; the urn of the dead holds nothing; the shroud over the dead Orestes covers the queen; and Electra’s mourning, a word kept against the deed, ends in the deed. The range is wide for a single play, from lament to argument to the race to the killing, and it holds. Charged only for the ending’s tone, which some read as a fracture rather than a design.
John A. Roebling and Washington Roebling · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the granite of an anchorage, set to resist a pull, and the thinnest suspender at midspan. They obey one law, stone in compression and steel in tension, and every element between is placed by it, down to the promenade riding the axis where the cables come down to meet it. The pointed arch is compression too, so the towers’ Gothic, which might seem a second law, is the masonry’s own. Held off the top for two reasons. The range is narrow: one structural idea and a territory of few elements, and narrowness is not coherence. And the deck as rebuilt for motor traffic, with its trusses, ramps and barriers, speaks the language of the mid-century highway; at the roadway the law blurs.
Henry James · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: every relation in the book is a question of freedom and use, of who is collecting whom. Take the two most distant elements, Henrietta’s brisk comedy of the American journalist and the terror of chapter 42. They obey the same law: Henrietta is the free woman in another key, who marries Bantling with open eyes, the comic counterpart of Isabel’s tragedy, and her last word to Goodwood is the book’s last irony. Pansy’s obedience, the Countess Gemini’s frivolity, Warburton’s decency, Ralph’s watching and Goodwood’s force are all positions on the one axis. The range is wide: social comedy, psychological tragedy, a ghost, a sexual climax; and the ghost is set early and kept, so that even the one supernatural touch obeys the law. Held off the top because the comic strand, though governed, at times sits beside the main action rather than inside it.
Claude Lanzmann · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the women of Grabów laughing on their doorsteps about the Jewish houses they now live in, and Müller in tears inside the memory of the undressing room. One law governs both: the past exists only as what the living say at the places, in the present tense, and the camera neither illustrates nor judges, only stays. Perpetrator, historian, survivor and farmer obey it, and the read documents are treated as speech. The range runs from the grotesque to the bottom of grief. The strain: the second era’s Warsaw material and Karski’s report lean toward history told, and the close takes a narrative arc the rest refuses.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Telegin’s comic speech on his faithfulness in the first act and Sonya’s last speech in the fourth; or the farce of the missed shots and Vanya’s cry that his life is lost. One law governs them: lives spent in service go on after the service is shown to be for nothing, and the comic and the tragic are the same fact seen from two distances. Telegin is faithful to a wife who left him, Sonya to a love that will not be returned, Vanya to an estate whose accounts he takes up again after he has fired at the man they served. The shots miss because in this world nothing ends. The range runs from farce to despair to a consoling vision, held in one tone. Charged because the world is narrow, one household on one estate, and narrowness is not coherence.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the prehistoric swamp in Lucy’s reading and the twelve aeroplanes overhead; or the Restoration farce and the snake swallowing the toad; or the comic gramophone and the dark close. One law governs them all: unity and dispersal alternate, the audience is made and unmade, and nature rushes into every gap the human leaves. The comedy and the dread are one tone. The range is wide, from parody to prehistory, and it is held. Charged by a tenth for the close, where the shift into myth is abrupt enough that a reader may feel a second law arrive rather than the first come to its end.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the grey pebbles under open water in the large pool and the polished chrome of a column; or the bronze woman and the onyx plane. They obey one law. Horizontal planes (podium, roof, water) and vertical planes (stone, glass) slide past one another on one grid, every surface either reflecting or reflected. The Kolbe is the test and passes it: the one thing in the building that is not a plane is placed where water, marble and glass will multiply her. The chairs are the same flat steel at the same mirror finish. The range is wider than it looks: a state’s ceremony and a pebble, a republic and a woman’s lifted arms, fall under one physics. Held below the top because the territory is one small building in one register, and narrowness is not coherence; and the service annex obeys the law more dully than the room.
Pontormo · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the small cloud at the upper left, the one sign of a world, and the woman seen from behind in the foreground, nearest to us. One law holds them: everything is weightless, lit from no source, laid on the plane in the same unnatural colour and ordered round the empty centre. The cloud is as flat and as pale as the silks; the woman’s back turns as the ring turns. The bearded man at the right edge obeys the law too, painted in the same key, and stands as the one face that looks out, an exception the law allows. Nothing falls back into the space of the inherited altarpiece. The range is one scene, a crowd and a body, with no landscape, architecture or second event: narrower than Las Meninas’ room or the world of trees and water in The Large Bathers.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the still life on the counter at the bottom, rendered closely, and the crowd in the far balcony at the top, a haze. They obey one law: everything is seen frontally, flattened toward the plane, in one white light, by a touch that slows as things come near and quickens as they recede. The girl is painted in the law of the bottles. The mirror is the one place where the law appears to break, and it is the law: the glass obeys the picture’s logic, not optics. What resists is that the reflected right side is painted in another and thinner key, and that the trapeze feet are a joke in a grave picture, which the law nearly but not quite absorbs. The range is moderate: a counter, a girl, a crowd and a show, wider than a still life and narrower than a court.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of Tommy asking Henry what he means by funny, a table of laughing men turning on a word, and the murder of Spider, shot in the foot for a slow drink and then shot dead for answering back. One law governs them, volatility: a laugh and a killing are the same event waiting on the same man’s mood, and the film cuts the two scenes to the same rhythm so that the viewer learns to fear the laughter. The law holds from the cabstand to the suburb, in Paulie’s slow displeasure as well as in Tommy’s speed. Two things strain it: the courtroom scenes, in another and flatter grammar, and the last address to the camera, which steps outside the world it has built to explain it.
Albrecht Altdorfer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a foot soldier’s plume in the lower corner and the sun breaking through the clouds at the upper right. One law holds them. Everything in the picture, men, banners, mountains, sea and sky, is drawn into one motion, a vortex that runs from the press at the foot through the curve of the earth to the wheeling clouds, and everything is painted at one intensity of finish and lit from the one sun. The tablet obeys too: it hangs in the sky and its cloth stirs in the same air. The range, from the smallest figure to the globe and the heavens, is very wide, and it holds. Held at 8.9 for a seam: the battle is a sixteenth century crowd under a cosmic sky, and the join between the narrative half and the visionary half, the town and camp at the right above all, is felt as a join.
Radiohead · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs nearly everything: a human voice or human-played instrument held at risk inside a processed space. The two most distant elements, the third track’s brass collapse and the fifth track’s still ambient drift, obey it: in one the human is drowned, in the other removed. The furthest apart in register, the band rock of the sixth and the closing hymn on pump organ, obey it too, and the hymn is cut off by silence. Even the promotion obeys it, with short animated blips released online in place of videos. The range runs from free jazz to ambient to hymn. The sixth track strains the law hardest, and that strain costs a tenth.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky’s “Э!”
(Eh!), the most trivial thing in the play, and the dumb scene, the most terrible. One law governs both: rumour and fear, multiplied by guilt, make a reality the town then has to live in. The gossip that names Khlestakov is the same mechanism as the letter that unmasks him, and the same as the real inspector, announced but unseen, whom the audience must now imagine for themselves. Farce, the Mayor putting a hatbox on his head for a hat in the first act, and the dread of the close obey the same physics; the hunger of the clerk and the greed of the officials are one appetite at two scales. The range is narrow, one town and two days, but within it nothing breaks the law. Charged a step for that narrowness, and for Bobchinsky’s request in the fourth act, the law at its most nearly whimsical.
Donato Bramante · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the opening in the crypt floor and the lantern, or the pagan Doric order and the Christian keys in its metopes. One law governs them, the centre and the module: every radius of the plan passes through the place of the cross, every member is measured from the column, and the Christian emblems are set into the ancient grammar without strain. The range is real: pagan and Christian, death and heaven, outside and in. What holds it: narrowness is not coherence, and the coherence is partly the ease of a small and single figure; the interior speaks less fully than the exterior; and the relation of drum and dome to the colonnade may not be what Bramante drew, so that the law is visibly bent at the top.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs everything: rhythm made by contour and by three flat fields. Take the two most distant figures, the planted, arched dancer at the left and the flung dancer at the front: they obey the same law of curve and counter-curve, and the hill and the sky obey it too. The broken grip does not break the law; it is the law’s tension made visible. What the canvas holds, stillness and motion, ground and air, joined and parted, it holds without exception, at a scale where any lapse would show. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range is narrow on purpose: one register, three colours, five figures, no opposing world. That holds the axis below 9.0.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole: everything is ground, site or path, seen from above. Take the two most distant elements, the violent fire at the centre and the quiet dotted margin: they obey the law equally, since the fire is shown as what it does to ground. Several Dreamings, with different beings, kinds and tempers, sit on one field without any breach of the law of representation, and the range they cover, judgment, journey and death among it, is wide. Narrowness is not the source of the coherence; it holds over a wide range. Held a tenth below 9.0 because the law is the tradition’s and the canvas’s edges cut it arbitrarily.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the curved glass wall of the ground floor, drawn by a car’s turning circle, and the curved screens of the roof solarium, drawn like the shapes of a Purist still life. One is machine and one is painting; one is at the earth and one at the sky. They obey one law: free curves set against a regular grid, inside a white prism lifted on columns. The garage, the servants’ rooms, the parents’ bath, the terrace and the roof obey the same physics of frame, free plan and light, and machine, household, body and landscape all fall under it. Held lower because a single house is a small territory, and narrowness is not coherence; and where the ramp needs room the grid yields, and the law bends.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comic montage of the peach and the staged cough, and the knife at the birthday party. One law governs both: position. Everyone is placed above or below, everyone performs for those above, and the Kims’ method of rising, mimicry and the planted lie, is the method that brings them down: the lie about the housekeeper creates the hostage who returns, and the performance of the servant ends in the servant’s blow. The comic signals persist into the horror, a newsreader routine played in the bunker with a phone held as a missile button. The range is wide, slapstick to tragedy, and the law holds across it. The strain: Ki-taek’s blow arrives faster than the man the film has built, and the epilogue’s dream is told in a new register.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the winds at the left, all motion, mouth to mouth in flight, and the grove at the right, all stillness, vertical trunks and leaves. They obey one law. The winds’ drapery, the strands of Venus’s hair, the attendant’s cloak and the edges of the trunks are written in one contour, and one pale key runs through flesh, hair and leaf. The law is linear rhythm under a cool light, and nothing in the picture breaks it: the attendant’s weight and the winds’ flight are two speeds of the same line. Narrowness is not coherence, and the range governed is modest, one moment and one register, with no darkness or opposition admitted. The coherence is complete; the range it governs holds it below 9.0.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Aunt Masa picking up a purse at a shrine and taking it for a good omen, broad and comic, and the father alone at the end, the apple peel breaking. One law governs both. Ordinary life goes on with a steadiness indifferent to the cost it imposes, and people meet that cost by keeping to custom and to manners. Masa’s comedy is the custom of the match seen from the side that does not pay; the father’s evening is the same custom from the side that does. The law holds through the tea ceremony, Aya’s independence, the Noh, the stone garden and the sea. The range is moderate, a household and its edges, and narrowness earns nothing here; the occupation and Kyoto widen it, and they obey. The one strain is Itō’s music, which at times speaks in another register.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Heinrich’s argument with his father over whether it is raining, in Part I, a comedy of doubt, and the shooting in the motel room in Part III, a violence. They obey one law: knowledge is so mediated that no fact can be held, talk is a defence against death, and every plot moves toward it. The range is wide, domestic comedy, campus satire, disaster narrative, thriller and religious parable under one voice and one physics, and the law holds to the end, where the rearranged shelves of the supermarket and the tabloid racks return the opening’s procession of goods as a scripture of the dead. The farce of the motel is governed too: Mink’s confusion of words and things, under the drug, is the noise of the title made pathological. Charged: that farce shifts the register further than the law needs, and the hospital of German nuns that follows arrives with something of the force of an epilogue grafted on.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the hot bath, small, enclosed and hollowed into its block, and the outdoor pool, open to snow and the valley. They obey one law: mass hollowed and mass opened, the stone as the body that encloses and the cut as the means of light and view. The cold bath and the sound room, the great pool, the roof joints and the valley openings are the same law at different scales and temperatures. Material, structure, light and use fall under it, and the range is wide: hot and cold, dark and bright, enclosed and open, solitude and company. Held below the top because the territory is still one building of one material, where a law is easier to keep than across a city or a long campaign; and because the joining to the hotel stands apart from the stone’s rule.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pale open water of Matin, all reflected sky, and the dark willow trunks that cut across the second room’s walls. They obey one law. Each is the pond seen from within it, without horizon, at the surface of the water, under changing light. The trunks are the bank intruding into the field, and they are painted as the water is, as colour and touch; they bring in no other physics. The range runs from dawn to sunset, from open water to shade, from blue and white to orange and near-black, and nothing in it contradicts the law. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is one motif: a pond, its plants and what it reflects. The law governs it completely, and is held for its size.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a single field of dark maroon, and a hard-edged black rectangle inside a maroon border, facing it across the room. They obey one law. Each is a dark field at the threshold of sight, frontal, without figure, scaled to the body and lit from above. The black form is the single field with an opening cut into it; the single field is the black form closed. Every canvas, and the room that places them, obeys that physics. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range here is narrow by design: maroon to black, one register, one scale, one kind of mark. The law governs a small territory completely, and is held for the size of the territory.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the five-metre aurochs on the Hall’s white calcite and the stick-man at the bottom of the Shaft. They obey one law. The animal is drawn full and the human is not; everything is in profile, floating, without ground; one idiom of head and body runs from the Hall to the Felines. One law of placement too: species by chamber, the big signs in the Nave, the human at the end. The range runs from five metres to a hand’s width, from paint to flint, from the rotunda to a hole. What resists: the signs, blazons, dots and barbs, obey no law anyone has stated; and the Apse’s superimpositions look lawless.
Radiohead · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the body in time, wanting and afraid. The two most distant elements obey it. Bodysnatchers, a distorted rock song of paranoia about a body not one’s own, and Videotape, a piano ballad of farewell, are each a body losing hold of itself, one in panic and one in acceptance. 15 Step, programmed and clipped, and Faust Arp, acoustic and rushed, both set a mind running against a clock. The sound is one sound throughout: warm, close, string-lit and rhythmically restless. There is no break in the law and no strain on it. The range is narrow, since no track stands in a different world, and that narrowness, not any breach, holds it off the top.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the closed concrete mass seen from Lake Street and the glowing amber grid of the ceiling seen from a gallery seat; weight and light, outside and inside. They obey one law, the square and its subdivision: the cube of the block, the square of the room, the Greek cross within it, the grid of the coffers, the squares of the leaded glass, the rectangles of the wood strips, the cubes of the lamps and the square capitals of the piers. The law holds from the massing to the pew end, and across the cross axis into Unity House, an oblong built of the same squares and joined by a hall of the same order. What bends it: Unity House is quieter and governed more by the oblong than by the square; the spheres of the lamps sit a little apart; and the street front takes its form from what it refuses.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy, Kit recording good advice to the young in a stranger’s house and handing his comb and lighter to the men who have caught him; and the murders, the father on the floor, Cato walking off to die. One law governs them: everything is seen at the same distance and spoken of in the same voice. The fire and the dance obey it; so do the dog and the cairn. The range from farce to death to lyric beauty is wide for a film of an hour and a half, and the law holds across it. The strain is real and recurs: in the woods and on the plains the images sometimes rise toward a reverence the narration does not share, and there the film’s physics is double.
Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gilded inscription on a frieze at the edge of the palace and the flame around Yusuf’s head at its centre. They obey one law: everything on the page is surface made to signify, the building as text, the light as gold, the sacred as a shape of fire within the pattern. Space, pattern and word share one physics, flat planes stacked into a navigable depth, each ornamented, each a stage of enclosure. Nothing contradicts the law. The range is narrower than the summit works’ (one building, one instant, one register of jewelled restraint), but it holds an earthly palace and a mystical allegory, the tile and the soul, and narrowness is not credited as coherence.
Tawaraya Sōtatsu · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dense, dark, formless cloud and the bare, bright, flat gold; or the hieratic origin of the figures and their comic vitality. One law governs them all: forces in motion across an empty, luminous field, rendered with a flat ground and full-bodied figures. The two screens mirror without repeating, green against white, bag against drums, a lean one way against a lean the other, and the asymmetry is one system. The law is not narrow in kind: it reconciles sacred and comic, icon and decoration, weight and void. Held below the top band because the range of elements is small, and narrowness does not stand for coherence.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bare geometric circle on the wall and the thick, living flesh of the face. They obey one law, paint as matter under one light. The circles are not laid on top of the picture; they lie on the wall in the same air as the figure, with the same pale ground showing through, and the face is the same matter at its most worked. The tools mediate, paint barely becoming object. Everything is ranked by how far the paint has been brought toward resolution, and the scale runs unbroken from line to face. What tests the law is the circles’ meaning: if they are emblems, they speak another language from the face.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole. Take the two most distant elements: the girders against the sky and the low wood partition inside, or the travertine steps at the street and the mullion at the ceiling. They obey the same law: the module of the bay and the grid, steel expressed as line, and the separation of what carries from what encloses from what divides. Nothing is ornament and nothing breaks the order; the stair, the platform and the service shafts are drawn to the grid that governs the structure. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: one room is a modest territory for a law, and the lower level, a floor of conventional rooms beneath the hall, is held to the law only in its grid.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the wooden carrel at the window, a seat for one, and the concrete hall with its circles, a room for the school. One is small, warm and lit from the side; the other immense, grey and lit from above. They obey one law: a square ring of rooms round a centre, each material in its zone, light falling from the edge and from the top, the reader passing between the two. The same law governs the piers that thin as they rise, the cut corners that show the rings, the screen above the roof and the stair rising into the centre. What bends it: the exterior obeys the law of the campus, brick, windows and modest height, more than the law of the hall, so that outside and inside meet as bark and heart, held by one plan; and the range covered is a single building’s.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a hairline thread of white flung across a dark tangle, and a pooled skein of black where the stick paused. They obey one law: everything on the canvas is the trace of one kind of act, paint leaving a moving tool under gravity, and nothing is admitted that was made another way. The law holds from edge to edge and through every layer; no passage is drawn, brushed for effect or composed in parts. The range within it is real, from the fastest line to the slowest pool, from thread to blot, from the top layer to the bare weave showing through. What holds the axis is that narrowness is not coherence: the law is single because the kind of element is single, one physics over one sort of matter.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the face of the left player under his hat brim, and the brown wood of the table. They obey one law. Every form is built from the same touch of modulated colour, and the forms differ only in the colour and direction the touch is given; flesh, cloth, glass and wood are one substance, and that is the meaning, men as solid as the world around them. The symmetry and its breaks obey a second law, the duel, which governs every pairing in the picture. The range is narrow by choice: two men, one table, one register of brown, ochre and blue-grey. Narrowness is not coherence, and the law here is total over a small territory. Held below 9.0 for the narrowness and for the background, which the law governs more loosely than the figures.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a small grey square set in a yellow line near the edge, and a large red rectangle holding a smaller square of another colour within the field. They obey one law: rectangular planes of pure colour, set horizontal and vertical on a white ground, in a balance that is never symmetrical. Every element is that law at some size; there is no diagonal, no curve, no mixed colour and no second kind of mark. The law is total. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is small by choice: four colours, two directions, one kind of form. Within it the range from line to block and from fast beat to slow accent is wider than in the classic compositions, and the law holds across it. Held for the territory’s size.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the servant, standing, bareheaded, behind and lower in rank, and the chairman, seated with the book at the centre of authority. One law holds them: everyone in the room is ordered by attention toward one place, the place before the table, and ranked by light and by position in a single shallow space. The rising man obeys it; so does the carpet, so does the closed wall. Nothing in the canvas contradicts the law or stands outside it, and it holds over six distinct men, four degrees of motion from seated to standing, and a range of temper from mildness to suspicion. But the territory is narrow, one table, one room, one moment, one register, and narrowness is not coherence. The figure records how much the law governs.
Elias of Dereham and Nicholas of Ely (attributed); spire by Richard of Farleigh · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Trinity Chapel of the early 1220s, low, slender and austere, and the tower and spire of the next century, with their ballflower ornament and Decorated detail. They obey one law. The tower takes up the lancet rhythm and the bay of the church below and turns it upward; the spire continues the vertical the crossing implies. Across the whole there is one style, one material system of pale stone and dark marble, one module of bay, one discipline of the lancet, and the law runs outward to the cloister, the chapter house and the close, which repeat the church’s proportion and order on the ground. Held below the top because part of the range is narrowness: the body’s unity is bought with repetition.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs eighteen rooms: what a system can file it keeps, and what the body knows and kindness costs passes without record. The two most distant elements obey it. In The Cell someone makes room, hands guiding a shoulder and withdrawing, and the gesture becomes a modification whose author has been erased; in the last story two boys spend their game on two fallen birds and neither resets the board. The halves are bound closer than the scheme requires, because unrecorded kindness also happens inside the apparatus: a half-step in a queue that passes without record, a useless cable given in a dead store. What holds it below the summit is that the law is narrow enough to be easy to keep, and narrowness is not coherence.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a hair-thin line thrown across the field at speed, and a pool where the paint fell thick and stood. They obey one law, the trace of the painter’s body on the surface: the line is the body’s motion carried by the paint without contact, the pool is where the hand slowed, and both are records of one presence. Every other element is that law at another speed or weight: the spatter where the hand snapped, the glint where aluminium caught. There is no figure, no edge, no second kind of image. The range runs from dark to pale and from line to stain, and nothing contradicts the law. But narrowness is not coherence: one law of mark governs one kind of field, and the axis is held for its size.
Ptolemaic builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pylon, decorated under Ptolemy XII in the last generation of the work, and the sanctuary, begun under Ptolemy III and dedicated under Ptolemy VIII. They obey one law: the same axis, the same canon of figure and text, the same gradient of light and level, the same theology of defended order. Through 180 years, a revolt and the reigns of many kings, the building kept to its plan with a coherence few buildings of a single campaign achieve. The range it covers is wide, from cosmic myth to the inventory of fields, from the open court to the sealed shrine, from the roof to the sanctuary floor. Held a step from the top because the uniform decoration narrows the range of tone: the law governs, but it rarely has to reconcile contraries.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the plot divided in thirds, the court as the one source of light, one material inside and out, the street refused, every room facing the void. Take the two most distant elements, the mute street front and the court open to the sky. They are the same law seen from outside and from inside. Nothing breaks the rule; the bathroom across the court, the house’s notorious inconvenience, is the law obeyed rather than an exception to it. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: one house, one material and one device are a small territory on which to keep a law. But the law covers the city, the house and the sky in one section, a wider range than the size implies.
Victor Horta · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the whiplash line, a curve that springs, turns back and resolves, drawn from plant growth. Take the two most distant elements, the structural iron of the street front and the mosaic underfoot in the vestibule, or the division of the plot and the door handle: they obey the same law. The plan’s split and offset is itself a version of the line, the movement of the visitor turning and rising through the house. The law holds across structure, plan, surface, light and fittings, which is a wide range for one house. What limits it: the street front, with its masonry symmetry and its bay, holds the law more loosely than the interior, and the range, though wide in kind, is that of a single dwelling.
Donald Judd · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: a constant outer volume, one material, one alignment with the building, and inside it free invention bounded only by the planes. Take the two most distant elements, a box closed on every face and a box open through with a single slanted plane, or the box at one end of a shed and the land seen through the glass beyond it: they obey the same law, and the law reaches from the object through the building to the horizon. The rubric warns that narrowness is not coherence, and the range here is narrow in kind: no colour, no figure, no second material. But the range within the kind is wide, a hundred configurations and every hour of light, and the law holds across all of it.
Tang builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the ridge struts high in the hidden roof frame and the column bases on the terrace. One law governs both: the frame of posts and beams, each member sized by a common module and each carrying the next downward to the ground. The same law runs through the bracket sets, the ceiling lattice, the corner rise, the rhythm of the bays across the front and the nested rings of the plan. Nothing in the hall belongs to another system; even the curve of the roof is the product of the frame. The range covered is wide in structure, from the smallest block to the whole roof. What holds the axis: one grave voice, and narrowness is not coherence; and the later doors and windows sit as patches in the front.
Anonymous (the Yahwist and the other sources) · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The two most distant elements are the making of the cosmos and a quarrel over a coat, and one law governs both: a word spoken, whether the creating word, the promise to Abraham or the blessing Isaac cannot take back, works itself out through the choices of men who do not know its end, so that the order of chapter 1 and the providence of chapter 50 are one physics. The motifs keep the law across the sources: the younger preferred; the barren wife made fruitful, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel; the deceiver deceived; the descent and the return. The breaks are real and keep the axis below 9.0: plants, beasts and humankind made in one order in chapter 1 and another in chapter 2; a flood of forty days (7:17) and of a hundred and fifty (7:24); a God who “repented” (6:6).
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
The two most distant elements are the herringbone hidden in the inner shell and the classical marble lantern on the skyline, and they obey one law. The octagon rises from the drum in eight corner ribs, which meet at the closing ring, turn into the lantern’s eight buttresses and climb into cone and ball. One material logic holds from base to cross: white ribs over red webs, structure as line and filling as field. The lantern’s scrolls are the ribs’ last curve. The range, from hidden structure to civic emblem, is wide for one form. What resists is three languages: the Gothic profile of 1367 and the lantern’s classical vocabulary meet unreconciled, and Vasari and Zuccari’s Last Judgment lays a third, figurative and Mannerist, over the inner shell. Baccio d’Agnolo’s gallery, on one face of eight, breaks the octagon at the foot. And narrowness counts: this is one form, repeated eight times.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: the Lilliputian emperor’s rope-dancers in the first voyage and Gulliver among his horses at the end of the fourth. One law governs both: man is measured against what he is not, smaller, larger, cleverer or more rational, and every measurement finds his pride. Each world keeps its own physics strictly, the scales above all. The tone runs from whimsy to disgust and the law holds across it, which is the book’s achievement: the comedy of the first voyage is the same instrument as the horror of the last. Charged: the third part, where the law loosens into a satire of learning that obeys a different measure; and Gulliver himself, gullible in one voyage and shrewd in another, so that his final transformation is willed by the argument more than grown.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The two most distant elements, the Miller’s Tale and the Parson’s treatise on penitence, obey one law: the game under the pilgrimage, in which play is licensed on the road and earnest waits at its end, “Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille” (B 4633, VII 3443). The range governed is very wide: fabliau, romance, saint’s life, beast fable, Breton lay, sermon, tragedy, an alchemist’s confession. What lowers it is that the law is not applied throughout, because the work was not finished: the Man of Law announces “I speke in prose” (B 96) and tells rhyme royal; the Second Nun calls herself “unworthy sone of Eve” (G 62); Sittingbourne comes before Rochester. These are seams of an unrevised draft, not contradictions of the law.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole, and the two most distant elements obey it: the siren-whistle comedy of the title track and the acoustic stillness of “Desolation Row”. In each, figures out of the Bible, history and popular culture are displaced into an American landscape of carnivals, highways, circuses and police, and judged by a refrain that names a place. The tender songs obey it too. “Queen Jane Approximately” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” address someone worn out by the same costume world, with an offer in place of a taunt. The range is wide: vaudeville to elegy, Chicago blues to Spanish-tinged guitar. “From a Buick 6” follows its genre’s law instead, and the law is a stance more than a structure.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the reportorial war plates, a woman stabbing a soldier, a village execution, and the allegories of the end, a vulture plucked by peasants, Truth dead with a monk and a bishop at her grave. They mostly obey one law. One witness, one ironic voice in the captions, one tonal world of etched line on aquatint, and one subject, unreason with power over bodies, carried from the soldier to the cleric. Goya’s manuscript title joins the two kinds, and the turn from war to famine to restoration is one argument. But the law bends. The last group changes register from witness to emblem, its animals and masks belong to the Caprichos more than to the war, and the joint shows. Wide range, held, with a seam.
Modest Mussorgsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Varlaam’s drunken song at the inn and Boris’s death in the Duma. One law governs both: Russian speech and song, folk and sacred, as the matter of the music; tsar and vagabond are made of the same modal and declamatory stuff. The bells of the coronation return as the knell of the death scene, and the crowd of the prologue returns at Kromy: the work begins and ends in the people. The strain is the Polish act, whose dance rhythms and Western lyrical forms can be heard as Poland through a Russian ear; but its love duet speaks the convention the rest refuses, not as a portrait of it.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Yoshinaka’s comedy of manners at court, and Lady Nii going into the sea with the child emperor. One law holds them: everything that rises falls, and the falling is the occasion of either clinging or release. The upstart from the mountains is undone by the capital as the Taira were; Yoshinaka dies in mud at Awazu, Tomomori by choice in the sea, and Kumagai and Kenreimon’in leave the world before it leaves them. The Genji are under the same law, which the text lets the reader see past its own end: Yoritomo’s ruthlessness to the Taira children, and the shadow over Yoshitsune. The range is very wide and governed. Charged: seams of accretion, inconsistencies of chronology, repeated matter, and a tension between the retribution that damns Kiyomori and the pathos that pities his house, which the work holds more than resolves.
Hafez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a panegyric couplet to Shah Shoja’ and the angels kneading Adam’s clay; or the Shirazi Turk, for whose Indian mole the poet would give Samarkand and Bukhara, and the fear of the whirlpool on a dark night. One law governs them: love is the only truthful relation, and every institution that claims to mediate it, mosque, cloister, court and reputation, is suspect, the court included, so that even the praise of princes is written in the lover’s vocabulary and can be read against itself. The couplet that excuses the war of the seventy-two sects, since they did not see the truth, states the law. The range is wide. The panegyric and occasional pieces, the qit’as and the chronograms do not all obey it, and that holds the axis at 8.8.
Anonymous, under King Lalibela · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Bete Giyorgis, a free cross on its plinth cut to a single geometry, and Bete Gabriel-Rufael, an irregular excavated complex that may have begun as a fortified dwelling; or Bete Abba Libanos, still joined to the rock face at its roof. One law governs them all, subtraction from one body of rock, and one vocabulary, the memory of Aksum in timber and stone, runs from the oldest unit to the youngest. The descent, the court and the sanctuary of the tabot recur throughout, and the range is wide: monolith and cave, basilica and chapel, church and cell, tomb and pool. Held because the law is one of method more than of form: the units differ in type, in finish and probably in date, and the two groups make no single plan.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the theological dialogue of chapter XXV and the Munich comedy of manners around the Roddes and Rudi’s violin. For the most part they obey one law. The coldness, the prohibition of love and the bargain govern both, and Rudi’s murder follows from Adrian’s one attempt to love by proxy. The same law binds the child’s death, the nation’s war and the father’s crystals: what imitates life is dead, and what Adrian reaches toward in warmth is taken from him. Where the law slips is in tone. The society chapters are written with a satirical ease that sits apart from the narrative of damnation, and the thread of Ines Rodde keeps a physics of its own, the physics of the bourgeois novel, so that the extremes are bound in matter more surely than in key.
Michel de Montaigne · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: “Des pouces” (II.26), a page on thumbs, and the Apology (II.12), the longest argument in the book on the limits of reason; or the cat of II.12 and Socrates facing death in III.12. One law governs them: a single judgment trying itself on whatever comes, against presumption, by the measure of nature and experience. The range is very wide and held. The book admits its contradictions and claims them for the law: “je me contredits bien à l’advanture, mais la verité ... je ne la contredy point” (III.2). The charge: the Stoic exercises of the early Book I and the naturalism of III.13 meet as development, but the fideism of II.12 and the trust in nature elsewhere sit in a tension the book leaves unresolved.
The Beatles · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: sound treated as material to be transformed, and a self pulled between the world’s demands and escape from them. The two most distant elements obey it. “Yellow Submarine” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” are both voyages out of the ordinary world into spaces built from studio effects, one a nursery ark and the other the void. Sleep, waking and death run through the rest, and the state’s claim in “Taxman” is the world the other songs leave. The range, from nursery song to Hindustani form, tape music and soul brass, is wide. The law loosens at “Doctor Robert” and “And Your Bird Can Sing”, which answer to nothing the record states.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Pumblechook’s farce at the Christmas dinner (chapter 4) and Miss Havisham burning in her wedding dress (chapter 49); or Wemmick’s drawbridge and cannon at Walworth (chapter 25) and Magwitch’s death in the prison ward (chapter 56). One law governs them: expectation, the claim one person makes on another’s future, and the prisons it builds. Pumblechook claims Pip’s rise as his own; Miss Havisham makes Estella the instrument of her revenge; Magwitch makes Pip his gentleman; Wemmick keeps his heart behind a moat. Comedy and Gothic obey the same physics. Charged: the web of coincidence, the book’s law of connection, strains it at the revelation of Estella’s parents; and the revised ending’s softened cadence sits a little apart from the book’s hard logic of partings.
Robert de Luzarches, Thomas and Renaud de Cormont · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the nave of Robert de Luzarches, of the 1220s, its triforium blind, and the upper choir of the Cormonts, after mid-century, glazed and Rayonnant. They obey one law: the same bay, the same three storeys in the same proportion, the arcade at half the height, the shafts carried through. The choir turns the law toward glass without breaking it, and outside the same order holds, flyer for bay and buttress for pier. Wider, the later life: chapels between the nave buttresses, towers of the fourteenth century, a Flamboyant rose, a spire of the sixteenth, the stalls, which keep the order of their imagery in a late idiom. Most are drawn into the law. What breaks it is the west front above the portals, stages whose height and towers do not answer the nave.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comet and rainbow over the open sea, and the nails on the floor. One law governs both: everything in the plate is potential held in suspension. The heavens signal and nothing answers; the tools lie ready and nothing is made; no one climbs the ladder; the hourglass runs, the bell is silent, the scales hang level. The woman, the child and the dog carry one arrest in three registers: the mind, unknowing childhood, the animal body. The range is wide and the law holds across it. Held below 9.0 because the symbolic systems, humoral, astrological, geometrical and mechanical, are layered rather than fused, and the seams show.
Honoré de Balzac · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dinner table of the Maison Vauquer, with the lodgers’ jokes in “-rama” and Poiret and Mlle Michonneau, and the salon of the vicomtesse de Beauséant in the faubourg Saint-Germain; or the convict’s slang of the bagne and the tact of the duchesse de Langeais. One law governs them: everything is bought and everyone has a price, and passion, the one force that will not calculate, destroys whoever has it. The pension sells Vautrin to the police for three thousand francs; the faubourg sells Mme de Beauséant for a marriage portion; the daughters sell their father for a ball; Goriot alone does not sell, and dies of it. Vautrin’s law and the salon’s are the same law, said plainly. Charged because the melodramatic devices obey the stage’s physics more than the book’s.
Li Bai · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the terror of Shu dao nan and the stillness of Jingting Mountain; or the three Qingping diao, written to order for Yang Guifei, “雲想衣裳花想容”
(clouds think of her robes, flowers of her face), and the refusal in the Tianmu poem to bend the waist to the powerful. One law governs most of the range: the self’s freedom measured against what lasts, mountain, moon and river, and what does not, office, dynasty and youth, with wine as the solvent between them. Terror and stillness both obey it; so do the war poems and the women’s laments, where the moon carries the same permanence. The court pieces strain the law, though they can be read as the immortal’s play, and the occasional verse often sits outside any law but convention. A wide range, mostly held.
Chinua Achebe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the folk tale of the tortoise and the birds, told by Ekwefi to Ezinma by firelight, and the Commissioner’s dry paragraph on the hanged man at the end. One law governs them: speech is power, the story belongs to whoever tells it, and a world exists only as long as its own telling holds. The tortoise who takes a new name for himself and falls; the clan whose account of itself is replaced by the officer’s. Okonkwo’s rigidity and the clan’s flexibility are the same law from two sides: the man who cannot bend breaks, and the clan that bends is taken. The range runs from comic wrestling and palm wine to murder, suicide and conquest, and holds. Charged a little because Part Three’s register of incident and politics is not prepared in full.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a watchful voice in a night world of masks, wanting what it cannot hold, and meeting it with wit. The two most distant elements are the brass-band carnival of the first track and the hymn of the fourteenth, and they obey the same law from opposite ends: a crowd in which everyone is punished, and one figure set apart from the crowd and adored. Between them the put-down, the confession, the vigil and the farce all speak in one voice and one sound, and the range is wide, from slapstick to devotion. The law strains at the opener, whose marching band stands outside the record’s sound, and the blues numbers obey it as habit rather than as law. Nothing breaks it.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Clarín’s comic flight into the rocks, and Segismundo’s kneeling father. They obey one law. Clarín hides to escape death and is found by it, and his dying words tell the king that no road is safe from what is fated; Basilio, who hid his son to escape the stars, hears in that death his own story and submits. The farce and the metaphysics are one physics, and Rosaura’s honour plot obeys the same law of a self reclaimed through action under disguise. The strain is at the close, where the play’s two laws, the providential rule to act well since all is a dream and the political rule of reason of state, are both in force and do not entirely agree, so that the soldier’s imprisonment reads to many as a breach. It costs a few tenths.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One physics governs the book: the body and the plain world, the sun and the sea, set against the explanations others want. Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of Salamano cursing his dog in the stairwell, and the night before the execution. They obey the same law, habit and loss with no meaning above them, and Meursault meets both the same way, with attention and without commentary. Both parts keep one voice, so the court’s language enters as a foreign tongue. The two breaks of style are prepared: the sun presses throughout the first part, and his refusals of God before magistrate and chaplain build toward the outburst. The nameless dead man obeys the law too, since Meursault does not name what he does not attend to. Held below the top because the range is narrow, one consciousness, one milieu, one tone, and narrowness is not coherence; and the late eloquence strains the voice a little more than the build accounts for.
Rashtrakuta, under Krishna I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the tower of the main temple, an object in the round, and the galleries in the cliff, cave architecture facing inward. They obey one law, the law of the excavation: both are what remained when the rest was taken away, one rock and one void, and the court is the space between them. One Dravida grammar governs gateway, Nandi shrine, temple and subsidiary shrines; one iconographic world, Shiva’s, with Vishnu and the epics placed beneath and around him, covers the whole. What bends the law: the masonry grammar describes a built temple while the physics is a cut one, and the periphery varies in style and finish. The range is wide, from a mountain to a frieze, and the law holds it.
Plato · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole, and the dialogue names it: order, taxis and kosmos. The good soul is ordered as a good ship, house or body is (503e to 504d); the wise say that heaven and earth, gods and men are held together by community, friendship, orderliness and justice, and that is why the whole is called a kosmos (507e to 508a); and Callicles has neglected “hē isotēs hē geōmetrikē”
“geometrical equality” (508a). Take the two most distant elements, Polus’ jingling opening and the naked judgment of souls: the first is disorder dressed as eloquence, the second order unmasked, and both obey the law. Held at 8.8 by the dramatic date, which the work never resolves, and by the change of register between the questioning and the myth, which some readers feel as a change of law; it is read here as completion.
John Keats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Indolence’s drowsy refusal of Love, Ambition and Poesy, and To Autumn’s impersonal calm, in which no “I” appears at all. One law governs them: a consciousness drawn by beauty toward a release from time, and its return to the self and to process. Psyche builds the inner temple; Nightingale and the Urn test escape and find its limit; Melancholy names the law; Autumn lives inside it. The range within the lyric is real: ecstasy, dread, irony and languor, the classical and the rural, the urn’s marble and the stubble-plains. Held at 8.8 because narrowness is not coherence: the speaker and his situation are nearly one across the body, and Indolence obeys the law weakly, a variation in a lesser key.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pirate comic, a period horror story read by a boy at a newsstand, and Manhattan on Mars thinking through time as a jewel already cut. They obey one law: everything is already made, and the question is what a person does who sees the mechanism. The mariner cannot stop his ship, the god cannot stop seeing, the vigilante will not compromise, the planner builds his own ending. The same law holds the tone from noir procedural to cosmic meditation to the romance of two retired heroes. Charged: the creature and the island of artists belong to a pulp physics the rest of the book does not obey; Manhattan’s change of heart on Mars is argued by a miracle of chance rather than tested; and the resolution of the plot depends on a device more than on the law the book has set. The range is very wide, and almost all of it holds.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Félicité’s room, crowded with relics of the dead and a stuffed bird, and the banquet hall at Machaerus with the Roman legate Vitellius, the Pharisees and the dancer. One law governs them: devotion and appetite pressed to the limit, seen without comment, until the sacred appears in the form the world allows it, a parrot, a leper, a severed head. The range is wide and held: the provinces, a legend in colour, an ancient court. Narrowness is not coherence, and this book is not narrow. Charged: the third tale’s political exposition runs on a looser law than the other two, and the unity of the triptych is partly an arrangement the reader is asked to complete.
The Clash · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the record: the city at the end of its world, where the music of every rebel and every diaspora is taken up as one’s own and tested against the system that would sell it back. The two most distant elements are the title track’s apocalyptic march and Lover’s Rock, a comic song about contraception in soft rocksteady; they obey through the record’s idea of a band that can play the whole city’s music. The Right Profile, a song about Montgomery Clift, and Spanish Bombs obey through the hero damaged by his legend and by history. The range is very wide, which the axis credits. The limit: some elements obey by sound and attitude rather than by meaning, and Train in Vain, a love song added at the end, stands outside the law.
Isaac Babel · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the lyric prose poem of “The Cemetery at Kozin” and the brutal comic skaz of “Salt”, a Cossack’s letter to the editor boasting of shooting a woman who carried salt in place of a child. One law governs both. The war is seen in flashes, nothing is explained, and the voice that admires and the voice that kills are set side by side without a judgment the book will state. Liutov’s irony, envy and horror hold the range together, and the skaz pieces are his opposite pole, not a breach. The law holds across a wide range of register. It falls short of the highest marks because the campaign pieces in the middle loosen it a little, and the narrator sometimes vanishes without the book marking it.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One physics governs four volumes that share almost no surface: registration, standing, warmth, the file. The most distant elements obey it. A café notebook of obscene sayings and a family book of bearers are the same law seen from the inside and the outside of a record; a satirical office comedy and a widow’s kitchen are the same country. The wrath obeys it too: a building unwinds because each part loses its administrative relation, and a woman fades from the files at the rate damp moves through plaster. The seam between the first two volumes is prepared now, the first closing on a typewriter that writes in the register’s voice. What holds the axis is the fourth volume’s garden, May flowers in October and a white city in the wood, a physics of grant the book disciplines, chairs still needing hands, without quite reconciling with the law that governs the rest.
The Beach Boys · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: longing that knows its object will be lost, voiced through tender, layered sound. The two most distant elements obey it. Sloop John B, a sea song of a wrecked and rowdy voyage, and Caroline, No, an elegy at walking pace, both end on wanting to be elsewhere, home or before; the shanty’s surface strains the law and does not break it. Wouldn’t It Be Nice, the brightest song, is still a wish for what is not yet; I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, the strangest, turns the same longing on the self; the instrumentals obey it without words. The range runs from shanty to elegy. What holds the axis below the top is its temperature: no anger, no terror, no irony, and narrowness is not coherence.
Michelangelo · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the vestibule’s turbulence and the hall’s calm. Opposite in register, they obey one law: the same grey stone frame on white wall, the same bay module, the same handling of the classical element as a member of a frame rather than a free-standing body. The contrast is designed, the second room the answer to the first, and the range held is wide. What strains the law is the vestibule’s history: it was finished by other hands long after its maker left, the stair raised a quarter century later from a model and letters, and the joins of that long completion are part of the one work and are charged here. The hall’s desks, ceiling and floor, also by others, keep the law closely.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the Dies irae and the Benedictus: terror at speed, and a gentle solo quartet in a major key. One law holds the range together: a dark sonority, counterpoint kept close to drama, and the tension between the liturgy of the many and the plea of the one. The range runs from fugue to the operatic and obeys one physics, and the Communion’s return of the opening and of the Kyrie’s fugue restores that law at the close and binds the end to the beginning. What holds the axis is a fault line in the later numbers: Süssmayr’s Sanctus and Benedictus are set in a lighter and more ordinary church manner, and the Hosanna returns in the Benedictus’s key rather than its own, breaking the tonal law the rest observes.
Kalidasa · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the police beating the fisherman for the ring he found in a carp’s belly, in the interlude of the sixth act, and the gods’ explanation in Mārīca’s heaven in the seventh. One law governs both: a token passes through every order of the world, low and high, and brings what was forgotten back into its place; desire is answered by restraint and returns as duty fulfilled. The natural world obeys the same law as the human: the trees give the bride her jewels, the creeper is married to the mango, and the bee at her face in the first act is the king’s rival in the painting of the sixth. The range is wide: hermitage idyll, palace comedy, a court of law, the sky. Charged for two strains: the curse, unknown to the king and kept from Shakuntala, suspends the moral law of the action at its centre, so that guilt and suffering fall where no one chose them; and Indra’s war enters from outside the play’s world.
Sergei Eisenstein · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the fog over the harbour, a still lyric of masts and water, and the massacre on the steps. One law governs both: the collision of images makes a collective feeling, mourning in the one and terror in the other, and the camera serves the mass, never a single point of view. The plate, the tarpaulin, the pier and the squadron obey the same dialectic, and the range from lyric to violence to suspense is wide. The strain is twofold. The caricature of the officers and the priest belongs to a cruder register than the steps, where the victims are seen with an exactness the oppressors never receive. And the hand-coloured flag, a placard in a film of shadows, breaks the film’s physics to make its point, although it does so deliberately.
U2 · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the album: longing for what does not arrive, under one wide space. The two most distant elements, the private bind of With or Without You and the state violence of Mothers of the Disappeared, share the same hush, delay and distance, as do hymn, protest and elegy. Red Hill Mining Town lies outside the album’s America only on the map, since a marriage held under a strike obeys the law. Exit strains it and ends inside it, on the “hands that build”. The range runs from exultation to grief and from the bedroom to the junta. It breaks once, in Trip Through Your Wires, a flirtation in which longing costs nothing.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of Schindler’s commerce, the black-market gifts, the secretaries he interviews, the charm, and the exhumation pyres. One law governs both: in this world everything is bought and sold, lives included, and the dealer’s comedy and the camp’s horror are one economy seen from two sides. The range is wide, and the law holds across it. The colour epilogue keeps the law, which the prologue prepared. Two places break it. In the breakdown a man kept opaque for three hours speaks his heart in a set piece, and the reticence that kept him unexplained is given up in the last scene. And the shower scene turns the camera from observation to suspense, a different physics for one sequence.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs: each man is the same sentence received differently, and every element obeys it. Take the two most distant figures, Eustache walking forward resigned and Andrieu d’Andres doubled over his own head: they are two answers to one question, made of one surface and one scale. The roughness of the modelling, the enlarged extremities and the sackcloth hold across all six, and nothing breaks register into allegory, ornament or portrait. The range is real, from resignation through defiance and grief to despair, so the coherence is not narrowness. Against a higher figure: the range is of one kind, fear and will before death, and the law is easier to keep across six states of one man than across the distances Las Meninas or The Large Bathers hold.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs: every relation is a contest, every letter a move, and the player who believes herself outside the game is the last to be beaten. Take the two most distant elements: Cécile’s first letter from the convent, about her clothes and her harp, and Merteuil’s declaration of war. They obey the same law: Cécile’s ignorance is the material Merteuil works, and the war is the moment the two masters turn the method on each other. The comic and the tragic are one physics: Prévan’s humiliation, which Merteuil tells as comedy, and Tourvel’s death obey the same rule of reputation. Charged: the ending changes physics. The smallpox and the lost lawsuit are punishments from outside the game, and the editor’s moral seems to step in from another book; irony or concession, the seam shows.
Henry Fielding · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Man of the Hill’s history, a grave tale of betrayal ending in a recluse’s misanthropy, and the Upton farce of bedroom doors and a muff; or Western’s hunting halloo and the terror of incest in the Gatehouse. One law governs them: human nature is mixed, the good heart errs and is tested, appearance deceives, and a comic providence restores the deserving when they have learned prudence. The Man of the Hill is the law’s negative, a man whom one bad experience taught to hate the species, set beside a hero who forgives it. The incest terror is the same law at its darkest, defused by the evidence the plot laid. The range is wide, from Homeric parody to the prison. Charged: the providence that resolves the plot is guaranteed by the narrator rather than tested, and the sentimental register of Sophia’s scenes sits apart from the farce around them.
George Gordon, Lord Byron · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the cannibal lottery in the longboat and the drawing-room comedy of Norman Abbey; or Haidée’s death and the Duchess in the friar’s hood. They obey one law, the narrator’s double vision, by which feeling is real and is then seen from a step outside, and nothing is so high it cannot be laughed at or so low it cannot be pitied. The law holds across an exceptional range, from the sublime to the obscene, from battle to gossip, and the wider the range, the stronger the achievement. What holds it here: the poem changes kind at the thirteenth canto, from picaresque romance to English novel of manners, and the change, though the narrator prepares it, splits the cantos into two kinds of book; and the English arc of Adeline, Aurora and the Duchess is laid down and left open. One physics, two worlds not yet brought to their meeting.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the landlady’s mahjong table, loud and comic, and the silent stone of Angkor where Chow buries his secret. One law governs both: what matters is kept from view, and the world is a set of walls between people and what they want. The mahjong table is one of those walls; the temple is the last. The rehearsals, the rain, room 2046 and the handbag and tie obey it, and the film’s coldness to the spouses, who never get a face, is the law applied without exception. The strain is in the coda’s newsreel of de Gaulle, which brings history in from outside rather than through the law, and in Ah Ping’s broad comedy. The range is narrow, and narrowness earns nothing; the coda widens it, and mostly holds.
Flannery O'Connor · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the proud self is broken by an outside force, violent or humiliating, and the breaking is the only opening for grace, which may or may not be taken. Take the most distant elements: the farce of “A Stroke of Good Fortune”, a woman climbing the stairs in denial of her pregnancy, and the near liturgy at the close of “The Displaced Person”, a dying farm and an old priest. They obey the same law: a self refusing what is coming, and what comes. The comic and the terrible are one register throughout, never alternating; the voice that laughs at the grandmother’s hat lays her dead in a ditch with her legs crossed under her like a child’s. The range is wider than one milieu suggests: children, intellectuals, widowed landowners, tramps, a Polish refugee. Held here because the law is a single one, and is sometimes enforced on the material rather than found in it.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the prologue’s montage of projector, cartoon, slaughter and morgue, and two women shelling mushrooms at a table. One law covers them: everything is image, and an image can fail. The prologue starts the projector, the break at the glass stops it, and the close lets the arc lamp die. The law strains in the second half. The husband’s visit and the hospital ending put realism and dream on one footing without saying which law is in force, and part of that uncertainty stands as a second law beside the first. The boy’s frame is never joined to the plot. The Saigon and Warsaw images bring in the law of history, which the chamber drama does not otherwise obey.
David Lynch · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Sandy’s dream of robins, told outside a church with an organ playing, and Frank’s assault seen through the closet slats. One law covers them. The film is a boy’s dream of a town, in which innocence and horror are two faces of one surface, rendered at the same pitch of excess. The descent into the grass, the robin with a beetle in its beak and the curtain at both ends frame everything in it. The range is wide, comedy, kitsch, horror, romance and noir, and the genre plot obeys the law too: the teen mystery is one more surface the dream wears, played straight and as dread like the rest. The strain is at the end. The robin is mechanical and the father is well, and the film leaves both standing. That strain, with a climax solved by a radio trick and a pistol, which obeys the plot more than the dream, holds the axis a step below the top.
U2 · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: desire as both rapture and blindness, and a self that plays a part in order to tell the truth. The two most distant elements obey it. “Even Better Than the Real Thing”, a bright glam single, is about loving the surface; “Love Is Blindness”, a dirge, is about choosing not to see. The funk of “Mysterious Ways” is a hymn to a woman as Spirit; the anguish of “Acrobat” is a man who cannot believe. The range runs from glam and funk to industrial, ballad, dirge and prayer, and nothing breaks the law; “Wild Horses” and “Tryin’” sit near it without adding.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the crucifix against the sky at the top left and the dog at the bottom right. They obey one law. Everything is under one grey daylight, without a source and without a miracle; every figure is painted to the same pitch of portrait truth, the priest as the gravedigger, the mayor as the women; the cliffs are painted as the people are, as matter. The sacred objects, the crucifix, the pall with its tears, the holy-water sprinkler, are painted as objects among hats and handkerchiefs, which is the law of the picture applied to the hardest case. The range runs from the cross to the animal, from the old men in the dress of the 1790s to the choirboys, from grief to boredom, and holds. Held below the top because the range is one occasion at one temperature, and the spatial break between the two halves is a small breach of the physics.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the foot of the robe, where the cloth meets the ground as a rough mass, and the head, the most worked and particular part. One law governs both: everything rises. The folds of the robe run upward; the lean carries the weight back so that the figure seems to lift; the mass narrows toward the shoulders and opens into the head, where the one point of particularity sits. The empty sleeves fall, the only downward line, and they mark the arms withdrawn into the mass, which serves the same law. Nothing contradicts it. Held because narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one figure, one cloth and one head, and a law held over so few elements is held over a small range, however completely.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gold and multitude of the parodos and Xerxes in rags at the end; or the Messenger’s war report and Darius’ theology. One law governs them: wealth and power are a crop, insolence its flower and ruin its harvest, and the gods hasten the man who hastens himself. The dream obeys it, the battle obeys it, the frozen Strymon obeys it, and the empty quiver obeys it. The range is wide and held: political report, divine law, the dead raised by rite, a mother’s care. Charged: a seam between the chorus’s language of a hostile power, a god who deceives, and Darius’ language of his son’s fault. The play joins them as Greek tragedy does, but the joint shows, and the innocence of Darius, who lost at Marathon, is held by suppression rather than argued.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a hard black line, ruled straight or bent at a sharp angle, and a soft pale wash of yellow or rose with no edge at all. They obey one law: everything on the canvas is a force of colour or line acting in a field, attracting or repelling, with no object and no space that is not made by those forces. The residual signs of the studies obey it too, present only as lines among lines. The range is wide: hard and soft, line and plane, transparent and opaque, hot and cold, crowded and open. What holds the axis is a slight unevenness of law: a few passages keep enough of their motif to read as a sign while their neighbours are pure form, and two rules show through in places, figure worn down and form invented.
Anonymous · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs: a world of vassalage under a God who judges and intervenes. Take the two most distant elements, Roncevaux, a tragedy of honour in a mountain pass, and the Baligant war, a cosmic battle of emperor against emir. They obey the same physics: loyalty owed upward to lord and God, angels carrying messages and souls, a sun that can stop, battle as judgment. The trial ends under the same law, settled by a combat in which God’s verdict shows in the outcome, and Bramimonde’s baptism and Gabriel’s last summons close the poem in the same register. Even the tension between Roland’s fault and his sanctity is held within it. Charged: the mirror world of the Saracens, built to the poem’s ideology rather than to its own law of particular people, and the more schematic register of the emir’s war.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Zephyrus at the right, a cold blue body forcing in from the laurels, all violence and diagonal; and Mercury at the left, upright, turned away, at rest, reaching into the clouds. They obey one law. Both are made by the same line, on the same dark ground, in the same shallow plane: every body is a contour moving in one rhythm under one light, and the wind’s body is that rhythm at its fastest. The range runs from rape to dance to contemplation, from cold colour to warm, from the flowered ground to the clouds, and holds. What keeps the axis below the top: the junctions between groups are spacing rather than structure, and Zephyrus’s colour sits at the edge of the law.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Apollo’s calm antique head and Daphne’s roots sunk in the rock. One law holds them. Everything in the group is one instant of a change in progress, read in the material as a gradient from marble that is flesh to marble that is plant, and the god’s composure belongs to that law, since he does not yet know what his hand has found. Rock, laurel, drapery and bodies obey one rule of surface: the stone is made into whatever it represents, and every surface tells its substance. Nothing contradicts. But the range is narrow: two bodies, one tree, one moment, one register of marvel. The law is held completely over a small territory, and narrowness is not coherence.
Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the kerb at the mound’s foot, carved in the open light, and the end recess of the chamber, in the dark. One law governs both: the axis from the groove of the entrance stone up the passage to the end recess, and on to the grooved kerbstone at the back of the mound. The spiral stands on the threshold and at the end of the journey. The circle of mound and kerb, the line of the passage and the cross of the chamber are one geometry: a centre reached along a line from the edge of a circle. The range is wide, from the landscape to the sun to the bones in the basins. What holds it: the carving in places stands off the law. The front, rebuilt, is weighed under The Imperishable and not here.
Horace · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs the body: against fortune and death, the good is measure, the mean held in every condition, “auream quisquis mediocritatem / diligit”
“whoever loves the golden mean” (2.10). Take the two most distant elements: Regulus walking back to torture in Carthage (3.5), and the boy told to spare the Persian trappings and pour the wine under the myrtle (1.38). They obey the same law: the civic virtue that keeps faith to death and the private pleasure that refuses excess are both restraint before what one cannot control. The voice holds from hymn to epitaph. Held at 8.8 because the joint between the Roman Odes’ grave moralising and the ironic private voice is where many readers feel the physics change, and Book 4’s court poems lean further toward the public.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gold sleeve at the left, the thickest and most physical paint in the picture, and the woman’s face, among the thinnest and most withdrawn. They obey one law. Everything in the field is ranked by its nearness to the touch at the centre, and the paint thickens toward the light and thins toward the dark and toward feeling. The whole canvas is one warm light in one darkness, and the two figures share it. Nothing contradicts the law. The range is wide in substance, from relief to glaze, from metal to skin, and narrow in kind: two people, one gesture, one temperature. The background obeys only by receding; it is not ruled, only dark.
Richard Strauss · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the quintet’s comic theological squabble and the final scene’s kiss. One law governs them: this is a court where everyone looks and talks and no one sees, and where the sacred is present only as a voice the court argues over. The Jews quarrel over whether anyone has seen God while the prophet sits in the cistern below them; the Nazarenes tell of miracles the court treats as gossip; Herodes fears omens and wants none of it; Salome wants only the mouth that spoke. The moon, which each character reads as himself, governs the whole. The strain is the Dance: a concert waltz in oriental dress, whose world is the salon and not the night of the rest of the score. A law broken there and kept everywhere else holds, at a cost.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the night’s run from a trap toward a promised land, pitched at the size of myth. The two most distant elements, the horn party of Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out and the hushed trumpet and bass of Meeting Across the River, obey it: one is the band’s legend of being saved by joining, the other a man’s last deal to get out, and both are the dream of a way out. Backstreets and She’s the One, grief and desire, keep it. The range runs from party to elegy, from porch to street war, from dawn to death. Tenth Avenue strains the law, a band’s own legend inside a record of strangers, and the single register of yearning, with no irony and almost no humour, narrows the range.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: every statement is double, every confession an accusation, every virtue a vanity, and the voice that says so is subject to the same law. Take the two most distant elements: the bright comedy of the Paris advocate helping blind men across the street for the pleasure of being thanked, and the camp where he drank a dying comrade’s water. They obey the same law, the good deed and the betrayal both turning on the need to stand above. The law reaches Christ, the Ghent panel, the doves and the snow, and the world of the book is consistent to the end. Held here because the range, wider than the setting suggests, is held by one voice in one key, and narrowness is not coherence; and because the speaker’s unreliability, which is the law, leaves some facts of the world, the woman and the camp, floating free of verification by design.
Vasily Grossman · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Shtrum at his blackboard, finding the equation that will make his name, and Sofya in the gas chamber; or Hitler at his headquarters and an old Kalmyk on the steppe. One law governs them: the state’s claim to own the person, against the person’s freedom, and the kindness that slips between. Shtrum’s discovery comes in the freedom of his own mind, and his fall is the state’s claim on it; Sofya’s last act is the one freedom the chamber leaves. The range is as wide as any novel’s, and the law holds across it, German and Soviet alike, without a change of tone. Charged: the book is the second of two, and some figures and threads carried from For a Just Cause, Vera, Spiridonov, Tolya’s death, are left hanging; and the chapter on Stalin is thinner than those on Hitler.
Federico García Lorca · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs the book: desire and death arrive together, under a moon, and the law, the state, the husband, the Church, the family, comes after them with a knife or a rifle. Take the most distant elements: the comic boast of La casada infiel and the Roman martyrdom of Santa Olalla, or the moon’s lullaby and the burning of the gypsy city. They obey that law, and the same horses, moons, knives and greens run through all of them. The archangels obey it too, as civic idols of the same Andalusia the guard destroys. The three histories are the test, and they pass it: Thamar y Amnón, the last poem, is the book’s eros and violence at their most extreme. Held below the top because the range, though wider than it looks, is one region, one register and one myth.
Duccio di Buoninsegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the enthroned Mother on the front, an icon at monumental scale, and Peter at the fire in the courtyard on the back, a narrative figure in a small room. They obey one law: every figure is a holy person on gold, painted with the same face types, the same drapery and the same gravity, and ranked in a single order of sacred time from the Annunciation to the death of the Mother. The range is wide in mode, icon and story, court and street, death and glory, and it holds. Held below the top because the spatial law does not: architecture is set by each panel’s needs, the scale of figures to buildings shifts, and the front’s ranked court and the back’s rooms are two systems joined by the gold and the hand.
John Milton · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Harapha’s scene, near comedy, a giant who will not fight a blind man, and the Messenger’s narration of the temple. One law governs both: strength is God’s, given and withdrawn, and it returns only when it is no longer Samson’s boast. Harapha is the boast outside him, refused; the temple is the strength returned and spent. Dalila’s scene obeys the same law, since she stands where the strength was lost. The Chorus spans the widest range, from despair at Providence, “God of our fathers, what is man!”, to the last calm, and the law holds across it. Held below 9.0 because the law is narrow, and because the Chorus on women after Dalila leaves speaks in a voice the play elsewhere keeps in check.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Sanctus, a bright double fugue of praise, and the soprano’s murmured Libera me. One law governs them, and it is dramatic: every section is a human response to the fact of judgement, in fear, praise, plea or exhaustion, and the returns of the Dies irae enforce it. The hushed opening and the murmured close obey the same physics of the voice at low dynamic before the vast. The strain lies in the liturgical middle: the Sanctus and the Offertorio stand somewhat outside the law the sequence and the responsory set. And the exchange of 1874 to 1875 shows a section whose manner could change from fugue to solo without breaking the whole.
Nasrid, under Yusuf I and Muhammad V · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the blank, battered outside of the Comares Tower, seen from the Albaicín, and the dome of the Two Sisters, a ceiling dissolved into cells. They obey one law: enclosure, everything given to the inside, and the inside made of geometry, water, light and word. The law is wide, governing fortress and garden, audience hall and bath. It is resisted in three places. Two palaces on two axes meet at an angle, and the law of their meeting is unclear. The lions and the painted figures of the Hall of the Kings break the aniconic rule of every other surface. And the static Myrtles and the restless Lions are two laws of one physics, not one law.
Anonymous (the Gawain poet) · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bloody unmaking of the deer and the boar in the field, and the courteous speech of the lady in the curtained bed; or the giant who speaks with his head in his hand, and the bookkeeping of the exchange of winnings. One law governs them: covenant kept or broken, trawþe, tested at every level from the hunt’s division of the spoil to the soul’s confession. The supernatural and the domestic obey the same rule, a promise made in the hall and paid at the chapel; the Christian signs and the talisman are weighed on one scale, and the talisman loses. The range is wide for a poem of its length: horror, comedy, liturgy, the wilderness, the bedroom. Charged: the late explanation, in which Morgan le Fay’s wish to frighten Guinevere and test the court is set over the whole, sits awkwardly with the moral design it is meant to cause; and the turn against women strains the poem’s own tone.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Welsh’s contempt, a sergeant who tells a private there is no other world and who then runs under fire to a dying man with morphine and refuses the medal; and Witt’s grace, a private who sees light in everything and dies drawing the enemy off. One law governs them, questioning: the film does not decide between them, and asks the same question over both, where the evil comes from and whether nature has one power or two. Welsh at the grave, asking Witt’s spark where it has gone, is the law closing. Two things strain it: the Bell marriage, which resolves into a plot of betrayal, and the Quintard scene, a career drama from another film.
August Strindberg · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the peasants’ mocking song and dance, which is folk comedy, and Julie’s walk out with the razor at sunrise; or Kristin’s churchgoing piety and Jean’s sale of himself to a future hotel. One law governs them: in every pair the stronger takes from the weaker, and every position of strength can be reversed except the one the bell enforces. The bird, the dog Diana and the gatekeeper’s pug, the boots, the dreams of falling and climbing, Kristin’s sermon on the first who shall be last: all obey it. The range is real for a single act, from farce to slaughter and trance. Charged: the Preface’s theory of heredity enters as a second law beside the play’s law of power, and the two do not always agree.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: people at the edge where work, kin, law and faith give way, told in one bare voice at night. The two most distant elements obey it. Nebraska, a killer’s slow, flat confession, and Open All Night, a frantic electric run down the turnpike to a girl at a chicken shack, are the same night road; the comic song’s driver is as alone, as watched and as close to the edge as the killer. Reason to Believe turns the law on faith itself, and the faith survives as absurdity. The range of story is wide and the range of sound narrow, and the matter carries the law. Open All Night’s comedy strains it a little.
Willem de Kooning · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the teeth, hard, white and almost drawn, the most legible thing on the canvas; and a slash of pale yellow in the ground at the right edge that describes nothing. They obey one law. Every passage is a stroke struck at speed that is at once a piece of the image and an event of paint, and figure and ground are made of the same marks, so that each can turn into the other. There is no second kind of making, no smooth passage, no ruled line. The law covers a wider range than the abstract fields of its decade, from legible anatomy to pure gesture, and holds across it. Held below the top where the law blurs into indecision rather than ambiguity, and for the territory: one figure, one register of violence and comedy.
Ornette Coleman · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the line leads, and every player follows the line and each other rather than a given frame. The two most distant elements obey it. “Lonely Woman” is a slow lament over a racing pulse; “Congeniality” is play at a bright swing. Both are made the same way, a composed head and then improvisation that answers the melody’s implication, with the bass following the horns. The range of tempo and mood is wider than Kind of Blue’s, lament, lyric, wit and speed, and the law holds across all of it. Held below the top because the range of form is narrower than the range of mood: the outline of head, solos and head repeats on every track, and the fast pieces resemble one another.
Walker Evans · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a studio window in New York, all commerce and signage, and a wooden church in the South or a Greek Revival house of the second part, all form and silence. They obey one law: the made world, looked at frontally and plainly, as evidence of the people who made it, without comment. The law governs the faces, the tenant farmer’s wife as frontal as a facade, and the facades, the houses portrayed as faces; city and town, North and South, posters and graves. The range is wide, people, signs, machines, buildings, the living and the dead, and the law holds across it: coherence over breadth, not by exclusion. Held below the top for the few early plates whose tilted modernist angle belongs to another law, and for a tone that at times tips into irony against plain regard.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pale opening high in the sky and the small dark figure on the light shore at the bottom. They obey one law. Everything in the field is a band or a point against a band, horizontal extension against a single upright, light above against dark at the horizon. The gulls are points of the same kind, the monk the largest of them. Nothing in the picture is drawn by another law: no ornament, no anecdote, no detail rendered for its own sake. The range is real, from the near black sea to the pale sky, from the void to the one human. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory the law governs is deliberately small: one shore, one figure, three bands.
Donatello · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gold-lit strands of hair at the shoulders, the last trace of beauty, and the bony, planted feet at the base, the body reduced to bearing. One law holds them: everything in the figure is what remains after consumption, and every surface records the same drying, thinning and hardening. Hair, skin, mouth and toes are cut to one pitch of austerity; even the gold obeys, since it is residue and not adornment. The near-meeting hands are the one place where the law strains toward its opposite, and they do so within it, as the remnant of will. Nothing in the figure contradicts it. But the range is one body in one state, and narrowness is not coherence: the law is held completely over a small territory.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Rolin’s fur collar at the front left, inches from the eye, and the mountains at the horizon. One law holds them: everything is a body in one daylight, seen at the resolution its distance allows, so that the chancellor, the Queen of Heaven and a rider on the bridge are made by one hand and one touch. The sacred and the secular share one room and one air, which is the panel’s claim and its law at once. The range is wide, from the face to the horizon and from the carved Fall over the donor to the Redeemer’s blessing, and it holds. What resists is the constructed perspective and the unexplained shift in scale between the near principals and the parapet, where the law of light is kept and the law of space is bent.
Mikhail Lermontov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: in each tale Pechorin intervenes in a life for the sake of feeling something, and leaves it worse. Take the two farthest elements: the adventure tale of “Bela”, told aloud by a soldier, with horse-theft, abduction and a dagger, and the journal entries of “Princess Mary”, a drawing-room diary of glances and stratagems. They obey that law: the same man, the same cold appetite for sensation, the same boredom after each conquest, seen first from love and then from within. The smuggler romance of “Taman” and the metaphysical wager of “The Fatalist” are tonally far from both and still answer to it. The range of registers is wide, which makes the coherence count. Held a tenth or two off because the Romantic machinery of “Taman” and the society comedy of the spas sit a little apart in manner.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: every person in this world is sealed in a private interest and an incomprehension, and the irony that measures the minister measures the murderer and the murdered. Take the two most distant elements: Sir Ethelred’s room at the Home Office, where the great man wants only to be spared details, and the back parlour of the shop, where Winnie sits still after Verloc has told her. Both obey the law. It covers the embassy, the police, the anarchists, the almshouse, the cabman and the Professor, and it covers comedy and horror without a change of physics, so that the farce of Toodles and the blood on the floor obey one rule. The range is wide, from the diplomatic and the governmental to a mother’s sacrifice and a boy’s drawing. The one strain is the Assistant Commissioner, whose motives and relative decency sit a little apart from the law that governs everyone else.
Dziga Vertov · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a woman giving birth, filmed plainly, and the camera on its tripod walking off by itself in stop motion. One law governs both: whatever happens, happens to and through the camera, and the film’s truth is the truth of the camera’s work. The birth is life caught by the camera; the walking tripod is the camera’s own life, the apparatus as actor. Mine, loom, telephone exchange, beach and beer hall obey the same law, and so does the frame of the cinema, which makes the whole film an event watched inside it. The strain lies between the two claims the law joins, life caught unawares and life shown as made. The film holds them by showing the making openly, but the staged waking and the tricks pull toward play.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the world does not care, and the one who does not care is not exempt from it. Take the two most distant elements, the comic set piece of the postmaster borrowing five hundred roubles after his losses at cards in Warsaw and Nikita’s beating in the dark ward. They obey the same law: Ragin’s life is taken from him piece by piece by people neither wicked nor kind, and his own inertia permits each step. The opening tour and the burial obey it too, a ward shown as a place anyone might be taken and a grave attended by the postmaster and Daryushka alone. The range is wide for a novella, and it holds. Charged a little: the dialogue chapters stand apart in manner, a law of argument laid into a world of action.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the black engine, the hardest and darkest form, and the gold opening of light over the river at the left, the softest and brightest. They obey one law: solidity follows speed and direction. What moves along the line is hard; what the line passes is vapour. The old bridge, the boat, the ploughman and the hare are given in the same veiled paint as the weather, which is their place in the argument, the world the line passes. The range is wide for one canvas, from fire to rain and from the furrow to the engine. What resists is small but real: the figures sit in the field as notes of a picturesque landscape, an older grammar, and the hare’s illegibility leaves its relation to the law uncertain.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the camp revue, with its men in corsets, comic patter and a gramophone, and the death of Boëldieu, shot by a friend who apologises. One law governs both: men are held by bonds the war did not make and cannot dissolve, and every bond is also a barrier. In the revue laughter crosses the line between prisoners and guards until the news of Douaumont redraws it; at the deathbed two aristocrats’ courtesy is the only language left to them, and it has killed one of them. The law holds at the farm, love across a line the line will reclaim, and at the frontier, invisible in snow and still obeyed. The range runs from farce to elegy. The strain is in Cartier’s broadest comedy.
Gislebertus · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the still, frontal judge at the centre and the clawed hands on a soul’s head at the lower right. One law governs both. The body is drawn by its meaning, size as rank, length as spirit, contortion as damnation, and everything in the field, angel, devil, apostle and soul, is cut in the same linear idiom of long folds and hooked edges. The range runs from God to the damned and from the eternal to the tombs, and it holds. What holds the axis at 8.8, below the top, is that the left half’s ceremonial regularity and the right half’s turbulence come close to two manners, reconciled by the frame of the semicircle more than by one touch.
Maya · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stone serpent head at the foot of the north stair and the serpent columns of the summit temple, or the calendar of the faces and the shadow on the balustrade. They obey one law, of the four quarters, the count of time and the feathered serpent, and it places every element from the base to the temple door. The asymmetry of the north stair and north door is lawful, the principal axis of a radial figure. The range is wider than it looks: a calendar, a mountain, a god and the sun in one geometry. What holds it from the top: narrowness is not coherence, and much of the coherence is that of a repeated mass, four faces alike; and the temple’s interior and exterior speak less clearly to each other than the pyramid’s parts do.
Tibetan, under the Fifth Dalai Lama · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the White Palace, the house of administration and of the living ruler, whitewashed and broad; and the gold-roofed tomb chapels on the summit of the Red Palace, the house of the dead and of worship. They obey one law. The same battered wall, the same window narrowing upward in its black frame, the same frieze, the same flat roof and pillared interior govern both, and the colour is the only change, stating function within the law rather than breaking it. The law holds across a wide range, from the seventh-century cave to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s tomb chapel of the 1930s, which keeps the idiom of 1690. Held below the top because three centuries of accretion inside the Red Palace leave a maze: the law governs the vocabulary more than the order of the rooms.
Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus of Rhodes (attributed) · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the younger son dying at the left, his head fallen back, and the elder son at the right, still alert, turning to his father. One law governs both. Every body is at the place in the coil that sets its fate, and the coil is continuous. The tone holds throughout, one register of agony in three degrees, and the scale holds as a convention. What strains the law is the elder son’s partial independence, in the composition and in the open question of where he belongs, and the frontality, which is one law for the front and a weaker one for the round. The range covered is narrow in kind, three bodies and one event, and narrowness is not coherence.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the front on the water and the friars’ choir behind the screen. The front is the state’s face: stone, temple front, steps. The choir is poverty: plain walls and stalls. They obey one law, the classical order applied with decreasing richness as the building passes from the city to the friars, so that the gradient from magnificence to austerity is itself ordered. Inside, one order and one palette govern nave, chapels, tribune and screen, and the thermal window recurs. The range is wide, from civic ceremony to mendicant prayer. What bends the law is the exterior seen in the round: a stone front, plain brick flanks, and a dome with two slender turrets that speak a Venetian, half-Eastern language of the skyline rather than the front’s Roman one.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the convex centre of the west front and the Altar of Mercy. Both obey the law of the curve swelling into space, the façade bowed outward, the canopy opening from every side. Inside, one law governs everything, curvature, interpenetration and light, from the ovals of the plan to the cornices, the stucco and the altar, in one palette of white, gold and rose, over a range from the high altar’s liturgy to the popular shrine. What breaks the law is the exterior’s massing: a Latin cross with transepts and a regular nave, an older law that does not know the ovals, so that outside and inside give two answers. Narrowness is not coherence, and the interior’s register is narrow.
Robert Schumann · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comic triangle of no. 11 and the burial of no. 16. One law governs them: the voice states a feeling and the piano reveals what the feeling hides, or what it leaves behind. No. 11 tells a heartbreak as a cheerful old story in E flat; no. 16 buries the songs and the piano keeps singing. The key plan supports it: a flatward drift by fifths, seven of fifteen joins, to the E flat minor of no. 13, and a frame in which the C sharp left hanging in no. 1 becomes the D flat of the last bars. The tension: the drift is broken by leaps, G minor to E flat and E flat minor to B, and the frame is enharmonic, heard more on paper than in the hall. The range governed is one love remembered, and narrowness is not coherence.
Titian · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the still, empty sea with the tiny ship at the far left, and the dense, noisy pile of the rout at the far right. They obey one law, that of the division and the colour scale, which gives the left to cool absence and the right to warm presence and lets the god’s body bridge them. The tonal range, from the solemn stars to the comic child satyr with the calf’s head, is wide, and it holds: the comic and the dreadful in the rout both belong to the god, and Ariadne’s terror belongs to the same instant as his desire. Held below the top because the range is that of a moment, not a world, and at the right edge the figures pile up more than they are placed.
Otto Dix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: everything is rendered with the same unflinching exactness, and every panel answers the altar’s order. Take the most distant elements, the grey march of the left wing and the red fire of the right, or the crowded day of the centre and the still night of the predella: they obey the same physics of light, time and body, and the same refusal to look away. The cool of the dawn and the heat of the evening are the two ends of one day. The range is wide, from the living column to the decayed dead, from a single deed to a heap of bodies, from a sky on fire to the dark of the dugout. Held below 9 because the centre obeys the law less strictly than the wings: its accumulation is at moments additive, a law of inventory beside the wings’ law of the single figure.
Roman Polanski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Gittes telling his operatives a dirty joke about a Chinaman while Evelyn stands behind him, and Evelyn’s death in Chinatown. One law governs both: Gittes is always a step behind what is happening in the room, and his confidence is the measure of his blindness. The comedy of the nose, Gittes’s jokes and the rest home’s crocheted quilts obey the same law as the slaps and the shot. The public crime and the private one are one law of possession, and the police confirm it at the close. The range is wide for a genre film, from comedy of manners to incest and murder. The strain is slight: the orange grove leans to action-picture rules, and the last crowd is staged more loosely than the rest.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the lieutenant’s gothic childhood, a ghost in a dark house and a poisoning, and a hostess at her door in a dressing-gown, her guests a day early. One law covers them: decorum continues, and whatever it cannot absorb is displaced into story or dream. The law holds for the bishop, the soldiers, the police and the gunmen, and the range is wide, from drawing-room comedy through ghost story and political murder to the stage, under one tone of composure. The strain is in two joints. The lieutenant’s and the sergeant’s tales are attached to the six only by being heard, and bring a grief and terror the main body keeps at arm’s length; the bishop’s killing blurs a line the rest of the film draws deliberately.
José Clemente Orozco · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
One law: fire. Take the two most distant elements, the burning figure at the apex and the grey figures of the ring at the base of the dome. They obey the same physics: the grey bodies are the matter the fire has not yet taken, and the gradient from them to him is the dome’s one movement, from earth colour to flame. Read with the chapel below, the law extends: the iron, conquest and crowd of the cycle are the same energy misused, and the dome is that energy turned upon itself. Nothing in the unit contradicts the law. Held at 8.8, two tenths below The Starry Night, because the range covered is not wide, one figure, a ring and one colour argument, and coherence that is partly narrowness is discounted.
J. M. Coetzee · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the campus comedy of the committee, with its jargon of sensitivity and its request for a statement, and the violence on the Eastern Cape smallholding, the burning and the rape. One law governs both: each is a demand that a man account for himself to a power he does not recognise, and each answers him with a loss of standing. The opera, which looks like ornament, obeys the same law, moving from Byron’s desire to the aging Teresa and a banjo, as Lurie’s own desire moves to care. The range is wide for a short book: satire, horror, pastoral and something close to devotion. The charge is that the single consciousness narrows the field: coherence is partly secured by having only one mind to cohere.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the dream of an orderly American life meets a disorder that rises from inside it, and no one can be known. Take the two most distant elements, the opening’s adolescent adoration of the Swede in wartime Newark and the fork raised to Lou Levov’s eye at the dinner party of 1973. They obey the same law: the hero worship is the first pastoral, the fork the counterpastoral in a drawing room, and each is a failure to see a person as they are. The law covers the glove factory, the riot, the bomb, the affair between Dawn and Bill Orcutt that the Swede glimpses in the kitchen, and his own brief affair with Sheila Salzman, Merry’s speech therapist, who hid her after the bombing. Charged: the frame’s law, that all this is Zuckerman’s invention, lapses once the chronicle starts, and the satire of the dinner guests shifts the register further than the law needs.
David Fincher · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stabbing at Lake Berryessa, silent and in daylight, and the newsroom comedy of Avery’s riffs and the inspectors’ banter over animal crackers. One law governs both: knowledge arrives in fragments, out of context, and too late. The killing is seen whole by the camera and by no one who could use it; the jokes are men handling dread as information. The same law holds the call to Melvin Belli on live television, where the voice may not be the killer’s, and the closing line-up, where certainty arrives twenty-two years after it could matter. The range is wide, horror, comedy and a quiet domestic drama, and the law covers it. The strain: the Graysmith third gives way to a more ordinary amateur’s thriller, and the film leans toward Allen.
John Fowler and Benjamin Baker · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the granite piers of the southern approach viaduct, masonry rising from the shore, and the suspended girder spans hung between cantilever tips in mid-channel. One law governs both: load brought to ground by the shortest legible path, each part shaped by what it carries. The same law makes a tube thick where it pushes and a lattice open where it pulls, splays the towers’ legs against the wind, and curves the bottom chord to the line of thrust. The range runs from stone to steel and from rivet to tower. What holds the axis: the range is that of one function, and narrowness is not coherence; and the approach viaducts, plain girders on piers, keep the law in a quieter key.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Gare de Lyon, all speed and hands, and the prison visit, all stillness and faces. One law governs both: the self is known only in what it does with its body, and the camera watches acts, not states. The theft and the kiss through the bars are shot by the same law, and that is the film’s argument, that the hand that takes and the face that turns at last are one person’s. The mother’s death, the inspector’s patience and the racecourse obey it too. The strain is at the end: the turn to Jeanne comes with a speed and a warmth the rest of the film has not prepared, and a second law, grace from outside its physics, can be felt arriving. The range is narrow for most of the film, and narrowness earns nothing.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: I, a child’s death under the ice, and X, a black comedy about stamps and a kidney. One law governs both. A desire placed in the wrong object — calculation in I, the collection in X — takes a body from its owner, and chance completes the cost. X ends with the brothers laughing over the same stamps, the inheritance accepted as a joke rather than a curse. The law also holds across the films’ different looks: V’s filters and IX’s cool interiors are both governed by the block, the watcher and Preisner’s music. The strain is the commandment scheme, a law declared at the top and loosely kept below. Ten precepts kept as themes rather than as rules hold this axis a step below the form.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the world goes on by its own order and gives nothing back to what is done in it, and what persists of any act is a story told by someone else. Take the two most distant elements, the she-wolf in the trap in the bootheel in the first part and the light of the Trinity test in the last pages. They obey the same law: each is a thing of the world taken hold of by men and turned to their uses, and each is witnessed by Billy, who can do nothing but see. The law holds the comic and the grave, the travelling players and the gypsies’ haggling, the small talk of ranch hands and the priest’s theodicy. Held below the top because the Spanish dialogues of the second crossing sometimes run on a looser law, local colour more than the book’s argument.
R.E.M. · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: mortality met with tenderness, in a hushed, slow, acoustic space. The two most distant elements obey it. Man on the Moon, a comic catalogue of icons and hoaxes, and Sweetness Follows, a family at a burial, both ask what lives on after a death, and both answer in the same low light. Try Not to Breathe and Find the River, a dying and a passage, frame the law from either end, and comedy and grief, the bedroom and the grave, are held inside it. Held from the top: the law strains at The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite, a novelty, and at Star Me Kitten, where tenderness blurs into desire, and it breaks once, at Ignoreland, an angry tirade in a harsher mix.
W. G. Sebald · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the moths at Andromeda Lodge on the Welsh coast, collected by Gerald’s uncle and dying in their own time, and the inventory of Terezín. One law governs them: everything made or living falls into the time that consumes it, and the orders human beings impose, collections, fortifications, timetables, ghettos, both resist that and serve it. The law holds from the opening in the Antwerp zoo to the close at Breendonk. The range of matter is wide: natural history, military architecture, astronomy and time, theatre, a Calvinist childhood, the Holocaust. Charged: the tonal range is narrow, one grief throughout, and narrowness is not coherence; and the equivalence the law implies between a moth’s death and a deportation is one the book does not always earn.
The masons under Ismaila Traoré · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the great piers of the hall, mass at its heaviest, and the ostrich eggs on the tower summits, the lightest touch on the skyline. One law governs both, earth shaped by hand and finished in plaster, and one rhythm runs from platform to pinnacle: the pilaster, the toron, the battered face, the rounded arris the hand leaves. Inside and out, wall and pier, the material and the method do not change. The one possible break is the symmetry of the eastern wall, which some read as a foreign law laid on the tradition; in the building as it stands it reads as the tradition’s own rhythm carried to order. Held because the range is moderate, one material, one structural system, one register, and narrowness is not coherence.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole: nothing holds its pitch or its edge, and the voice is inside the sound, not in front of it. The two most distant elements obey it. Only Shallow is assault and Blown a Wish a lullaby, and both bend the same way; Touched, tone without song, and Soon, a dance track, are both guitar dissolved into something else. Nothing breaks the law. But narrowness is not coherence. The range runs from violence to tenderness inside one register of erotic dream, with no satire, no narrative, no elegy and no public voice, and that, not any breach, holds the figure.
Nabataean · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a betyl, a plain block in a niche in the Siq, and the figured goddess of al-Khazneh’s tholos. They obey one law. Both are made by taking away from the rock, both face the passer on the sacred road, and the classical figure sits within an Arabian logic of the god in the stone. The crow-step tombs and the Hellenistic fronts share the same cut, the same face and the same blank interiors; the hydraulics follow the same rock; the theatre is cut through the older tombs in the same material. The law is wide, and it holds from the cleft to the summit altars. What resists: the Byzantine city, where the Petra Church, masonry laid with mosaics, obeys another physics; and many hands over two centuries, sharing a practice rather than one design.
Achaemenid, under Darius I and Xerxes · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the colossal bulls at the Gate, and the smallest figure on the Apadana stair, a man of a far people holding a cup or leading an animal. They obey one law. Everything is frontal or in profile procession, calm, in files and registers, each figure in its rank; the many converge on the one; the hall is a square grid of columns; the doorway has its cavetto cornice. The law held across three reigns and more than a century, and later kings built to it. The range is wide in scale, from mountain terrace to carved bracelet, and in content, the nations of half the known world. But the mode is narrow by design, one register of calm, no narrative, and narrowness is not coherence. The axis is held there.
Pink Floyd · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the pressures of an ordinary life, carried in one unbroken passage between two heartbeats, and the sanity they wear down. The two most distant elements obey it. On the Run, a synthesiser sequence with footsteps, and the Great Gig in the Sky, a wordless voice over piano, are the same fear, of motion and of death, set once as machine and once as body. Money’s satire and the hymn of Us and Them meet in their saxophone and in the theme of division. The range runs from tape collage and soul to blues rock, a sequencer and a choral finale. The law strains at Money, where sympathy turns to caricature, and at Any Colour You Like, which obeys by sound alone. Two strains, no break.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The two most distant elements are the silver shaft of 1898, wordless and bodily, and the bowling alley of 1927, all talk and grotesque comedy. One law governs them: appetite with no object but more, and its consequence, isolation. Plainview is alone in the frame at the start and on the floor of his own house at the end. The middle obeys the same physics: every bond is weighed as a lease, every claim of kinship as a pitch, and the milkshake speech is the film’s governing act carried to its end. The range is wide, from documentary labour to farce, and the law holds across it. One strain holds the figure: the epilogue’s register, its comedy prepared by the film’s argument but not by its earlier tone. The slack middle hour is a matter of length, not a break in the law.
Ursula K. Le Guin · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole, and the widest range obeys it. Take the two most distant elements, the court politics of Erhenrang and the Orgota Creation Myth: both obey the law of the cold and of the doubled sex. The climate makes the people’s slowness, their hearths, their absence of war, raids and feuds but no armies, until Orgoreyn learns the nation. The biology makes shifgrethor, the Domains, the kemmerhouses and the absence of a fixed division of labour. The religions answer climate and biology: the Handdara with its praise of darkness and ignorance, the Yomesh with its demand for light. The Ekumen’s quiet method, one envoy sent alone, is the outside law that tests the inside one. Nothing breaks the world. Held below the top because Orgoreyn is less fully worked than Karhide.
Jane Austen · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: in a world where marriage is the only provision for women and money the condition of choice, every character is judged by how far self-love governs their judgment and their conduct. Take the two most distant elements, Collins’s proposal (19), pure farce, and Lydia’s elopement (46), a near ruin that threatens every sister. They obey the same law: Collins proposes out of self-regard and the economy of the entail, and Lydia’s ruin comes of a vanity her parents’ indulgence fed and Wickham exploits for money. Mrs Bennet’s nerves and Lady Catherine’s condescension are the same failing in two classes. The tone obeys it too: comedy throughout, held over the possibility of disgrace. The coherence is complete. What holds the axis below the top is the range it covers, three or four families and one great house, and narrowness is not coherence.
Robert Smithson · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the straight stem leaving the shore, which belongs to the road, the causeway and the oil jetty, the human line laid across the land; and the closed centre of the coil, which belongs to the whirlpool and the crystal. They obey one law: a path of the site’s own rock, laid on the water, turning. The stem is the coil before it turns; the coil is the stem given back to the lake. The law holds across scales, the salt crystal, the walker’s path, the coil, the basin in its hills, and across time, since the white crust of the re-emerged work and the red water of 1970 are one process at two moments. No element is of a second kind. Held for the size of the territory: one material, one figure, one gesture.
Giorgione · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the lightning at the top of the sky and the infant at the breast in the right foreground. They obey one law: one light, one moment, one wet air, everything from the town’s walls to the woman’s skin painted at the same pitch of tone. The unease is the law. The figures do not address each other, the weather does not address them, the columns are broken, and nothing in the picture breaks the silence. The range covers sky, town, ruin, water, trees, a man, a woman and a child, and it holds. Held below the top because the range is moderate in kind, and because the plinth and its columns sit a little apart from the painted world, a sign set into it.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the white steel frame outside the glass, industrial, repeated and open, and the primavera core inside it, warm, solid, enclosed and singular. They obey one law: a freestanding object in an unbounded space between two planes, each part an element placed, none an enclosure built. The terrace obeys it as a second plane offset from the first, the wardrobe as a second object, the steps as planes slipped between planes. The grid rules the stone, the bays rule the frame, and the glass is the condition that lets the law be seen. Nothing contradicts it. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: one room on one meadow is the smallest territory on which a law can be kept, and the law excludes the life it would have had to govern, the screens, the furniture of a dwelling, the climate.
Ife · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the body: a canon of calm, symmetrical, idealised naturalism at life-size, the eyes heavy-lidded, the lips firm, the expression withdrawn. Take the two most distant elements, the plain unstriated head and the crowned head with its tiers of beads and its crest, or the copper mask with its slits beneath the eyes and a striated head in brass: they obey the same law of face and the same proportion. The law reaches, as context shows, into the Ita Yemoo figures and the seated figure of Tada, which carry the naturalism into the body, though the full figures take the larger head of Yoruba proportion. But narrowness is not coherence, and the scored body is narrow, all faces and mostly one type. The force of the law is credited and the span it covers charged.
Käthe Kollwitz · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
One law holds the whole: closure, weight, lowness, apartness. The two most distant elements are the father’s upright, open-eyed, contained rigidity and the mother’s bowed collapse with her face hidden. They obey the same physics: each a body kneeling and closed upon itself, of the same stone, at the same scale and the same distance from the graves. The field obeys it too: the flat plates are the extreme case of lowness and closure, and the parents are the living version of the same law. Narrowness is not coherence, and the range is not wide, but it is wider than it looks: it holds the two sexes, two kinds of grief, the living and the dead, and a nation’s cemetery. Under Las Meninas at 9.4 and The Large Bathers at 9.2, a tenth under Water Lilies.
Naguib Mahfouz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: time passing through a house and changing it, seen with the same patient, ironic and sympathetic eye. Take the two most distant elements, the father’s nights of lute and drink with singers and the grandsons’ prison cells for their opposed faiths: both obey that law. So do the comedy of Yasin’s appetites and the grief for Fahmy. The range is wide, farce, tragedy, love story, political novel and novel of ideas, and the tone holds across it. The third volume’s acceleration is a change of tempo, not of law. Charged slightly for the middle volume’s long passages of Kamal’s argument, which at times press the novel toward the essay.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
One law, the grid and the rectangle, runs from the paving of the plaza into the lobby, up every elevation and into the ceilings. Take the two most distant elements: the pools in the open plaza and the Johnson rooms at the rear. They obey the same discipline of plane, proportion and material, the rooms in a warmer key, which tests the law and keeps it. Where it strains: the rear spine and wings, which the front’s purity cannot fully absorb, so that the side elevations show a building of two parts; and the I-sections, whose claim to show the structure is contradicted by the encased structure behind them, a contradiction the building chooses rather than resolves. The range is narrow, and narrowness is not coherence; the figure credits a law held without exception across a modest range.
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Spaceship’s catastrophe at full force and Knee Play 5’s quiet story of lovers on a bench. One law governs both, repetition with slow change: in the music under each, the counting chorus and the cycle; in the image, each family transformed the third time; in the dance, the diagonal and the spins; in the texts, Knowles’s word-patterns permuted like the music’s cells. The law covers music, light, movement, speech and stage machinery, and that breadth is why the figure is high. The strain is in the spoken texts. Johnson’s speeches are narrative and sentimental in a work that otherwise refuses narrative, and the Trials’ verbal comedy runs on a looser rule than the music beneath it. Their being repeated material answers most of the strain, not all.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gilt finial of the chair, hard metal, and the eyes, the most alive thing in the picture. One law governs both and everything between: every surface is red light seen at audience distance, and each is given as much finish as its share in the looking requires, the eyes most, the drapery least. The law holds from the hanging to the paper to the ring without a break in tone or touch, and nothing in the canvas contradicts it. But the range is narrow: one figure, one colour, one moment, one register. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure records a law held completely over a small territory.
Built for Taira no Kiyomori · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the closed honden of 1571, inmost and highest in rank, and the gate of 1875 standing alone in the open sea. They obey one law: the same vermilion and white, the same horizontal discipline, the same orientation on one axis across the water, the same relation to the tide, for the honden stands on the sea at high water as the gate does. The corridors carry that law through every part, bending at right angles over the water and binding the Marōdo shrine, the stages and the Noh stage into it. The rebuildings and additions of four centuries kept the law rather than breaking it. Held below the top because the range is narrow, one register, one colour, one horizontal mode, and because the Noh stage, though conformed, sits a little apart from the axis’s argument.
R.E.M. · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: everything half heard, a voice inside the band, a region remembered as sound. The two most distant elements obey it. Radio Free Europe, the fastest and most single-like song, and Perfect Circle, the slowest and stillest, both set the voice inside the texture and both hold the same chime. The tense, garbled 9-9 and the slight We Walk keep the law in different keys, the one by distortion, the other by a childlike lightness, and nothing on the record breaks it; the sleeve, a landscape overgrown, keeps it too. Held from the top because narrowness is not coherence: one band of tempo, one palette and one manner of voice make the law easier to keep, and a wider record governed as well would stand higher.
Artemisia Gentileschi · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gold damask and the bracelet, the luxury of a woman dressed to seduce, and the blood jetting from the neck. They obey one law. Everything is lit by the one raking light, and everything serves the act. The finery is what Judith wore to enter the tent, now soiled at the sleeve; the bracelet is on the arm that does the killing. The same law governs the maid’s coarse sleeve and the red coverlet, the sheet and the sword. One physics, force meeting force under one light, holds across the field, and nothing escapes into decoration. Held below the top because the range is narrow by design: one instant, three bodies, one bed. Narrowness is not coherence, and the coherence here is complete within a deliberately small world.
Ancient Egyptian, under Ramesses II · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the battle of Kadesh, chariots and a camp in confusion, and the seated gods in the dark of the sanctuary. They obey one law, the king’s divinity, by which a battle is a cosmic act and the sanctuary holds the warrior as a god. The same law governs the façade and the sun’s entry, the baboons and the name in the niche, the captive rows and the Osiris pillars. The two temples share it: east-facing fronts of colossi cut from the rock, an axis into the hill, the king in both, a solar temple and a Hathoric one, male and female, side by side on one bank. The range is wide, war, death, marriage and cosmos. Held below the top by the Small Temple’s looser relation to the larger, two works on one law rather than one structure, and by the crowding of the interior walls.
George Bähr · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the curve of the bell. Take the two most distant elements, the lantern at the top and the pulpit at the floor; both stand on the central axis and both obey the same rising curve of the section, which runs from the canted corners through the galleries to the dome. The corner towers repeat the dome in small. Inside, the ring of galleries answers the dome, and the vertical of the altar wall answers the lantern. The coherence is close to complete. The altar’s exuberant sculpture, louder than the grave exterior, is a small seam.
Edward Yang · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Yang-Yang dropping a water balloon on a teacher, and the killing in the Fatty strand. One law is meant to govern both: every person acts from a part of the truth and cannot see the rest, and others bear the consequences. The balloon falls on the wrong head; the killing comes from a boy who cannot see what he is in. NJ’s honest dealing and his partners’ imitation, Min-Min’s retreat and Ting-Ting’s guilt over the garbage obey the same law, and the even distance of the camera treats each alike. The range is wide, from a child’s comedy to a birth, a death and a murder. The strain is in the murder, which brings a crime film’s logic into a physics of ordinary life, and in A-Di’s broader tone.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: sound emerging from silence and returning to it, grace and violence alike arising out of stillness. The two most distant elements obey it. Desire’s eruption of distortion and drums and Wealth’s hushed organ hymn are opposite poles, appetite and surrender, and both are built the same way, out of long quiet toward a single movement. Blues harmonica, a choir, jazz trumpet, a double bass and feedback all serve the one law, and none sounds borrowed. The range is wide in instruments and in feeling, from terror to devotion, and narrow in tempo and procedure: every piece moves slowly, shaped from quiet to height and back. That sameness, not any break, holds it below the top.
Giacomo Puccini · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Benoit’s comic rent scene and Mimì’s death. One law governs them: the life of these people is play conducted against want, and the same quick idiom carries both. The friends get rid of the landlord with a joke because they cannot pay him; at the end they cannot pay a doctor, and the joke has run out. Act II’s carnival and Act III’s frozen dawn rhyme by place, the café and the tavern at the barrier, warmth seen from inside and from outside. The themes recur and bind the span. Held below the top by Act II, where spectacle strains the law, and by Musetta, who moves from comic coquette to moral centre with less preparation than the change asks.
Gerhard of Cologne and successors; completed by Ernst Friedrich Zwirner · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the choir of the 1260s to 1320s, of Drachenfels stone and French in idiom, and the tops of the west towers of the 1870s, of sandstone set by an iron age. They obey one law. The completion followed the medieval drawing and the medieval bay system, and from choir to spire one Gothic system governs, pier, vault, flyer, gable and tracery, at every scale from window to tower. Across six centuries of making that is a rare coherence, and the range is wide, from chapel to tower. What bends it: the later work keeps the law by obedience, and shows it in the colour of its stone and a mechanical regularity of detail; and the hidden iron roof is another physics under the stone one.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One physics governs, and it is a ledger. The Horned Beast of the opening and the thing with horns in the Roses’ house are one creature, and the same horned pressure waits outside door 137 in an audit near the close; the bowel movement that authenticates a vote and the statement that credits a massacre to the last man to touch it are one bookkeeping. Consent collapses into function in every register, from scatological satire to administered elegy. The bunker gathers the book’s objects into one archive, a hockey-card box, a varsity jacket torn by wire, a guard’s clipboard, a child’s sweater, a row of Lagados, one with its vent hose cut, so that the most distant parts are shown to have been filed together. The supernatural obeys the same law: the coffin that will not go down is an entry that will not close, and the balloon hangs lower once a weight has gone into it. Held below the top by the seam between the opening grotesque and the bunker’s metaphysics, which the law spans but does not smooth.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: what holds after the worker leaves, and what no category without a physical test can judge. A ravine, a market, a rink, a kill floor, a block, a gym, a graveside, a store office, a garage and a demolition container obey it alike. The chronology survives every check: born in 1948, ten in the Saraguay wood, sixteen in January 1964, twenty-nine at the block in March 1977, forty-seven in October 1995, when the file gives eighteen years of continuous service and a Saturday with the World Series on three televisions and the referendum on the radio places the chair on 28 October; fifty-six in Colorado. Every dateline, age and season agrees. What holds it short of the top is that the consistency is bought partly with narrowness, and two registers, the hockey play-by-play and a vintner’s long account in Early Harvest, sit at the edge of the law.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a black arc a metre long, thrown fast and thin, and a pooled white blot where the paint fell thick and stood. They obey one law, and it is physical: paint leaving a hand in motion and falling onto a flat surface. Every mark is that event at some speed and some thickness, and there is no second kind of mark, no brushed passage, no drawn contour, no correction; the four colours obey it alike. The law is more total than Guernica’s, where the newsprint texture is a second rule used once. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is narrow: one event, four colours, one scale of making. The range within it, from the longest line to the stillest pool and from full cover to bare ground, is wider than the Rothko Chapel’s maroon to black and narrower than Monet’s dawn to dusk. Held for the territory’s size.
August Sander · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a farm couple in the Westerwald in the 1910s and a political prisoner or a man in the uniform of the regime in the 1930s; or the painter of the avant garde and the inmate of an asylum. They obey one law: the sitter faces the camera in his or her own role, in plain light, at the same distance, sharp, unflattered and unmocked. The law holds across class, decade, regime, sanity and death, and the range it governs is the widest a portrait photograph can cover, a whole society over forty years. Narrowness is not coherence, and this is not narrow. Held below the top because the categories sometimes strain against the pictures, and the late folders of the persecuted break the original cycle, as history broke it.
Raymond Hood and the Associated Architects · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the six-storey Fifth Avenue pavilion with its garden roof and the 70-storey slab; or the Music Hall auditorium and the service levels under the street. They obey one law: limestone and the vertical pier, setback massing, the axis, and the principle that the ground is given to the pedestrian while service is pushed below. The range is wide, from garden to theatre to tower to the underground, and the law holds across it. That is the achievement of the Associated Architects working as one office: three firms and fourteen buildings read as one place. Narrowness is not the explanation; the range is wide. What holds the figure is the edge: on the side streets and at Sixth Avenue the buildings are fabric with the family resemblance but not the logic of the centre.
João Gilberto · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the voice at speaking level, level with the guitar, over a pulse that does not change speed within a song, with nothing pressed. The two most distant elements obey it. “Hô-ba-la-lá”, near-nonsense syllables over the beat, and “Aos Pés da Cruz”, an old samba of the 1940s with a lament for its text, are sung in the same voice, in the same band of tempo and with the same balance, and the second is not made solemn nor the first made comic. The range covered is wider than it sounds: three decades of Brazilian song, from Ary Barroso and Caymmi to the new writers, comic and grieving, major and minor. The range of dynamic and tempo is narrow by design, which is the law and not a lapse; but narrowness is not coherence, and it holds the axis below 9.0.
Paul Auster · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: a man who gives himself to watching or writing another loses himself in the other, and his story becomes the room in which he is shut. Take the two most distant elements: Blue in a rented room in Brooklyn Heights in 1947, in a fable whose persons are colours, and the narrator of The Locked Room in a Paris bar, fighting a stranger whom he insists on calling Fanshawe. They obey the same law: each has become the man he was set to find. The red notebook, the pseudonyms, the rooms and the disappearances recur across three registers and keep their meaning in each. The range, from fable to realist novel to metafiction, is wide for so short a work, and the law holds across all of it. Held off the top because the last novel’s claim that the three are one story asks to be taken partly on trust, and the return of Quinn’s name in it bends the law of the first book.
Henri Rousseau · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the moon at the upper right, remote and cold, and the striped robe in the lower foreground, the warmest and most patterned thing in the picture. They obey one law: everything is lit by the same even light, held in its own contour, set parallel to the picture plane and still. The lion, the most violent possibility in the field, obeys the law too; its threat is as fixed as the hills. The range is wide for a picture of two figures: the cosmos and the earth, the beast and the human, music and sleep, the near and the far, and nothing breaks the physics. What resists slightly: the stars, small and scattered, have less presence than the law gives everything else, and the sleeper’s pose sits a little apart from the frieze, tilted toward the viewer, as if drawn from another position.
English embroiderers (probably Canterbury) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Edward’s deathbed and the stripped corpses in the lower border at Hastings; or a beast fable in the border and Harold’s death. They obey one law: the same scale of figure, the same palette, the same convention of colour for depth, the same strip and the same two borders, held across about 68 metres and several lengths of linen. The range is wide: court, church, sea, field, kitchen, battle, fable and the heavens. The borders bend to the story without breaking their rule, which is the strongest evidence of one law. What holds the axis below the top: the borders’ relation to the main field is not uniformly governed, long stretches of ornament, then sudden pointed comment, then erotic figures with no settled reading; and the lost and restored end leaves the close of the law unknowable.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Gaear feeding Carl’s leg into the woodchipper in a snowy yard, and Norm telling Marge in bed that his mallard will be on the three-cent stamp. One law governs both: people in this world are absorbed in small tasks and small wants, and whether the want is a ransom, a stamp, a car or a breakfast buffet, it is pursued with the same flat attention. The killers are ordinary men made terrible by the pettiness that makes Jerry pathetic and Norm content, and Marge’s competence is the same attention turned outward. The law holds the comedy of manners and the killings in one register across the whole film, a wide range for a crime film. The strain is slight: the Yanagita episode obeys the law of the inquiry only obliquely, and the escort scenes lean to a broader comedy than the rest.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the sitter’s face, lit and inward, and the animal’s claws gripping her sleeve. One law governs them: everything on the panel is a living body turned by one impulse toward one light, and modelled by that light alone. Woman and animal share the turn, the light and the alertness; the hand mediates between them in the same modelling; the dress and the beads take the same light and fall away into the same shadow. Nothing the painter made contradicts the law. The one passage that stands outside it is the black ground, held to be a later hand’s, which flattens a space and makes the figure a silhouette on a void. The range is narrow, one person, one animal, one light, and narrowness is not coherence: held below the top for the range.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the black sky at the top edge and the red path at the bottom centre. They obey one law. Both are worked in the same paint, and both press toward the viewer rather than recede. The loaded stroke, laid by direction, carries field, sky, path and bird alike, and the colour keeps one logic of complementary contrast from top to bottom. The crows, the most foreign element, are made of the same mark in another colour. The unity is real and strict. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range governed is narrow: four elements, one place, one moment of weather. The law is complete over a small domain. A picture that brings a household, a room and a mirror under one light, or fourteen figures, trees and sky under one structure, does more under its law.
Mexica · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the face at the centre and the edge band at the rim, or the date 13 Reed at the top and the two faces in the serpents’ jaws at the bottom. One law governs them: everything on the disc is a measure of solar time and of its sustaining by sacrifice, placed by its scale outward from the present. Days, ages, the year, the sun’s fire and the boundary serpents all obey the one geometry and the one theology. The range is wide, from a single day sign to the whole history of the world, and nothing contradicts the law. Held below the top because the law is one of diagram, and a diagram’s coherence costs less than a scene’s; the range is of scale more than of kind.
Otto Wagner · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs from the farthest outside to the farthest inside: the bolt head on the front, the rivet on the column, the aluminium cap on the attic figure and the aluminium outlet in the hall obey the same principle, a made surface that shows how it is made and serves. The hall and the fronts differ in tone, one luminous and floating, the other grave and gridded, and yet they read as one physics, skin over frame, light over use. The range is wide in scale, from the city front on the square to the handle on a door. The law loosens in two places: at the cornice figures, an older allegorical register, and in the routine office floors, which merely continue the order.
Three Kingdoms Korea · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the face at the top, inward and smiling, and the foot on the lotus at the bottom, set on the ground. One law holds them: every part of the figure is a slow curve, and every curve turns either inward to the thought or outward to the world, the two balanced across the body. The softness of the torso, the rhythm of the folds, the line of the arm and the bowed head are made by one hand in one temperament, and nothing is louder than the rest. Nothing contradicts the law. But narrowness is not coherence: one figure in one state is a small territory to govern, and the figure is held below the top for that range.
Liao builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stone platform and the iron finial, or a dark braced storey and the bright hall of images above it. One law governs them. The octagon and the module of the timber section run from the platform’s edge to the foot of the spire; each storey diminishes from the one below by the same logic; light and dark alternate as stiff and flexible alternate, so that the law of the structure and the law of the visit are one. The clay images sit at the centres of the frame, not against it. The range is wide, stone to iron, clay to timber, a hall of colossal scale to a hidden crawl space. Held below the top because later plaques and repairs sit on the work without its law, and the exterior’s even rhythm is narrower than the interior’s.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gold opening at the top, where the angels dance, and the cracks in the earth at the bottom, where the devils go. One law holds them: everything in the picture is placed on a single vertical of being and moves toward reconciliation. The olive branch, carried by angels in every register, is the thread of that law; the angels lead, embrace, sing and dance, so one agency runs from heaven to the pit. Scale obeys the law, not optics, and does so consistently: the Virgin is largest because she is nearest the event. The range is wide, heaven to hell, joy to flight, the eternal to a dated year. Held below the top because the middle register is less firmly bound to the law than the ring and the embraces.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the cantilevered corner of the plate at the street and the wall of the sunken garden at the back. They obey one law: the grid, the free-standing support, the stone plane, the set-back enclosure. The two marble shafts in the hall, the stairs, the granite paving and the black steel are governed by the same module and the same refusal of ornament. The range is not wide, one palette of materials and one order of space, and narrowness is not coherence. What holds the axis below the top is the lower floor: its galleries, cellular and artificially lit, are of a different law from the hall above, and a visitor feels the change of world on the stair.
Alberto Burri · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the aerial image of the whole, a white shape on a brown hill, and a single fissure walked at noon, a corridor of white walls and sky. They obey one law: mass where life was, void where it moved, all of it white, all of it cast over the ruin. The same law governs every block and every street, the edge of the field against the uncast slope, and the relation of studio crackle to geological crack. The completion of 2015 obeys it too, and that is the test of a law: other hands, after the maker’s death, continued it without breaking it. The range is wide in scale, from a body’s width to a town, and narrow in kind. Held below the top because narrowness of material and treatment makes the law easy to keep.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the suburb remembered from adulthood, prison and paradise at once, and time running out on the remembering. The two most distant elements obey it. Month of May, a fast punk thrash, and Sprawl II, a synthesised disco song, are the two ways out of the suburb the record knows, the rage of youth and the dance away from the dead malls, and the reprise brings both back to the place. Empty Room, Chassagne’s string-driven sprint, is the same isolation at speed. One band sounds the whole, and from the punk of one song to the disco of another nothing breaks the law. The limit is range: the mood is held in a wistful middle ground, narrowness is not coherence, and Rococo and Modern Man obey the law by restating it rather than extending it.
Massive Attack · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: desire pressed under dread, at a slow pulse, in a closed room at night. The two most distant elements obey it. Teardrop, the most open and luminous track, sets love as action over a heartbeat; Inertia Creeps, the densest and most abrasive, sets love as a creeping, sleepless betrayal; the pulse under both is the same. Horace Andy’s reggae voice in Man Next Door, Fraser’s singing and the heavy guitar of Group Four are all bent to one pressure, and five voices across eleven tracks never break it. What holds the figure: the range is narrow, one tempo band and one mood, and narrowness is not coherence; and Man Next Door obeys by treatment more than by its own matter.
Interpol · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: desire held at a distance in a city at night, and release possible only in sound. The two most distant elements are Untitled, a wash of guitar with the voice barely present, and Roland, the fastest and most jagged song; they obey the law in that both keep the human at a distance, one by blur and one by speed and edge. Stella’s descent and The New’s release meet in the same cold space, and the city of NYC and the explorer of Leif Erikson are seen in the same reverberant light. The palette is one, the two-guitar band with a melodic bass, and the range of tempo and texture is moderate. What holds it is that the law is tested over a narrow field, and that Roland strains it, its manner outside the record’s own. Narrowness is not coherence.
Jacob Lawrence · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the lynching panel, a branch and a folded figure in an empty field, and a Northern panel of schoolgirls at a blackboard, learning. One law governs both: flat shapes in a few unmixed colours, figures without faces or nearly so, a caption of one sentence in the plain voice of a chronicle, every event at the same middle distance. Nothing in sixty panels breaks it, from floods and trains to riots, churches, steel mills and tenements, and the range is wide, across violence, labour, faith, law, the family and the city, from terror to hope, without a change of voice. Held below the top only where the law becomes formula, and the even tread of the sequence carries a panel that has not earned its place.
Giuseppe Terragni · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the open grid of the entrance front and the near-solid marble plane beside it; or the entrance front and the back, which hardly resemble each other. They obey one law. Every front is a cut through the same half cube by the same frame, with the same ratio and the same marble, and each varies the relation of frame to wall in a sequence that can be read round the building. The interior obeys it too: the hall is the cube’s hollow centre, and the galleries carry the frame’s grid inward. The range covered is wide, four distinct fronts, solid and void, inside and out, and the coherence holds across it. Not higher because the range, however wide, is of one order, composition, and the coherence of a life lived in it is not at stake.
Thelonious Monk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: Monk’s language of displaced accent, the struck minor second, the whole-tone run, space left where it is not expected, and the theme kept present in the improvising. Take the two most distant elements. “I Surrender, Dear” is a popular song of 1931 for solo piano, stride in its ancestry; “Brilliant Corners” is a new composition of irregular length for quintet at two tempos. Both obey the same law: the standard is bent at its corners as the new piece is built from them. The range is wide, a blues, a portrait ballad with celeste, a solo standard, a swing with timpani and the title piece, three line-ups and three sessions under one physics. Held from the top: the soloists other than Monk and Rollins do not always speak the language, and the blues at times relaxes into the common practice of the day.
Arvo Pärt · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the loud A’s struck out of silence at the start of Ludus, and the last low voices running out at the end of Silentium. One law governs both, the triad against the scale and tone against silence. Ludus is that law in motion and at full force; Silentium is the same law with motion withdrawn. The range from game to stillness is real. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range is narrow by design: two movements, one method, few elements. A law that governs so little holds more easily than one that governs a quartet’s seven movements or a set of thirty variations, and the figure stands below the Quartet Op. 131 and the Goldberg Variations, both at 9.6, for that reason.
Joseon builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the first chambers, laid out in 1395 and rebuilt in 1608, and the last four, added in 1836. They obey one law. Every chamber has the same bay, the same doors, the same porch; the roof runs on as if laid at once. The second hall applies the same rule with a single inflection, the raised centre for the founder’s ancestors, which itself states the law: rank by height, all else equal. The terrace, the paths, the gates and the lesser halls keep the same manner. The range is wide in time, from the founding to the dynasty’s last century, and the law held across it by deliberate fidelity. It is narrow in kind, one material, one register, one function, and narrowness is not coherence: that holds the figure.
Walter De Maria · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the cabin, a wooden shelter where visitors eat and sleep, and a lightning strike on a steel pole. They obey one law, measure set against the unmeasured. The cabin is where the visitor is held still for the duration the field’s measure requires, and the strike is the unmeasured answering the measure. Between them the grid, the level plane, the open land, the changing light and the walk through the rows obey the same law, and nothing in the work breaks it. The range is wider than it looks, from steel to weather, from survey to night, from body to sky. Held below 9.0 because the law is so simple that its coherence costs it little; narrowness is not coherence, and the work stands near that line without crossing it.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the still description of the river valley through a window, and a call about the ministry’s fund-raising after the drowned boy. They obey one law: in this world everything that speaks is selling, and the only things that do not sell, the landscape, the house’s bones, Elizabeth’s attempt at her own sentences, are the things no one attends to. The law holds from the marriage to the war in Africa: the same falsification, the same appetite, the same deafness. Charged a little: the satirical apparatus, the evangelist’s name and ministry and the comic litigation, runs to broader exaggeration than the domestic realism of the scenes with Elizabeth, and the Africa plot’s arrival at war is partly asserted from offstage.
Josef Hoffmann · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stair tower seen across the avenue, and a fork on the dining table. Both obey one law: the rectangle and the square, the plane edged by a line, luxury held in geometry. The law runs through the fronts, the hall, the dining room, the bathrooms, the furniture and the light fittings, and on into the terraces of the garden, and that range is the house’s chief claim; it is not narrowness that makes it coherent. There are two points of strain: the tower’s crown, whose figures and dome speak a sculptural and symbolic language beside the rest, and the massing, whose free grouping is not plainly governed by the law of the strict panels that clothe it. Both are small against the range.
Claude Lorrain · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark near architecture at the left and the pale far horizon at the centre. They obey one law, the law of a single light and its air. One source at the centre determines every value in the picture, from the dazzle on the water to the shadowed face of the palace at the left and the backlit rigging of the ship at the right. The range is broader than it first appears, from the bustle of the quay to the stillness of the distance, from a ceremonial descent to bales of trade, and all of it sits in one atmosphere. But the law is narrow, one hour of light, and the human register is almost uniform. Narrowness is not coherence, and the axis is held below the top for it.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
One physics governs: obedience and time, and everything is subject to both. Take the two most distant elements: the comic anecdotes of the first hours, the fish in the car, Hoffa’s quarrels over punctuality, the gangster captions played for deadpan, and the funereal end in the care home. They obey the same law. The captions that are jokes early on are the same fact as the coffin at the close, and the comedy is the sound of men who do not know they are dying. The range is wide, labour politics, Washington, Philadelphia kitchens, a war in Italy, a wedding journey to Detroit, and nothing breaks the law. A tenth or two is lost where the Kennedy material and the Bay of Pigs run by the logic of chronicle rather than the film’s own: a seam of the historical pageant, in a film otherwise governed by one man’s obedience.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the young face at the front, soft and particular, and the dense incised text on the back, which no one was meant to read. One law holds them: everything on the object is the king’s head remade as a divine body and protected. The face does it by material and calm; the text does it by naming the gods of each part. Between them the regalia carry the same law: the two lands at the brow, Osiris at the chin, the collar of protection at the shoulders. Nothing contradicts it or stands outside it. The range is wider than the size suggests, from a human face to kingship and the gods, from image to word. Held below the top because it is one programme in one register, and narrowness is not coherence.
Giovanni Boccaccio · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Alibech and Rustico, the hermit’s putting of the devil into hell, and Griselda’s trial; the obscene and the near-sacred, both told by Dioneo. They obey one law: a world of nature, fortune and wit, without miracle, in which a story’s worth is weighed by the company. The same law holds the plague, the courtly tragedies and the tricks, and the company’s decorum governs the telling of every tale. Narrowness is not the cause: the range runs from the Sultan of Babylon to the peasant of Lamporecchio. What lowers it: the magnificence of the tenth day, Griselda above all, strains the law, a cruelty praised as virtue and ironised by its teller; and the ordered frame and the anarchy of the seventh and eighth days meet by juxtaposition more than by integration.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the place beyond heaven (247c) and the list of terms from the handbooks (266d to 267d). One law governs both: speech is judged by whether it leads a soul toward what is true, and love and rhetoric are both kinds of that leading, each needing madness governed by knowledge. Lysias’s speech, the palinode, the handbooks and the myths are put to the same test, and the prayer to Pan, asking for beauty within and only as much gold as a moderate man can carry, closes it. The law is stated (264c) and largely kept. Held below 9.0 because it is reached by argument after the fact more than felt throughout: the tone falls from rapture to analysis at 257b, and readers since antiquity have had to argue the unity. The hint that the whole was a game (265c to d) both answers and sharpens the charge.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Lena on the wagon, mild and comic and serenely unaware, and Christmas castrated on Hightower’s kitchen floor. One law governs them, the law of a community that decides what a person is. Lena is named a fallen woman, and the town makes room for her; Christmas is named a Black man, and the town kills him; Byron and Hightower, who step outside the community’s sentence, are the ones changed. The law holds a wide range: farce, theology, pastoral, a manhunt and a crucifixion. Charged: the tonal joins are hard, and the furniture dealer’s comic coda, landing on Byron’s frustrated courtship days after the killing, is a dissonance the book sustains rather than resolves; and Hightower’s story is governed by a private law, the grandfather and the dead wife, that touches the book’s law only at its edges.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Byron the Bulb, an immortal light bulb hunted by an electrical cartel, and the Herero genocide. They obey one law, the book’s system of They, a web of corporate and state control that uses every life and passes over the Preterite. Slapstick and atrocity are governed by the same physics of connection and control, and the range so governed, of tone and of matter, is one few novels attempt; narrowness would have been easier to hold. The book builds its own counter-law into itself, Mexico’s statistics of chance against Pointsman’s causes, and leaves it unresolved, a tension inside the physics, not a breach of it. Held down by tone: the comic and the grievous do not always sit in one frame, and Pudding with the Domina Nocturna, or the drill of sweets, answer to appetite for excess more than to the law.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a song of “Alchimie du verbe”, far from birds, flocks and village girls, and the parodic war cry of “Mauvais sang”, “Les blancs débarquent. Le canon!”; or the plaint of the Vierge folle and the clipped resolve of “Adieu”. One law governs them: the damned self tries each identity, pagan, convict, saint, lover, alchemist, worker, and is thrown back by the law of its inheritance. Every part obeys it, and the range is wide: lyric, dramatic monologue, satire, visionary night, sermon. Charged: the law is sometimes held by tone more than by structure, and the book’s contradictions, though meant, now and then become mere changes of mood. The ending, between conversion and secular labour, leaves the governing question unresolved by design, which costs a little as coherence where it gains as depth.
Raphael · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the transfigured Christ at the top centre and the kneeling woman at the bottom front, her back turned. Do they obey one law? The law the panel states is the vertical order of light: everything is ranked by its relation to the light above, toward which it points or from which it turns. By that law the woman, lit hard on her shoulders, and the boy, his eyes turned up, belong to the same physics as Christ. But the panel runs two regimes of light and scale, and the case that it is two pictures has force in the gap between the upper zone’s calm radial symmetry and the lower zone’s scattered diagonals. The two deacon saints stand outside both laws. One law, held across a wide range, with seams.
Samuel Richardson · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Lovelace’s comic, theatrical letters, with their rake’s wit and stage plots, and Clarissa’s dying meditations, devotional and grave. They obey one law. Every act in the book is written, every letter is a will exercised on another, and every plot, the family’s, Lovelace’s and Clarissa’s own towards death, is a contest over who authors a life. Lovelace’s comedy is part of the tragedy, not relief from it. The fault is at the end: the punishments of the minor wicked, Mrs Sinclair’s gangrene and death and the ends of the women and accomplices, follow a law of Providence the realist action had not needed, and Belford’s tidy conversion and the moral summings-up lay a second law over the first.
Euripides · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gods’ cold bargain in the prologue, Athena turning on her own Greeks over a private outrage, and Hecuba washing the child’s wounds. One law holds them: power, divine or human, acts for its own reasons, and the cost is paid by those who cannot act. The Greek council kills Astyanax for a calculation; Athena destroys the Greek fleet for an insult; Menelaus spares Helen for desire; Zeus abandons the city he once loved. The range is wide: theophany, madness, forensic debate, cradle-song, the destruction of a city. Charged: the sophistic register of the Helen debate strains against the lament around it, and the rationalist prayer and the prologue’s literal gods stand side by side, unresolved, at some cost to unity.
William Wordsworth · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs: every episode is weighed by what it did to the growth of the mind, and the poem keeps to it across a wide range. Take the most distant elements: the comedy of Cambridge, where the young poet drinks to Milton’s memory in Milton’s rooms until his head turns, and the terror of the Simplon gorge; the din of Bartholomew Fair and the stillness of Snowdon; the politics of Beaupuy and the “hunger-bitten girl” of Book IX beside the spots of time. They obey the same law: London and France are the impairment that the natural spots repair, and the comedy is the mind’s first estrangement from its powers. The range is wide and the law holds. Two places strain it: Vaudracour and Julia, a tale told from outside the speaker’s mind, which obeys a different physics; and the political books, where the law becomes argued history and coherence is kept by statement.
Henry David Thoreau · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs most of it: look at the fact until it gives up its meaning, and price every act in life. Take the two most distant elements, the cost table for the house in “Economy” and the Gita in “The Pond in Winter”, where the scripture and the ice trade at the pond meet in one paragraph: they obey the same law, and that is the book’s achievement. The tonal range is wide, from sneer to rapture. Charged: the sneer sometimes breaks the law. The contempt for neighbours, for the farmer, for John Field is not the patient attention the book demands of itself before a loon or a pickerel.
David Lynch · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Adam Kesher’s comedy, the espresso spat into a napkin and the pink paint in the jewellery box, and Diane on her bed with a gun. One law governs them: the dreamer’s physics, in which every humiliation of the waking life is reassigned to someone else and played as farce. Kesher is comic because Diane needs the director who took her lover to be a man things happen to. The hitman is a fool for the same reason. The Cowboy, who belongs to no genre, obeys the law: he appears twice, as he said he would, once in each world. What breaks it is the pilot’s residue the dream cannot claim: Mr Roque and his telephones, the detectives, Louise Bonner at the door, present without a dreamer’s motive.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Marathe and Steeply dialogue, a political conversation about freedom on a mountainside outside Tucson, and Gately in his hospital bed refusing Demerol. They obey one law: a person is what he chooses to give himself to, and the free choice to serve one’s own pleasure ends in slavery to it. The academy, where boys give themselves to tennis, and the recovery house, where adults give themselves to a programme in place of a drug, are one law seen from two sides; the separatists who want the Entertainment as a weapon understand the American appetite exactly. The range is very wide, from slapstick to theology. Charged: the satirical future, its catapulted waste and outsized infants, runs on a looser physics of comic exaggeration than the naturalism of Ennet House, and the refusal to bring the strands together leaves some of their laws asserted rather than tested in collision.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the widest range: each person attaches himself to something incorruptible outside himself, silver, reputation, love, an idea of order, the republic, scepticism, and is undone by the attachment or by its failure. Take the most distant elements. Captain Mitchell’s comic tour of “historical events” and Decoud’s death on the island obey it alike, the one as the public story that conceals the law, the other as the private truth beneath it. Gould’s marriage and the Garibaldino’s lighthouse, the Azuera legend and the coda’s prophecy of the next revolt: one physics. The range runs from farce (Sotillo’s fury) through the satire of politicians to tragedy and intimate grief. Charged once: the tone of the final love plot, operatic and sentimental, is the one place where the law seems applied from outside rather than lived.
Kenji Mizoguchi · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Tōbei strutting at the head of his retainers in a stolen glory, and the dead Wakasa singing in her ruined house. One law governs both: each man pursues a dream the war makes possible, and each dream costs a woman. The ghost world and the war world are shot at one distance, in one light; Miyagi’s death on the road and Wakasa’s feast obey one physics, and the range runs from farce through the uncanny to grief. The strain is Tōbei’s strand. Its comedy is broader than anything around it, its coincidences belong to another kind of story, and its resolution, the wife found in a brothel and the husband reformed in a scene, is a lighter law than the one that kills Miyagi. The halves are parallel and do not weigh the same.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a deadpan voice over a steady pulse or drone, a city seen without judgment, beauty and abrasion held at one distance. The two most distant elements obey it. “I’ll Be Your Mirror” is a tender two-minute love song and “European Son” nearly eight minutes of noise, yet the love song is the counter-truth the drug songs need, sung in the same cool register. “Sunday Morning” carries paranoia under its celesta. The range is wide, from Brill Building pop to the avant-garde, and three studios barely show. The law loosens at “There She Goes Again” and “Run Run Run”, and Nico’s three songs sit a step apart.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Athena’s cold display of the madman in the prologue and Odysseus’s plea over the body at the end. One law governs both, and Athena states it herself to Odysseus: think no proud word against the gods, since a day lays low and raises up all human things. Calchas’s prophecy that her anger lasts this one day says it again, and the speech on time says it a third time, as the law of the seasons. The ending obeys it: the man who learned it at the start is the one who can act on it. The range is wide, from madness and domestic pleading to cosmic lyric, the death and a legal quarrel. Charged: the quarrel drops toward the near comic, archers against spearmen, and strains the single physics more than it extends it.
The Beatles · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: ordinary English life, the street, the kitchen, the newspaper, seen through a lens that makes it bright and strange. The two most distant elements sit side by side and obey it. Within You Without You, a sermon on illusion in Indian form, and When I’m Sixty-Four, a music-hall proposal of a long marriage, both concern a life passing, and the frame of the variety show admits both. A Day in the Life obeys the law by tearing the surface it governs. The range is very wide, from devotion to fairground and from a nursery dream to an orchestral roar. Held from the top: a variety bill is also a law of convenience, and Getting Better and Lovely Rita obey the bright surface and nothing deeper.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Odysseus’ prologue of method and Heracles’ epiphany. The law of the play is that ends do not justify means, and that the gods’ purpose is real and must be met freely. Odysseus seeks the right end by the wrong road and fails; Neoptolemus takes the right road to the wrong end, home to Greece, and is stopped; Heracles joins right end to right road by persuading, not compelling, as Odysseus never could. On that reading the play holds, and the range is real: the comedy of a disguise, physical agony, elegy. But the reading is argued, not obvious, and the epiphany’s change of register, from a human scene of exhausted decision to a god’s prophecy and a farewell in anapaests, is the widest leap in the surviving Sophocles.
Roberto Bolaño · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law: horror lies under boredom, and those who could see it look away. Take the two most distant elements, the critics in a London taxi beating a Pakistani driver, and a girl’s body found on waste ground in Santa Teresa with the file closed. They obey the same law: the critics’ violence erupts once and is forgotten, as the city forgets. Reiter’s war and the border city obey it; Amalfitano’s madness is the mind of one man who cannot stop seeing. The range runs from comedy through the forensic to fable, and holds. Charged: the unrevised book leaves threads whose law is never tested, Fate’s interview with Haas, Norton’s departure, the critics simply dropping from the book; and the seer and the Penitent run on a looser physics than the police record.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the opening’s divorce of Unnr from Hrútr, a near-comic legal matter of a marriage unconsummated under a queen’s curse, and the battle of Clontarf with its blood rain and the valkyries weaving on a loom of men’s entrails. One law runs between them: the will of others presses on a person through law, curse and doom, and what follows is paid for in kind until someone forgoes payment. The same law runs from Hallgerðr’s stolen cheese to the burning, across farm quarrels, courtroom, conversion, Norway, Orkney, Ireland and Rome. Charged: the Irish chapters work by a different pattern, joined by Kári’s pursuit more than by the inner law, and the wonders of the conversion sit a register apart from the sober supernatural of dream and second sight.
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the old inspector of the Custom House remembering his dinners, a comic grotesque of the 1840s, and Dimmesdale dying on the scaffold in the 1640s. One law governs them: the relation of the outward sign to the inward fact, and the cost of a life that keeps them apart. The sketch’s officials are the decayed heirs of the Puritan magistrates, and the author who wears the found letter and is turned out of office stands on a small scaffold of his own. Within the romance the law is kept to the end: every marvel is offered with its natural reading beside it, so the book’s physics never breaks into the supernatural or flattens into report. The range is real, comedy, Gothic, psychological analysis, the town holiday and the forest, but narrower than the widest novels, and narrowness is not coherence; the frame’s comedy is also a register the romance never returns to.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the whites of the god’s eyes at the top of the field and the pale, broken back of the victim in his hands. They obey one law. Everything in the field is flesh made out of darkness by the same dragged stroke and lit by no source. Devourer and devoured are painted in the same greys, so that the eater is as much a ruin as the eaten, and the red belongs to both. The black admits nothing that could break the law. But narrowness is not coherence. The territory is one figure, one body and one act on one ground, at one temperature, and a law that governs it completely is held for the smallness of what it governs.
D. H. Lawrence · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Pussum’s bohemian chatter in the café in “Crème de Menthe” and Gerald dead in the snow; or Ursula’s lesson on catkins in “Class-room” and Loerke’s factory frieze in the Tyrol. One law governs them: the will that would master life, in a woman, a horse, a mine or a work of art, against the spontaneous being that will not be mastered, and what each does to the other. The satire, the industrial chapter, the love story and the alpine end obey it, across a range that holds a comedy of manners, a drowning, a cat and a wrestling bout. Charged: Birkin is both the book’s searcher and its mouthpiece, and its judgement on him wavers; and Loerke, admitted late, carries the law stated more than shown.
Émile Zola · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Cécile Grégoire’s brioche at breakfast and Catherine dying of hunger and cold under the earth; or Souvarine’s tender love for his tame rabbit Pologne and the same man sawing through the Voreux’s tubbing to drown a pit. One law governs them: bodies under need, and a system that feeds some on the hunger of others without anyone’s will. Cécile dies under Bonnemort’s hands because the chain runs both ways, and Souvarine’s nihilism is the same law carried out by a man without appetites. The range is wide and held: comedy at La Piolaine, the bestial in the corons, the political debate at the Avantage, the tomb underground. Charged: the close turns the law of fact into a law of promise that the rest of the book does not entirely support.
Hans Scharoun · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gold, peaked roof seen from the Tiergarten, and the stair landing under the seating where the crowd mills at the interval. They obey one law. Space follows movement and gathering round a centre, never a grid or an axis; every form tilts, folds and branches from the platform outward, the roof following the ceiling, the walls following the terraces, the foyer following the paths to them. The same asymmetric, organic law governs plan, section, ceiling, foyer and envelope, and it holds across a wide range, from the acoustic geometry of the room to the circulation of a crowd and the silhouette in the city. What bends it: in the foyer the law is loose enough that arbitrariness and law are hard to tell apart, and the exterior, first in ochre and then in gold metal, reads as a residue of the inside more than a governed surface.
Théodore Géricault · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the corpse sliding into the sea at the lower edge and the speck of the Argus on the horizon. They obey one law: everything is weight and direction under one light, bodies and objects pressed by the same wind toward or away from one point. The dead and the living are modelled alike, with the same sculptural density; the sail, the wave and the climbing bodies share the same diagonals; the light on the father falls on the man at the apex. The range is wide in state, from death through despair to frenzied hope, and in depth, from the planks at our feet to the horizon. What holds the axis lower: the heroic academic body and the starved raft are two physics visible together, and the range in kind is narrow, men and the sea in one instant and one tonality.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the assault on Burpelson, filmed as war, American soldiers killing American soldiers in newsreel grain; and Strangelove’s arm throttling its owner and snapping into a salute. One law governs both: procedure obeyed to its last term by men ruled by appetite and fear, with reason serving madness. The soldiers follow orders that are perfectly correct; the arm is the body following a rule older than the mind. The same law governs Kong’s survival kit, Guano’s respect for the property of the Coca-Cola Company and Turgidson’s actuarial calm, and sex runs through all three settings as the hidden motor. The range is wide, from documentary violence to slapstick, and the law holds across it. The strain: Strangelove’s last scene presses to the edge of revue, and the bomber, played wholly straight, sometimes seems to belong to another film until the bomb.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The two most distant elements are the farce of the smith and his wife and the reading from Revelation at the castle. They obey one law, the law of the Dance of Death: the comic and the terrible are partners because Death takes both, and the dance leads them off the hill hand in hand, the cuckold beside the knight. The law shows where the registers meet: Skat’s stage suicide, a joke, is followed by his real death in the tree. The range runs from bawdy to apocalypse, and the law spans it. The strain is in the speech: the knight and Jöns talk as modern men, in a twentieth-century vocabulary of doubt, inside a world painted as the fourteenth. Much of that anachronism is the film’s own law, the present seen in a medieval mirror, and it is charged only where the speech steps outside the world the images build.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs: the thing is seen until it gives back its inwardness, and is made in a closed form. Take the most distant elements, a flamingo in the Jardin des Plantes and Saul among the prophets, or the carousel and the corpses in the morgue: they obey the same law. The range is wide, beast, flower, building, myth, Bible, Paris street and the dead, and the law holds across all of it; this is an achievement, and not the coherence of a narrow book. Held off the top because the law is held more loosely in the second part, where portraits and narrative poems drift toward anecdote, and because some of the sacred and mythic poems bring back the older, effusive Rilke the method was meant to exclude.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs: what is, is transformed by being praised, sung or tasted, and what is held fast is lost. Take the most distant pairs, the dismembered god of I.26 and the fruit sonnet of I.13, or the machine of II.10 and the unicorn of II.4: they obey the same law. The range is wide, from Spanish dancers, a Russian horse and gardens never seen to a child’s spring song and the dead girl’s dance, and the law holds across it. What costs the axis is a pull between two centres that the book never fully settles: the Orphic sequence, impersonal and cosmic, and the tombstone for a dead girl, personal and occasional. The dedication says the second; most of the poems are the first.
Elia Kazan · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the glove in the park, a small courtship among swings and a fence, and the sermon in the hold, a priest preaching over a dead man while things are thrown at him. One law governs both: on this waterfront every bond, love, kinship, faith and labour, is held under the eye of the men who own the docks, and every act of care is a risk. The pigeons obey it, the brothers obey it, Edie’s door obeys it, and the range it covers runs from courtship to murder to liturgy. The world keeps its weather, idiom and pressures from the first killing to the last walk. The strain is at the close, where the law of the place gives way to the law of the parable.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the jester’s obscene song in a barn in the rain, and the Trinity in colour at the close. One law governs both: the spirit is made in the flesh, among people, at a cost, and is punished, denied and continued by them. The jester is beaten for his art as the masons are blinded for theirs, and Boriska’s bell is made from the same mud. The range runs from comedy to atrocity, and the chronicle in grey and the icons in colour are one physics, since the icons are what the chronicle produced. The strain lies in the Theophanes episode’s register of debate and the Feast’s night, partly outside the argued line.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
One law: the logic of remembered time, in which past and present, private and public, are present at once to one consciousness. Take the two most distant elements, the newsreel of foreign crowds and distant wars and the mother washing her hair under a falling ceiling. Both obey the law: they are what the narrator’s century and his childhood put into him, given with the same weight and the same lack of explanation. The hypnotist and the dying man’s bird obey it too: the prologue’s cure and the closing release of the bird are one act of speech at last. The strain: the Pushkin letter speaks in the voice of an essay, a thesis on Russia the rest of the film never states, and the Spanish household is joined by theme more than by memory.
Gustave Eiffel · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a masonry footing at the foot of a leg, and the lattice at the summit. They obey one law: iron in lattice, diminishing with the load and gathering with height, the four edges drawn by one curve from the ground to the top. Legs, stages and spire are one physics. Held lower for two seams and a limit. The arches between the legs look like structure and are mostly not: they speak an architect’s language of portal and ornament over the engineer’s, and the first stage’s halls and restaurants have always spoken a third, of the exhibition and the shop. The antennas at the top, a different element, end the law rather than complete it. And one structural idea, a tower, is a small territory however tall: narrowness is not coherence.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the shepherds’ dance-song “Lasciate i monti” and Caronte’s refusal over the regal. One law governs them: music as the power that orders worlds, each world sounding by its own instruments and its own kind of song. The Prologue’s ritornello, heard in the frame and at the turning points, holds Thrace, Hades and heaven inside one design. The strain is the close. The Apollo ending answers grief with a moral and a machine, and lifts the work from tragedy into apotheosis by a law the first four acts have not prepared: the god who reproves excess of passion enters a work that has made passion its art. That the libretto of 1607 printed a different ending shows the close was not fixed by the work’s own law, and the axis is charged for it.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the lower church under the chevet and the high vault of the nave, decades apart. They obey one law: the stepped section, the shafted pier, the unbroken run of bays. The nave was built to the choir’s design with only modest change, so the interior reads as one physics from west to east, across a wide range of five aisles, three lit heights and a double ambulatory. The law breaks at the west front, where thirteenth-century portals, the buttress pier, a later great window and a sixteenth-century Flamboyant tower stand together without a governing order, and in the nave chapels of the later Middle Ages, additions in their own idiom. The cathedral is one work, and these count against the whole.
Zhang Zeduan · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the misty fields at the right and the packed street at the left. They obey one law. One high oblique view governs both; figures keep one scale throughout; the light, even and shadowless, is the same over country and city; and the density rises by degrees through the river, so that no seam can be found. The range is wide, rural and urban, labour and leisure, officials and beggars, calm and the near disaster at the bridge, and none of it breaks register. The law is also an ethic: every part has equal clarity, and no subject is dramatised at another’s expense. It is a law of observation, not stretched to hold the inner and the outer, the sacred and the common, and so stops below 9.0.
The Cure · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: love as the thing that consumes the self, in one sound world of keyboard washes, chorused guitars and six-string bass. The two most distant elements obey it. “Lullaby” is a whispered nightmare in a nursery rhythm; “The Same Deep Water as You” is a nine-minute drowning in reverberation and rain. Both have the one subject and the one timbre, and so do the short singles and the frantic title track; even “Lovesong”, the single statement of comfort, sits inside the same sound. Nothing strains the law anywhere in seventy-two minutes. But narrowness is not coherence. The range runs from melancholy through dread to tenderness, with panic only in the title track and no humour, and that narrowness, not any breach, holds the figure.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the colonnade at its eastern ends, open to the city, and the corridors where they meet Maderno’s façade. One law governs both: the same order, entablature and balustrade, the same travertine and the same line of saints, carried from the open arms to the church through two different figures. The inherited obelisk and fountain are taken into the law: the obelisk is the centre, the fountains mark the transverse axis, and the focal points lie between them. Within the square nothing contradicts. What holds the axis: oval and trapezoid are two geometries joined, and the join is felt where the corridors leave the oval; the façade belongs to another law the corridors must meet; and the range the law covers is narrow, one order and one material.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the lynx at the lower right, solid, lit and awake, and the bats at the top, black, blurred and in flight. One law holds them. Everything in the plate is ranked by its distance from the sleeper’s lit body and by its wakefulness: the nearer and more lit, the more fully drawn; the farther and darker, the more a creature dissolves into the aquatint it came from. The block, the papers and the title obey the same law as the night; they are the lit, squared order of reason, and the night presses on them from behind. Nothing contradicts the law. Held here for range: one man, one night, one register of dread, and narrowness is not coherence.
Daniel Libeskind · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the baroque entrance hall of the court house and the Holocaust Tower. They obey one law, the law of the competition’s title: a rupture between lines. The baroque house is the continuous surface of the city’s history; the stair down from it is the break; the axes, the voids and the Tower follow from that break, and the Garden is the same law turned outward, ground tilted off its grid. Zinc, slash, angle and void govern every part of the new building, and the line of voids cuts every floor by one geometry. The range is wide, from the court house to the dark of the Tower. Held below the top because the exhibitions are a second law fitted into the first and visibly at odds with it, and because the slash, repeated everywhere, narrows toward a manner.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Rotunda’s Corinthian portico and a hotel kitchen on the Range. They obey one law, the axis and the classical order graded by rank: the temple at the head, the pavilions’ full orders, the plainer columns of the colonnade, the Ranges’ arcades, the yards behind. Every element is placed by one geometry of axis, terrace and row, and the hierarchy of the plan is the hierarchy of the institution. The range is wide: library, teaching, dwelling, eating, service, gardens and landscape under one law. Held below the top because the law admits a deliberate variety, ten orders chosen to differ, which the colonnade binds but does not resolve; because its hierarchy includes the hidden yards, so that one order governs and also conceals; and because the south end now answers to another hand.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comic business of the underworld conference, criminals in bowler hats arguing their professional standing, and Elsie’s ball rolling out of the bushes. One law governs both: the city is organised, every power in it works by system, and the system has no place for the child or for the man who killed her. The beggars’ guild, the police files and the court are one physics, and the comedy belongs to it, never a release from it. The range is wide, from farce to the stairwell. The strain comes in the last minutes: the cut from the cellar to a state courtroom and the mothers’ appeal is a change of register the film does not prepare, and it states as a moral what the law of the film had shown.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Macon Dead’s rent book on one side, and on the other a woman with no navel who talks with her father’s ghost; or the barbershop’s radio report of Emmett Till’s murder, and the ancestor who flew. They obey one law. The book’s physics is that the past is present and acts, as a ghost, as a song, as bones in a sack, and the realist and the marvellous are both its forms: the economy of the Dead house is a haunting as much as Circe’s mansion is. The tones, broad comedy in the naming of streets, domestic rancour, murder and elegy, hold together under the narrator’s level voice. Held below the top because the Seven Days pull toward a political thriller whose logic is argued in another register, and because the closing leap opens a question the book’s law does not fully settle.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the crypt, curved, painted in strong colours and lit from above, a free form in the manner of Ronchamp; and the cell wings, orthogonal, gridded by the Modulor and the rhythm of the loggias. They obey one law: rough concrete throughout, every opening a calibrated device for admitting light, every dimension from the Modulor, the whole hung from one level line over the slope. Cell, corridor, refectory and church are each a stage in the same descent from solitude to common prayer, so that the programme’s order and the building’s coincide across a range from a sleeping room to the altar. Held below the top because the crypt and the sacristy’s tubes speak a second dialect, and the church box stands beside the wings rather than growing from them.
Ivan Turgenev · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Kukshina’s cigarette and her chatter of George Sand and chemistry in a provincial town, and Bazarov’s death in his father’s house. One law holds them: theories of life, old or new, borrowed or sincere, are measured against what life does to the body and the heart, and nature, the garden, the fields, the burdock and the flowers on the grave, outlasts them all. Pavel’s principles fail by that law as Bazarov’s denials do, and Kukshina’s are its comic shadow. The range is wide for so short a book, from drawing-room comedy and a duel half farce to a deathbed and a grave, and it is held in one tone of grave irony. Charged: the satirical pair are drawn in a broader hand than the law elsewhere allows; and the closing paragraph’s eternal reconciliation strains against indifferent nature, a strain the book may intend.
Marvin Gaye · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a witness’s voice, unhurried and tender, carried by one continuous groove against news that is hard. The two most distant elements are the party chatter that opens the title song and the cold, unresolving close of Inner City Blues, with Wholy Holy, a hymn, between them. They obey the same law: the party is the community the voice speaks from, the holler is what that community is driven to, and the hymn is what it holds to in between. The voice never changes register to suit its subject, and that constancy is the law. Held from the top because the range is moderate, one tempo band, one palette and one lead voice, and narrowness is not coherence. Right On, a Latin groove with a looser law, strains it a little.
Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a kitchen court on the south range and the gilded altarpiece at the end of the axis. One law governs both: the grid, the granite, the Tuscan and Doric orders, the axis that places every court in relation to the altar. The range is very wide, from bake-house to tomb, from student’s cell to audience room, and the same physics holds across it. What bends the law is the interiors: the library vault and the battle gallery painted in an Italian idiom of colour and crowded figure, the altarpiece of jasper and gilt bronze in another taste from its frame, and the later Bourbon rooms under a different law altogether. The structure keeps it.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs: the world breaks every one, by the plain’s war or by the body, and the only peace is a separate one that cannot hold. Take the two most distant elements, the army on the road in the first chapter and the delivery room at Lausanne. They obey the same law. The cholera of the first chapter and the haemorrhage of the last are the same “they”, and the rain runs through both. The Milan idyll obeys it too, since the wound is its price and the pregnancy its consequence. Charged: the interlude with Count Greffi and the comedy of the race track sit in a softer register the law does not fully govern, and the lovers’ private world sometimes reads as an escape the book indulges rather than tests, until the last book tests it. The range of tone is wide, from Rinaldi’s farce to the battle police, and the law holds across it.
James Baldwin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: every life is judged by the same scripture and the same question, whether grace can come to the sinner and through him, and the book holds each person to it, from the saint on the floor to the sinner in the grave. Take the two most distant elements: John’s Saturday in Manhattan, the cinema and the hill above Central Park with the city at his feet, and the rural South of Gabriel’s youth, with Deborah’s rape and Esther’s death. They obey the same physics, the pull between the world and the church, in one moral and tonal key. Short of the top because Florence’s section, with its long story of Frank in the North, runs looser than the rest, and because the visionary register of the third part is a different instrument from the realism of the first, joined well but felt as a join.
Kurt Vonnegut · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the author in the first chapter, telephoning old comrades late at night with drink on his breath, and the Tralfamadorian zoo with its geodesic dome. They obey one law: to the wounded mind all time is present at once, and every moment, the comic and the atrocious, is equally there and equally unredeemable. The firebombing and the optometry convention, the boxcars and the honeymoon at Cape Ann, are governed by the same physics, and the refrain falls on every death without grading it. The range is wide, from slapstick to massacre and from autobiography to space opera. Charged: the author’s own stance in the frame, a refusal of massacre, sits against the Tralfamadorian counsel to ignore the bad times and dwell on the good; the tension is designed rather than a contradiction, but it leaves one law in suspension.
John Milton · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: every element is a trial of the Son’s obedience, and every scene is weighed by it. Take the two most distant elements, the sensual banquet laid in the wilderness and Mary’s quiet meditation at home: both obey it, the one offered and refused, the other waiting and keeping. The heavenly frame, God speaking to Gabriel in Book I and the angels at the close, and the earthly test are one action. The strain is learning. A work woven of classical allusion has its hero dismiss classical wisdom as needless to one who has light from above. It can be read as dramatic, the Son refusing learning as a means of power and not learning itself, and the poem allows that; but the strain is felt, and it costs the axis.
Gillo Pontecorvo · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the children of the Casbah chasing and beating a drunk down the stairs during the purge, and the paratroopers’ rooms of torture with their blowtorch and water. One law governs both: in this war each side makes a people obey by violence, and every act is a move in a system that answers it with its countermove. The wedding without music, the strike, the women’s bombs, the police bomb and Mathieu’s press conference obey the same law, the method that follows from the aim, across a range from the comedy of the purge to the death of a child in a wall. The strain is at the close: the coda replaces the law of system with the law of a spontaneous people, a force the method did not include.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs everything inside the wall: placement by asymmetric balance across emptiness, with every element reduced to its least form. Take the two most distant elements, the heaviest group in the east and the stained, level wall: both obey it, mass against field, mark against ground. The raked lines, straight across the open gravel and circling each group, carry the same law into the ground itself. There is no exception; even the weathering of the wall reads as composition, and the near and the far, the small and the boundless, are held in one physics. What holds it: narrowness is not coherence, and a law over stone, gravel, moss and clay is more easily kept than one over a whole building.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comic talk between Tom and Betsy in the campaign office, and the massacre on the stairs. One law governs them: the world is a place Travis cannot read. The office comedy is a social code he cannot enter; the massacre is the one code he can. The diary’s pieties and the porno theatre obey the same law, the gap between what he says he is and where he goes, and the epilogue, read as real, keeps it: the society misreads him as he misreads it. The strain is in the scenes outside his presence and in the epilogue’s change of tone. The range is narrower than it looks, one man in one city, mostly at night, and narrowness earns nothing.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a self observed from a cold distance, in an empty space where every sound is set apart from every other. The two most distant elements test it. Interzone, two shouted voices over a fast rock figure, strains the law and still obeys it in its sound and in its subject, a city of exile; I Remember Nothing, slow, nearly formless, glass breaking in a void, is the law at its purest. Disorder’s bright drive and Candidate’s stasis obey it from opposite ends, motion that goes nowhere and stillness that waits, and from the fastest song to the near-silent close nothing leaves the one temperature. What holds the figure is range: the record runs from fast to slow and from loud to near silence inside one palette, and narrowness is not coherence.
The Smiths · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the mock-heroic, grievance raised to grandeur and undercut by wit, with grief beneath the wit. The two most distant elements, “I Know It’s Over” and “Vicar in a Tutu”, obey it: the ballad’s burial is extravagant enough to be comic, and the vicar belongs to the same dead England as the title track’s church. A single speaking voice holds the whole, and one sound world, a guitar band with sparing colour, holds with it. The range, from guitar rock through music hall and rockabilly to a pastoral with strings, is moderate. Held from the top for range, not for law.
Charles Mingus · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a vocal, crying ensemble sound, a time anchored in the bass that bends and surges, and the solo voice rising out of the group and returning to it. Take the two most distant elements, the opening’s slow, heaving chorale and the Spanish guitar of side two. They obey the same law, because the guitar too is one voice set against the group, and its scale returns into the ensemble’s lament. The range is wide: chorale, blues shout, ballad, Spanish interlude, near-free collective passages, a swing that leans toward the waltz. The strain is on side two, where some joins sound like changes of scene in a ballet rather than consequences of one law, and where the reprise of side one can sound like recall rather than growth.
José Saramago · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: a single impossible premise followed with realist consequence. Take the two most distant elements, the first blind man at the green light and the doctor’s wife at the window at the close. The first loses his sight among the instruments of an ordered city; the last keeps hers and fears its loss above a ruined one; both obey one physics. The ward of the gun and the balcony in the rain are one law seen from opposite sides, the power that blindness frees and the care it calls out. The narrator’s irony, at the asylum’s worst, stays within the law, as the voice of the one perspective that can see. Charged: two exemptions the book does not explain, that she alone keeps her sight and that the blindness lifts as it came, which a parable may claim but which cost something in a book that has kept its consequences so strictly.
David Lean · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Lawrence putting out a match with his fingers in the Cairo map room, a joke for a bored officer, and the massacre at Tafas. One law governs both: a man performs his capacity for pain and for the extraordinary, before audiences, until the performance owns him. The match is the first step toward the dagger blade in which he studies himself, the train roof, the robes and the blood. The British comedy of Dryden and Allenby obeys the same law as the desert: everyone is using Lawrence, and Lawrence is using the desert. The range is wide, from mess-hall wit to massacre. The strain is in Part Two: Bentley’s journalism plays in a lighter key than the law can carry, and the council in Damascus is a satire of politics set a little apart from the tragedy.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the young facing loss in the dark and answering with light, heat and one another. The two most distant elements obey it. Une année sans lumière, quiet and sung partly in French, and Rebellion (Lies), the most driven track, are the same year without light, endured once and refused once. Haïti, the one song of a real country and its dead, obeys too: history is the family’s grief at a larger scale. Crown of Love, a love song turning to dance, is the law’s private case. The range runs from chamber pop and a post-punk pulse to a waltz, a dance coda and a closing ballad. What holds it is the palette, largely one swelling many-voiced band, and Crown of Love, whose torch-song manner strains the law a little. Narrowness is not coherence.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs: a single remembering consciousness, exact, ironic, tender and haughty, and the faith that attention reveals pattern. Take the two most distant elements: Mademoiselle O’s comic bulk, her progress like a steamship’s through a Russian winter, and the father’s murder in a Berlin hall; or the football and rooms of the Cambridge chapter and the parks and the son of the last. They obey the same law: the same eye, the same refusal to state pathos aloud, the grief carried in detail. The range is wide, from comedy to elegy, lepidoptera to politics, Russia to the edge of America, and the tone does not break. Held below the high band because the law is one of temperament more than of structure: the political chapters, 9 and 14, fit the voice but strain the method.
Alberto Giacometti · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the small head, a knot of scored bronze, and the great feet sunk in the base. They obey one law: the figure as seen across a space, eaten by it in proportion to its distance from the ground, the head furthest and slightest, the feet nearest and heaviest. The surface obeys the same law everywhere, worked and unresolved, so that no part is finished and no part is left. There is no second physics: no smooth passage, no descriptive detail, no attribute. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is narrow: one figure, one action, one material. The range within it, from head to feet and from the near-disappearance of the front view to the long stride of the side, is real and held, and the figure is held for the size of that territory.
Werner Herzog · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the vast, misty descent of the prologue, solemn and choral, and the farce of Guzmán eating alone at his throne while his subjects starve. One law governs both: the will of Europe, in its grandeur and its absurdity, moving through a place indifferent to it and dissolving by stages. The comedy and the terror are one fact seen at two distances. The law holds from the first shot to the last: no rescue, no turning back, nothing outside the current. The ship in the tree and the monkeys are not breaks in realism but the realism of a starving mind, prepared by every stage before them. Held below the top: the register is narrower than its range of tone suggests, and the law is simple.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
One law: everything in the picture has been burnt, and what was made for the perpetrators’ glory belongs now to the victims’ ash. Take the two most distant elements: the architecture of the Reich and the name of the Jewish woman written over it. They obey that one law: the hall is hers because it is burnt, and the name is legible because the hall is dark. The flames at the end are the law’s one source, the fire that made the ash and the light of the sanctuary. Nothing in the canvas breaks it. What holds the axis is that the range is narrow in kind: one hall, one perspective, one word, one fire. The width is in what the law joins (perpetrator and victim, tomb and temple, poem and building), not in what the canvas shows, and narrowness is not coherence.
Knut Hamsun · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs: everything is seen through a mind made unreliable by hunger, and the book never breaks it, not for the city, not for Ylajali, not for the end. Take the two most distant elements, the farce of the old man on the bench and the lie of Herr Happolati, and the near-death in the garret. They obey the same physics: both are the mind performing for itself. The ending, the sudden decision to go to sea, comes from outside the cycle and is the one place the law bends, though it can be read as the last remission. The range the law covers is narrow, one mind in one condition, and narrowness is not coherence: the figure is held by it.
Graham Greene · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the divine is present in what is squalid and absent from what is respectable, and everyone sees it wrongly. Take the two most distant elements: Tench’s dental chair at the port, with its ether cylinder and its talk of home, and the hagiography of the boy Juan, who dies a martyr before a firing squad. They obey the same law. Tench watches a true martyrdom and sees nothing; the pious book records a false one. The law covers the prison, the field of crosses, the Lehrs’ Lutheran propriety across the border, Padre José, the married priest mocked by children and too frightened to hear a confession, the lieutenant’s room, and the boy at the door. The range runs from comedy to agony and is held. What holds the axis there is a little convenience in the machinery of the trap.
Samuel Johnson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pages on Savage’s nights in the streets and his death in prison, and a notice of two paragraphs on a Restoration courtier-poet; or the Milton’s political invective and the Gray’s concurrence with the common reader. One law governs them: truth to general nature and to experience, the moral seriousness of a life, and the reader’s pleasure as the final court. Johnson applies it to Milton, whom he dislikes as a man and reveres as a poet, as to Pope, whom he loves and still calls to account; the standard that condemns Lycidas praises the Elegy. The law holds across a century and more of poets and every scale of life. What lowers the axis is that it holds better than the texture: the minor lives obey it only by being thin, and prejudice, on Milton’s politics and on Swift, bends the judicial temper.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the monkey’s funeral, and the bright night of Betty and Gillis on the backlot streets. One law governs both: the image outlives the life, and everyone in the film is selling to a camera. Norma buries a pet as a star buries everything, in a scene; Betty and Gillis work by night in a town of painted fronts, writing a picture and falling in love in the studio’s own street. The bridge game, the screening, the DeMille set, the newsreel cameras and the corpse in the pool obey the same law. The range runs from comedy of manners through gothic to homicide, and the tone holds. The strain is the Betty strand, whose sincerity the film half believes and half mocks, and a flippant voice-over that at moments undercuts what the images are doing.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Mrs. Miller’s ledger, in which she totals the week’s take and corrects McCabe’s figures, and the gunfight in the snow. One law governs them: commerce. The gunmen are a collection department and the duel a repossession; McCabe dies because he asked too much, and the company pays in bullets what it would have paid in cash. The church fire is within the law, since the town saves the one building that produces nothing while its founder dies. Cohen’s songs, from outside the story, name the law in another voice. Held at the figure by the stretches of pure ensemble life, the baths and the party, which obey no law but Altman’s pleasure in his people, and by an opium ending that leaves the law without a witness.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the turning, refused, attempted, and given. Take the two most distant elements: the surreal bones of the second section, content to be scattered under the juniper, and the plain petition of the sixth among the granite and the sea. They obey one law: both are the self giving up its will, the first in dissolution, the last in prayer. The tonal range is wide for so short a poem, from the dry penance of the first section through the sensuous memory of the third and fourth to the incantation of the fifth, and the law holds across it. Charged: the seam of the assembly is still faintly audible between the second section and the third, where the register changes more than the argument requires.
Salian builders, under Conrad II and Henry IV · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements of the Salian building: the crypt, low, dense, banded and columned; and the east end outside, towered and opened by the dwarf gallery under the eaves. One law governs both: the round arch, the square bay, the cubic mass, the wall as a sequence of arched units, carried from the cellar to the eaves. The two campaigns join under it: the second thickens and vaults what the first articulated, and the giant arches become the frame of the vaulted bay. The range runs from the cellar to the skyline, from burial to procession. Held below the top because the retrofit leaves a double rhythm in the nave, and the register is one, its range of degree.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Jigo, a comic monk who eats from a pot and complains about his feet, and the headless god pouring death across the mountain. One law governs both: every life is bought from another, and every party has a reason the film respects. Jigo serves the emperor’s writ for the god’s head because that is his living; the flood of death is what the taking costs. Eboshi’s charity and her guns, the women’s songs at the bellows, the boars’ pride and their failing size, Moro’s love for San and her hatred of men all obey it, and comedy and dread live in one world. The strain is in Kohroku and the town’s broad humour, which obey the law but lightly, and in the ending, where the grass and a single kodama make a consolation the law has not quite earned. The range is wide, and it mostly holds.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs: the Greek trabeated order and the elementary geometry of square, circle and rectangle. Take the two most distant elements, the long open stoa facing the city and the closed, round, top-lit sanctuary at the centre. They obey the one law: post and beam outside, the same columns in a ring inside, the circle set within the rectangle as the dome is set within the attic. The relation of outside and inside, open line and closed centre, is the building’s argument, and it holds from the steps to the oculus. The range is real but not wide: one order, one material character, one register of calm. The hidden dome is the one place where the law bends toward a stage effect, a centre kept secret from the city, and even that agrees with the stoa’s refusal of a centre outside. Narrowness is not coherence, and the coherence here holds across a moderate range.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Somerton ritual and the last morning in the toy store. One law governs both. Everything is an offer of pleasure made and withheld, priced and displayed: the masked bodies in the great rooms, and the goods round Helena as she picks out what she wants while her parents talk of what they will do. Desire is deferred in every scene until the last word ends the deferral. The law strains in three places: the desk clerk’s flirtation is camp comedy in another key; the stalker plays thriller suspense, which the film otherwise refuses; and Ziegler’s explanation turns to exposition, a register the dream logic forbids.
Pagan builders, under King Kyansittha · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark inner corridor at the foot of an image, and the gilded spire seen from across the plain. They obey one law, four-fold symmetry about a vertical axis. The plan repeats on each face; the section steps in at each terrace toward the single point; the corridors turn the same way at each quarter; the light falls from above where the axis comes down to the image. Ascent outside and circuit within are two readings of one figure, round and up. The Indian tower on Burmese terraces reads as one figure, not a collision. Held below the top for the porches, whose gabled fronts belong to another scale and grammar, and for a narrow range.
Henri Labrouste · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stone façade, grave and classical, and the iron lace of the reading room. They obey one law, because both are made to be read. The façade is a text of names, the iron a text of its own forces, each showing what it is and what lies behind it. The painted vestibule and the lit room belong to one passage from dim to clear. Ornament throughout is derived from the use, garlands, names and pierced arches, and not borrowed wholesale from the orders. Nothing contradicts. Held below the top because the range the law covers is moderate, one programme in one building, and the widest coherences hold far more.
Joni Mitchell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs: an unguarded voice, close to the ear, with the least accompaniment the song will bear, telling the truth against its own interest. Take the two most distant elements. Carey is a happy drinking song on a Greek island, with others playing; Little Green is a ballad of a child given away, for voice and guitar alone. Both obey the law: the voice is the same, and so is the candour. The Last Time I Saw Richard brings in comedy and satire, and the law holds there too. The range of tone is wide, from joy to desolation, and the range of instrument is kept within strict limits. The limit: the range of form is narrower than the range of tone. These are all songs of verse and chorus, or of verses alone, with no extended structure.
Kendrick Lamar · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the self under seduction, by money, by fame, by institutions and by its own self-hatred, and the long work back to a love of self that is also a love of others. The two most distant elements obey it. Wesley’s Theory, glittering P-Funk with George Clinton, and Mortal Man, a spoken poem and a dialogue with the dead, are the beginning and end of one passage: the pact signed and the lineage consulted. For Free?, a free-jazz rant, and These Walls, a smooth love song with a revenge inside it, are the same bargain, the body as currency. The range is wide: funk, jazz, soul, spoken word, an interview tape, a live performance. The law strains at Complexion and You Ain’t Gotta Lie, which obey it by theme more than by the record’s own physics, and at the sermon of i.
Carol Reed · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Crabbin’s lecture, with its questions about James Joyce, and the sewer where one friend shoots another. One law governs both: a city where everything is traded and nothing is what it is called, played to a dance tune. The lecture is a gentle fraud, Holly taken for a novelist; the black market a murderous one, penicillin diluted and sold as cure; the funerals are false and then true; the zither plays over all of it without changing key. No one stands outside the tilted world, not even the hero. The strain is in the comedy, which at its broadest obeys the law of gaiety over rot only loosely, and in Holly, who wavers between fool and conscience.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Chicago steel mill of the prologue, all fire and noise, with Bill’s blow against a foreman; and the coda, two girls walking a railway line through empty country in the morning. One law governs both: the people move through a world of labour and seasons indifferent to them, always in transit, by train, on foot, by water, never at home. The mill’s fire returns as the fire of the fields; the train that brings them takes Abby away with soldiers; the house, the one fixed thing, is the place the law forbids them. Linda’s voice, comic, morbid and offhand, obeys it too. The strain: the flying circus is a holiday from the law, charming and loosely held, and the flight and pursuit lean to a genre’s rules the rest has refused.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the opening farce, the Tramp asleep in the lap of a civic statue, his trousers caught on its sword, and the last close-up. One law governs both: an unveiling, in which what the city displays is drawn back to show a ragged man, laughed at, who has done nothing wrong. Between them the same law holds. The girl unveils him in her mind as rich, the millionaire unveils him to his household and forgets him, and the police unveil him as a thief. Slapstick and pathos obey one physics, because the body’s comedy is always the comedy of being misseen. The range is wide, and it holds. The strain is in the millionaire’s amnesia, a device that runs on a farce’s rules rather than the film’s, and in the nightclub business, a music-hall routine at the edge of the law.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Keyes in his office, comic and irritable, lecturing a claimant and his own boss on the statistics of suicide; and Phyllis and Neff in the dark room at the end, each with a gun. One law governs both: every relation is a contract, every contract is a bet against the house, and the house has the tables. The flirtation is a sales call, the murder a claim, the marriage a policy, the friendship a matter of trust between a salesman and a claims man, and the lovers’ end the moment each decides the other is a liability. The matches, lit for Keyes by Neff and at last by Keyes for Neff, carry the same law into the frame. The range is wide, from office comedy to murder. The strain is at the edges: Lola and Zachetti obey the law of the plot more than the law of the film.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the long axial ridge of the large hall and the single spiral of the small one. They obey one law: a roof hung from a mast-borne cable and falling in a curve to a concrete rim on the ground. The same law governs the anchors, the stands, the entrances at the crescent tips and the pair on the podium, the large hall’s axis aimed so that the two figures answer. Concrete and steel are distinct materials under one physics, compression below and tension above, and the concrete takes the roof’s curve so the two read as one. What bends the law: the podium and its low buildings are of a plainer order, the interiors at floor level follow the needs of events, and the readings of shrine and tent sit beside the structural law rather than within it.
Maya, under K'inich Janaab' Pakal and his son · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the eroded stucco infant god on an outer pier and the carved lid at the bottom of the mountain. One law governs both, the dynasty’s continuity through the king’s death, rendered as a vertical axis from the earth to the temple. The infant K’awiil held up on the piers, the god of royal lineage shown as an heir; the text of dynastic time; the conduit; the nine figures; the world tree on the lid and the ancestor trees on the sides: all speak that one law. The range is wide (history, calendar, body, god, mountain), and the law holds across it. What bends it: the exterior’s shared Palenque vocabulary is fitted to the law rather than made by it.
Octavio Paz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant things in the poem: the woman’s body as a field of wheat in the opening, and Trotsky murdered in Coyoacán in the tribunal. They obey one law. Everything in the poem is a passage of the one current, time returning on itself and the self found only by going out into the other, and the murder of the just is the same breach of the instant as the kiss under the bombs, seen from history’s side. The single sentence enforces the law grammatically, and the return of the opening seals it. The range is wide, from the bedroom to the house of Atreus, and the law holds across it. Held below the top because the law is partly stated, the poem arguing its own metaphysics, and because the political passages strain the tone where the speaker addresses history directly.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: sound emerging from silence and returning to it, a small voice held in a large space, under a light of devotion. The two most distant elements obey it. Ascension Day, a stumbling, overdriven frenzy cut off without warning, and New Grass, a light and steady pulse that never raises its voice, are opposites in force and temperature, and both are governed by the silence that frames them: one is broken off into it, the other moves through it without disturbing it. The range is wider than the quietness suggests: blues harmonica, free-jazz noise, string clusters, a brass chorale, a near-hymn, a guitar figure of pastoral calm. What holds the figure from the top is that the range keeps to one tempo of feeling, slow and grave.
Hilary Mantel · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs: everything is as Cromwell perceives it in the moment, and everything is weighed. Take the most distant elements: the bleeding boy at Putney and the minister at the king’s side in 1535; the comic household and the burning of heretics; the grief for the dead daughters and the cold management of More’s trial. They obey the same physics, attention as a form of power and the past as a ledger never closed. The tonal range is wide, comedy, horror, grief and intrigue, and it is held; the ghosts do not break the realism, because they are given as what this mind sees. The ambiguity of the pronoun is a local fault, not a breach of the law. Level with Infinite Jest at 8.7.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs: everything is known and nothing is prevented, and every particular is a case of it. Take the two most distant elements: the comic, almost operetta courtship of Bayardo San Román, who buys the widower Xius’s house and its memories with money, and the walk of the dying Santiago round his own house. They obey the same law: acts done in public, under the eyes of the whole town, by people bound by codes they do not examine. The omens (the dreams, the note under the door, the bishop’s boat) and the forensic detail (the hours, the knives, the autopsy) belong to one physics, in which coincidence is indistinguishable from destiny. What holds the axis there is range and one inconstancy: the range is that of a novella and one town, and the narrator’s position, now inside the story and now a reporter outside it, is not always held to one rule.
Nirvana · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the body exposed and consumed, and tenderness and violence heard as the same wound. The two most distant elements are tourette’s, a minute and a half of screaming, and All Apologies, a lullaby with cello, and they obey the law as its two poles, the wound shouted and the wound offered. Dumb, “I think I’m dumb”, is the law at rest, the consumed self accepting its smallness. Frances Farmer gives the law a history; Scentless Apprentice gives it a predator. The range runs from punk sprint to dirge, ballad with strings and noise. What holds the figure: the two remixed singles bend the law in sound, sweeter than their neighbours, and the palette, a trio with cello on two songs, is narrow. The law strains and does not break.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Europe mourning at the far left before the open temple, and Plague and Famine at the far right in the shadow. One law holds them: everything is drawn along a single current from peace into war, and each figure is placed by where it stands in that current, the mourner where it begins, the destroyers where it leads, Venus and Mars at the hinge as its resistance and its object. Light and colour obey the same law, warm where the good things are, dark where the current runs. The range is wide in kind, from a nude goddess to a monster, from a mother and child to a fallen architect, and it holds. Held below the top because the attributes at the bottom obey the code rather than the current.
Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the drive-rod scene, a lover’s sulk carried off by a moving engine, and the battle at the Rock River, with men shot and the Texas sinking in flames. One law governs both: the world is a mechanism that runs whether or not one attends to it, and the hero survives by attention to the one thing in front of him while the rest passes unseen. The engine carries Johnnie in his grief as the war carries him north unnoticing; the sword that flies from his hand and kills a sniper obeys the law of the cannon that misses him on the curve. The strain: the prologue’s romance and the closing battle loosen the law into convention, and a death on screen passes as quickly as a gag.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Kyoami’s comic songs and dances, and Kaede’s death. One law governs both: deeds return, and heaven looks on. The fool tells the king the truth of what he has done in nonsense, as Lear’s fool does, and his last cry against the gods is the same law spoken from below; Kaede’s death is the law enacted from the other side. Sue’s piety and Kaede’s vengeance, the two most opposed women, are the two answers to the one injury Hidetora did, and both end in death. The colours, the camera’s distance and the Noh register keep the guns and the politics under one physics with the masklike faces. The strain: the fool’s scenes and the stylised women sometimes sit in another key from the plain soldiers’ war, governed by the law but not felt in one body.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a heavily painted head at the left, orange ground, yellow hair, red mouth, and a ghost at the far right of the black panel where the face has nearly gone. They obey one law: the same screen pulled across a surface, with more or less ink, over more or less colour. Every head is that one event at a different load on a different ground; there is no second kind of mark, no drawn passage, no image that is not the screen. The law covers a wide range, saturated colour to bare ground, presence to absence, glamour to death, and it holds as one work two panels that could have been two. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is still narrow: one face, one screen, one grid, two grounds.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: everything in the room is subject to the same wearing away, and only the face resists it. Take the two most distant elements, the girl’s lit profile and the dark, muddied curtain and table at the right. They obey the same law, for the curtain is what the face is turned toward and is already the darkness the face will enter. The bowed head, faceless, is the law applied to the living: the mourner is more effaced than the dying. The scratches cross figure and ground alike and bind them. Nothing contradicts the law. Held below the top because the range it governs is narrow, one room, two people, one light, and narrowness is not coherence; The Starry Night and The Large Bathers carry one law across earth and sky, or a crowd of bodies and a landscape.
Frank Herbert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One physics governs a very wide range. Take the two most distant elements: the water discipline of a Fremen sietch, the stillsuit, the deathstill, the water of the dead given to the tribe; and the politics of the Imperium, CHOAM, the Landsraad, the Emperor’s Sardaukar, the Guild’s monopoly on travel. They obey one law, because the spice binds them: produced by the worm, required by the Guild’s navigators, controlled by whoever rules Arrakis. “The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.” states the law, and the end obeys it. The invented rules hold: shields against projectiles, the explosion of lasgun and shield that makes atomics and knives the weapons of choice, no thinking machines. What holds the axis is tonal distance, the Baron’s grotesque comedy set against the gravity of the sietch, and a prescience sometimes as convenient as it is lawful.
Jean-François Millet · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the left gleaner’s hand reaching into the stubble at the bottom edge, and the stacks dissolved in gold haze near the horizon. They obey one law: one light from the left at one hour, one air that softens with distance, one handling for flesh, cloth, straw and earth. The separation of near and far is not a break in the law but its finding: the same light falls on both, and the same air fills the empty field between them. Tone, scale and handling grade continuously from front to back. What holds it below the top is range: one field at one hour, three figures and a harvest. What is held is held completely, but narrowness is not coherence, and the law is tested across little.
Andrea del Verrocchio · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the scowling face at the top and the lifted hoof at the front, or the swept tail behind. One law governs them, tension held at the point of release. The face is braced; the neck turns against the shoulders; the shoulders turn against the horse; the horse’s head turns against its stride; the free hoof hangs at the top of the step. Every part is a force restrained by another, and the armour plates, set at angles that carry the twist, and the taut harness obey it. The law slackens at the pedestal, whose columns and frieze are in a calm, decorative classical idiom that frames the tension without sharing it. The range is narrow, one action and one temper, and narrowness is not coherence.
Nicolas Poussin · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dead under the stone, present only as four words, and the living woman at the right edge, the most present body in the picture. They obey one law, which is measure. Every element is placed in one shallow space, under one light, in one calm, and the dead and the living are ranked by the same geometry round the same block. The register holds from the finger on the stone to the far sky, and nothing contradicts it. What holds the axis below the top is the rubric’s own caution: narrowness is not coherence. The range governed is narrow, four figures and a tomb in one mood, and the picture keeps its law partly by keeping out what would test it: age, labour, the town, any passion stronger than wonder.
Thomas Eakins · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the woman at the left, in black, her face covered and her hand clenched, and the clerk at the rail, writing calmly. One law holds them: everyone in the room is ranked by their relation to the wound, by looking, recording, working, enduring or refusing to look, and the light gives each a share by that relation. The surgeon’s brow, the assistants’ hands, the clerk’s pen, the students’ eyes and the woman’s averted face all answer to it. The range is wide for one room, from horror to clinical calm, from the anonymous body to the named man, from the work of the hand to the work of the mind, and nothing contradicts the law. Held below the top because the woman’s theatrical grief sits at the edge of the picture’s plain idiom, as if from another genre; the law includes her, but her manner tests it.
Constantin Brâncuși · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the small cone of the foot and the oblique, open top. They obey one law: every part is a phase of one continuous curve, rising and thinning, and the surface follows it without a break, so that foot, neck, body and top are one motion stated four times. The polish obeys the same law, carrying the light along the curve. Nothing in the bronze is of a second kind. The one question is the base, which is not part of the bronze and may or may not be part of the work: if it is, the law is wider, a contrast of ground and flight; if not, the law is total and narrow. Narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one form, and the range between its farthest elements is small.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark outcrop with its solid figure, and the faintest range at the far left, where mountain becomes sky. They obey one law, distance as dissolution: everything near is dark, solid and defined, everything far is pale, veiled and unbounded, and every passage between obeys the gradient. The figure belongs to the near world and looks into the far, and that is the picture’s argument. The fog is not an exception to the law but its medium. The light is diffuse throughout; nothing casts a strong shadow, and nothing contradicts. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: rock, fog, mountain, sky and one man, in one hour and one weather, make a small territory, and the law governs it completely.
Joseph Wright of Derby · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the girl hiding her eyes at the right, and the lovers at the left who look only at each other. One law holds them: every figure’s place is its relation to the light and to the life in the glass, ranked by attention, so that grief and indifference are measured on one scale. The moon outside obeys the same law as the candle within, a light of nature against a light of inquiry, and the brooding older man, lit but looking at nothing, is its third term. The range is wide for a single scene: childhood and age, science and feeling, love and death, the domestic and the cosmic. Nothing contradicts the law. Held below the top because a few figures are joined to it by placement more than necessity, and the emblems sit a little outside it.
Luis Barragán · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the grey, rough, blind street front, all refusal, and the roof terrace, all colour and sky. They obey one law: the wall as the instrument of withdrawal, light admitted only where it is chosen, the world excluded so that what remains, the garden, the sky, the gold and a cross, can be seen. The same law governs the vestibule, the hall, the library stair, the living room window and the studio patio, and it holds from the city’s edge to the sky and from devotion to the domestic routine. Held lower because the house was built up over forty years, and the accretion of objects and colours, though governed by one hand, is less strictly derived from one principle than a single campaign would be; and because the range is that of one inward life.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the patient’s need, met in light, air, quiet and cleanliness. Take the two most distant elements, the chimney of the boiler house and the curve of the armchair’s arm. Both obey it: the heat that keeps the patient warm, the angle that eases the breath of a patient sitting up. The free angles of the plan might seem to break the law of the orthogonal frame, but they serve the same law, sun and separation, so the range is wide and coherent. Held below the top because the coherence is that of a single programme, and because the later additions and alterations of the hospital years weaken its reach as the building stands.
Metallica · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the will taken by a master, and the force of that taking, heard in one sound of locked riffs and controlled speed. The two most distant elements obey it. Orion, an instrumental with a slow bass melody at its centre, and Damage, Inc., the fastest and most violent track, are the same discipline, turned once to grave beauty and once to destruction, and Orion’s frame of marching riffs keeps it inside the law. The acoustic introductions obey too, each a calm that the band overruns. The range of form runs from ballad to instrumental to fast thrash. The law strains where the master becomes a monster from a book, and where the critique of violence becomes its celebration.
Hilma af Klint · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the loose, floating buds and spirals of Childhood, and the ordered circles and symmetrical figures of Old Age. They obey one law: growth, read as the development of a form from germ to order, laid flat on a coloured field at one scale. The change from organic to geometric is not a second physics but the law itself unfolding, and the cycle’s most distant parts are stages of one process. The range is wide: four colour keys, two vocabularies, organic and geometric, and a written element. What holds the axis is that the written element sits uneasily: letters and words are a second order of sign, legible only by doctrine, laid onto a field otherwise governed by visual growth. Held for that seam, not for narrowness.
Hasegawa Tōhaku · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the darkest near pine at the right of the right screen, wet and heavy, and the snowy peak at the top of the left screen, given almost wholly by the paper. They obey one law. Density of ink is presence and nearness; the paper is air, distance and snow alike; every element in the work sits on that one scale, and nothing breaks it. No other physics enters: no line of ground, no colour, no human sign. The law governs the whole completely. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is small: pines, mist and one mountain, in one weather, at one hour, in one season. The law of Water Lilies (8.9) holds a day, from dawn to sunset and from open water to shade; this holds less, as completely.
Paul Valéry · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the most distant elements: the Pythia in convulsion and the palm in its patience; the erotic, almost weightless “Les Pas” and the metaphysical argument of “Le Cimetière marin”. One law governs them: the mind attending to itself in the act of making, its stillness and its motion, its waiting and its seizure, under strict measure. The serpent is that law turned to irony, Narcissus the same law turned to longing. The range is real: myth, landscape, love, death, the body, the tree, the architecture of columns. Held below the highest because this is a collection, not a sequence, its minor pieces belonging to the law by tone more than by need, and because every poem turns on the one consciousness.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the girl dancing in a meadow in the first hour and the girl walking in a clipped English garden in the last. One law governs both, a gaze of wonder meeting a world it cannot keep. The English look at Virginia and the girl looks at England under that law, and the camera treats both alike, which is the film’s argument. The famine at the fort, the council of Powhatan, the baptism and the court obey it too, over a wide range: idyll, war, famine, court, deathbed. Held below the top because the law softens what does not fit it. The colony’s brutality and the war are drawn into the same lyric key and lose their weight, and the change of narrator, right in design, is less complete in tone than in structure.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dinner at Bill’s house, glass and threat and children frozen at the table, and the close at Big Bend, light on rock and talk of the moment. One law governs both: life comes as a run of present moments, and nothing is held. Bill’s house is escaped in one cut and never resolved; his children, the step-siblings, simply leave the film, as people leave a child’s life. The sold car, the friends and girlfriends who go without ceremony and Olivia’s last scene obey the same law, applied with discipline across a range from domestic violence to the comedy of the grandparents’ church. The late moralising and the plumber’s return close a circle the law says the film does not close.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Stella’s comic massage and her talk of Jeff’s love life, and the dog’s owner keening over the dead dog, or Lisa trapped in a murderer’s flat. One law governs both: everyone in the courtyard is seen and alone, and every life across the yard answers the question of what two people owe each other. Miss Torso’s suitors, the newlyweds’ blind and Miss Lonelyhearts’ imaginary guest obey the same law as the Thorwald marriage that ended in murder. The range runs from farce to murder on one set, and the tone passes between them without a seam. Two strains hold it: the close resolves every window happily at once, a comic coda tidier than the law the film has shown, and the one breach of Jeff’s sightline bends the film’s own rule.
The Strokes · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: feeling held behind a pose, and the pose played with exactness. The two most distant elements obey it. The title song, slow and swaying, and Take It or Leave It, the fastest and loudest, are the same shrug, once tired and once furious; the ruefulness of Someday and the sneer of New York City Cops meet in the same dry sound. Nothing in the record breaks its law, from the first bar of the title song to the last shout of the closing track, and no song reaches for a manner the rest does not share. What holds it is range: the law is tested over a narrow field, one band, one band of tempo, one stance and one texture for eleven songs, and narrowness is not coherence.
Television · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: two guitars in conversation over a steady ground, reaching toward an elevation that is wanted and feared, in a city at night. The two most distant elements obey it. See No Evil, under four minutes of nervous drive, and Torn Curtain, seven minutes of slow, heavy dread, are the same interplay at opposite speeds and temperatures, one reaching up and one weighed down. Guiding Light, the tenderest song, keeps the interlocking parts and the night, and Prove It’s detective and Venus’s statue are images from the same city. Nothing breaks the law. Held from the top by range: the instrumentation is one throughout, the voice one, the register largely nocturnal, and narrowness is not coherence. The law, never broken, is tested over a modest field.
Kongo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the calm carved face and the chaotic field of driven iron below it, or the sealed medicine within and the blades without. One law holds them: everything in the figure is the force and its restraint, the power to strike held in a body by a specialist’s art and a community’s agreements. The calm face is the authority the iron obeys; the mirror is the eye that directs the blades; the raised arm is the iron gathered into one act. Nothing in the figure stands outside that law, and its range is wide, from the most composed carving to the most random accretion, from healing to killing. Charged: on smaller and later examples the bindings and additions sometimes read as heap rather than law, and the type cannot be credited with the coherence of its best figures alone.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a hurt fled into a dream of sound, and the dream swinging between hush and flood. The two most distant elements are Silverfuck’s long noise and Luna’s lullaby, and they obey the law as its poles, the dream as overwhelm and the dream as sleep. Disarm, the most distant in texture, obeys in sense: there the dream’s source is named. Today joins bright sound to dark meaning, the law’s irony in miniature. The range is fair: hard rock, a ballad with strings, noise, a lullaby, a pop single. What holds the figure: the palette is largely one, the guitar wall at one tone, and narrowness is not coherence; and Silverfuck and Geek U.S.A. tilt toward display, where refuge gives way to the pleasure of force for its own sake.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law, felt rather than stated: what is on the record and what is kept off it. It governs a kitchen with a bad tap and an envelope behind the utility receipts, a day the log could not see, a board under glass where a community posts its own debts and leaves one sheet off, a field changed as a data error, a file that goes into a furnace and a bundle that goes into a drawer beside a flashlight. The two most distant elements, the log’s flat fields and the killings in February, obey it exactly: the one names the call, the other answers it, and neither says so. The range is wider than before, and the coherence depends less on exclusion.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the girl with the fruit in white heat by night, and the museum’s cleaners in plain colour some eighty years later. One law governs both, the film’s whole law: what the wall hides, and who looks. The girl acts in the dark the household will not look into; the cleaners keep the hidden thing visible, behind glass, daily. The house, the river, the engineers and the telephone call obey the same law, across a range from domestic comedy through industry and fable to document. The strain is at the joints: the red screen belongs to none of the film’s worlds, and the cut to the present changes the law for a moment.
Roman · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the great arch over the river at the base and the small arches carrying the channel at the top. One law governs both: the semicircular arch on piers, the load carried down pier on pier, each tier lighter and thinner than the one beneath, so that the whole reads as one diminishing rhythm. The road deck of the 1740s, joined to the lower tier, obeys the same law, in stone and in arches matched to the piers above, and is hardly seen from upstream. Held below the higher figures because the range is narrow: one structural idea, repeated and scaled, with no element far enough from another to test the law hard. The rhythm also slips: the upper arches keep no exact count over those below, and the arch widths vary.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bride, still and framed under her crown at the back, and the child on the floor licking a plate at the lower left. One law holds them: everything in the barn is ordered by the feast and ranked by its relation to the food, those who serve, those who eat, those who wait, those who watch. The gentleman and the friar at the right obey the same law from outside, as watchers; the crowd at the door obeys it as those not yet fed. The register is consistent, plain, close and unsentimental, from the grain wall to the dog under the table, and the figures are built to one weight throughout. But it is one room, one hour, one register: a law held completely over a modest territory.
Itō Jakuchū · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the white phoenix, imagined and ceremonial, on its pine, and the frogs and tadpoles in the mud of Insects at a Pond. One law holds them. Every creature, sacred or common, is rendered with the same total attention, as a pattern that is also a living thing, set against a ground that is itself pattern. The law runs across air, land, water and shore, across the seasons, from the auspicious to the comic, from a single bird to a beach of shells, and nothing in the set breaks it. The range is wide in kinds of being and in register. It is narrow in another sense: there is one mode of seeing for everything and no human presence, and the law governs a single act of regard. Narrowness is not coherence, and the range of creatures is large.
Italo Calvino · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: a city is the relation of a perceiving mind with space, memory and desire, and every description is also a description of the describer. Take the two most distant elements: Zobeide, the city built from a dream of desire, and Leonia, the city that throws away its refuse every day until the refuse surrounds it like mountains; or a single square of wood on the Khan’s chessboard and Kublai’s atlas, which includes cities not yet founded. They obey the same law: the city is made by what people want, remember and discard. The tones run from whimsy to dread, the scale from one square of wood to the whole empire, and the law holds. Held below the top because the range is of ideas and tones within one prose form, not of worlds as unlike as a novel can hold.
Eladio Dieste · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: form, not mass, gives stability, and brick is made to obey it. Take the two most distant elements, the sunken baptistery and the open tower: a closed room below ground and a perforated brick frame in the air, and both are brick made light by geometry. The walls and the roof, the waves rising from the straight ground line and the vaults crossing between them, are the same law in two directions. Light enters through the same material that encloses. Nothing contradicts the system. What keeps the axis from the top is range: one material, one structural idea and one modest programme, and narrowness is not coherence; buildings that hold a larger range under one law stand higher.
Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole: the X and the taper. Take the two most distant elements, the base with its shops and parking and the top with its observatory, its last apartments and its masts. Both obey the same law. The same diagonals cross the parking floors and the apartments; the same taper that widens the base for cars narrows the top for the view. The range is wide in use, car, shop, desk, home and view, and the law holds across all of it: narrowness is not coherence, and this is not narrow. Two things hold the axis at 8.7. The masts on the roof are a second law, the broadcaster’s, set on the first, and the base meets the city less surely than the shaft meets the sky.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs: brick for mass, timber for what spans, grass for what is common, and the rule that one ascends from commerce to commons to decision. Take the most distant elements, the shops’ ordinary windows at the base and the dark chamber at the top, or the hard stair toward the village and the turf stair at the wood: each pair obeys the same physics of material and section. Nothing in the building speaks another language; the flats and offices are in the same brick at the same scale. The range is not wide, a small civic programme, and narrowness is not coherence. But the building holds civic, commercial, domestic and landscape elements, and it holds them all under one rule.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
One physics: ornament is the world’s substance, and flesh is where persons break through it. Take the two most distant elements, the modelled face of the woman and the flat gold field behind her. They obey one law: everything is pattern except the points of feeling, faces, hands and feet, and every element keeps to it, even the meadow, whose flowers are half pattern and half nature where the two worlds meet. The male and female ornaments obey one grammar of opposed signs within one mass. Nothing contradicts. Held below the top because the range is narrow, two figures and one ground, and narrowness is not coherence; and because the edge of the meadow, the one element of drama, is the only place where the law of ornament gives way to a law of danger, and the picture does not reconcile the two.
Adolf Loos · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the mute white exterior, its windows cut without ornament, and the lady’s room, lined in light wood, upholstered and intimate. One is the public mask and one the most private room. They obey one law: the house tells the street nothing, and the interior is graded by use and intimacy, each room given its height, level and material by its place in the household. The servants’ rooms, the dining room, the library and the roof terrace fall under the same law, and the contradiction between outside and inside is the law’s own statement, not a breach of it. Held below the top because a single house is a narrow territory, and because the law relaxes on the upper bedroom floor, where the Raumplan thins toward an ordinary plan.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Eli, high, driving his car into the front of the house and killing the dog, broad farce; and Richie in the bathroom with a razor, the most serious thing in the film. One law governs both: everything is presented, composed and slightly distanced, as a page in a book, and the distance neither mocks the despair nor softens the farce. The narrator’s level voice covers the suicide attempt and the go-kart ride alike. The range is wide, slapstick, a love story, grief, a con and a death, and the law holds across all of it. The strain: in a few places the law governs by decor rather than understanding, in Raleigh’s research and the mice, and the closing grace, Royal’s death set down on an epitaph, arrives quickly.
Medang (Mataram) builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the great Shiva tower and the smallest perwara at the outer edge of the fourth row. They obey one law. Every shrine, from 47 m to a few metres, is the same type, base, body and stepped roof crowned by a ratna, and every position is fixed by one geometry of nested squares on the cardinal axes, the god at the centre and rank expressed as height and distance from him. The law reaches the ornament: kala and makara frames, lion and wishing tree, and the bell-shaped ratna recur at every scale, and the reliefs obey the circuit the plan prescribes. Held below 9 because the law is simple and its range mostly one of scale within a single type.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements the cycle holds: a field where red glows through maroon, and one where black opens in black. They obey one law: a soft-edged open rectangle on a ground of close value, painted in thin layers, its colour emerging from dark, scaled to the body. Nothing in the cycle breaks it: no drawn line, no figure, no second kind of form. The law governs the differences between canvases, and in the room it governs the relation of wall to wall, each canvas the threshold the others repeat. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is small by choice: one motif, three or four colours, one register of light. The law holds completely over a range wider in time and size than in kind, and it is held for the territory. Just below The Rothko Chapel (8.9).
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the broken pane at the upper left, where the light enters, and the foot warmer and tiles at the lower right, in the floor’s half shade. One law holds them: everything in the corner is a surface receiving the same light, ranked by how much of it it takes and how it gives it back, and every object is made with the same patient touch. The woman obeys the law that governs the bread and the pail; she is not painted as a different kind of thing. Nothing contradicts the picture’s physics or its register. But one corner, one figure, one instant and one tone make a narrow territory, and narrowness is not coherence. The law is held completely over a small ground, and the axis is held for the ground.
The White Stripes · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: plain means and an old code, held against a present that has given up both. The two most distant elements obey it. I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself, a song made for an orchestra and a soul singer, is played by two people at full volume; It’s True That We Love One Another is a comic music-hall trio with acoustic guitar. Both are old forms kept alive by plain means, and the code of constancy, courtship and craft runs through both. In the Cold, Cold Night, sung by Meg White, small and still, is the quietest instance of the same restriction. The range of form is wide; the range of sound is narrower, and the comic coda strains the law in tone.
Michael Haneke · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bright literary talk show, books on its set, where Georges edits out a guest’s too-theoretical passage, and a throat cut in a bare flat in the suburbs. One law governs both: what a comfortable order cannot bear to see is cut from the record, and returns. The talk-show edit is that law in miniature; the suicide is the cut thing returning in blood. The tapes, the drawings, the lies to Anne, the arrest of the two, the mother’s vague memory, the pills and drawn curtains and the news on the living-room television obey it without exception, across media, marriage, childhood, the suburbs and the national past. The strain is slight: the dinner anecdote and Anne’s confidant run a parallel of mistrust the law permits rather than requires.
Unknown (English or French) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark rocky ground and trees behind the king on the left, and the flowered meadow of paradise on the right. One law holds them. Everything in the diptych is ranked by its nearness to heaven, and heaven and earth are bound by one livery. The king’s hart and broom pods are worn by the angels; the saints carry their emblems as the angels carry the banner; the gold of earth’s ground and the gold of the haloes are one material; and the exteriors close the law, giving outside the emblem the angels wear within. Nothing in the object contradicts its argument or stands outside it. The range is real but bounded, earth and heaven, king and saints, one court and its double, and the figure stands below the top for the range.
Portishead · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a lone, exposed voice set against a world of machines that will not adapt to it. The two most distant elements obey it. Deep Water, ninety seconds of ukulele and close harmony in the barbershop manner, is the lightest thing on the record; Machine Gun, which follows it, is the hardest. The first is the human figure at its smallest and most domestic, the second the same voice under fire, and the placing of the one against the other is the law made audible. The range is wide: krautrock pulse, folk guitar, close harmony, organ psychedelia, industrial drum machine, synthesiser score. The law strains once, at Small, whose organ middle drifts toward a 1960s psychedelia the rest does not share.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the east entrance of 1897 to 1899, with its curving stone, its Art Nouveau iron and its tower stair; and the west wing of 1907 to 1909, with its sheer oriels and bare geometry. Eight years and a change of style separate them, and they obey one law: use governs the form, light governs the opening, ornament gathers only where the hand touches or the eye stops, and stone holds the whole. The four façades differ entirely and do not contradict one another, because each answers its own rooms and its own slope. The range is wide for a single building. Held below the top because the decorative passages of the first phase and the austerity of the second are joined by principle more than by idiom, and the join is felt.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bare floating genii at the start of the first wall and the dense coiled Typhoeus at the centre of the end wall; or starving grief and the gold-enclosed lovers. They obey one law. Everything is a flat silhouette bound by a single even contour, set on an untouched ground, patterned inside, gilded where it is precious or sacred, and without depth or cast light. The emptiness obeys the law as fully as the crowded passages. The range is wide in subject, beatitude and monster, starvation and lust, armour and nakedness, and in density, from nearly nothing to a full wall, and one physics holds it. Held below the top: the law is one of manner more than of thought, so that horror and bliss are made of the same gold ornament.
Ikeda Terumasa · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stone-dropping bays of the keep, a device for killing at a wall, and the Keshō-yagura of the West Bailey, a lady’s retiring room at the end of a long corridor. One law governs both: white plaster over timber on a stone base, under tiled roofs, the same vocabulary from the smallest wall to the great keep and across two campaigns. The approach and the keep obey one idea of controlled ascent. The range is real, from gate and loophole to residence and shrine, from the stones of earlier castles to Honda’s corridor, and the law holds across it. Held below the top because the territory is one building type in one idiom, and the lost palaces leave the residential half of its law to a single bailey.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a man undone at breakfast by the sound of toast, and the fevered vision of his dead mother in her wedding dress. One law governs both: the House is a body governed by Reynolds’s rules, and whatever enters it must submit or make him ill. The breakfast is the rule defended; the fever is the rule broken, and what lay beneath it showing. The poisonings, the dresses and the frame obey it, and the ending keeps it: he submits to the illness as a new rule. Comedy, romance, gothic and near ghost story are held in one tone. The strain is small: Barbara Rose’s wedding plays as broader satire, and the imagined futures loosen the law for a moment.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark depth of the upper block and the heat of the ground at the margin. They obey one law: soft-edged horizontal planes of colour stacked frontally on a single ground, each defined by its relation to the others and none by drawing. There is no line, no figure, no diagonal, no second kind of mark; the law is total. The range within it is real, from near darkness to near flame, wider in temperature than the warm canvases of the early 1950s, and the law holds across it. But narrowness is not coherence: three planes, one direction, one kind of edge. Held a step below Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie and Monet’s Water Lilies, both at 8.9, whose territories are wider.
Cindy Sherman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a woman at a mirror in a bathroom or bedroom, inside, close, half-dressed, and a small figure with a suitcase on a road in open country. They obey one law: a single woman, alone in the frame, caught between two moments of a film that does not exist, played by the artist, framed as the screen once framed her and offered to a viewer who must supply the story. Every image is that law. No image has a second figure, a caption, colour or a real film behind it. The range under the law is wide for a photographic series: interior and landscape, America and the European art film, comedy and menace, city and suburb. Held below the top because the law is simple and the medium uniform; the width is in genre and setting, not in kind of making.
Richard Serra · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the single torqued ellipse at the start, a closed oval entered through one gap, and Snake, long open curves one walks along rather than into. They obey one law: plate of one material and one thickness, curved in plan and leaning in section, standing by weight, higher than the body, to be known only in movement. Every work is that law at a different degree of complexity, and the law reaches the floor, level throughout so that only the walls move, and the light. Nothing contradicts it. Narrowness is not coherence, and the material range is narrow; but the range of spatial effect under the one law is wide, from closed to open, from the still chamber to the moving corridor. Held below 9 because Snake obeys the law in an earlier dialect, and the join shows.
Gustave Caillebotte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the near couple at life size, rich in material and colour, and the tiny walker at the far end of the square, a few strokes of grey. One law holds them: every figure is a unit in one perspective, one light and one weather, the heads on one line, each walker alone under an umbrella, the grey falling equally on the rich and the small. The post, the façades, the paving and the people obey the same geometry and the same cool tonality; nothing breaks the order, and the rain enters every surface. The range runs from intimate foreground to deep architectural space, from fabric to stone to sky. Held below the top because the law governs one instant, one class and one key, and narrowness is not coherence.
Bernd and Hilla Becher · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: a nineteenth-century brick tower with a castellated top and a steel spherical tank on legs. They obey one law, the same frontal view, the same light, the same scale in the frame, the same place in the grid, and the law makes them comparable rather than merely adjacent. The range the law governs is wide: decades of building, several countries, every material and many styles, from historicist ornament to bare concrete engineering. Nothing in the body contradicts it. This is a law that admits a great variety and orders it, not coherence by exclusion. Held below 9.0 because the law is a rule of procedure, not a law discovered in the material, and it governs by repetition more than by inner development: the grids do not grow from one another.
Imhotep, under Djoser · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the perishable world of the king’s life translated into permanent, mostly solid stone for the use of the ka. Take the two most distant elements, the panelled outer wall of the living palace and the granite vault 28 m below the pyramid. Both obey it: both are the king’s house, one for the festival above and one for the body below, and the faience rooms that copy reed-matted chambers underground tie them together. The north and south ordering of the plan holds across the enclosure. Held below the top because the law is applied loosely: a plan revised rather than composed, and a second burial never reconciled.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Stepan Trofimovich’s vanity over a lost manuscript and a teacup in Part One, and Kirillov’s suicide in Part Three. One law governs them: persons possessed by ideas they did not make, circling, the father’s harmless aestheticism and the man-god’s logic two ends of the same descent. The comic and the tragic obey it, as the epigraphs say they must, and the last chapter brings Stepan Trofimovich back to read the law aloud. Charged: the change of plan leaves a seam between pamphlet and tragedy, so that some conspirators are satirised under one law and Stavrogin and Kirillov tragedised under another; Karmazinov is a caricature drawn from outside the book’s world; and the narrator’s knowledge breaks its own rule. The range held is very wide; the hold is not seamless.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bawdy comedy of Enkidu’s seven nights with Shamhat, or Gilgamesh’s catalogue of Ishtar’s ruined lovers, and the gods cowering from their own Flood. Across the first eleven tablets they obey one law: the gods set a limit, the human lot is death, and a man learns the limit only by crossing toward it; what he gets is the city, the friend and the record. The comedy of the insult to Ishtar is that law, for the king insults the goddess believing himself beyond limit, and Enkidu dies for it. The wild and the civilised, the steppe and the walls, the netherworld and the bottom of the sea all fall under it, and the range is wide. Even the gods’ caprice is lawful in the work’s terms, rebuked from within by Ea: punish the sinner, not all mankind. What breaks the law is Tablet XII: Enkidu, dead and mourned, is alive again, goes down to the netherworld as a servant to fetch the king’s lost ball and stick, and rises as a ghost, and its netherworld is not the house of dust he dreamed. It is part of the series as transmitted and is charged here at full weight, the largest structural fault in the work; the eleven tablets alone would stand higher. The tone also ranges uneasily at points, the farce of the goddess spurned set close beside the grief of the eighth tablet.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Korobochka, “дубинноголовая”
(cudgel-headed), haggling over dead souls as over hemp and lard, and the closing apostrophe, “Русь, куда ж несешься ты? дай ответ. Не дает ответа.”
(Rus, where are you rushing? Give an answer. She gives no answer.) Does one law govern both? The narrator’s voice, hyperbolic and wandering, covers both, and the troika rises out of Chichikov’s own britzka, so that the exaltation rides on the scoundrel. Many hear one physics there; many hear a break, the satirist turned prophet. Both hearings are in the text, and the work does not settle between them. The biography of chapter 11 also shifts the register. Held where it is for that unresolved seam across a wide range.
Victor Hugo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the essay on argot (IV.7) and Valjean’s deathbed (V.9); or Tholomyès’s student picnic in the first part and the sewer. One law is meant to govern them, and mostly does: the movement from night to light, conscience against the abyss, the social underworld as the place where souls are lost and saved. Argot is the language of that night, the sewer its body, Waterloo the hinge of the century that made the misérables. The comedy obeys it, Gillenormand, the students, Gavroche’s wit, and so do the dread and the essays. Charged: the melodrama and the sociology do not always share one physics. Thénardier is a demon in the plot and a social product in the essays; Cosette is an idea where Fantine was a woman; and providential coincidence sits uneasily beside a realist account of how poverty works.
Virgil · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law runs through the book: song is the shepherd’s work and comfort, and the world outside it, war, eviction, unrequited love and death, presses on it and is answered only by more song, which does not suffice. Take the two most distant elements, the bawdy rivalry of the third poem and the cosmic prophecy of the fourth. They obey the law, because the fourth says aloud that it is stretching the pastoral, and the stretch is the law’s own test. Gallus’s “omnia vincit Amor: et nos cedamus Amori”
“Love conquers all: let us too yield to Love” (10.69) is the same defeat as Moeris’s lost memory in the ninth. What holds the axis is that the law is a frame more than a single physics: the Silenus song is held in only by being sung.
Stendhal · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the King’s visit to Verrières, which is comedy, and the cell at Besançon, which is tragedy. One law governs both: the self acts a role that society assigns and is judged by the role, and only when the play ends is it free to feel. The irony that makes the comedy is the irony that lets Julien, at the last, see through his own ambition. The range is wide: provincial satire, seminary intrigue, salon comedy, political conspiracy, two loves of different natures, a trial. What charges the axis is the shot, long found a break in the book’s causality, a crime borrowed from a court report and imposed on a hero about to succeed. It holds, as the role’s last move, but it is written so fast that the law is asserted there rather than shown.
Sappho · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the public, ceremonial narrative of fragment 44, with Hector’s bride arriving by sea to the city’s music, and the private interior of fragment 31, one woman’s body watched by herself. One law governs them: beauty and desire as the measure by which persons and events are known, under the goddess whose power the poems both serve and suffer. The same law holds the invective of fragment 55, where the woman without share in the roses of Pieria goes unremembered among the dead, the consolations of memory in fragments 94 and 96, and the acceptance of age in fragment 58: what is loved and remembered lasts. Held lower because coherence across a body this broken can be shown only between a dozen poems, and the order of the books was the editors’, not hers.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Pandarus’s farce on the night of rain in Book III, and Troilus laughing from the eighth sphere. For most of the poem one law governs both. Fortune rules, and what is joyful is joyful because it is unstable, so that comedy and tragedy are two speeds of the same wheel, and the narrator’s tenderness and irony are held in one voice. The range is wide: farce, lyric, philosophy, war council, heavenly ascent. The charge is the ending. The contempt of the world and the call to young lovers to turn to Christ come after a poem that has made earthly love its beauty, and the turn is abrupt; the stacked farewells read as several laws asserting themselves at once. It is partly a seam, and the axis stands below the other two of the floor.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Christian narrator’s providence, with the song of Creation sung in Heorot, and the pagan law of vengeance, fate and fame. One physics holds them on the whole. God governs, and wyrd names the same force seen from below: Wyrd oft nereð / unfægne eorl, þonne his ellen deah, fate often spares the undoomed man when his courage holds. The counsel to avenge rather than mourn sits beside Hrothgar’s sermon against pride, oferhyda ne gym, without contradiction, across a range from banquet to swamp to barrow. But the law slips. The Danes turn to idols though Hrothgar speaks always as a monotheist; Beowulf’s slack youth, told late, contradicts the first part; the turn from Hygd to Modthryth is abrupt.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, “Byzantium”, all spirit and artifice, and Crazy Jane’s “place of excrement”. They obey one law, the antinomy that “Vacillation” states and the “Dialogue” plays out: the soul’s refusal and the body’s affirmation are each true and each require the other, and Crazy Jane is the Self of the “Dialogue” in another key. The Coole Park elegies and “Blood and the Moon” come under the same law through the tower and the Anglo-Irish house, sites of that quarrel in history. The range the law covers is wide. What holds the axis lower than the others is that the book is a collection: the run of short occasional pieces, “Statistics”, “The Seven Sages”, “The Results of Thought”, is governed by the law only loosely, and “A Woman Young and Old”, older in part, sits beside “Words for Music Perhaps” rather than inside one design.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the classical west front and the thirteenth-century cloister, or the dark crypt of Saint-Martin and the gilded archangel of 1897. They share no idiom. They largely share a law, the rock and the ascent, which every campaign obeyed, each age building upward, closing the pyramid and subordinating its style to the silhouette. The neo-Gothic spire is the clearest proof: added last, it obeys the law better than anything since the thirteenth century. But the law holds at the scale of the mass more than inside the building, where a Romanesque nave abuts a Flamboyant choir unreconciled and the west front breaks the church’s own grammar. The range runs from charnel and cellar to sky.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the hieratic Commune in his arc of virtues on the north wall, and a peasant driving a pig toward the gate on the east. One law holds them: cause and effect, government and its fruit, in a single territory that runs from the throne to the horizon, and the west wall obeys the same law reversed. The range is very wide, allegory to observation, palace to field, virtue to vice. But the mode changes at the corner of the room, from personification ranked by size and labelled to a world painted as seen, and the joint shows: the two modes agree in argument, not in kind of image. Security, flying over the fields with her scroll and gallows, carries allegory into the world, and she holds. The seam keeps the axis below the higher marks.
Hector Berlioz · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the waltz of the ball and the Dies irae of the sabbath. One law governs both: everything is the dreamer’s perception, and the beloved’s melody is the measure of each scene. At the ball it intrudes, at the sabbath it is degraded, and both times it is the same theme bent by the mind that carries it. The tonal plan closes as a cadence, C to C by two falling thirds and the dominant. The range governed is wide: salon, pasture, public execution, the infernal. The law sounds less clearly where the materials were borrowed: the march obeys the story but not the theme until its last bars, and the Largo’s romance belongs to another life. One physics, with the seams showing.
El Greco · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the count’s armoured body at the bottom, painted with weight and reflections, and Christ at the apex, white and nearly without mass. They do not obey one law of rendering; the picture runs two on purpose. The law that governs both is the picture’s argument: earth painted as seen and heaven as believed, joined at one point, the passage of the soul, and by a few glances upward, the priest’s and a mourner’s. Read so, the range is wide, from portrait realism to visionary distortion in one field. The objection stands: the seam is a seam, not a modulation, and the agitation above is not answered by the stillness below. The range is credited and the abruptness charged.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the massive incised cylinders of the nave and the Galilee’s slender shafts. Within the Romanesque church one law governs: the double bay, the alternation, the pier as support and field of pattern, the three storeys, held from the first campaign to the nave vault of 1133, across forty years and more than one bishop. That is wide range under one law. The Galilee obeys part of it, its chevron arches answering the nave’s, but its physics of support is the opposite; the Nine Altars obeys another law, a Gothic of shaft and lancet joined to a Romanesque arm; the Perpendicular tower a third. The church as it stands is a composite of four periods, joined well but not under one law, and the axis is held for that.
James Boswell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs: the life of one man, in dated order, seen through one observer and the witnesses he gathers. Take the two most distant elements, the farce of the Wilkes dinner and the prayers and the fear of death: they obey the same law, because both are Johnson’s character in action, and the book never treats the comic and the dreadful as different kinds. The range is wide, from tavern banter to theology. The law strains in places. The polemic against Hawkins and Piozzi turns the record into a brief for its author; the borrowed accounts of the youth and the death work under a different physics from the witnessed scenes; and Boswell’s self-display at times takes the stage for its own sake.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of the Angel and Blake over the abyss in the Leviathan fancy, which ends with the Angel unable to answer, and the revolutionary apocalypse of the Song, “Empire is no more!” One law governs both: contraries are necessary, restraint passes itself off as reason, and the energy it forbids returns as revelation or revolution. The saying of plate 24, “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression”, and the theology of the Prolific and the Devourer obey the same law, across a wide range: aphorism, satire, cosmology, politics. Charged because the book proclaims that both contraries must stand and then speaks mostly for one of them. The Prolific and the Devourer reconcile the two, but not every plate keeps that balance, and the Song reads from a slightly different law, that of the prophecies to come.
Søren Kierkegaard · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the liturgical terror of the Exordium and the comic portrait of the tax collector; or the fairy tale of Agnes and the merman and the dry hypothesis of Problema I. One law governs them. Everything is measured by the relation of the single individual to the absolute, and every figure is a variation on Abraham, falling short of him, imitating him, or parodying him. The pseudonym’s stance, admiring, unable, ironic about himself, is held from the Preface to the Epilogue. What holds the axis is a seam in Problema III. There the demonic, in the merman and in Gloucester, opens a second way for the single individual to stand higher than the universal, in sin, and the book does not fully decide its relation to faith; Johannes leaves it as an excursus. Wide range, one law, a loose seam.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Flanders night at the start, with the colonel’s body on the road, and the asylum director Baryton at Vigny, who abandons his clinic to learn English and goes off to England. One law governs both. The world uses up the body, and every institution, army, company, factory, hospital, asylum, is a device for doing it with good conscience; the only freedom is flight, and the only truth is death. War and peace, Africa and Detroit, a child dying and a crypt for tourists obey that law and speak in one voice. The range is wide and held: farce, horror, social report, a love story, a murder plot. Held at this figure because the law is so uniform that it is at times imposed rather than found, and the tenderness of the Molly and Bébert passages stands a little outside it, admitted by the voice without being reconciled to its verdict.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: an inherited order, of state, commerce, church and the folk movement itself, seen as a fraud, and a self that refuses it by laughing or by leaving. The two most distant elements obey it. The 115th Dream, farce over a band, and Baby Blue, elegy over a guitar, are the same departure: a man who leaves a continent that robs him, and a voice telling another to leave everything behind (“stepping stones behind”). Maggie’s Farm’s refusal of labour and It’s Alright, Ma’s refusal of a whole society are one refusal at two scales, and the love songs belong as the private counter-law, a woman beyond the order. What holds it: the halves meet in argument more than in sound, and Outlaw Blues and On the Road Again obey in attitude only.
Robert Browning · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the book: a single human voice under pressure, in love, art or faith, saying more than it means to. It holds across the widest range: a Renaissance friar, a Greek poet-king, an Arab physician, a Victorian bishop, a knight in a waste land, a wife, a lover in the Campagna. Take the two most distant elements, “Childe Roland” and “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”: both obey it, and so do “Love Among the Ruins” and “Holy-Cross Day”. What breaks the law: “In a Balcony”, a dramatic scene among monologues, and the slightest lyrics, which are songs rather than voices. The redistribution of 1863 suggests that Browning himself felt the book’s frame was weak. A law strong in the poems and loose in the frame holds the axis here.
Andrea Mantegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the soles of the feet at the front edge, and the Virgin’s weeping face in the upper left corner. They largely obey one law. The law is one viewpoint and one substance: everything is seen from where the viewer stands, low and close, and everything, flesh, linen and marble, is rendered in one grave, near colourless matter. The jar, the pillow and the wounds are placed under the same law. What resists is the mourners. They are seen from a different height and at a different scale, crowded in as if from another picture, and their warmer pathos sits beside the body’s cold rather than under its law. The range is also narrow: one body, one stone, one corner of grief, one register, and narrowness is not coherence.
Georges Bizet · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the street boys’ mock-military march and the killing at the bullring gate. One law governs them, and the prelude announces it, passing from the bullring’s daylight to the fate motive, so that festival and death are one physics before the curtain rises. Every bright scene is the festival half of that law, and the motive returns inside them, at the flower, the cards and the end. The comic quintet is business done by people whose trade lies outside the law, and fits. The strain is Micaëla: her scenes obey another physics, the piety of the village and the mother, in another idiom. The contrast measures José’s fall, but sets a second law beside the first.
Sylvia Plath · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant poems: “Morning Song”, tender, comic and waking, and “Edge”, cold and final. One physics governs both: the body seen as an object, mother and child as figures, the moon as witness, white against red. The tenderness of “Nick and the Candlestick” and the savagery of “Daddy” are one voice in one system of images, and the law holds from the first poem to the last. Held at 8.6 because the range it governs is moderate: one voice, one life, a few registers, and narrowness is not coherence. The assembly by another hand also bends the law at the close, where an editor’s ending stands in place of the poet’s.
Percy Bysshe Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Furies’ torture of Prometheus in the ravine of Act I and the Moon’s love song to the Earth in Act IV. One law governs both: the mind is enslaved by what it serves and freed by love, and the physical cosmos follows the moral; the ice that binds the Titan and the spheres that dance are one physics of feeling. Demogorgon names the law: “All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil”. The range is wide: Greek myth, Christian vision, geology, revolution, cosmic song. Charged: the causal joint is unclear, since Jupiter falls at Demogorgon’s hour and not visibly by the revocation, and the poem never says how the two meet; and the renewed human of Act III is left qualified, the question of chance and death not closed, in a way the rapture of Act IV does not quite hold.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the first section’s question of what in us wants truth, and the closing poem’s midday song to a friend who comes. One law governs both: everything is read as the expression of a kind of life, and rank is its measure, and the poem is that law become lyric, the solitary waiting for his equal. The law holds from the theory of knowledge through religion and morals to peoples and nobility, which is a wide range. The cost: a perspectivism that calls every judgement a symptom pronounces, in the seventh and eighth parts, on women and nations with a dogmatist’s confidence, and the book does not always make that tension its subject. Narrowness is not the fault; the inconsistency of tone toward its own claims is, in places.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the electric guitar’s sound as an extension of the body and of consciousness, through the blues into whatever lies past it. The two most distant elements are Red House, a slow twelve-bar blues, and Third Stone from the Sun, a theme thrown into space with treated voices, and they obey the same law: one is the blues voiced through the guitar, the other the guitar leaving the blues, and the same tone carries both. Manic Depression’s waltz and Fire’s sprint obey it. The range is wide, blues, pop, rhythm and blues, jazz rhythm, tape collage, and one sound holds it. What holds the figure: Can You See Me and Remember obey only as songs by the same band, and the record’s halves of song and space meet in the guitar more than in an argument.
John Donne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the “Song”, “Go and catch a falling star”, whose world holds no woman “true, and fair”, and the “Valediction”, whose love is “Inter-assured of the mind”; or the farce of “The Flea” and the night of the “Nocturnal”. One law governs them: love is argued, by a speaker who claims the right to remake the world’s order in its name and uses all knowledge as evidence. The cynic and the devotee obey it alike; their conclusions differ, but their method and their claim on the cosmos do not. The range is wide, from bawdy to the year’s midnight, and it is held. Charged: the law governs method more than vision, and the stances do contradict, inconstancy praised and constancy sworn, with no frame to reconcile them, since the body has no order of its author’s making. Held at 8.6, as dramatic voices rather than one mind’s settled sense.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bright noon office in Phoenix, an oil man flirting over cash, and the dark cellar in Fairvale with the mother’s mummified body. One law governs both: secret guilt carried in private, money and desire pushing ordinary people into traps, and the watching eye, from the employer at the crossing and the patrolman’s sunglasses to the peephole and the cellar’s sockets. Mirrors and birds recur throughout, and the swamp gives back at the end what the first part stole. Crime film and horror film obey one physics, and the break between them is the design. What weakens it is register: the courthouse speaks the expert’s language, and the comic sheriff’s wife and the hardware store sit lighter.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the open, lettered capriccio of the title plate and the darkened, inscribed XVI. One law governs both: architecture coherent in every part and impossible as a whole, at a scale that annihilates the figure, drawn in one line. The new plates, II and V, obey it. Against it, the overlay of 1761, Roman inscriptions, reliefs and instruments of punishment, is a second law laid on the first, an argument about Roman law and magnificence pressed onto plates whose first law was dream and space. In most plates the two fuse, the inscription becoming one more surface of the prison; in a few the antiquarian matter reads as applied. And the range is narrow in temper: all of it one dread.
Titian · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the nude, still and turned to us at the picture plane, and the kneeling servant with her head in the chest, deep in the room and turned away. They obey one law: one light falling from the left, one colour system tying the red of the mattress to the red beyond the divide. The hanging that divides the fields is itself an object in the room and obeys its physics. The range, from the body offered to the viewer to the domestic work that ignores him, holds. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range is narrow: one room, one light, four creatures. The joint between the shallow near field and the deep far one is abrupt, the one place the law strains.
Baldassare Longhena · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the steps on the canal and the friars’ choir behind the high altar. Do they obey one law? The law is scenographic: every element is placed for a viewer at a fixed point, the entrant at the door, the worshipper at the centre, the sailor on the basin. From the door the arches open in sequence to the high altar and the choir beyond; from the water the domes, drum and towers compose as a picture. Under that law the building coheres, and its range is wide, from the city’s skyline to the rose at the centre of the floor. What resists is that two geometries meet: the octagon’s centralised, Byzantine law and the sanctuary’s Palladian one, with its apses and its separate dome, joined by viewing rather than by one system of proportion. The building is wide, and it is not seamless.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the plain railing, uncarved but for its donative records, and the gates, the densest carving on the hill. They obey one law. The boundary is plain and the threshold is full; the walking path is quiet and the passage into it is crowded with the world being left. The yakshi and the empty seat, abundance and renunciation, kings at war over relics and a riderless horse, all sit inside one economy of gift and circling, and the law holds across the centuries of building, from the brick of the foundation to the stone of the gates. The one break is the Gupta Buddhas: the teacher’s body brought, after the gates had shown only his signs, into a work built to show his absence. The work absorbed the change rather than split on it, and it is charged lightly.
Lorenzo Ghiberti · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Creation, Adam lifted from the earth in an unbounded field, and Solomon, a symmetrical crowd under an architecture drawn to one point. One law holds them: every story stands on the same gold ground, in the same graded relief, with the same canon of graceful figures, so that cosmos and court obey one light and one metal. The frame binds the ten into one surface, and the range is wide, from the creation of the world to the state, from wilderness to city. But the law is not uniform. The doors record a style changing over twenty-seven years, and the scattered multi-episode fields of the first panels and the unified stages of the later ones are two systems of space, held together by metal and canon rather than by one construction.
John Bunyan · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs: the way is the life of faith, every place a state of the soul, every person a disposition. Take the two most distant elements, the low comedy of By-ends and his companions trading reasons for following religion for gain, and the River at the end: they obey the same law, and the tone moves between them without a break. The literal and the allegorical do not always lie on one plane. Christian’s wife and children are real people left in a real city, while his companions are virtues; Faithful’s trial and burning are told with the literal force of Foxe’s martyrs, which presses the allegory towards history; the frame leaks, as the dreamer sees within the gates; and the one break in the dream is a seam of the composition. These are small breaches in a law that holds over a wide range.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs: the mind is free only when its conditions let it forget itself, and whatever forces it to remember sex damages the work. Take the two most distant elements: the turf and the beadle on the first pages, and the androgynous mind at the close. The beadle’s fence, the professor’s anger, the woman’s grievance and the man’s “I” lying across the page all obey the same law, and satire, elegy, history, fiction and polemic answer to it alike. Charged because the law is strained at the close: a book whose force is a grievance made exact ends by asking that writers not write with a grievance, and the turn reads in part as a change of rule more than its fulfilment. Against that, the ideal of a mind unconscious of its sex is the end the material argument aims at, prepared from the first chapter’s interrupted thought.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Latin sentence in gold on the dark ground at the right, and the fur at the collar under the fingers. They obey one law. Everything on the panel is governed by the symmetry and fixity of the icon and by the precision of the hand that made it: letters, curls, fur and features are given the same exact, unhurried scrutiny, and the one asymmetry, the hand, is the law’s own exception, placed where it means. But the range is narrow: one figure, one ground, one light, one register of grave stillness, and narrowness is not coherence. A law held completely over a small territory, and held below the top for that range.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the book: feeling is shown only through action and omission, and the narrative never consoles. Take the two most distant elements, Sam Cardinella carried to the scaffold in a chair and the wife at the hotel window in “Cat in the Rain”. They obey the same law: a human being reduced to what can be seen, the want or the terror unspoken and total. The range is wide: war, execution, bullring, marriage, boyhood, wilderness, the expatriate hotel and the home town of “Soldier’s Home”. Held at this figure because two pieces break the law. “My Old Man” is told in a borrowed boy’s voice and closes on sentiment, and “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” puts satire in place of omission, judging its people where the rest of the book declines to.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of the miracle, children who change their story and a crowd led by the cameras, and the horror of Steiner’s flat. One law governs both. Everything that promises meaning is taken up by the apparatus and returned empty, and Marcello watches: the miracle is the sacred taken up by television, Steiner’s death the cultivated life taken up by the photographers, who wait for the widow. The law holds across a wide range, until Fregene. There Marcello stops watching and acts, cruelly, and the register turns from observation to disgust. The feathers sit uneasily with the sympathy that came before them. They may be the law’s last term, or a second law, the film losing its patience, and the doubt counts against the whole.
Spike Lee · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the three men on the corner, laughing at the Korean grocer who has made a business on the block in a year while they sit, and Radio Raheem dying under a police baton. One law governs both: everyone on the block makes a claim on the same space, and the claim is spoken first as a joke, then as an insult, then as force. The Wall of Fame, the hydrant, the radio, the scuffed sneaker and the slur montage obey that law, and so do the riot and the coda’s quarrel over money. The range is wide, from sketch comedy to death, and the comic opening and the tragic close are one physics of heat and territory. The strain is bounded: the montage and the epigraphs step outside the fiction under the same law; the scene with Tina belongs to a looser film; the score’s sweetness pulls against the image.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs: everything is paid for, in money or in pain, and those who know the values live by them, while those who do not make scenes. Take the two most distant elements, Bill’s comic riffs on irony and pity and stuffed dogs, and the death of Vicente Girones in the street. They obey the same law: the comedy is a way of paying without complaint, and the death is the price of a fiesta that no one in the band of foreigners pays. The Count with his arrow wounds and his values, Romero in the ring, Jake settling his bills at the hotel and Brett sending Romero away all fall under it, and the style holds evenly across city, river and ring. Held at this figure because the range is narrower than the highest marks need, one voice and one milieu of leisure, and because Cohn is governed by the narrator’s spite more than by the book’s law. Narrowness is not coherence.
Salman Rushdie · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One physics governs: the marvellous is admitted exactly where it carries the nation’s story, telepathy at midnight, the nose that smells, the witch’s basket of invisibility, and the comic and the atrocious obey one voice. Take the two most distant elements, the slapstick of the spittoon-hitting game in Agra and the massacres in Dacca in 1971: one narrator and one law, history entering the body, hold both. Narrowness is not the risk; the range is enormous. The strain comes late, when the allegory of Book Three overrides the law the first books set: the Widow’s sterilisation of the children works as plot rather than world, and Saleem’s amnesia as the buddha is a convenience of the frame as much as an event in it. The cracking of the narrator’s body is meant to excuse such strain, and partly does.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the free sculpture of the roof, its stacks, stage and ramps, and the strict grid of the long faces. One law governs both, the Modulor in dimension and raw concrete in matter: the roof’s curves are cast in the same material and measured in the same series as the loggias, and the pilotis, the most sculptural part of all, are the grid’s columns made into figures. The mid-height band of taller brise-soleil reads as the frame’s own variation, and the colour, confined to the loggias’ sides, obeys the grid. What bends the law: sculptural feet and crown against the rational rack set the hand beside the system, and inside, the streets and the flats obey a finer, more domestic physics than the faces.
Eugène Delacroix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Liberty at the apex, an allegory in a Phrygian cap, and the stripped corpse at the lower left, the barest fact in the picture. Do they obey one law? Largely, and that is the work’s achievement: the goddess is given a body of the same weight and dirt as the dead, the same smoke lies over both, the same light models them, and the flag’s colours bind the allegory to the men below. The range is wide: myth and reportage, triumph and death, the living and the dead, a cathedral and a paving stone. What holds the axis is that the law strains at its joins. The classical profile and the bare breast keep a register the rest of the field does not share, and the critics of 1831 who found her neither goddess nor woman were pointing at a real seam. Coherent across a wide range, not seamless.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements in Wright’s part of the work: the great rotunda and the smallest detail of the floor or of a window. One law governs both, the circle and the spiral, in plan, in section, in the openings and in the pattern of the floor, and the small rotunda repeats the large at another scale and for another use. Within the rotunda the law is as strict as any building of its century obeys, and it covers structure, route, light and gallery at once. What bends it is the one work as it stands: the tower of 1992 behind is governed by a rectilinear grid clad in stone, another law, joined to the first at the back and seen with it from the park. It is a quiet second law, not a contradiction, and it holds the axis below 9.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the open face, eyes and mouth still holding the last moment of life, and the stiff feet at the other end, already a thing. One law governs both: the body is a fact, and everything in the field is painted at the same pitch of fact, stone, sheet, flesh, wound and hair, with no element exempt and none raised to symbol. The light obeys it too, falling along the body as it would in a cell; nothing glows. The inscription is the one element of another order, words in a picture that otherwise says nothing, and it is held to the law by being painted as a thing in the niche. The range is narrow, and narrowness is not coherence: a law kept without breach over a small territory.
Guarino Guarini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the front on Piazza Castello and the lantern’s small interlaced vault. The front belongs to the square and obeys the court’s law, not Guarini’s. Inside, the law is one: the octagon and the number eight, convex played against concave, arch crossing arch. The bowed bays at the floor and the crossing ribs overhead are the same idea at two heights, a line pressed inward and a line crossing over, and the lantern repeats the dome. The range runs from the heaviest marble at the floor to the thinnest skeleton at the crown, and the law holds across it. Held below the top by the front, and by the presbytery, whose second centre is joined to the first by addition along an axis.
Pablo Neruda · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the hermetic, almost voiceless “Débil del alba” or “Significa sombras” of the first volume, and the public, warm “Oda a Federico García Lorca” of the second, addressed to a living friend in a voice that names streets and comrades. One law joins them: the world is matter in process, decay and rebirth, and the self is something matter passes through. The ode weeps for the living poet in the same images of water, coffins and flowers that govern the poems of the East, and the prose poems, the tango, the material songs and the elegy for Alberto Rojas Giménez keep the same physics. The cost is that the second volume’s turn toward communion and toward other people loosens the closed world of the first, so the law bends where the book turns. That is the book’s history rather than a contradiction, but it is felt.
Alfred Tennyson · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dawn of VII on “the bald street” and the wedding feast of the epilogue; or the careless nature of LVI and the “one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves” with which the epilogue closes. Do they obey one law? Largely. The law is the mourner’s mind changing in time, and the poem is explicit that the later hope is reached from the earlier despair, not in denial of it: in CXXIV the answer to the colder reasoning is that he has felt. The stanza and the voice hold throughout. The charge is the frame. The prologue, written last, in 1849, and the epilogue impose a settled faith and a social occasion from outside the sequence’s law, so that frame and poem do not fully cohere, and the wedding can read as a different poem.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Ullman’s interview, a sunny office and a corporate courtesy, and Jack frozen in the maze. One law governs both: the institution’s hospitality conceals a violence it will hire, and the man who serves it becomes it. Ullman tells of Grady’s murders as a point of policy; the waiter Grady is the same courtesy turned to instruction; the photograph closes the law on Jack. The dance band over the ballroom of the dead, the twins’ sweetness and Lloyd’s patience at the bar obey it too. The strain is real. Nicholson’s register runs comic against the film’s cold, and late in the film the man in the bear costume, the skeletons in cobwebs and the bleeding head that says “Great party” loosen the law toward a funfair of apparitions: ghost and madness are one law in principle and two in practice.
Bureau of Reclamation, with Gordon Kaufmann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bare curved face of the dam and Hansen’s bronze winged figures over their star chart. One is mass concrete obeying gravity and the arch; the other is allegory obeying the law of sculpture and of the heavens. They are held together by Kaufmann’s law of plain planes and streamlined profiles, which governs the crest, the towers’ caps, the elevator towers, the powerhouse walls and the monument’s diorite base alike, and by the law of the water, which places every element: towers upstream, dam across, spillways round, powerhouse below. The range runs from geology to the stars, and one physics rules most of it. What bends it: the figures and True’s Native motifs speak a symbolic language the engineering does not share, commentary on the structure rather than of it; and the visitor centre of 1995 obeys neither law fully.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a love that has ended is lived through again in memory, and fate and blame are weighed against each other without a verdict. The two most distant elements obey it. Idiot Wind, eight minutes of fury in the first person, and Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, nine minutes of a western tale in the third, both turn on a triangle, a betrayal and a fate no one controls; the caper is the record’s love story told as a card game. Buckets of Rain obeys as the shrug the law permits after rage; Shelter from the Storm and Meet Me in the Morning share the road and the waiting. The tonal range is wide, from venom to grace and wit. The limit: the musical range, acoustic folk, country and blues, is narrow.
Natsume Sōseki · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the heart cannot be known from outside, and its cost is paid when it is known from inside. Take the two most distant elements, the summer sea at Kamakura and K’s blood on the screen; or the father’s slow dying in the country, among talk of the young man’s diploma, and Sensei’s last instruction to keep the secret. They obey the same law. The father’s dying and Sensei’s death are made to answer each other, and the Emperor’s death and Nogi’s are taken into the same pattern. The range, from family comedy to suicide, is moderate, and it holds. Charged: the spirit of Meiji enters the law late and by report, and the reader is asked to take an era’s end as the motive of a private guilt the testament had already made sufficient. That is the one place where two orders meet without a joint.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: obligation to the others, kept in the full knowledge of death, and the cost of keeping it. Take the two most distant elements, the comic squabbling at the cave over the wine and the gypsy’s laziness, and Sordo’s men dying on the hill. They obey the same law: the band’s comedy is the life the order puts in pawn, and Sordo’s death is the bill. The law reaches Gaylord’s and Karkov, where the war is managed by people who will not die in it, and Andrés’s journey, where it breaks against bureaucracy; it reaches the father and grandfather, as a test of courage passed on. Held at this figure because the love story obeys a softer law, a sanctuary the book allows no one else, and the Marty chapter turns satire into caricature more than the law needs.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the Chaos and the love duet Holde Gattin. One law reaches both: whatever is made is ordered, good and answered with praise, and the pair in Eden are that order become conscious of itself and giving thanks. The worm and the sunrise obey it too; the smallest thing and the greatest are each made and named. The tension is real. The key frame does not close, opening in C and ending in B flat; Part III moves from the angels’ narration to a human pastoral in another idiom; and the comedy of the pictorial writing sits at a distance from the seriousness of the Chaos. The law holds, but it is a law of praise more than of form, wide in nature and narrow in feeling: after no. 2 no darkness asks it to stretch.
John Soane · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two farthest points: the bright yellow South Drawing Room at the front of No. 13, a Georgian reception room, and the Sepulchral Chamber in the basement beside the sarcophagus. They obey one law: the shallow canopy, the incised line, light from an unseen source and the borrowed view through to another space govern both. The law holds across a wide range, domestic, professional, funerary and comic, and across thirty-two years of building. It slips at the edges. No. 12 is a plainer house of the 1790s; the Monk’s Parlour’s Gothic jokes sit on the law’s border; and the crowding of fragments round the Dome, though designed, reads at moments as accumulation rather than order.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Sebastian’s apartment of mechanical toys that greet him at the door, near comedy, and Batty dying on the roof in the rain. One law governs both: made things wanting life, in a world where everything living has been replaced by a copy. Sebastian makes friends because he has none, and his disease ages him too fast, as the replicants’ term kills them; the toys, the owl, the snake, Rachael’s memories and Batty are one law at different scales. The street, with its stalls, its cityspeak and its advertising, obeys it, a crowd of copies and the past retrofitted. The range is wide, from Gaff’s origami and Chew’s freezer to the summit on the roof, in a single dark register. The strain: Pris’s gymnastics and Batty’s howling in the last chase lean toward the rules of the horror film, and the romance belongs to a softer film than the one around it.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the blazing sun low on the right and the pale crescent high on the left. They obey one law, the law of light at the turn of day, and so does everything between them: the ship takes the moon’s cool and the sun’s last warmth at once, the tug takes neither and stands black, the water reflects both. One physics, which is also one meaning, the passing of time, governs the hottest and coolest passages and the thickest and thinnest paint. Nothing breaks it; the masts and yards the ship carries serve it, so that she can take the light as a ghost. Held short of the top because the range, wide in temperature and handling, is narrow in subject and mood: one hour, one feeling.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Man rising in the boat to drown his wife, and the drunken pig at Luna Park. One law is meant to govern both, the law of the song: in one day the world’s forces, city and country, night and day, water and land, act on two people who stand for every couple, and laughter returns before trust does. Much obeys it. The storm is nature carrying out the plan the Man refused, and the bulrushes turn the law round exactly. The strain is the comic middle, where the pig and the barber’s shop become routines another film could have held, and the swift end, where the Woman from the City is sent off in a cart and the fable closes faster than its world.
Diego Rivera · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the infant asleep in the bulb of a plant, and the masked workers making poison gas. One law holds them. Everything in the court is the transformation of the earth’s matter by human hands, and every transformation can turn toward life or toward death. The infant is matter becoming a body; the gas is matter turned against bodies; the car is matter becoming a machine; the races hold the ore that becomes it. The same law governs the geology, the vaccination, the aircraft and the line. The range is very wide, from the germinating seed to the military plane, and nothing contradicts the law. Held below the top because the paired allegories are set beside the main panels as commentary more than built into the same space, and the passages from the factory’s realism to the allegorical registers are joins one sees.
Assyrian court sculptors · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dying lioness, alone on open ground, and the king pouring his libation over the dead, calm among attendants and musicians. One law holds them: everything in the cycle belongs to a single royal rite, from cage to kill to offering, and the animals’ deaths are the matter of the rite. The range of tone is wide, from frenzy to ceremony, from the beast’s agony to the court’s order. But the law strains. The carving gives the lions an inner life and the humans none, so that the cycle runs on two physics, one observed and one conventional, the animal seen and the king displayed. That double law is the work’s interest and also its fault. It does not contradict itself in plan, which keeps it high; it divides in its making, which holds it below 9.
Mamluk, under Sultan an-Nasir Hasan · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the portal, angled to the street, crowded with ornament and unfinished, and the court, aligned to Mecca, almost bare, its law the square and the arch. They obey different alignments and different idioms. The vestibule and the bent passage reconcile them, so that the turn becomes part of the law: the street’s order is left in the dark and the court’s begins in the light. Within the court one law governs four iwans, unequal in size and equal in figure, and the mausoleum carries the qibla axis outward. What does not obey: the corner madrasas, sealed from the court but for their doors; the later minaret and dome; and the unfinished portal.
Sergei Prokofiev · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the Nurse’s comic gait and the death of Juliet. One law governs them. Every person and place is a theme bound to a way of moving, and the tragedy is the passage of those themes from the ballroom and the street to the tomb, where they are transformed; the same idiom, a diatonic melody bent by side-steps, holds the comedy and the grief. The law holds most firmly in the thread of Juliet and the lovers, which runs from her first entrance to the last bars. The strain is the divertissement: the Dance with Mandolins, the Five Couples and the Lilies obey the idiom but not the drama’s law, and could stand in another ballet. The range governed is wide, from farce to funeral; the slack is in the middle of the second act.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: separated sounds in cold space, one voice at one distance, and every song turning on a self cut off from others. The two most distant elements obey it. “Isolation” is a fast synthesizer song under three minutes; “The Eternal” is a six-minute funeral march. The noise of “Atrocity Exhibition” and the elegy of “Decades” are a second pair, and they keep the same physics. The law is Hannett’s and Curtis’s together, and nothing breaks it. But narrowness is not coherence. There is no humour, no warmth and no relief, and the record never tests its law against anything that would resist it. The law is total over a small territory.
Stanisław Lem · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bibliographic catalogue of Solaristics, with its schools and its dry ironies, and Harey trying to die in the liquid oxygen. One law governs both: the mind meets the other and finds itself, and cannot pass the boundary. Science meets the ocean and finds its own theories; Kelvin meets the ocean’s gift and finds his own memory; in both the failure is the knowledge. The tone holds from the dread of the arrival to the quiet of the ending, and the book never cheats its premise with an explanation: no voice from the ocean ever speaks. The range is wide for a book of four men and their Visitors, from the comedy of the Solaristic quarrels and Snaut’s fatalism to terror and grief. Held below the top because the two registers sit beside each other in blocks rather than through each other, and the reader feels the join.
Alejo Carpentier · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs: in this world the powers the enslaved serve are real and act in history, and every order of masters reproduces the last. Take the two most distant elements. Pauline Bonaparte, idle and sensual at Cap Français, bathed and massaged by her servant Soliman; and the old Ti Noël changed into a goose and turned away by the flock. They obey the same law. When the plague comes Pauline turns in terror to Soliman’s charms, so that Europe falls under the same powers; and among the geese Ti Noël learns that every order has its masters. The exiled court in Rome is touched by it too, Soliman before the marble of Pauline. The law holds from comedy of manners to atrocity. Charged where the European digressions are joined by theme alone.
Lewis Carroll · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One physics governs the dream: words are taken at their letter, events follow from what is said rather than what is meant, and authority is absolute and groundless. The two most distant elements are the Caucus-Race (chapter III), a pure game of animals running in a ring, and the trial (chapters XI and XII), a satire on a court of law. The same law runs both: in each the forms of an adult practice, a race and a verdict, are enacted without their sense, and everyone gets a prize or a sentence alike. The size changes keep a rule of their own, eat, drink or fan, and keep it. The riverbank belongs to waking, a different law by design, and the book marks the boundary. Held below nine because the range is wide in tone and narrow in kind: everything is one mode of play, and the law is never asked to govern grief or desire. Narrowness is not coherence.
George Orwell · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Mollie admiring herself in a ribbon (chapter II) and the pile of corpses at Napoleon’s feet (chapter VII). They obey one law: on this farm every appetite and every fear is an opening for whoever controls what the others know. Mollie trades freedom for sugar; the animals trade truth for the promise that Jones will not come back. The pigs’ hangover after the whisky and the terror of the dogs come from the same physics. The law runs unbroken from Old Major’s dream to the last sentence, and the end returns the book to its beginning by its own logic. Charged: the range is narrow, one farm and its neighbours, and narrowness is not coherence; and in the forged banknotes and the farmers’ trade the historical key bends the fable’s world, so that the farm behaves as a state because history requires it.
Francis Bacon · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the left figure, hunched and turned inward, its head hidden, and the right creature, thrust outward, its mouth open on the viewer. They obey one law: a grey body, modelled, alone on a support, against a flat orange with no shadow and no depth, its form given by its pain. The centre figure is the hinge, frontal and blind, between the one who turns away and the one who screams. Nothing obeys a second physics: no figure is lit otherwise, no panel opens a real space, no element is painted in another manner. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is narrow: three creatures, one ground, one register, about two square metres. The law governs it completely, and the figure is held for the size of what it governs.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: every element is doubled into a face and a back door. The house, the hand, the will, the name, the two doctors, Lanyon’s science against Jekyll’s, and even Utterson’s own self-denial and his tolerance of men in decline obey it. Take the two most distant parts, the dry comedy of the first chapter and the anguished confession of the last. They obey the same law, since the confession explains the comedy’s outward signs one by one, and Utterson’s reserve is the respectable silence the confession indicts. The chemical premise is held to its rules, and the end follows from a rule set early: the impure salt that cannot be bought again. What holds the axis there is range. Narrowness is not coherence: the field is a single milieu, and the law covers it whole but covers no wide field.
Luis Cernuda · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole, and the title states it: the self’s desire set against a reality that refuses it, and faith to the desire as the one fidelity. Take the two most distant elements: the décimas of the first book, a young man at a window watching a world in which he takes no part, and “Supervivencias tribales en el medio literario”, the late satire on the literary life of Spain. They obey the same law: the solitary against the many, the desire against the world’s order, the poet’s integrity against the tribe. Between them it holds through surrealism, elegy, hymn, monologue and satire, and that width earns the figure. Held at 8.6 because the range of the law is wider in manner than in matter: it is one man’s case throughout, and narrowness of that kind is not coherence.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the red palm dots and hand stencils near the front and the black Lion Panel at the back. They obey one law: the mark made on the living rock in the dark, by hand, in relation to the wall’s form, and the animal in profile, from knowledge, without ground line or setting. The progression from red at the front to dense black at the back is itself an order, a passage inward. The range is wide: many species, single figures and great panels, signs and stencils, the composite, painting, drawing and engraving. Two things resist. The field was accumulated by several hands over a span not closed, and not every figure keeps the law of the great panels; and the signs and dots cannot be shown to share the law of the animals.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the slapstick, Sam’s desk dragged through the wall by the man next door, Spoor and Dowser buried in their own sewage, and the torture chamber. They obey one law: the state is a machine of absurd procedure, and absurdity is how it kills. Lint’s baby mask is where the two meet, comic and appalling at once. Dream and waking obey one law too, since every dream image is a transform of something Sam has seen: the ducts, Jill’s truck, his mother. The range is wide and held. What gives is the tonal scatter of the middle hour, where the farce runs on its own energy and the danger lapses, and the restaurant and department store, whose satire of consumer life seems drawn from a broader film.
Public Enemy · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the voice against the noise, a speaker holding his ground in an alarm, answered by a chorus of one. Take the two most distant elements, Cold Lampin’ with Flavor, a comic turn in the fool’s voice, and Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, a slow prison epic told in the first person. They obey the same law: in each a voice works inside a sound that presses on it, and the fool’s comedy is the prophet’s seriousness seen from below. Party for Your Right to Fight closes on an answer to another group’s party anthem, and obeys the law as rebuttal. The range is wide in subject and narrower in sound, where the palette is largely one, attack and density; narrowness is not coherence, and the sameness of the faster tracks is charged. No break, and one manner.
Jules Hardouin-Mansart · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gilt lantern high over the city and the floor of Visconti’s well below the pavement. They obey one law, the vertical axis through the centre of the Greek cross, which the dome raises to the sky and the crypt sinks into the earth; one geometry of square, cross and circle places chapels, crossing, cupolas and well. The law governs light too: hidden above, falling on the sarcophagus below. The range is wide: royal chapel and imperial tomb, Baroque scenography and Empire severity, worship and the cult of the state. Held below the top because the idioms do not fully agree: Visconti’s grave, colossal classicism sits in Mansart’s richer royal interior as a second voice, and the double church, its north opening closed by glass, no longer works as one space.
Robert Frost · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs: the voice of the place, spoken in metre, about lives bounded by work, weather and the next farm. Take the two most distant elements, the comedy of “A Hundred Collars”, where a shy doctor shares a hotel room with a hard-drinking collector, and the madness of “A Servant to Servants”, where a farm wife who says she cannot get through her housework tells a stranger of an uncle kept caged in the house and of her own confinement. They obey the same law: talk between strangers, in the same measure, across a boundary of class or of sanity, and the same refusal to judge. The lyric frame poems obey it from the other side, the solitary walker outside the houses. Held at this figure because the range, comedy, tragedy, gossip and vision, lies inside one region, one class and one decade, and the coherence of a narrow world is partly its narrowness.
J. D. Salinger · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the world seen by a mind that loves what cannot change and despises what performs, and that cannot stop either change or performance in itself. Take the two most distant elements, the comic squalor of the Pencey dormitory, Ackley’s teeth and Stradlater’s razor, and the carrousel in the rain. They obey the same law: Holden cannot bear the adults who perform and cannot bear to let a child grow, and the contempt and the tenderness come from the one grief. The voice runs unchanged from the first line to the last, and the world it describes, from the hotel windows to the nuns at breakfast, is held in one key. Held here because the range is narrow, one voice, three days and one class, and narrowness is not coherence: the unity is that of a single consciousness rather than the harder unity of a wide world under one law.
Built for Qabus ibn Wushmgir · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: brick, the tenfold division, the vertical. Take the two most distant elements, the doorway at the foot and the cone high above it: both are brick, both stand on the ten-sided rhythm, both serve the one rising line. The letters obey it too, divided into ten panels between ten flanges, so that writing and structure keep one count. Nothing in the building contradicts its law. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range here is narrow: one material, one register, one idea, almost nothing for the law to reconcile. The coherence is complete over a short span. Held below Sainte-Chapelle’s 9.0, which keeps one law across far more diverse parts.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the petition montage, mothers sent from desk to desk in a run of quick cuts played as farce, and the swing in the snow. One law governs both: a man’s time against an institution’s. The farce is the institution’s time, in which nothing is done and nothing ends; the swing is a man’s time, finished. The night tour, the toy factory, the wake and the last morning at the office obey the same law, each measuring what is done against what merely passes, and the range, from satire to elegy, is wide. The law holds across it, but the strain is not slight, and it falls in three places: the narrator’s dry irony at the start is a voice the film later drops; the days with Toyo hover between romance and something else the film does not settle; and the wake’s comedy of drunken officials sits at times outside the grief it frames.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the roaring Borsa and the silent crossing of the coda. One law governs both: persons are absorbed into systems and places that go on without them. The Borsa absorbs a dead man in a minute; the crossing absorbs two living ones without a trace. The prologue’s objects, the flagpoles in the wind, the drowned car whose dents matter more than the drowned man, and Vittoria’s mother counting her losses all obey it, and the camera’s coolness toward everyone is the law applied. The range is wide for so cool a film, from comedy at the airfield to dread at the end. The strain is at Marta’s flat, where masquerade and colonial talk come closer to satire than to the film’s even regard, and in the Verona flight’s lightness.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the white front on the water, seen from half a mile, and the screen of columns behind the altar, seen from the nave. One law governs both: the classical orders at two scales, the giant and the lesser, set one in front of the other to state a section and a hierarchy. The front’s two orders return inside as the half-columns and pilasters of the nave; the screen is that order opened into air; the thermal windows obey the same Roman source. The law holds from the scale of the city to the choir, outside and in, in stone and in plaster. What bends it: the front’s tall pedestals and executed proportions depart from the interior’s measure, so that front and room do not quite read as one hand; and the plainer monks’ choir is governed by its use more than by the law.
Alain Resnais · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the theatre performance in the first minutes, whose actors speak lines the film will later give to X and A, and the night garden at the end. One law governs both: the past is a story told until it is believed, and the hotel stages that telling. The game, the statue, the shooting gallery and the costumes all obey it, and the film’s refusal to settle its ending is the law applied without exception. The strain is where the law becomes a style: some of the frozen guests and the comic fragments of overheard talk read as decoration rather than law, and the overexposed bursts in the bedroom are the one passage where the cool rule gives way to shock. The range is one register throughout, and narrowness earns nothing.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
One physics governs the film: every act of goodness produces its opposite, and the comic and the horrible obey the same dry law. Take the two most distant elements: Don Jaime alone at night, fitting his foot into his dead wife’s satin shoe, and the beggars’ riot under the “Hallelujah”, one private and almost sorrowful, the other public, grotesque and funny. Both are desire dressed in sacred forms, and the gown is the thread between them. Jorge’s dog is the law stated as a joke; Viridiana’s ruin is the law stated as fate. What holds the axis here is the field it is tested on: one estate and its dependants, with the town, the Church beyond a single convent and the country itself kept outside the frame, so the law is never asked to govern what it was not built for.
Guru Arjan; rebuilt and gilded under Maharaja Ranjit Singh · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the plain square of water, open to the sky and the town, and the interior, close, dense and glittering with gilt and inlay. One law governs both: the centre and the four quarters. The pool is a square round a square shrine; the parikrama is the circuit round the centre; the four doors open to the four sides; the causeway is the one axis the procession uses. Marble below and gold above make one figure, water and the lotus risen from it, and the nineteenth-century cladding obeys the plan rather than overriding it. What bends the law: the single causeway breaks the fourfold symmetry for the sake of approach, and the opulence of the finish argues with the humility the plan states. The law holds from water to gold.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the oblique wall, the one line in the building that breaks the box’s orthogonal order, and the cross, the one opening in the altar wall. They obey one law: the wall plane as the building’s only means, made to enclose, to divide and to admit light by being cut or set apart. The floor and pews obey it in a second material, rough, dark and low against the smooth grey planes. The light at the side slit and the light at the cross are the same light at two strengths. Nothing contradicts the law. Held lower because narrowness is not coherence: one room, one material, one register and one act of worship are the smallest territory on which a law could be kept; and the frame of the glazing in the cross obeys another rule.
William Kentridge · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the broad satire of Soho at his desk, fat and pinstriped, telephones ringing, and the bodies of the dead covered by the land in Felix in Exile. They obey one law: every image is a drawing that changes into another under the same hand and keeps the trace of what it was, and every change is a passage between the owner’s world and what it rests on. The desk becomes the city, the coffee pot the mine, the land the dead; satire and lament are two speeds of one transformation. The law reaches across nine films and fourteen years, through characters who change and a country that changed under them. Held below 9 because the cycle was made without a plan: the later films change the terms, and the arc closes by addition, not by design.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the girl in gold at the left, an emblem lit from nowhere, and the dog barking at the drum at the right. They obey one law. Everything is a body in motion, ranked by light, in one space opening out of the arch; both belong to the moment of moving off. What resists is a second law laid over the first, the portrait contract. Some faces turn out to be recognised while their bodies take part in the action, and the light that ranks the march sometimes bends to show a face that paid. The girl’s light has no source the scene shares. The painting holds the two physics together without dissolving them.
David Bowie · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: speech failing and sound taking its place, under a cold, close light. The two most distant elements obey it. Breaking Glass is under two minutes of brittle funk, Warszawa over six minutes of wordless liturgy; in one the song is cut off before it can complete, in the other the voice is kept and the words removed. Be My Wife, the plainest song, is speech reduced to a plea. The range is wide: funk, pop single, instrumental rock, ambient, liturgy, lament. But the halves are joined by a bridge rather than fused, and a listener may hear two records in one sleeve; side one’s nervous energy and side two’s stillness obey one law only at the level of the argument. That strain holds the figure.
Bernardo Bertolucci · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Giulia in a striped dress in light striped by the blinds, listing her confessions as comedy, and Anna’s death in the snow. One law governs both: Marcello watches and does not act, and the world is arranged to be looked at by a man who will not see it. The comedy of the wedding preparations and the terror of the wood are lit and framed by the same rule of composition, and the cave holds from the lecture to the last firelight. The range is wide, from comedy of manners to murder, and from dream to the documentary look of the crowd of 1943. The strain lies in two places: the decadence of the mother and the father runs on a broader satirical law than the rest, and the coincidence of Lino in the coda breaks the film’s psychological physics for a schematic one.
Marilynne Robinson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the great-aunts, Lily and Nona, fussing over drafts and planning their return to Spokane, and the night on the lake and the crossing of the bridge. One law governs both: what a person cannot hold, the water takes, and the settled life is a defence against a loss it cannot prevent. The aunts’ comedy is the same flight from loss as Lucille’s dressmaking and the town’s visits; Sylvie’s housekeeping, letting the weather and the lake into the rooms, is the opposite consent to it, and the book holds both under one physics. Comedy and grief share one register throughout. Charged on two counts: the range is narrow by design, a house, a town and a lake, and narrowness is not coherence; and the crossing, offered as both death and survival, asks the law to carry a double reading the book leaves open by intent.
Max Beckmann · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: an inverted, bound body in the left wing and the open blue of the sea in the centre. They obey one law. Everything is contoured, flattened and placed for meaning, the torments and the release built of the same black line and the same clotted colour, so that the open sea is a made thing like the rooms and not a window on nature. The same law governs the props and the royal figures; the cabaret and the gospel share one stage, and the contrast between wings and centre is the law, not a break in it. Short of the top because the law is the painter’s manner as much as the work’s: the private symbols obey it by being painted in it while their meanings follow no single key, and the panels’ scales of figure and space differ in ways the work does not wholly resolve.
Yasunari Kawabata · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the book: beauty seen at a distance, by a man who will not close the distance, and dissolving as it is seen. The most distant elements obey it. The warm and furious Komako is seen through glass as surely as the remote, almost bodiless Yoko; the inn’s comedy of drunk guests and the Milky Way at the close belong to one order; and the fire is the last and largest of the book’s spectacles. The tone holds from the tunnel to the fire. Charged: the range is narrow by choice, one consciousness, one town, three seasons of one affair, and narrowness is not coherence; the coherence is real and earned within a small compass. The fire, in a book that had refused event, is the point of strain, though it reads here as the law fulfilled and not broken.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the game of Strip Botticelli in the Echo Courts motel, Oedipa putting on all her clothes with the Paranoids on the lawn, and the old sailor in a rooming house, shaking with the delirium tremens. They obey one law: every encounter is a problem of transmission, of whether what passes between people is signal or noise, and the book’s entropy, thermodynamic and informational at once, governs the comic and the elegiac alike. Mucho’s LSD, Hilarius’s paranoia, Driblette’s walk into the Pacific and the forged stamps are all instances of it. The range is wide in tone, from slapstick to elegy. Charged: the cartoon physics of some comic turns runs looser than the night walk, and the short span limits the range on which the law is tested.
Van Morrison · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: acoustic, unhurried time; a voice that circles and repeats until the phrase changes; memory and desire set in a few named places. The two most distant elements are “Sweet Thing”, all joy, the garden seen, and “Slim Slow Slider”, bare and dying, the voice and the soprano saxophone almost alone. They obey the same law, the same voice, the same circling, the same acoustic room, and the second answers the first as afterwards answers the beginning. The range is real: rapture, adolescent paralysis, tenderness, farewell, illness, from guitar and bass to strings. The one breach is “The Way Young Lovers Do”, whose brass and swing belong to another record. Narrowness is not the issue: the range is wider than the record’s name for a single mood.
Luchino Visconti · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the street fighting in Palermo, with its barricades and a woman shot at a window, and the Prince alone before a painting of a deathbed in a quiet library at the ball. One law governs both. History passes the Prince by while he watches it, and violence and decorum are one settlement at two moments: the fighting that makes a new state, and the party where its owners meet. The comedy of Don Calogero’s tailcoat, Father Pirrone’s errands and the family’s rituals obeys the same law, manners as the form in which power changes hands, across a range from comedy to death and from battle to ballroom. The strain is at two places: the Palermo battle keeps the epic’s rules more than the Prince’s gaze, and the lovers’ passage through the palace leans toward a romance the film otherwise holds at a distance.
David Fincher · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comic satire of the support groups and the catalogue apartment, and the terrorist climax with its towers falling. One law governs both: the world is seen from inside the narrator’s split consciousness, and the revelation binds the comedy to the terror after the fact. The man who weeps on Bob’s chest is the man building bombs. The law holds through the twist, its hardest test, and the planted frames show it was in force from the start. It strains at the end. The last shot plays the destruction as romantic release just after the story has made the case against Tyler’s project; read as the narrator not yet free of him, it obeys the law, but the film does not settle it.
Senenmut (attributed), under Hatshepsut · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs: axis, symmetry and the horizontal stratum. Take the two most distant elements, the Punt reliefs, a foreign coast with its trees and animals, and the sanctuary, the god’s house in the dark of the mountain. Both obey the same law, since the expedition’s goods are offerings brought up the same axis to the same god. The chapels of Hathor and Anubis balance at the two ends of the middle terrace; the solar court and the royal cult chapels balance on the upper; square pillar, polygonal column, Osiride pillar and Hathor column keep one trabeated order. The range is wide. What holds it: the Ptolemaic chamber and the asymmetries of the upper terrace are small breaches, and a reconstructed upper portico makes the law there partly a modern reading of it.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Freddie mixing torpedo fuel and mounting a woman of sand on a Pacific beach, and Dodd dictating doctrine in an English school. One law governs them: every scene is a contest between a will that would give form and a creature that resists form, and the contest is also love. It holds across the farce of the party and the pain of Lynn, across the cells and the Processing, and into the pub at the end, where Freddie uses Dodd’s questions on a woman and so carries the law out of the Cause. The range is wide, from comedy of the body to theology. The strain: the party seen through Freddie’s eyes and the passage from the cinema to England work by a dream logic the earlier film has not fully licensed, and the society scenes hold to the law more loosely.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Polacca of No. 1, a court dance for strings inside a suite, and the opening canon of No. 6 for two violas, dark and close. One law governs both, the law of concertare, voices set against and with one another inside the ritornello’s return, and both obey it, the canon more plainly than the dance. The range is wide: twelve parts to seven, a dance suite to a fugue, a cadenza to two chords. The law holds by principle more than by material. The six share no themes and the key plan is a collection’s; the set is governed by one idea, not by one physics of motive and key. No. 1’s dances bend the law furthest.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: appetite and its bill, sung by people who are both the buyers and the bought. The two most distant elements, Brown Sugar, a horn-driven party on a slave ship, and Moonlight Mile, a string-lit road home at dawn, obey it as the night and its cost. Sister Morphine and Dead Flowers set the same subject at opposite temperatures, dread and irony, and both obey. The range is wide: hard rock, country, Delta blues, Memphis soul, Latin jazz, a string ballad. The law strains at You Gotta Move, which obeys it only by sitting near death, at I Got the Blues, which obeys it as style, and at Brown Sugar, whose subject the law does not judge. Strains, no break.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the subjunctive against the indicative, the world of what might be against the line of what shall be owned. Take the two most distant elements, the Learned English Dog in the first part and the death of Mason in Philadelphia in the last. They obey the same law: the dog is a marvel that reason would reduce to a specimen, and Mason dies having served reason and lost the marvels he glimpsed. The fabulous and the historical share one physics because Cherrycoke’s telling admits both on equal terms, and the listeners’ doubts are part of the law. The range is very wide, from farce to elegy, from astronomy to ghost story. Charged: some episodes, several of the tavern routines among them, belong to the law only loosely, and the anachronistic jokes sit outside the frame’s physics at some cost.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the farthest elements: the farce of the parrot and the ladder, and the suicide of a fourteen-year-old girl; the serenade in the cemetery and the cholera corpses in the river; the bourgeois comedy of the soap and the plague flag at the end. One law governs them all: a narration that tells everything with the same ironic tenderness and lets the reader feel the weight the voice withholds. It holds across fifty years and across the three principal consciousnesses. What holds the axis there is that the even voice that makes the law also narrows the range. The book does not admit tragedy at full strength, and where it brushes it, with América Vicuña, or with Olimpia Zuleta, murdered by her husband for the words Florentino painted on her belly, the law holds by absorbing the event, not by rising to it. The range is wide and the coherence real, but the coherence is partly the coherence of a single tone.
Dmitri Shostakovich · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the Largo’s lament and the finale’s march. One law governs them: the opposition of a private voice to a public one, which runs through the whole. In the first movement the lyric line becomes a march; the Largo is the private voice alone, without brass; the finale is the public voice, and its coda sets the private voice, a single note repeated in winds and strings, inside it. The key plan supports the law: the dark of D minor, the Largo’s remote F sharp, the forced D major. The tension is the scherzo, whose grotesque wit obeys the law of public masks but stands apart in material and manner. The range governed is wide for a symphony, and the law is felt more than shown in the motifs.
Robert Wiene · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the fair, with its turning carousel and its barkers, and the asylum courtyard of the frame, with its inmates and its kindly director. One law governs both: the world is as the perceiving mind makes it, and the lines of the world lean with the mind. The officials on their absurdly high stools, the leaning walls of the police station, the rooftops, the doctor’s study and the courtyard obey the same painted physics, and the frame extends the law rather than breaking it, since the sane world is painted too. The range is wide: farce, terror, pathos on the hillside, irony in the last shot. The strain: some players, Jane above all, belong to a naturalistic picture, and the reassuring last words sit uneasily on a world made untrustworthy.
Egyptian (Early Dynastic) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the serpopards bound at the necks round the well, and the serekh with the king’s name at the top. One law holds them: everything on the stone is ranked by its nearness to the king and by whether it is bound, struck or ordered. Beasts are leashed, enemies grasped or beheaded, towns broken, officials carry standards, the god holds a rope. Human, animal, divine and written orders all obey it, on both faces, and nothing contradicts it. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: the law is one of domination only, and its range, wide in the kinds of being it governs, is narrow in what can happen under it.
Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, under Bega Begum and Akbar · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, a water channel in the farthest corner of the garden and the finial on the dome. They obey one law. The square subdivided governs the garden; the same square, chamfered and divided into nine, governs the plan; the plinth’s cells repeat its module; the dome rises over the centre that the causeways meet. Red and white is one system from the gateways to the drum. The Indian kiosks and the Persian dome, the most distant in origin, are placed by the same geometry and the same symmetry. The later graves in the plinth fill cells the law had already made and do not break it. Held below the top because the law, once given, is simple, and its range is of scale more than of kind: one register, calm and dynastic, and the kiosks obey by position more than by nature.
The Beatles · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a soft, acoustic, close sound in which love is looked at from a step away, with irony or regret. The two most distant elements, Drive My Car, a comic soul song about a girl who wants to be famous, and In My Life, a slow meditation on the dead and the living, obey it: both are a young man looking at love and ambition without illusion, one laughing, one grieving, in the same warm palette. The range is wide for a beat group in 1965: soul, French chanson in Michelle, a sitar waltz, folk rock, country, a gospel call, a baroque solo. The law strains twice, at the country cheer of What Goes On and the threat of Run for Your Life. Two strains in fourteen songs, and no break.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the hospital ward where the narrator lies after the crash, and Vaughan’s rehearsals of the death of Elizabeth Taylor; or the marriage of the narrator and Catherine at the start, a cool exchange of infidelities, and the narrator’s encounter with Vaughan in the car near the end. One law governs them: every human relation is mediated by the machine, and every wound is a sexual opening. Nothing in the book breaks it, and the consistency is the book’s strongest feature. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range here is deliberately confined: one register, one landscape, one obsession. The law is total over a small territory, and that holds it in the mid eights.
Miles Davis · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a voice emerging from a dark, dense field that never clears, over a slow, insistent pulse. Take the two most distant elements. “Spanish Key” is the record at its most rock, a driving straight groove with modulating vamps; “Sanctuary” is a written ballad played out of time, the oldest kind of jazz on the record. They obey one law: in both the trumpet speaks over a field it does not command, and “Sanctuary” sounds like the same band after the brew, not a different band. The range is wide: processional, ritual groove, rock vamp, blues, ballad. What holds the figure is that the palette within that range is narrow, the same keyboards, drums and murk on every side, and narrowness is not coherence; and “John McLaughlin”, a fragment, sits a little outside the argument. Level with Low.
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with Gianfranco Franchini · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the east face to the rue du Renard, a wall of coloured ducts and stacks, and the west face to the square, a glass tube of moving people. They obey one law: whatever serves or moves is put outside the clear volume, in the zone the gerberettes carry, and coded by what it carries. Air, water, power and people become the same kind of thing, and the whole length obeys one bay and one joint. The square obeys it too, the open floor carried outdoors as open ground. Held below the top on two counts. The law is one register, narrow in material and mood, and narrowness is not coherence. And inside, since the 1980s, a second law of rooms and walls has governed the galleries.
Akkadian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the soldier at the lower left starting the climb, and the defeated man tumbling from the right edge. One law holds both: every body in the field is placed by its relation to the king’s height, the victors rising toward it, the vanquished falling from it or bowed below it, and the stars above it close the system. The tree, the mountain and the outline of the stone obey the same upward law. Nothing in the field stands outside it. The Elamite inscription on the mountain is the one later element, and it sits in the field as a foreign voice, weighed on The Imperishable. Held below the top because the range is narrow, one event, one instant, one register of triumph, and narrowness is not coherence.
Pérotin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the opening, where the tenor holds one note and time stops, and a passage of discant, where the tenor moves in measured rhythm and all four voices walk together. One law governs them: the chant fixes the ground, the mode fixes the time, consonance fixes the strong beat, and nothing in the work obeys any other rule. The choir’s plainchant, sung between the polyphonic sections, obeys the same law in its root form: the chant is what the polyphony is made of. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range governed here is narrow: one register of feeling, one harmonic vocabulary, one rhythmic mode for most of the span. The law is perfect over a small field.
Agnès Varda · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs: the gaze and the clock. Take the two most distant elements, the colour tarot prologue and the silent burlesque in the projection booth. Both obey it. The first is death foretold as a reading of images; the second is a comedy in which dark glasses turn the world to mourning and taking them off restores it, a joke that is the film’s argument in small. The documentary street and the studio interiors obey the same law, since what changes between them is how Cléo looks, and Antoine’s war fits it as the second death that waits by the clock. A tenth or two is lost because the middle chapters at times seem to wander from the law, and because the closing relief is reached very quickly.
Kraftwerk · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: Europe and the self seen through glass and machine, in a measured pulse and a cool, even light. The two most distant elements obey it. Showroom Dummies is the most comic, a stiff dance about people as goods; Franz Schubert is the most serene, a wordless slow piece named for a Romantic composer. Both set the past and the person behind a pane: the window of the shop, the window of the train. The circular close makes the law explicit. But the range is real and not wide: tempo, palette and register vary within a narrow band, and narrowness is not coherence. Side one’s three vignettes and side two’s continuous journey are two methods governed by one theme rather than one method, and that holds the figure.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: these are men who neither acted nor were damned, and everything in the poem obeys that suspension. Take the two most distant elements: the nursery rhyme “Here we go round the prickly pear” and the “Multifoliate rose” of the Paradiso. They obey the same law: the children’s ring goes round and round without arriving, and the heavenly rose is seen only as the hope of empty men. The eyes that will not be met, the kingdom that cannot be named, the prayer that cannot be finished, the world that ends without an act: one physics from the first line to the last, and the assembly from separate fragments leaves no visible seam in the law. Held at this figure because the range is narrow, one mood, one voice, one condition, and narrowness is not coherence.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the snow below the summit and the forest at the foot: they obey one law, a mark repeated and placed, pale strokes down and dark dots across, and the clouds are a third version of the same rule. Colour obeys one law too: every area flat or graded, none modelled. The design holds without contradiction anywhere. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range here is narrow: one subject, one hour, one register, four or five areas of colour. Coherence over so small a span is easy to keep, and the figure sits below Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.9), which holds a whole city’s movement under one law.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the carriage basement, dark and ruled by the turning of wheels, and the roof terrace, bright and peopled by figures. One law governs both: the surface follows a natural formation, rock, water, growth, and no straight line is admitted where a curve can serve. It runs through the front, the balconies, the curved walls of the courtyards, the ceilings, the door frames, the attic’s arches and the roof, and machine, household, service and sky fall under it; the range runs from a garage to a sculpture garden. What bends it: the law of the surface is not the law of the structure, for the stone front looks like a bearing mass and is carried, disguising the frame the plan obeys; and the flats keep the law in their outline more than in their rooms.
Claire Denis · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the drills on the volcanic plain under Britten, and Galoup alone in a Marseille room, making his bed before he lies down on it with a pistol. One law governs both: a self is made by discipline and kept by ritual, and is destroyed when the ritual loses its object. The ironing, the laundry lines and the tight bed obey it; so does the nightclub, where the same men perform another rite for the women of the town. The last dance is the law’s limit rather than its break. The strain is real: the town scenes and the girlfriend sit beside the law rather than under it, and the frame narration speaks in a register the images do not share. The range is narrow, one camp and one man, and narrowness earns nothing.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: everything is seen through one man’s obsession, and the obsession is coherent with itself to the end. Take the two most distant elements, the polite general conversation in the carriage and the killing at night in its physical exactness. They obey the same law: the conversation releases the confession, and the killing is where the conversation’s assumptions lead in Pozdnyshev’s account. The music obeys it too, the sonata felt as the same force as desire. The range is wider than it first looks, from social comedy through theory, domestic quarrel, music and horror to a last plea for pardon, and it holds. Held at this figure because the law is one voice’s and the range is bounded by it: narrowness is not coherence, and part of the book’s coherence is the narrowness of monomania.
Barnett Newman · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the broad red field, and a narrow zip that crosses it. They obey one law: the frontal field divided by a vertical, nothing bounded, nothing composed, every element the full height of the canvas. There is no exception, no gesture, no second kind of mark, and the law is total. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is narrow: one colour field, five verticals, one direction, one scale. The range within it is real and small. Held below the Rothko Chapel, whose law spans a room and two kinds of canvas, and below Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm, whose single law covers a wider range of event.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the convention’s salesmanship and Moran’s boasting, comic and vulgar, and the toilet brimming with blood in a cleaned hotel room. One law governs both: everyone is listening, and no one who listens is safe from being heard. Moran’s pen obeys it, and so do the landlady’s key, the confessional, Meredith’s seduction, Stett’s telephone call and the camera’s last sweep. The dream, the furthest formal departure, obeys it too: in it Harry at last speaks to someone he has only overheard, and is not answered. The tone is one temperature from the square to the stripped room. That evenness is a strength and a limit: the range is narrower than Chinatown’s, and narrowness is not coherence. The strain is slight: the hotel’s horror leans on the conventions of the suspense film.
Kazuo Ishiguro · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs: people formed to accept their use accept it, and their acceptance takes the form of care, pride and small loves. Take the two most distant elements: the Hailsham Exchanges, where children trade their own drawings and poems for tokens, and the recovery centre at Kingsfield, where Tommy waits for his fourth donation. They obey the same law: what you make, and then what you are, is taken and valued by others, and you are taught to be glad of it. The law holds in small things: the sales of other people’s junk, the guardians’ evasions, Ruth’s manners copied from television. Charged: the premise rests on an outside world kept almost entirely offstage, and the refusal to explain why no one runs is a law the book asserts rather than tests; the strictness of the rest makes that exemption visible.
Jakob Prandtauer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bastions at the eastern gate, kept from the older fortified abbey, and the gilt high altar at the far end of the church; a wall of defence and a theatre of glory. One law governs the line between them: an axial progression from the plain to the splendid, each stage richer than the last, so that even the bastions read as the outer threshold of the way. The ochre and white of the exterior, the repeated bay and the paired wings at the head bind the range, and the many hands inside worked to one programme. What bends the law: the imperial wing obeys a palace’s physics of repetition rather than the progression, and the church interior is denser and more Roman than the clean exterior figure. The range, from defence to heaven, is held.
Gunnar Asplund · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the cylinder of the rotunda and the shop fronts on the street, or the Egyptian door and the plain square windows of the block. One law governs them: elementary geometry, planar surface, ornament reduced to incision and a few figured panels, and scale stepped from the civic to the domestic by the same means. The children’s rooms and the adult reading rooms are made of the same parts at a different size, and the closing wing keeps the law of the first three. The range is fair, monument, workplace, shop and child’s room, and it is held. The discords are small: the archaism of the door and the reliefs belongs to an older manner than the stripped drum, and the block reads as a frame round the drum more than its partner.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the crimson curtain at the upper right and the blurred face in the mirror. One law governs both: everything in the picture serves the act of looking at Venus and the deferral of that look. The curtain is the theatre’s, framing an exhibition; the face is the exhibition returned. The palette obeys one rule, three fields of cool grey, warm flesh and crimson with the white between, and the handling one economy throughout, broad where the eye passes and fused where it rests. Nothing contradicts the law. But the range is narrow, one room, two figures, one instant, and the law is held over a small territory, with a slight break in the Cupid, whose handling is closer to routine than to the Venus’s attention.
Edith Wharton · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: form governs feeling, the code is kinder and crueller than any person in it, and every escape is absorbed. Take the two most distant elements, the comedy of Mrs Manson Mingott, enthroned on the ground floor of her cream-coloured house, and the last bench in Paris. They obey the same law. Beaufort’s ruin, a public scandal, is governed as Archer’s private one is: the society expels the one and keeps the other by the identical means of silence. The tonal range runs from social satire to tragedy, and it holds without a break. Held below the top by the axis’s own clause, that narrowness is not coherence: one class, one city, a handful of houses and a few European scenes are narrower ground than the great social novels cover, so a coherence that is perfect covers less.
Aretha Franklin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dance of “Respect” and the hymn of “A Change Is Gonna Come”, or the frank desire of “Dr. Feelgood” and the country soul of “Do Right Woman”, written by two white Southern songwriters, Dan Penn and Chips Moman. One law governs them: a gospel voice and piano, a rhythm section that follows the singer, and answering voices, the order of a Black church carried into secular song. The range is real, blues, gospel, dance, country soul and the civil rights hymn, and the law holds across it; two studios a month apart do not sound like two physics. What holds the figure: the lighter tracks obey the law loosely and add no reach to it, and the record is never cold, never ironic, never strange.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: everything the self reaches for is consumed into its descent. The two most distant elements obey it. A Warm Place, a slow, gentle instrumental, and March of the Pigs, the fastest and most violent track, are the same law, the warmth already lost and the violence that destroyed it; in March of the Pigs the law is enacted inside the song, in the quiet phrase that breaks and is crushed. Hurt, nearly acoustic and quiet, obeys too: it is what the law leaves. The range is wide, from ambient to thrash, from ballad to the dance rhythm of Closer, and one physics holds. Held from the top: Big Man with a Gun strains the law into provocation, and the middle narrows the range the record elsewhere covers.
Unknown court painters (Heian period) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the open garden of Minori, with wind in the grasses and the sky above, and the closed interior of Azumaya, where a woman reads aloud while Ukifune looks at pictures and has her hair washed or combed. They obey one law. Every space is seen from above at an angle, every figure is a mass of colour with a nearly blank face, and feeling is carried by placement and pattern. Several groups of painters and calligraphers worked within one grammar, and nothing in the survivors contradicts it, from music to death, moonlight to lamplight, emperors to servants. Held below the top because the variation of hands is visible, a seam though not a breach, and because the territory, the interior life of one court, is wide in mood and narrow in kind.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the curved milk-glass enclosure of the entrance at the top of the house and the lowered pane opening the living room to the garden below. One closes, one opens; one is the street’s, one the garden’s. One law governs both: a frame of points carrying the roof, with every wall freed to be a plane, a screen or a membrane of glass, its material chosen to declare what it divides. The same law places the onyx, the ebony, the curtains and the winter garden’s glass, and it rules the servants’ wing and the plant by its absence there, where ordinary walls return. What bends it: the bedroom floor is a row of closed rooms, an older and quieter order laid over the open floor below, so the law holds fully on one level and in part on the other; and a single house is a small territory. Narrowness is not coherence.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the apparatus records, the body keeps, the explanation absorbs. Comedy, adultery, grief, a misread bylaw, a boy inside a wall and a man who walks home at 3:14 all obey it, and the range is wide. Take the two most distant elements, Mr. Patel’s twenty-three minutes in a bathroom while his guests leave and Daniel crossing a camera’s frame after the search has ended: one physics keeps both. The figure wobbles between revenant, thermal artifact and metaphor, and the book makes the wobble the law: the standard feed and the thermal layer record incompatible versions of one night, and the Coverage Map reconciles neither. Held at 8.6 for a narrator that in the last movement still gives verdicts the bodies have not given, and for threads that loosen rather than hold: the woman whose tissue Mrs. Patel finds is never placed.
Maya · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stately presentation of the infant before the mantled nobles of the first room, and the scramble of the battle in the second. They obey one law. Both are scenes of a court ordered by rank, and the battle resolves into the same tiers on the arraignment wall; the dancers of the last room return to the stair that held the captives; the women’s blood answers the captives’ blood. One graphic law holds throughout: contour and flat colour, figures under life size on registers, Maya blue as the field of action, the vault as the sky. The range runs from the royal family on its throne bench to massacre, and the law holds across it. It slackens in the long repeated ranks, in the unevenness of hands, and in a sequence of rooms the cycle itself does not settle.
Robert Maillart · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole, literally. Every element obeys the logic of a three-hinged arch under load, from the hinges through the swelling box to the slender cross walls and the plain approach spans. Take the two most distant elements, the narrow hinge at a springing and the wide closed box at a quarter point: they obey the same law, and the profile draws the passage between them as one continuous curve. What holds the axis is range. The bridge holds one structural idea in one material, and narrowness is not coherence. The rail and parapet are ordinary rather than drawn under the same law. A high coherence in a small territory.
George Miller · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the guitarist on the drum truck, playing a flame-throwing guitar into the storm, a joke at the edge of the grotesque; and Furiosa screaming in the dunes over the dead Green Place. One law governs both: in this world everything is stock and motion, and every value, music and grief included, is carried at speed on a machine. The same economy of fluids runs from the milking room to the blood bag to the water at the close; the war boys’ cult and the wives’ slogans obey it from opposite sides. The range runs from grotesque comedy to tragedy, and the tone holds. The strain is slight: the Vuvalini soften the physics toward sentiment, and the closing ascent resolves the political law too easily.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a star, brushed in white wax as a bounded shape, and a scrap of comic strip floating under a white stripe. They obey one law: everything is the flag, made of wax over print, and every mark both builds the design and records the hand. There is no second rule, no passage of free painting outside the design, no image that is not the emblem, no ornament. The newsprint is not a second law but the ground of the first, and it never breaks the surface into a separate picture. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is narrow: one given design, three colours, one support, one technique. The range within it, from the sharp edge of a star to the drowned print, is real and small, and the law, which governs it completely, is held for the size of the territory.
Voltaire · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One physics governs: every event is a case against the claim that all is for the best, and every person is a position in the argument. Take the two most distant elements: El Dorado, where no one prays for anything because all have what they need and the king embraces his guests, and the Turkish galley of chapter 27, where the philosopher and the baron row in chains. They obey the same law, since El Dorado is good only because the world cannot reach it, and Candide leaves it for the world. The range is wide, from Westphalian farce and Lisbon horror to Paraguayan satire, Venetian ennui and the final peace, and the tone holds across it. Held off the top because chapter 22 obeys a smaller law, literary score-settling inside the larger argument, and because the garden’s turn from irony to counsel changes the register with little prepared for it beyond the old Turk’s few lines.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Bob in a bathrobe on the telephone, unable to recall the code his old comrades require, and Lockjaw’s paternity test, the father of the blood confirmed in a man who seeks admission to a club of racial purity. One law governs both: authority is absurd and lethal at once, and everyone is bound to an order, the network’s protocol or the club’s rule, that does not care for him. The law holds from slapstick to the threat of rape, the killing of a guard and a child pursued to the death, and the axis rewards that width. The strain: the Adventurers sometimes lean out of the law into sketch comedy; the convent is played at another temperature; and Perfidia’s exit takes the moral centre out of the second part, so its return in the coda comes from outside the pursuit.
William Blake · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the encrusted, many-coloured rock at the upper left and the pale ruled diagram at the lower right. One law holds them, and it is the law of the image: the world is growth, colour and the uncontrolled, and the figure’s attention is turned from it to the measured and the white. Every element is placed by that opposition. The body sits between the two, belonging by its beauty to the living and by its gesture to the measured; the dark ground surrounds both as the element of the unknown. Nothing contradicts the law: colour, process and pose all serve it. Held below the top because the territory is small, one figure, one rock, one gesture, one ground, and narrowness is not coherence.
Walter Gropius · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the workshop wing, an almost wholly glass volume of collective production, and the studio block, a cellular tower of private rooms, each with its own balcony. One is transparency and labour, the other enclosure and sleep. They obey one law: each volume takes its form, height and glazing from its use, inside one vocabulary of rendered skeleton, flat roof, dark steel window and white wall, joined by circulation rather than by a front. The vocational school, the bridge, the hall and the canteen obey it, and so do the interiors, where lamps, chairs, lettering and colour are made under the building’s rule. The range runs from factory to dwelling, so the coherence is not narrow. Held lower because the law is a method rather than a proportion: it explains each part, but binds the parts to one another less closely.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Monsieur Adolphe, the sweet manufacturer, farcical with his money and his appetite, and Pierre in his wheelchair, blind, while Husson tells him the truth off screen. One law governs both: desire runs beneath the bourgeois order and mocks it, and the order absorbs the cost without changing its surface. The clients’ farce, the gravity of the Duke’s rite, the violence of the fantasies and the calm of the twin beds are shot in one deadpan register and obey one physics, in which dream and act weigh the same. The range is wide, from comedy of manners to sacrilege and a shooting. The strain is in the last act, where the gangster plot leans on genre rules, the follow, the gun, the police, and its pace breaks from the film’s measured law.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the human hair on the head and the wax skin of the face, the real thing and its representation, side by side. They obey one law, the law of the specimen: every element is either a real thing or a thing made to be taken for real, and every element is set out for inspection. The bodice is real cloth made wax, and the slippers likewise; the skirt is real cloth left as cloth; the hair is real; the skin is wax made to be skin; and the case puts the whole under one glass. Even the pose, the trained body at rest, belongs to the regime of inspection. Held because narrowness is not coherence: one figure, one instant, one register, and the range between the farthest elements, sharp in kind, is small in territory.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a grey canvas in dull weather, where the mass of the building returns, and the blazing orange and blue canvas at full sun, where the building is almost lost in light. They obey one law: one motif, one near viewpoint, one crop, one touch, and the variable is light alone. The coherence of the series is its premise, and it holds across the whole set, over a wide range of tone and colour. Nothing in any canvas contradicts the law. But narrowness is not coherence. The series is coherent partly because it varies one thing, and the law governs a deliberately narrow world of façade, air and hour. It is held there.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a fine silver skein near an edge and a blue pole crossing the full height. Do they obey one law? Mostly, yes. The law is paint as the trace of an act laid on a flat field: the skein is a thrown act, the pole a pressed and dragged one, both made of the same enamels, both lying in the same plane, and where the pour runs across the poles they sit inside the field, not on it. The range is wide: from the finest line to pools and bars, from black to silver to the hottest colour, from the fast mark to the slow. Narrowness is not coherence, and this field is not narrow. Held below the top by the standing question: the poles are a second kind of mark, rigid and repeated where the field is free, and in places they read as a second law laid over the first.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the doss house at dawn, photographed as documentary, and the romp on purple backdrop paper with two girls. One law governs both: the photographer takes, and drops, and nothing he takes holds his attention past the taking. The same law covers the propeller he buys and forgets, the guitar neck he fights for and leaves on the pavement, the corpse he finds and cannot make anyone see, and Jane’s roll of film. The mimes obey it from outside: a world of agreed appearances, which he finally joins. The range is wide, from documentary to sex comedy to thriller to allegory, and the law holds across it. The strain: the party and the visit to Bill and Patricia are mood more than law, and Patricia’s thread is left at an angle.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the paving of the public concourse at the bottom and the maintenance cranes on the roof. Both obey one law: the building as an assembled machine, open beneath, served at the edges, every part shown as what it does. The stepped profile is the frame’s zones made visible; the atrium is the hollow the frame permits; the sunscoop is a part bolted to the facade like the rest. The grey cladding, the masts lit at night and the interior fittings belong to one family, across a range wide for an office tower: street, banking hall, working floors, plant and roof. What bends the law is the concession to older ritual, the lions and the reported adjustments of geomancy, accepted rather than absorbed, though they are small.
Thutmose (attributed) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the heavy, geometric, painted crown at the top and the soft, living throat at the bottom. They obey one law: an ideal geometry governing a living form, so that the crown’s clean planes and the neck’s taut curve are drawn to the same proportion, and the whole leans in one balance of forward neck and backward crown. The colour obeys it too: the crown’s flat blue, the collar’s measured bands and the warm modelled skin are each exact in their kind. The empty eye is the one place the law is suspended, and it is the state of a model, not a contradiction. But narrowness is not coherence: the law governs one head and its regalia, a small territory, completely.
Bill Evans Trio · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: three equal voices, the time felt and not marked, lyric restraint even at speed. Take the two most distant elements. “Solar” is a fast minor line on which bass and piano run in counterpoint; “My Man’s Gone Now” is a dirge nearly at rest. Both obey: in the dirge the bass is a second voice in the lament, not a pulse, and in “Solar” the piano leaves room as it does in the ballad. The waltz, the Porter song and LaFaro’s two oblique originals keep to the same law. The range is real but moderate: show tunes, a jazz line, two originals, tempos from very slow to fast, and one mood of inward attention throughout. Narrowness is not coherence, and the range keeps the figure below the 8.9 of Kind of Blue.
Joseph Strauss, Charles Ellis, Leon Moisseiff and Irving Morrow · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the steel arch over Fort Point at the southern end and the cable falling across the strait; or the tower and the lamp standard on the railing. One law governs them: steel in tension and compression, drawn by the vertical of the tower and the curve of the cable, with Morrow’s stepped, recessed and fluted vertical treatment carried from the portals of the towers down to the lamp posts and the rhythm of the railing; and one colour over everything, so that arch, truss, tower and cable read as one body. The law holds from 746 feet to the height of a handrail, and from the ocean’s mouth to the brick fort under the arch. What bends it: the approach viaducts and the arch obey a different structural law from the span, the Marin approach is a truss of the ordinary kind, and the type sets much of the law, so the range is narrower than a building’s.
Hildegard of Bingen · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Devil’s shouts and the closing chorus’s greening creation. One law governs them, the law of the work’s title: order, the right placing of every voice in a consonant whole, and its negation. The Devil is outside it by having no melody; the Souls in prison lament inside it; Anima leaves it and returns to it; the closing chorus sets it at the scale of the cosmos, from creation through the wounds of Christ to the bending of the knee. The Patriarchs and Prophets of the prologue and the closing chorus frame the drama in the same history. The strain is the ending, which turns from Anima to Christ’s wounds and the Father: prepared by her wounds, it does not name the drama’s protagonist. The range governed is wide in theology and narrow in register.
Ogata Kōrin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dense cluster at the right edge of the right screen and the last thin plants at the far left of the left, before the open gold. They obey one law. Everything in the work is a plant in one light, at one scale, on one ground, drawn in the same two blues and one green and ordered by the same interval. Nothing breaks it: no figure, no line of water, no bridge, no change of scale. The gold is the same everywhere, which is why it can be water at one point and distance at another without contradiction. But narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one plant, one season and one palette, and the law governs it completely because it covers so little.
Björk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the land and its fracture, strings and beats under one voice. Take the two most distant elements, Unravel and Pluto: the first a near-still ballad of a lover’s absence, the second three minutes of distorted techno and a scream. They obey the same law, as quiet ground and eruption, and the sequence places them as such. Bachelorette and All Neon Like, the most orchestral and the most electronic of the slow tracks, share the palette and the voice. The range is moderate, not narrow: march, ballad, dramatic waltz, trance, techno, pop. The law loosens at Alarm Call, whose brightness obeys the palette but not the argument, and the record’s coherence is helped by the narrowness of its palette, which counts for nothing as coherence. That holds the figure.
Hellenistic · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the grey hull with its oar-boxes and the feathers of the left wing. They obey one law. Everything is shaped by motion through air over water, the ship’s from below and the goddess’s from above, and one wind from in front governs cloth, feather and stance alike; even the end of the himation, flicking out behind the left leg, answers the same gust. The two marbles obey it too: made thing and god, told apart by colour and joined in one diagonal. Nothing contradicts. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range the law must cover is small: one figure, one ship, one instant. It is high because nothing breaks, and held because little is asked.
Steely Dan · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a flawless surface laid over lives that are failing, held in a cool, ironic voice that never quite judges. The two most distant elements obey it. The title track is an eight-minute jazz composition with a saxophone solo and a drum climax; Josie is a guitar-driven strut of four and a half minutes about a girl coming back to the block. Both are made to the same finish, both are about a place one goes to escape, and both are sung by the same knowing observer. Deacon Blues, the most personal song, and Peg, the most artificial, obey it too. The range of form runs from jazz ballad to funk to pop single, but the palette is largely one palette, and I Got the News follows the law in sound more than in substance.
Steve Reich · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole, and it is plain: the pulse, the cycle of chords and the gradual process. Take the two most distant elements: the opening Pulses, where the chord changes every few breaths, and a long section where one chord is held for minutes while a pattern is built note by note. Both obey the same law, the same pulse at the same speed, and the second is the first slowed. That is a strong coherence, and the rubric’s warning applies to it: narrowness is not coherence. The range the law holds is narrow by design, one tempo, one world of dynamics, one mode of brightness, no silence and no contrast of character, and so the law is tested less than in a work that holds grief and a joke on one bass.
Umberto Boccioni · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the closed helmet of the head and the trailing flare of the rear calf. They obey one law: every mass is the body’s form compressed or extended by its motion, pressed forward where it meets the air, drawn back where it leaves it. The head is the front of the wave, the calf its wake, and the torso between is their transition. The law holds through every surface. The one element that seems to obey another law is the pair of plinths, static rectilinear blocks under a figure of curves; read as the two points from which the motion springs, the ground made part of the stride, they are included. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: the law governs one figure, one material and one action, and the range it covers is small.
Aleijadinho · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the soapstone front of the 1770s, and the painted ceiling of the first years of the nineteenth century, by another hand, in another medium, a generation later. They obey one law. White ground, framed by grey-green stone or by gilt, carrying figures that rise in curved and broken lines to a crowning image: frontispiece and ceiling are the same composition turned from wall to vault. The pulpits answer the portal, the retable answers the frontispiece, and the round towers answer the curve of the cartouches. White, stone and gold hold from the street to the chancel without a break. Held at 8.6 because the law governs a narrow set of means in a small building, and narrowness is not coherence.
Konstantin Melnikov · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the blank street front with its one window and its name, and the pierced rear cylinder that faces the garden and holds the work. They obey one law, the circle and the cell. The plan is two circles; the wall is a field of hexagonal cells; the window is the cell glazed; the inscription is set in a band that answers the great window below it. The same wall is opened sparingly where the house faces the city and generously where it faces its garden and its studio, and interior and exterior are one geometry. Held lower because a single house is a narrow territory, and narrowness is not coherence; but here the law governs structure, light, plan and street face together.
New Order · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: feeling carried inside a regular pulse, the human held within the machine, under a cool and melancholy light. The two most distant elements obey it. We All Stand, slow, dubbed and played, and Ecstasy, fast, sequenced and nearly wordless, are the same arrangement of a small human sound against a larger regularity, once as drift and once as motion. Leave Me Alone, the most purely a band song, keeps the law by its chiming regularity. The range of form runs from guitar song to electro to processional. The Village’s brightness strains the law a little, and the range of tone is narrow, nearly all melancholy and cool; narrowness is not coherence.
Brinkman and Van der Vlugt · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: frame, slab, glass and the movement of goods. Take the two most distant elements, the long straight tobacco block and the curved office building at the gate: the second bends the same language of band and glass to the line of the drive and obeys the same physics. The tearoom on the roof, a cylinder of glass, is the furthest formal departure and still belongs, the same transparency made into a pavilion. The bridges join the dispatch building to the range on the same terms. The range covered is moderate rather than wide, production, office, dispatch and leisure, and the coherence is partly that of repetition; within it the consistency is near complete, and the conversion has not broken it.
Radiohead · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a fragile self in a manufactured world, sung in a voice that breaks under it, over guitars that move between chime and storm. The two most distant elements obey it. My Iron Lung, quiet verse and explosive noise aimed at the band’s own success, and Fake Plastic Trees, a near-acoustic lament, are the fake world raged at and the fake world mourned, with the same failing, cosseted body in both. Street Spirit carries the law to its end, dissolution. It strains at Black Star and Sulk, which reach for the record’s anxiety by general rock grandeur rather than its particular physics, and at the title track’s swagger. What holds it short is range, ballad to thrash: narrowness is not coherence.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the outside, a hard, pale, rectilinear prism with sharp arrises, standing in the open light of a field; and the inside, a black, soft-ribbed, leaning cavity, closed, curved and lit from one point. They obey one law: the making. Each is the trace of the same process, the outside the trace of the rammed lifts, the inside the trace of the burnt tent, so that light and dark, hard and soft, open and closed are one law seen from its two sides. The same law governs the glass stoppers, holes of the making turned to light; the lead floor, receiving water and light from the one opening; and the door. Held below the top because the range is narrow, one room and its shell in one register, and narrowness is not coherence.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the arched pane at the top, glass whole and lettered with the infinite, and the shards on the floor, glass broken and unlettered. They obey one law, and they are one substance: matter as vessel, every element a container either holding or broken. The lead books hold a word no one can read; the shelf holds the books; the panes held light and broke. The law is visible in a single material from top to bottom, whole above and shattered below, and the range runs from the infinite to debris without a break. Held below the top because the wired labels are another kind of thing, a diagram’s register set among objects, and because the territory, though tall, is one theme.
Lee Chang-dong · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the tangerine peeled from nothing in a Seoul bar, a light comedy of flirtation, and the stabbing on the snowy road. One law governs both: what is not seen is supplied by desire, and what desire supplies becomes real enough to act on. The tangerine is the law stated as a joke; the cat, the well, the burnt greenhouse and Ben’s guilt are the law applied; the killing is the law obeyed to its end. The father’s trial, the mother’s return and Ben’s party, where Hae-mi’s story is laughed at, obey it too: each character is known to others only as a story. The range is wide, from comedy of manners to murder. The strain is the switch from passive watching to violence, which the laptop scene reconciles but does not fully earn.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the blind man on the shore handing out blankets in soft English light, and men drowning in the dark hold of the trawler as the tide fills it. One law governs both: survival is the whole of the task, and each survivor owes a debt to strangers. The trawler is survival at others’ cost, Gibson found to be French and ordered off the boat; the blankets are the debt acknowledged. The shivering soldier, Farrier’s choice to stay and the lie told about George obey the same law, across a range from dread to elegy. The strain: the close moves from survival into national celebration, a speech read over the rescued and the captured pilot, in a key warmer than the law; and the time scheme, where it shows, bends the physics it set.
Dashiell Hammett · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: everyone acts for gain and says what serves, and the only fixed point is a code that cannot justify itself. Take the two most distant elements: the comic opera of the chase, Cairo’s gun and perfumed handkerchief, Gutman’s speeches, the bargaining in Spade’s flat over who will be handed to the police as the fall guy while the sun comes up; and the last chapter’s cold reckoning between Spade and Brigid. They obey the same law. The bargaining over Wilmer and the bargaining over Brigid are one transaction, and Spade’s terms do not change between them. The Flitcraft story, the bird’s history and the police scenes keep to it as well. Narrowness is not coherence, and what holds the axis at 8.6 is range: comedy, menace and a sharp grief are all held, but in one register and one milieu.
Gerrit Rietveld · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the projecting planes and coloured members of the exterior, read from the street, and the hinged lid of a built-in cupboard or a sliding partition inside. One is front and one is furniture; one is public and one is private. They obey one law: rectangular planes and lines that meet without merging, each element kept distinct and set in balance, white and greys for surfaces and the primaries for what is small and linear. The law runs from the scale of the house to the scale of a hinge. Held lower for two reasons: a single small house is a narrow territory, and narrowness is not coherence; and the law bends where it meets what it cannot govern, the brick end wall, the conventional rooms below, the masonry inside the planes.
Henry Bacon · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs from podium to attic: a Greek order taken with archaeological seriousness and bent to a civic census. Take the two most distant elements, the Doric peristyle outside and the Ionic screens within: they obey one grammar, Doric for the public shell and Ionic for the inner rooms, and the carved texts sit in the same calm register as the stone. The numbers of columns and names are part of the order, not applied to it. The Roman festoons of the attic and the entry on the long side strain the Greek law a little. The range is not wide: one type, one palette of stone, one mood, held throughout.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Oscar’s play of brothers at Antietam, and the judge’s opinion on a dog trapped in a steel sculpture in a small town. They obey one law: a society that has lost the means of saying what is owed between persons can say it only as a claim at law, and the claim, won or lost, does not return the thing. The comic and the elegiac in the book share that law; so do the car, the film and the death in the family. The range is wide, from the slapstick of a car that runs over its owner to the old judge’s last opinion, and the same law holds. Charged because the minor suits sometimes run as jokes in a looser physics, outside the law that governs the rest.
Greek colonists of Poseidonia · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the massive outer column on the platform and the slender upper column inside the cella. They obey one law. The Doric module and its rules of correspondence govern the whole, from the platform to the cornice and from the outer peristyle to the inner colonnade, which repeats the outer order in diminished form as a second, interior statement of the same law, in the same proportion of diminution. No part comes from a different idea, and there is no exception. Narrowness is not coherence, and the charge applies: the range the law covers is one type and one order, with no programme of sculpture or space of another kind to hold together. The score credits the coherence and charges the narrowness.
Georges de La Tour · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the flame, all light, and the darkness at the edges of the canvas, all absence. One law holds them, and the law is the single source: every form in the picture exists exactly to the degree the flame reaches it, so that the dark is not a background but the far end of the same scale. The face and the skull obey it, and so does everything on the table; the smoke obeys it inversely, a dark line drawn through the light. The stillness of the figure and the stillness of the flame are one stillness, broken only by the smoke, which belongs to the flame. Nothing stands outside the law. Held below the top because the range is narrow, one figure, one room, one register of quiet, and the law is held completely over a small territory.
Built for Bishop Bernward · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the west choir over Bernward’s tomb and the east apse with the altar of the community; or the bare Ottonian arcade and the Jesse ceiling painted two centuries later. One law governs: the square and its repetition. Both ends obey the same module, the same crossing, the same group of towers, and the alternation counts the squares between them. The ceiling is laid in panels over a nave already ruled in units, and its genealogy runs along the axis between the two poles, so the later hand obeys the law of the first. Held below the top because the range is moderate, one austere register and few kinds of space; within it the law holds without exception, across the twelfth-century repair and the rebuilding after 1945.
James McNeill Whistler · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the patterned curtain at the left and the white of the cap and lace at the head. They obey one law: everything is a tone set against grey, colour suppressed, pattern admitted only where the design needs weight. Face, hands, curtain, print and wall are painted at one pitch, as members of one arrangement; nothing is lit for drama, nothing described for its material beyond what the tone requires. The law is the title’s, and the canvas keeps it everywhere. The range is narrow: one figure, one wall, one picture, one textile, one piece of furniture, one light. Narrowness is not coherence, which is why the axis stops here, level with The Living Form and The Made, below Broadway Boogie Woogie at 8.9.
James Gibbs · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs: the centre, and its division into equal parts round it. The polygon of the base, the paired columns of the drum, the ribs of the dome, the arcade of the reading room and the bays of the bookcases all count out the same circle, and nothing in the building faces one way more than another. The two most distant elements, the rusticated lower storey and the stucco of the dome’s inner face, obey it: weight and roughness below, lightness and finish above, one turning figure from ground to lantern. The glazing of the 1860s keeps the law; the arches still read as arches. The law strains at the seam between the polygonal lower storey and the round drum, long noted by critics, and the Baroque language sits a little apart from the plain reading life inside it.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the dot laid over ground, at varying density and colour, across a field with no centre and no edge. Take the two most distant elements, the dense, hot passages of red and ochre under green and the open, pale passages of white and blue. Both obey the rule of the layered mark, and the pale passages read as the same ground breathing, not as a second idea. The four panels join without a seam in the image. The range is real, from near monochrome openness to saturated density, and from the design beneath to the last touch on the surface. It is held below the top by the axis’s own caution: the range is of one kind, a field of one mark, and narrowness is not coherence.
Antonio Canova · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the hard rough rock and the near weightless wings. One law governs both, finish by meaning: what is earth and sleep is rough and heavy, what is living flesh is polished, what is divine and in the air is carved thin. Take her slack lower body, still asleep, and her taut lifted arms, already awake: one law again, the waking moving upward through her. The crossing, the ring and the gap obey a single idea, approach without arrival. Held because the range is narrow, two figures, one moment, one tone, and narrowness is not counted as coherence. Within it there is no contradiction; only the vessel belongs to another, emblematic register.
Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint; completed by Kaare Klint · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole, over a wider range than the building’s plainness suggests. Take the two most distant elements: the west front, a public monument pitched to the scale of the city, and the chairs in the nave, sized to a single sitting body. Both obey the same law: the plain unit repeated, the common material honestly shown, the vernacular raised by proportion rather than by ornament. Between them the stepped gable, the pier, the vault rib and the window derive from the one module. Two makers across twenty years did not break the law; at the scale of the whole the son’s completion shows no change of hand. The deduction is that the law is narrow in its means, one material and one style: wide in scale, less wide in kind.
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Take the two most distant elements: Cromwell Tower, a sawtooth shaft on the skyline, and the arts centre’s foyer below the lake. They obey one law: bush-hammered concrete; the round arch and the vault, at the tops of the terraces, in the arcades and in the centre; horizontal bands of balcony and parapet; water and planting set against mass. The law holds across a range no single building covers, towers, terraces, crescents, mews, schools, a music school, a theatre, a concert hall and a glasshouse, built over some twenty years. The retained church and wall are framed, not imitated. What bends it: the softer dialect of the arts centre’s interiors, and podium undersides that belong to the car.
Rachel Whiteread · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a light switch, the smallest trace of a hand on a wall, and the council’s order that pulled the whole down. They obey one law: inversion and removal. Every element of the work is what is left when something is taken away. The rooms become solid because the air is replaced; the house becomes visible because its walls are removed; the windows are blind because the glass is gone; the street is gone because the terrace was cleared; and the work becomes record because the work is gone. The interior is outside, the private public, the absent present, the dwelling a tomb, and nothing breaks the law. The range is wide, from the mark of a fitting to a city’s housing policy. Held below the top because some of that range is supplied by circumstance, the council and the prize, rather than governed by the work.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the warm, figured, crowded pattern of the jacket and the empty dark grey field. They obey one law: everything is the light of a photograph, translated into paint at a single focus and a single distance. The grey is not a different kind of painting from the figure; it is rendered as the figure is, and that is the canvas’s most exact coherence. The turn obeys the same law, the camera’s instant held. Nothing departs from it: no second kind of mark, no expressive passage, no symbol painted in. What holds the axis is the size of the territory, one figure, one ground, one light, one instant, for narrowness is not coherence. Within it the range from ornament to void is wide, and the law holds across it.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the small green plane at the centre and the straight orange strips at the edge. They obey one law: flat cut planes of unmodulated colour on white, placed so that each acts on its neighbours, ordered by one movement, the turn outward. The border is the turn’s counter-measure, straight against curved, made of the same matter and placed by the same choice; nothing in the field is drawn, modelled or shaded, and nothing is a second kind of mark. The law is total. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is small by choice: one kind of mark, one movement, a dozen or so planes. Within it the range from hot to cold, ragged to straight, centre to edge is real and fully governed. A complete law over a small field.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the glint on the earring and the dark ground behind the head. One law governs both: light from a single source at the upper left, falling on surfaces and described only as light, without line, so that the jewel is a reflection and the darkness is the absence of reflection. The same law makes the highlights in the eyes, the points on the lips, the folds of the turban and the edge of the collar. Nothing breaks it: no anecdote, no inscription beyond the signature, no second light, no change of handling but the broader jacket, which still obeys the same fall of light. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is very small, one head, one source and three colours. Within it the law is total; the figure is held for its size.
Michel Virlogeux and Norman Foster · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the shortest pier, about 77 metres, and the tallest, about 245 metres, over the valley floor; or the abutment on the causse and the mast over the river. All obey one law: equal spans, one pier profile scaled to the ground, one mast, one fan of stays, one deck section, so that the varying land is read against an unvarying rule. The line of each pier runs through the deck into its mast, and the whole bridge is one gesture made seven times. The range is wide in scale, from rock to cloud, and narrow in kind, one module and one language of material, and narrowness is not coherence. The screens follow a plainer law of their own, and are the one discord.
The Cure · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: slow mass, a voice arriving late into it, and every song turned toward an ending. Take the two most distant elements, Drone:Nodrone, its guitars sawing and its voice harried, and the piano and keyboards of I Can Never Say Goodbye. They obey the same law, one as dread and one as grief, both in the same low weather and both about something coming. Warsong’s bitterness and And Nothing Is Forever’s vow are the same pair at a smaller distance. The record never leaves its tonal world, and the frame, the end of song at the opening and the end of everything at the close, binds it tightly. What holds it a tenth below Disintegration’s 8.7 is that narrowness is not coherence: one palette and one band of tempo throughout, a law that holds partly because it is never tested.
Built for Frederick II · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole, as strictly as in almost any building: the octagon, from the court to the main body to each tower, and every room shaped by the same figure. Take the two most distant elements, the classical portal and the Gothic rib vault: they obey the same law of measured geometry and are reconciled, not opposed. The range is moderate: one kind of room repeated sixteen times, a court and eight towers, and some of the strictness is narrowness, which is not coherence. But the law also holds across the wider range of sources the building absorbs, Cistercian, classical and perhaps Islamic, and that range keeps the figure where it stands.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the mourning women at the tomb, the most human moment, and the seated gods of the tribunal above the judgment, the most remote. One law governs both: Maat, the order the scale measures, which is also the order of the drawing. The same canon of proportion, the same registers and baselines, the same flat colour inside the line and the same columns of text naming every figure hold the dead man, the priests, the mourners, the devourer and the gods. Ammit is drawn as calmly as Thoth. The range is wide, earth and the underworld, the living and the gods, grief and verdict, and nothing contradicts the law. Held below the upper band because the law is the tradition’s, and a received order is not quite the achievement of one a work makes for itself.
Canaletto · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take two distant elements: the rough blocks and the dressing of stone in the shadow at the front, and the sunlit campanile across the water. They obey one law: one light, one hour, one perspective, and one temperature of observation that neither ennobles the church nor sentimentalises the yard. The rough and the finished, the domestic and the sacred, the near and the far all sit in one physics of light and air, and nothing in the canvas breaks it. The range is fair, from rubble to spire, from washing on a line to a church, and the coherence within it is complete. What holds the figure at 8.6 is the width: one view at one moment, wider than a single figure piece but not tested by extremes. The canvas holds a moderate width perfectly.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: light filtered by a repeated element, under a grey timber skin on a white frame, at the scale of a house. Take the most distant elements: the veranda on the street and the innermost gallery, the treasure house above and the planted courts below, the building and the bungalows across the road. They obey the same law: the same leaf, the same grey, the same steel, the same height. The law reaches beyond the building to its campus, held to one grey and one scale. Range is the limit. Narrowness is not coherence, and the building’s law covers a deliberately narrow range of spaces and moods, so the coherence, though complete, is that of a small vocabulary.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the clouded sky at the upper left and the woman bent over the tub in the dim yard beyond the passage. One law governs them. Everything in the picture is a surface receiving the same cool daylight and bearing the marks of time and use, and every figure is absorbed, turned to its task and away from the viewer. Sky, brick, whitewash, pavement, cloth and skin obey one light and one stillness, and the geometry of the façade and the irregularity of its wear are reconciled in one grid that is everywhere slightly broken. Nothing contradicts the law. The range is narrow, one street, one hour, one register of quiet, and narrowness is not coherence; the law is complete over a small territory.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stubble on the jaw and the gold of the collar. One law holds them: everything is seen with the same disinterested exactness, the king’s livery and the unshaven skin given the same truth and the same light. Rank does not alter the handling; the man is not idealised to match his chain, nor the chain dulled to suit the man. The range runs from cloth to metal to skin to paper, from the green of the ground to the red of the sleeves, and nothing in the field contradicts the law. But narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one man at half length before a curtain, and the law, fully kept, governs a small field.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the roof shells, lifted over the roadside on their piers, and the information counter or a stair balustrade, a piece of furniture at the hand. One law governs both: the continuous curve in concrete, surface flowing into surface without joint or applied order, structure and fitting of one substance. The tubes carry the law into the passages, and the seams follow it at the scale of the whole roof. That unity, from structure to fitting, is the building’s strongest achievement and among the most complete in modern architecture. What bends it: the inclined glass walls are flat planes in a curved world, a necessary compromise; alterations for baggage and security broke it before the restoration; and the range is narrow, one building, one purpose, one register, and narrowness is not coherence.
Valmiki · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One law, dharma, governs from the palace to the monkey court to Laṅkā. Vālin and Sugrīva re-enact the quarrel of brothers over a throne that Ayodhyā averted; Vibhīṣaṇa chooses right over kin as Bharata chose it over his mother; Rāvaṇa’s appetite is the law’s inversion, not an alien force. The tonal range, from the monkeys’ comedy to the grief of Laṅkā’s women, holds. The breach is in the strata: the Rāma of Books 2 to 6 grieves, doubts and does not know he is a god until he is told after the war; the Rāma of Books 1 and 7 is Viṣṇu descended. Sītā’s abandonment and Śambūka’s death can be read as the same law applied without mercy, which largely saves the coherence, but the joins remain visible.
Louis Le Vau, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the brick and stone lodge in the Cour de Marbre and the far end of the Grand Canal. One law joins them: the axis passes through both, and the lodge was kept so that the axis would begin in the father’s house. Across the garden front the law holds from parterre to horizon, symmetry, axis, cross-axis and perspective, with the bosquets as rooms hidden off the public line. But the whole is asked, and the whole breaks. The town front sets three or four idioms side by side, down to Gabriel’s unfinished neoclassical wing; Louis XV’s cabinets obey a rococo law; and the Hamlet and the Petit Trianon’s English garden obey a law opposed to Le Nôtre’s, inside his domain.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: General Ivolgin’s tale of serving Napoleon in Moscow as a boy, a comedy of lying, and the vigil over Nastasya Filippovna’s body. Do they obey one law? In large part, yes: both are humiliation, the lie told to preserve a self and the murder committed to possess one, and Myshkin meets both with the same unjudging pity. Lebedev’s farce and Ippolit’s despair share the novel’s physics of confession. But the law shifts as the book goes. The Myshkin of the first part, wise and sure, becomes in the last a figure the narrator cannot account for, and the narrator himself changes footing. Subplots open under one law and close by report. The range is very wide, and the law holds it with visible strain.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Rahman I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a reused Roman column in the first mosque, its capital not matching its shaft, and the ribbed dome before al-Hakam II’s mihrab. They obey one law: the arch on the column, multiplied. In the first mosque the arch is doubled; in the maqsura it is lobed, interlaced and at last crossed into the vault. The range is wide, two centuries and four patrons, spolia to gold, and the law holds across it. Three things resist. Al-Hakam II’s central aisle, enclosure and domes give the centreless field a line of approach its law does not contain. Al-Mansur’s aisles keep the law more thinly and shift its centre. And the cathedral, rising through the roof at the centre of the field, is a second law imposed on the first, a cruciform order where the field has none. It is charged most.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Playmates’ show, near farce, and the killing of Kurtz, a rite. One law covers them: the war is a performance staged by power for itself, and the river strips the staging away until only the rite is left. The surfing, the television crew and the lit stage are the performance; Do Lung is a stage with no director; the compound is a theatre with one spectator; the killing is the oldest show of all. The strain is in the last act’s register: two thirds ironic and swift, then a compound solemn and incantatory, with the photojournalist’s comic patter uneasy inside it. That change may be the law’s last term or a second law, and it counts partly against.
Byzantine, under Bishop Ecclesius and Justinian · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the plain brick exterior and the mosaic presbytery. One law governs both, the Byzantine law that a building is an interior and its outside a husk: the contrast is the law kept, not broken. Through core, ambulatory and presbytery the law is the screen: arcades, openwork capitals and mosaic surfaces dissolving solid into light and pattern. The range is wide, from structure to theology. What bends it: the centred octagon and the longitudinal presbytery are two geometries joined on one side, and the narthex is a third; and the eighteenth-century dome, part of the one work, paints a heaven in perspective illusion over a building whose law is the flat, gold, frontal image. It is the one place where the work’s physics is contradicted, and it is the summit.
Charlotte Brontë · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the red-room at Gateshead (ch. 2) and the voice across the moors (ch. 35); or Lowood’s burnt porridge and the burning of Thornfield. One law governs them: passion and conscience must both be kept, and each household tests which one Jane will give up. The red-room is the child’s rage shut up; the third storey is the same room in a grown house; the summons comes when conscience and passion at last agree. The range is wide, from the charity school’s realism to the Gothic and the visionary, and mostly held. Charged: the realist law and the providential law are not one law, and the book needs both; the voice is taken by the narrator as fact and left as fact; and St John’s closing words open a second law, of vocation, death and heaven, that Ferndean has not met.
Thomas Hardy · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Jack Durbeyfield drunk at the Pure Drop, calling himself Sir John (I to III), and Tess on the altar stone at Stonehenge (LVIII). One law governs them: blood, chance and appetite run under a social order that pretends to moral sense, and the comedy of the first and the sacrifice of the last are one fact seen at two distances. The range is wide and held, from rustic comedy and pastoral idyll to Gothic sleepwalking, social realism and melodrama. Charged: the book states its cosmos in more than one way, and the ways do not always agree. The force is sometimes chance, sometimes heredity, sometimes the gods’ sport, sometimes society alone, as the scene suits. Alec’s conversion obeys the law poorly, and his return is plot more than necessity.
Hugo van der Goes · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the tiny angels in the air above the stable and the shepherds’ huge rough hands at the right. They obey one law: size is rank in the order of the sacred, and all of it stands in one light and one cold. Saints tower over donors, the Virgin is larger than the angels, the angels vary, the shepherds are at the scale of the world, and everything is painted with the same observation. The law holds across all three panels, consistently and by rank, and it is the work’s own. But it is a double law, natural light and sacred scale, and the seam shows: the eye registers the shifts of scale as dissonance before it reads them as order, and the building and the ground do not wholly agree. A law that governs from sacrament to weather, with a visible strain.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
One law can be stated: old powers, of the blues, of the English land and of myth, brought into an electric music that makes them elemental. The record governs a wide range by it, from a mandolin duet to a flood of drums, and the two closers obey it fully, a pilgrimage and an inherited catastrophe made elemental in sound. Take the two most distant elements, Going to California, an acoustic wish for a new coast, and When the Levee Breaks: they meet in idiom, and in two men without a place to stay, more than in one condition. Rock and Roll, a 1950s homage, obeys no law but energy, and the four symbols on the sleeve, one for each player, admit a law partly plural.
Ancient Egyptian · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the open Middle Kingdom court at the east, with its few granite thresholds, and the unfinished First Pylon of the thirtieth dynasty, some fifteen centuries apart. They obey one law: axial approach, threshold, the god’s house in the deepest place, the canonical figure on every wall. That one physics governs a work built under so many reigns is the achievement, and the range in time is very wide. What resists: two axes joined at the Cachette Court, two processions, not one; Ramesses III’s temple breaking through the First Court’s south wall at right angles; and contradiction in the record, Hatshepsut erased, Amun erased and recut, kings carving their names over their predecessors’. The restoration of order is itself the law, but the fabric shows the fractures.
Ivan Goncharov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of Zakhar and the elegy of the grave on the Vyborg side. They obey one law, that Oblomov’s world goes on as it was made unless something stronger than wishing intervenes, and nothing does; comedy and grief are the same inertia seen from two sides. The Dream and the Petersburg satire hold together too, the visitors being what Oblomovka would have to become if it moved. The element that strains the law is Stolz: built to a schema, German method and Russian heart, and set up as the counter-principle, he behaves by the author’s need rather than by the novel’s physics, and the marriage chapters of Part Four turn the book for a time from novel to essay.
Joseph Heller · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the vaudeville of Major Major’s name and his promotion by an I.B.M. machine, and Snowden’s entrails on the floor of the plane. They obey one law: the institution’s logic is indifferent to the body it governs. The farce and the horror are the same mechanism seen from outside and from inside, and that is the book’s great feat of coherence; the width of the range is what makes the figure. The law bends in one place, the ending. Orr’s escape to Sweden, revealed as the plan behind his crashes, and Yossarian’s leap to follow are a comic deliverance the book’s physics has spent four hundred pages denying, and Nately’s whore lunging at him with a knife as he runs does not quite pull the ending back under the law. As a moral choice rather than a plausible escape, the ending is credited in part.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law: the double consciousness of the city dweller, who longs for the infinite and lives among things for sale, and whose every lyric impulse is answered by irony, money or cruelty. Take the two most distant pieces: “Any where out of the world”, a pure dialogue of the soul’s longing, and “Assommons les pauvres!”, a beating on a street corner. They obey the same law: an escape from the world as it is, attempted once by flight and once by violence, and each ironised. The voice, lyric, satirical, confessional and essayistic by turns, stays one voice, a narrator who watches and judges himself, and the range it covers is wide. Held where it is because the poetics of the removable vertebra admits a looseness, the doublets belong to the verse book’s law more than to the city’s, and the allegories sit apart in tone.
John Steinbeck · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs: the land and those who work it against the abstraction that owns it, and the move from the family to the people. Take the two most distant elements, the documentary general chapter of the used car lot and the allegorical close in the barn. Both are about what a person is worth when the market has finished with them, and the ending answers the lot. The turtle of chapter 3 and the family’s truck are one creature on one road. The strain is between naturalism and allegory: the book is for the most part a record and its ending is a sacrament, and many readers have felt the change of key as a breach. It is a fulfilment, prepared by chapter 14 and by Ma’s widening of the family at every stage; but the seam shows, as does the seam between a biologist’s detached view of the group and an intimate sentiment for the family.
Paul Gauguin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the infant at the lower right and the idol at the upper left. They obey one law. Everything is flat colour bounded by contour; nothing is lit by a source or casts a shadow; figures, trees, idol and animals are painted at one pitch, so that the sacred and the newborn share one ground. The yellow corners obey it too, as a frame painted into the picture. The range is wide for a painting: birth to death, the animal to the god, the near ground to the far sea. What resists: the two walkers in purple belong to another register, a genre scene inside a dream; the scale of the figures shifts between groups with no consistent space to justify it; and Eden, idol, mummy and Buddha sit side by side more than they fuse. One law of paint, two or three laws of meaning, held together by the frieze.
Odo of Metz, under Charlemagne · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Carolingian octagon, massive, dim and centred, and the Gothic choir hall, a skeleton of glass rising above it. Inside the octagon one law governs: the eight and its double, the ring and its centre, storey over storey from floor to vault, from the bronze railings to the column screens. The range there is real, from Roman spolia to Frankish masonry, held in one geometry. The choir obeys another physics but keeps the building’s law of axis and ascent: it carries the line from throne to altar on to the shrines of Charlemagne and the Virgin, and was built in his honour. The modern revetment keeps the law by imitation. Held below the octagon’s own figure because the whole is two buildings joined on one axis, read from outside as an accumulation.
Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Woodland Chapel of 1920, a hut with a classical porch and a hidden dome, and the crematorium of 1940, modern, planar and white. Add Lewerentz’s Resurrection Chapel, a severe temple on a rigid axis in a landscape of free paths. In style these are three systems by two hands over twenty years. One law nonetheless governs them: each building yields to the ground. Each is reached on foot through landscape, sits low against the forest, and opens from shade toward light. The range is wide, from forest hut to temple to crematorium, and the landscape holds it. But one physics is asked of the whole, and at the scale of the buildings the work is a sequence of answers more than one answer: the angled portico and the crematorium’s turn of style show the seams.
Wallace Stevens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the grave meditation of “Sunday Morning” and the gaudy play of “Bantams in Pine-Woods” or “The Plot Against the Giant”. They obey one law. Both are acts of the imagination upon a reality it cannot master, and the comedy is the gravity in another key. The title admits as much: a harmonium is a small reed organ, and a harmony of many voices. The range is wide, and the law holds across most of it. Narrowness is not the issue; looseness is. As a gathering of eight years’ magazine poems, the book admits pieces that sit outside its physics as occasional verse, and “The Comedian as the Letter C”, which argues for plainness, contradicts its own argument by its style.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the cow pastoral in its lyric excess and Mink’s killing of Houston, with the hound howling in the woods; or the comedy of the horse auction and Eula’s mythic stillness. One law governs them, the law of exchange set against what cannot be exchanged, and the range it covers is wide: farce, idyll, murder, legal comedy, fable. The law holds. Charged a step on two counts: where a story’s own frame survives into the novel its tone sits apart, and Flem, whom the book never enters, stands a little apart from the depth it gives Mink and Ike.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the sun at the centre, all light and dissolution, and the manacled leg at the lower right, all hard fact. One law holds them. Everything in the field is subject to the same light and the same storm, and the light that makes the sky glorious is the light that lies on the drowned. Sky, sea, ship and bodies are made of one substance, colour moved by weather, and nothing stands outside it; the range, from cosmic light to a chain, is wide for one canvas. What resists is a second law entering at the bottom: the fish and sea creatures belong to illustration and the grotesque, drawn as things rather than as light, and they break the physics at the very place where it matters most.
Zora Neale Hurston · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two farthest elements: the porch comedy of the mule’s funeral and the shooting of Tea Cake in the house on the muck. One law governs both: a life is made and judged by talk, by the porch, by the court and at last by the woman who tells it, and love is real only where it lets the other speak. The pear tree and the flood belong to one nature, bloom and judgment. The law strains in two places. Tea Cake’s beating of Janie, which the law of mutual voice should condemn, is absorbed by the narrative as a sign of love. At the trial the porch’s law, the Black community hostile, and the court’s, the white jury lenient, are set side by side without being fully weighed.
Robert Johnson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: a single voice and guitar, the blues form bent to the breath, and restlessness. The two most distant sides are “Terraplane Blues”, a comic song of a car as a woman’s body, and “Hellhound on My Trail”, a song of pursuit by something not human. They obey the same law. Desire and dread are one restlessness, the car and the hellhound are both on the road, and the voice that leers in one mutters in the other. The range of tone is wide, through comedy, lust, grief, terror and prayer; the range of form is narrow, one voice, one guitar, one family of forms. The narrowness and the sides made for the trade hold it from the top.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the nocturnal centre, a corpse lowered against a dark sky, and the Visitation in its bright loggia, two pregnant women greeting in daylight, with a servant and a husband on the stair. They obey one law, the bearing of Christ, and the programme holds conception and death, joy and grief, at either end of one act. The range is wide, and that is credit. But the law is iconographic, and the painting does not make it visible in one physics: the wings stand in another register of light, colour and temper from the centre, a gracious classicism beside a dark pathos, and the outer faces in a third. One idea governs the triptych; one manner does not.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the book: loss comes, it cannot be undone or spoken of, and what a man has left is how he carries it. Take the two most distant elements, the bullring in Madrid in “The Undefeated” and the lunch-room in Summit, Illinois, in “The Killers”. They obey the law: Manuel will not quit, Ole will not run, and neither has a choice that would save him. The couple on the train in “A Canary for One”, going back to Paris “to set up separate residences”, and the soldier who cannot sleep in “Now I Lay Me” obey it too. Charged on two counts. “Banal Story” and “To-day Is Friday” step outside the law into satire and pastiche. And the law is narrow, one stance applied across a range of settings, so that some of the coherence is that of a single temper rather than a wide world under one physics.
Louis Le Vau and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stone entrance front with its forecourt of brick service buildings, and the grassy rise with Hercules beyond the canal. They obey one law: the axis, the symmetry about it, and the measured succession of terraces and basins that the eye reads from the salon as one perspective. House and garden were drawn as one, and architecture, water, planting, painting, sculpture and theatre were brought under that law. What breaks it: the exterior sets the high French roofs against an Italian dome, two laws not fully reconciled; the cross-canal interrupts the axis by design, a contradiction absorbed only by optics; and the restored planting is a later reading of the law, not the first.
Seamus Heaney · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the kitchen of “Sunlight”, warm and timeless, and the Belfast street of “Whatever You Say Say Nothing”, with its journalists and its slogans; or, inside Part I, a Viking ship’s tongue and the girls tarred at the railings. One law governs them: the ground as memory, and the speaking self as one who belongs to that ground and must answer for what it holds. “Sunlight” and “The Seed Cutters” set the ground before the dead are laid in it; “Exposure” brings the poet out of the bog into the woods at Glanmore, still under the same question. The split between the parts is wide and it is held. What costs the axis is elsewhere: “Ocean’s Love to Ireland” bends the law toward a history lesson, and “Act of Union” runs on a more schematic physics.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Ratov’s complaints and Livy’s jokes, and the ballet’s cellophane sea with the death on the railway. One law governs both: the work consumes the people who make it, and they consent. The comedy is the company’s daily life under that law, people who have given everything to the art and grumble about it; the ballet is the law raised to myth; the death is the law applied to one life. Julian’s stolen music, Boronskaja’s marriage and Vicky’s fall are three cases of it, and the colour obeys it, red belonging to the art throughout. The seams: the love story keeps a romantic law, that love should win, and the train in the last minutes is a device rather than a consequence.
Charles Laughton · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Icey Spoon at her parlour counter praising the preacher, and Willa under the river with her throat cut. One law governs both: adults hear the language of piety and stop seeing, and only the children see. The Spoons’ comedy, Powell’s pratfalls on the stairs, the hymn duet and the mob obey that law, and the fable frame governs the rest: the world is a storybook in which an ogre may be funny and an old woman may hold a shotgun. The range is wide, from farce to murder to pastoral to Christmas. The strain is real: the passage to Rachel’s farm changes the film’s centre and tempo, the frame’s moralising runs warmer than the cellar, and the mob is staged as satire more than consequence.
Margaret Atwood · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Ceremony, and the academic jokes of the Historical Notes two centuries later. They obey one law: a woman’s body and voice as material for men’s use, and the telling as the one counter-act. The Notes apply the law after the regime is gone, in Pieixoto’s pun on the title and his handling of her tapes, and the book ends on his “Are there any questions?” The time before obeys it too, in the frozen bank account, the mother’s feminism and Luke’s too-easy acceptance; the Aunts’ slogans and Moira’s defiance are two answers to it. Charged: Jezebel’s runs on a looser law, a convenience of plot and a turn toward carnival; the regime’s war, economy and Colonies are left loose; and the single point of view narrows the range, and narrowness is not coherence.
Andrea Palladio; scene by Vincenzo Scamozzi · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The law is Vitruvian antiquity seen through perspective, and the room obeys it from the lowest step to the ceiling: orders on the frons answer the colonnade of the cavea, statues on the frons answer statues on the balustrade, and the city beyond the doors is built in the same classical vocabulary as the wall before it. Take the two most distant elements, Palladio’s frons, conceived as a wall of doors in the Roman way, and Scamozzi’s streets, which make the wall a screen to see through. Two hands under two ideas, and the join holds better than it should, because the streets are classical and are seen only through the openings. The strain shows between the frons’s shallow relief and the deep illusion, and between its crowding and the cavea’s calm.
Prince · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dry drum-machine report of the title track and the gospel fervour of The Cross, or the nursery whimsy of Starfish and Coffee and the jealousy of Strange Relationship. The range is very wide, and narrowness is not the case here. One physics holds most of it across funk, gospel, rock and ballad: one appetite, erotic, sacred and social, and one maker’s sound, the dry close drums and layered voices, govern the four sides, and the distant elements are joined by that appetite more than by contrast. The law strains where the record’s origin in three projects shows. U Got the Look and Play in the Sunshine obey the law of the pop single more than the album’s, and the live track’s acoustic differs in kind from the rest, though the sequence places it with intent. The strains are local, and the wider the range a law governs, the stronger the achievement; here the width carries the figure past the strains.
Kate Bush · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the drum-driven single Running Up That Hill and the choral chant of Hello Earth. They obey one law: a woman’s voice reaching across a divide that cannot be crossed, lover from lover, child from father, the drowning from home, the earth from the one above it, in a sound world of drum, Fairlight and voice that spans the pop single and the choral elegy. Weather and element join the sides: the big sky and the rainmaker of side one become the sea and the ice of side two. The range is wide and the law holds. Side one’s songs are bound by sound and theme more than by structure, and two of them sit loosely: that holds the figure.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the charlotte russe on the stair and the rape in the car. They mostly obey one law, memory’s, in which childhood comedy and adult brutality are held by the same mind and lit by the same longing; the film never steps outside Noodles’s remembering to judge it. The opium frame governs the whole and makes the tonal range cohere. The range is very wide, from childhood and love to crime, politics, old age and possible dream, and the coherence that holds is credited for it. The strain is in the middle period: the maternity-ward prank and the line-up with Carol are played in a register the film’s own disclosure of the gang does not support.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the cellar of captives and the coda of the brook trout. They obey one law: the world is what is left after a loss that cannot be undone, and what remains human in it is what refuses to consume what is left. The bands consume; the man hoards and protects; the boy gives. The dreams of colour and the memories of the mother obey the same law from the past, as temptations to stop. One physics holds across terror, tenderness and elegy. Charged on two counts. The range is narrow by design, two people, one road, one season, and narrowness is not coherence. And the closing family, arriving at the moment of greatest need with children of their own and a kindness the road has not shown before, obeys a gentler law than the rest of the book allows, and the book does not settle within its own terms whether it is grace or breach.
Henry Purcell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the witches’ laughing chorus and the Lament. One law joins them. Destruction is the delight of the destroyers and the fate of the destroyed, and “Destruction’s our delight” is sung in the act where Dido destroys herself. The echo chorus in the cave answers the court’s choruses; the sailors’ careless farewell to their nymphs parodies the parting to come; the last act closes in the key of the Lament. The strains are real: the witches act without cause, so their law is asserted, not shown; the false Mercury is a device the work does not return to; and the frame of Act II, as it survives, does not close. The law holds by mirror more than by necessity.
Ovid · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs: the poet exists now only as text, and every poem is that text’s attempt to reach the city it cannot enter. Take the most distant elements, the grief of 1.3 and the wit of Book 2’s literary catalogue, or the frozen ethnography of 3.10 and the self-epitaph of 3.3. They obey the one law: the memory the text must carry, the case it must win, the report from where it is written, the stone it will leave. The tension between flattery and accusation is held as one condition, the petitioner’s, not as a contradiction. Held at this figure because the range, though real, is the range of one voice in one situation, and the claim of failing Latin sits uneasily, by design or not, against the polish everywhere.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the storm of cloud at the top and the clamp in the lap at the bottom. One law holds them: everything is shown as a sign laid out plainly, the inner state as visibly as the dress, the heart as visibly as the lace, the weather as the state of the soul. The pair obeys one symmetry with one exception, the opened heart and the clamp on the left, and the exception is the meaning. Dress, anatomy, miniature and sky are all brought to the surface and presented without concealment, which is the picture’s physics. Held below the top for two reasons. The sky is painted in a looser, atmospheric manner that sits a little apart from the emblematic precision of the figures. And the range is narrow: two figures, one bench, one sky. Narrowness is not coherence.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the book: the divine is achieved in struggle, by spirit refusing the flesh it loves, and every rest is a temptation. Take the two most distant elements: the disciples’ comic bickering over places in the kingdom, and the crucifixion. Both measure how far each man is from that refusal. The queue at Magdalene’s door and the desert monastery are flesh and the ascetic flight from it, both found wanting. The vision’s domestic years and Jerusalem burning are the good life and the history it ignores. The range is wide, from comedy and the brothel to theology and apocalypse, and it holds under the one law. Charged: the law is sometimes enforced by the narrator rather than borne by events; and the book’s ironic view of scripture, a gospel made by its writer and a Christ made by his apostle, sits uneasily beside its own visionary claim, a tension between demystifying and mystic registers that the book does not resolve.
Giorgio de Chirico · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the lit arcade at the upper left and the van’s black interior at the lower right. One law holds them: every object in the street is a container of light or of dark, and the space between them is unreliable. The arcade is an order of openings filled with shadow; the van is an opening filled with dark; the statue’s shadow is dark without a container; the girl is a dark shape in light. The broken perspective is itself the law, applied everywhere, and its disagreement is uniform: nothing in the canvas stands outside it. But the range is narrow by design, one street, one hour, one register, and narrowness is not coherence: a law held completely over a small territory, a shade below Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.9), whose territory is larger.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant pieces: “Anotación al 23 de agosto de 1944”, on the joy of the city at the liberation of Paris, and “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins”. One law covers both: the world is read as a text whose orders are human conjectures, and a regime that takes its conjecture for reality, Nazism, nationalism, the state that would make individuals to a pattern, fails as reading as much as in morals. “Nuestro pobre individualismo” is of a piece with the idealism. The law holds across Quevedo, Hawthorne, Wells, Chesterton, Pascal and the legend of the Buddha. Held at this figure because a few reviews obey no law but their occasion, and because the political essays, though consistent, are thinner in the law than the metaphysical ones.
Parmigianino · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the vast, polished Virgin at the centre left and the minute, sketchy prophet at the lower right. One law holds them, the law of artifice. Proportion, scale and space are governed not by nature but by an ideal of grace and by symbolic rank, so the Virgin is as tall as the column and the prophet as small as an emblem. Under that law the neck, the crowded angels, the vertical shaft and the void cohere, and nothing contradicts the rule that the picture is not a window onto nature. The range is wide in space and narrow in register. Held where it is because the unfinish leaves open whether the leap is the law or an accident, and the two sides are worked to different degrees.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
One law, the curve drawn by structure, governs the crown, the circle of the plan and the sweep of the passage. Take the two most distant elements: the crown, and the separate bell tower, a thin vertical blade. With them stand the figurative bronzes, Ceschiatti’s evangelists outside and angels within in an elongated modern figuration, and Peretti’s free, organic glass, a later hand with its own law. The angels and the glass are held by the room, the angels hung on the axis of the ring and the glass following the bays, but they bring a second idiom, and the tower stands apart from the law rather than within it. The range is moderate, one room with its outbuildings; narrowness is not coherence, and the law, though clear, does not always hold.
Octavia E. Butler · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole. The mechanism of the journeys is never explained and never broken: Dana goes when Rufus is in danger of death, she returns when she is, time runs at different rates in the two worlds, and the book keeps its accounts. Take the two most distant elements, the bungalow in Los Angeles and the cookhouse of the Weylin plantation: they obey the same moral physics, in Kevin’s ease, in the books that do not survive the journey and in the bruises that do. The tone holds from the first sentence to the last return, across a range that runs from a marriage to slavery to an archive. What holds the axis there is a strain at two points: why Kevin crosses only once, by holding her, is accepted rather than ruled, and the police and doctors of the present are waved away a little quickly.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law: everything that appears is Anthony’s, called out of his memory, his reading and his desire, and each apparition tempts by offering what the last withheld. Take the two most distant elements, the gluttonous banquet of the second part and the first cells of the seventh: they obey the same law, appetite rising from the stomach to the mind to the wish to be all things, and the book’s movement from the sensual to the cosmic is one movement. The tone holds from the Queen of Sheba’s coquetry to the Devil’s cold metaphysics. Charged: the comic grotesque of some of the monsters and the solemnity of the gods are not always held in one key, and the dawn arrives by stage direction with a force the law has not wholly earned.
Hou Hsiao-hsien · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the brawl in the gambling den, loud and sudden, and Hinomi’s diary over the mountain mists. One law governs both: lives are seen from a fixed distance, and what decides them comes from outside the frame. The brawl happens in the depth of a shot and its consequences come later; the diary records what it cannot alter. The train, the prison, the photograph and the meals obey the same law, and the sound in five languages is the law heard. The range is wide, from gangster business and a hospital to ancestral rite, prison and marriage. The strain holds the figure: the gangster plot’s feud, revenge and shot in the dark sit close to genre, and the ellipses sometimes make the law look like opacity.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: “Del rigor en la ciencia”, a mock citation about an empire’s cartographers, and “Alusión a la muerte del coronel Francisco Borges”, for the poet’s grandfather riding to his death in 1874. One law governs both: what is made outlasts its makers and becomes the form in which they are remembered, or replaces them. The map survives in tatters in the deserts of the West; the colonel survives as verse. The same law holds Homer and the blind librarian, Shakespeare and God, Caesar and the gaucho, across parable, false document, metaphysical sonnet, family elegy and political fable. Charged for the few pieces outside the law, “Las uñas” among them, and because a miscellany coheres by temperament as much as by design.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: a man is measured by how he does his work to the end, and the sea gives and takes by the same law that governs him. Take the two most distant elements, the lions playing on the African beach, which the old man dreams of in the first part and the last, and the tourists who take the skeleton for a shark’s. They obey the same law: the young strength he no longer has and the deed that no one present can read are both what the work leaves behind it. The voice, the plain diction and the code run unbroken from the first sentence to the last, and the turn to the café in the coda is held inside them. Held at this figure because the range is narrow: one man, one sea, three days, one register; and narrowness is not coherence.
Robert Penn Warren · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Level with The Archetypal Deep and The Encompassed. Take the two furthest elements: the burlesque of the picnic and the hick speech, and the antebellum confession of Cass Mastern. Both obey one law, the web of consequence, “an enormous spider web” in which a touch at any point runs to the edge and returns. Cass’s adultery kills Duncan Trice and sells Phebe; Jack’s research kills his father; Willie’s compromise, Tiny Duffy, Larson and the hospital contract, kills Willie. The tonal range runs from wisecrack to elegy, and the narrating voice holds both. The law bends where the plot needs coincidence, in the paternity, and where Jack’s reconciliation, his marriage to Anne and his housing of the Scholarly Attorney in the Judge’s house, arrives faster than the book’s own physics would grant.
Talking Heads · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the self taken up into a pattern larger than itself, felt first as ecstasy and then as loss. The two most distant elements obey it: The Great Curve, the most exultant track, and The Overload, the most desolate, are the same dissolving, once into rhythm and once into drone. Listening Wind, the one narrative and political song, obeys too: a village is taken up into a foreign pattern, and answers with violence. Seen and Not Seen is the law’s case history. What holds the figure: the palette is largely one, groove and layered voice, and narrowness is not coherence; and The Overload strains the law in sound, its heavier, darker manner a little outside the record’s own. Two tenths below Infinite Jest at 8.7.
Henryk Górecki · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the fifteenth-century Lament over the canon’s slow modal counterpoint, and the Silesian folk song over its rocking ostinato. One law governs both: lament as a slow, modal, consonant line over a ground that barely moves, sung by or for a mother. The cell inscription obeys it too, and its reversal of who consoles whom is a turn inside the law, not a break. Every movement is slow; every text is a mother and a child; every ending sinks or holds. The law holds from the first bar to the last. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range governed is one tempo, one affect and one archetype. The coherence is real and covers a narrow span; the figure says both.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dance in the billiard hall, the freest moment in the film, and the catechism of the trade, the most bureaucratic. One law governs both: Nana is seen from outside, by a camera that watches and does not enter, and what she is lies in what she does in view. The dance is watched by men who look away and by a camera that circles; the catechism describes her as a case seen by the police. The talk with Parain and the Poe obey the same law, speech and art as the outside that may be the soul, and the flatness of the ending is the law applied to death. The strain holds the figure: documentary voice and essay set pieces stand beside a fiction played straight, and the law holds them, but not without visible joins. The range, from philosophy to the pavement, is real.
Zhang Yimou · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Songlian’s first night, the lanterns lit and her feet massaged, a pleasure; and Meishan’s death in the room on the roof. One law governs both: what the house gives is the house’s to take, and favour and death are dispensed by the same ritual and seen by the same courtyards. The haircut that cuts an ear, the faked pregnancy, the snow that kills Yan’er, the gramophone that plays Meishan’s voice after her death all obey it. The film never breaks its tone, ceremonial and cold from the first summer to the last. But the range is narrow: one compound, one class, one register, almost no comedy beyond Meishan’s mockery. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure is held for it.
Pearl Jam · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: damage held inside until it breaks out as sound, with survival as the cost. The two most distant elements obey it. Oceans, a gentle song of the sea, and Porch, the fastest and most aggressive, are both escape from the pressure the record describes, one by withdrawal and one by force. Jeremy’s public catastrophe and Black’s private grief are the same breaking-out at two scales, and Release turns it at last toward prayer. Held from the top: the range is narrow, one register of earnest anguish in one hard-rock palette, and narrowness is not coherence; the second half obeys the law by mood more than by argument, and Oceans strains it a little.
U2 · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law of sound governs all ten tracks: the same room, the same delay and wash. The two most distant elements obey it. Pride, a rock anthem of the band’s old kind, rings in an air its predecessor did not have, and 4th of July, two minutes of guitar and bass with no song in them, is that air with the song taken out. Wire and MLK, agitation and hush, share it too. A second, looser law is thematic: fire and memory, home and the road, the martyr and the addict, America seen from Ireland; Wire and Promenade barely obey it. The range runs from anthem to ambient fragment, and the record holds together by atmosphere more than by argument.
Eastern Ganga builders, under Narasimhadeva I · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a spoke of a wheel at the base, carved with tiny medallions of lovers and courtiers, and the musicians on the top terrace of the hall, set against the sky. One law governs both: the chariot as the body of the building, carved throughout as an image of the sun’s world, and the Kalinga articulation of horizontal courses and vertical projections ordering every face. Desire, war, court and cult obey one rhythm and one scale of address, and the range runs from the cosmic to the intimate. What holds it is the joint between chariot and temple type: wheels and horses attach to a plan not born as a car, and the sculpture at points runs over the architectural order rather than through it. The absent tower leaves the law’s culmination unstated.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: plots, a state’s or a man’s, carry their own logic toward death, and the space between design and chance is where history happens. Take the two most distant elements: Branch, aging in a room of documents in the present of the book, and the thirteen-year-old riding the subway in the Bronx in 1953. They obey the same law: both are men in small rooms trying to make a pattern of a world that exceeds them, and both fail. The law also covers Marguerite’s self-justification, Ruby’s sentimental violence, Everett’s plan that escapes him and the death on television, and the range is wide, from the domestic to the state. Charged: the mob strand and some of the operatives follow a thriller’s looser physics of motive, and the book’s theories, stated by characters, sometimes do the work of the law rather than the events.
The Flaming Lips · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a small human tenderness held up against death and an indifferent cosmos, in a sound that makes the cosmos audible. The two most distant elements obey it. The Gash, a martial massed chant about a fight for the mind, and Suddenly Everything Has Changed, a domestic scene sung softly, are the same law at two scales: the struggle, and the small act that makes the struggle bearable. What Is the Light? and The Spiderbite Song, cosmology and a friend’s injury, are joined by one claim, that the chemical and the cosmic do not cancel love. Held from the top: Buggin’, a light song about summer insects, strains the law, the remixes stand outside the sequence, and the palette is narrow, one sonic world throughout. Narrowness is not coherence.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs: every human act is a response to death, and the only choice is between lying about it and not. Take the two most distant elements: the street puppet act of the 1950s for which the young Sabbath was arrested, his finger reaching from behind the screen to a girl’s breast, and the old man wrapped in his brother’s flag. They obey the same law: transgression as the refusal of a world that permits death, and comedy and grief as one appetite. The law holds across a wide range, from farce at the Cowans’ to the cemetery at night, from a merchant seaman’s youth to a dying woman’s bed. Charged: the swings of tone are mostly held, but at moments the comedy is performance with no law under it, and the book’s refusal to judge its hero leaves some of its moral physics asserted rather than tested.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a mother on a bed beside her dying daughter, hand in her hair, and a soldier wiring a bomb in a tent at the base camp. One law governs both: everything is already written and is still chosen. The domestic scenes obey it fully, since each is seen by a woman who knows its end, and the range it covers, from a nursery to a world on alert, is wide and credited. The strain is at the joints. The thriller runs on ordinary suspense, asking the audience to fear outcomes its own law has fixed, and the call to Shang, where the future supplies the words that make the future possible, is a loop the film uses without thinking it through.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: in this consciousness catastrophe and grace are the same experience, and the narrator receives both with the same hunger and the same incapacity to act. Take the two most distant elements, the crash and the scream of the first story and the window of the last, through which the recovering narrator watches a couple and feels himself blessed. They obey that law: transport found in another’s life, by a man who cannot help. The voice, and the habit of breaking time, run unchanged from the first story to the last. Held at this figure because the range is narrow, one voice, one milieu and one register, and narrowness is not coherence. The law covers a field of bars, hospitals and abandoned houses, not the wider spread a larger work would have to hold.
Hoysala builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the elephant at the foot of the plinth and the god in the niche above, or the outer wall in sunlight and the turned pillar in the dark hall. One law governs them: horizontal register, staggered projection, a hierarchy of being read upward and clockwise, the same stone cut to the same precision. The two shrines obey one law and answer each other exactly. The range is wide, beast, epic, god, dancer, ornament and structure, and it is held. What holds the axis is the unfinished top: the law that governs base and wall has no completion above, so the whole does not close. The platform, pavilions and later work on the site are not all of one moment, and they keep the law.
Dorothea Lange · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the infant at the lower left, swaddled and partly in shadow, and the mother’s eyes at the upper centre, looking out of the frame. They obey one law: everything in the frame turns toward the mother, and she alone turns away, toward what is not shown. The children lean in, the infant lies against her, the tent closes around her; her gaze leaves. The worn sleeve, the dirty hand and the lined face are held to one texture of want, in one light and one tonal key, and nothing in the frame breaks the law. What holds the axis is that narrowness is not coherence: one group, one place, one instant, and the range between its farthest elements is a family’s span.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of Antiterra’s dorophones and the comic sexual catalogues, and Lucette’s drowning. They obey one law: everything is seen through Van’s consciousness, which makes pleasure and play of everything and is shown, at the limit, unable to do so with Lucette. The counter-world’s physics holds: its banned electricity, its displaced geography and its Terra-madness recur consistently through the whole length of the book. Charged: the joke-logic of Antiterra sometimes overrides the human logic, dates and borders bending for a pun, and the shift of moral weight between the Ardis chapters and Lucette’s is real enough that the book can seem to obey two laws, the comedy of genius and the tragedy of its cost, with the join left to the reader.
Antoine Watteau · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stone herm of Venus at the right, garlanded, and the misted hills across the water at the far left. One law holds them: everything is drawn into a single current from shrine to sea, and stone, flesh, silk, putti and landscape are made of the same light and the same touch. The myth and the costume of 1717 share one air; a putto beside a seated woman is as real as her fan. Nothing contradicts the law. The range is wider than an intrigue, statue, couples, a company, a boat, a sea and a distance, and two orders of being, the mythic and the social. But it is one register and one hour, and narrowness is not coherence.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs: every desire is answered by its prohibition, and every rebellion carries the voice it rebels against. Take the two most distant elements, the boy in the kitchen under the bread knife and the grown man in Israel with Naomi. They obey the same law: a Jewish woman’s reproach unmans him, and the promised land is the mother’s kitchen again. The dictionary entry, the liver, the Gentile women, the office of Human Opportunity and the howl answer to one physics, and the punch line confirms it by putting the whole back on the couch. The range is wider than it looks, from childhood farce to adult despair, from Newark to Rome and Haifa. Held in the middle of the eights because the range is held by one consciousness that never yields the floor; narrowness is not coherence, and the book’s coherence is in part the coherence of a single obsession.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Gelsomina clowning for the children at the wedding in a bowler hat, and the Fool dying by the road while Zampanò hides the car. One law governs both. The road gives and takes without reason, every figure is a performer, and each is valued by whether he serves a use: the clowning is the work she was bought for, the killing Zampanò’s answer to a man who mocked the only act he has. The sacred belongs to the same world, since the procession and the convent are further roads and further shows. The strain is in tone, and it counts: the film’s tenderness toward Gelsomina presses at moments on its otherwise indifferent law, and the Fool’s allegorical speech stands slightly outside the world he lives in.
Chris Marker · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Sunday crowd on the jetty, a child among parents watching planes, and the dark camp under Chaillot where men whisper over a body strapped down with pads on his eyes. One law governs both: time is had only as image, and every image is held by someone with a purpose. The child keeps the face; the camp keeps the man to use his keeping; the woman is met in a past that is a gallery of stills; the museum keeps animals out of time. The ending applies the law without exception, since the jetty was always the camp’s. The range is wide, from romance to war to science fiction. The strain is in the future section, where the law bends toward plot device.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the painter in the dark at the far left and the infant held up in the light at the far right. One law holds them: every figure is a body in one light, ranked by how the light takes its surface, and the same unsparing hand paints king and child, the old aunt and the young prince, with no rank of handling. Glitter and plainness obey one rule across the whole width, that the costume outshines the person; the bride obeys it too, all dress and no face. The painter is the exception that confirms it: unlit, undressed, the one who sees. Held below the top because the range is narrow in kind, one room, one family, one instant of being looked at, and because the flanks are held by placement more than by the law.
François Truffaut · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the classroom farce of the pin-up calendar, the ink and the lines, and the face of the boy in tears in the police van. One law governs both. The world is seen from the boy’s height, adults are judged by what they do to him and not by what they intend, and the camera keeps the same sympathetic distance whether he is mischievous or wretched. The tender comedy, the rotor, the stolen milk, the family laughing in the car after the cinema, obeys the same physics as the punishment. The range is wide for so small a film, from comedy to the cell, and the transitions are never forced. The strain is in the adults: the schoolmaster’s caricature belongs to a broader comic law than the rest.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the drawing-room comedy of the first night, the waiter’s planned fall and the hostess’s joke with a bear and sheep, and the sacrament and massacre of the last minutes. One law covers them: a form once begun cannot be broken except by being completed. The servants who leave by instinct and the masters who cannot are two sides of that law. The crowd outside cannot enter, as the guests cannot leave, and a child who walks toward the gate is called back by the same paralysis. The law covers farce, horror and liturgy without a breach, across a wide range. What holds the axis here is how it binds the middle: the hand, the bear and the Kabbalistic rite belong to it only as what the room throws up when its rules run unchecked, joined by association rather than consequence.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark shop window across the street, with its faint shapes, and the woman’s red dress under the strongest light. One law holds them: everything is a surface ranked by how much light reaches it from one source, figure and building alike, so that a face and a shop front are treated with the same plainness and the same stillness. Inside and outside, the human and the architectural, obey one geometry and one temperature. Nothing breaks the law; even the sign and the urns are planes and cylinders in the same light. Held below the top because the range is narrow in kind: one street, one room, one light, four figures in one mood, and narrowness is not coherence. The law covers a small world consistently, not a wide one.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the women’s first chorus, dreading any event, and the Fourth Knight’s brisk prose asking for a verdict of suicide. They obey one law. The play is governed by the distinction between the timeless pattern and the temporal will, and every register is placed by its distance from it: the women who wish nothing to happen, the Tempters who offer the will its objects, Thomas who gives up his will, the Knights who have only will and reasons. The anachronism of the Knights is not a breach of that law but its sharpest application. Held at its figure because the range, though real, is narrow, one action in one week in one place, and narrowness is not coherence.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bowed head at the top and the rough rock at the bottom. They obey one law, compression inward and downward: the head bends to the hand, the hand to the knee, the arm across the body, the toes into the rock, the rock under the weight. The rough-hewn base and the modelled flesh are worked by the same hand, so that the man seems to rise out of his stone. Every part bends toward the centre of the figure, and nothing escapes it; the twist that the crossed elbow brings is not a break but the strongest instance of the law. Held because narrowness is not coherence: one figure, one gesture and a rock are a small territory to govern. Wholly lawful within its range, and the range is the smallest a figure can have.
Correggio · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the cold, formless grey of the god and the warm, formed light of the body; or the rapt face at the top and the drinking stag at the bottom. One law holds them: everything in the picture is touch, softness and the dissolving of edges. The cloud melts into her, her flesh melts into shadow, the stag drinks, the water and the foliage are soft. Nothing contradicts that physics. The range is wider than it looks, since the law holds the divine and the animal, warmth and cold. But it is still one figure in one instant, and narrowness is not coherence: held below the high eights by range.
Gandharan · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the spent body, all bone and cord, and the full robe falling in heavy regular folds over the legs and the seat. One law holds them: everything in the figure is subject to the discipline of the meditative posture, and the abundance of the drapery is what the body has given up, kept round it as the world it has renounced. The face obeys the same law as the ribs: the flesh is gone and the composure stays. Nothing contradicts it; the frontal symmetry governs body, cloth and halo alike. But the territory is small, one figure, one moment, one register of austere calm over horror, and narrowness is not coherence. The law is held completely over a single body, and the axis is held for that range.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs: the visible world is ensouled and kind, and fear lives inside it without breaking it. Take the two most distant elements, the comic sublime of Totoro’s roar and the dread of the dusk search with a small sandal in a pond. They obey the same physics: the spirits never solve the illness and never act beyond the children’s need, and when Totoro helps, it is by sending what a child could have asked for. The father’s belief, the village’s care and the spirits’ care are one order, and the tone holds from a toddler’s mischief to a mother’s possible death. What holds the figure is that the range is bounded by design: no cruelty and no adult world enter the frame to test the law harder.
David Markson · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: a mind alone states facts, and the facts drift, return and fail to reach what matters. Take the two most distant elements, the comic anecdotes of painters and composers and the grave of the lost child. They obey the same law, entering the typescript in the same declarative voice, and it is the sameness of treatment that discloses the grief. The cultural range is very wide, from Homer to the modern painters, and all of it falls under the one rule. The law is never broken: no second voice enters, no scene is dramatised, and the ambiguity of her solitude is kept to the last line. Held at this figure because narrowness is not coherence: the event-range is one woman on one beach, and the law is tested across references more than across worlds.
Milan Kundera · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: lightness and weight, the single life that cannot be repeated and therefore cannot be measured, set against the longing for necessity, “Es muss sein!” Take the two most distant elements: the death of Stalin’s son over excrement, on the electrified fence of a prison camp, and the death of Karenin in the Czech countryside. They obey the same law: the one dies because he cannot bear the denial of shit; the other is loved because a dog lives outside kitsch and outside linear time. The law covers eros, in Tomas’s split between love and sex; politics, in the Grand March; art, in Sabina’s paintings; exile and the body. The range is wide and held, from the essay on Parmenides to a dog’s tumour. Charged: the narrator’s freedom to interrupt sometimes breaks the novel’s own physics, and Franz’s death in Bangkok is satire in a looser register than the rest.
Louise Bourgeois · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the needle point on which a leg meets the ground, the sharpest and most threatening thing in the work, and the marble eggs in their sac, the smoothest and most vulnerable. They obey one law: a structure that holds something precious out of reach. The points keep the body aloft, the body keeps the sac aloft, the sac keeps the eggs; menace and care are the same physics seen from outside and from inside. The surface obeys it too: everything is worked, the legs knuckled, the body ribbed, the mesh woven, and nothing is smooth but the eggs, which are what is protected. Held for the size of the territory: one creature, one register of material, one encounter, coherent completely and narrow by choice.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the rectilinear, industrial exterior and the billowing white vault. They are opposed on purpose, and Frampton read them so, but one law governs both: standard additive elements on a grid wherever the building is ordinary, and one free form exactly where light and worship require it. The corridors, courts, fittings and parish rooms all obey the grid, and the white tile and the pale wood run from the outside to the altar screen. The range is wide, from shed to sky, and the law holds across it. What keeps the axis from the top: at some points of the section and outside, the joint between the two systems reads as a juxtaposition rather than a synthesis.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a laughing man in a Glasgow street, filmed unawares, giving directions to a van, and a black body in a snowy forest lifting a human face off itself. One law governs both: the skin is a surface by which creatures are taken, and seeing is predation until it becomes recognition. The street, the void, the beach, the mirror, the meal she cannot eat and the woodsman obey it, and the film never steps outside her to explain. The range is wide, from vérité to pure abstraction, and it is held. What holds the axis is the motorcyclist, whose function is plotted rather than governed by the same law, and the Highland drift, where the law slackens.
Robert Smythson (attributed), for Bess of Hardwick · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the kitchen on the ground floor and the cresting on the tower tops. One law holds them: symmetry on two axes, and a rise in height, light and rank from bottom to top. The kitchen is low, at the side, on the plan’s grid; the initials under their coronet are the summit of the same ascent, set on the axis of each tower. Every window, tower and room is placed by the same doubled symmetry, and the gradient of ceiling and window heights runs without exception; even the windows that serve no room obey the law, since they exist because the symmetry governs. The range is wide: service, family, chapel, state and pleasure on the leads. What bends the law: interiors finished over several years, partly with fittings brought from Bess’s other houses, are less unified than the shell, and later arrangements sit on the surface of the rooms.
John Updike · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the boys’ game at the backboard in the opening pages, and Kruppenbach’s harangue to Eccles in his yard on a minister’s proper business. They obey one law: the self’s hunger for a grace felt once, in the body, against the claims of others and of the law, and neither the game nor the sermon can settle which is God’s. Golf, sex, the night drive, the garden, the drowning and the last run are all instances of it, and the book never breaks its own physics: no one is rescued by plot, and the consequences follow from the characters. The range runs from comic domestic squalor to the theological, and from Rabbit’s senses to Janice’s. Charged: the departures in point of view, though lawful, are unevenly prepared, and the world beyond Mt. Judge enters only as radio news.
Chaulukya, under Queen Udayamati · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the entrance stair at the east, open to the sky, and the dark shaft at the west with the god asleep on the water. One law governs them: descent as approach to the sacred source, stated in a single axis, a single rhythm of pavilion bays and one grammar of pilaster, niche and band running unchanged from top to bottom. The programme keeps the same law: the god’s descents into the world line the visitor’s descent into the earth, and the figures of women adorning themselves belong to the order of the water they flank, beauty and fertility gathered round the source. What holds it: the repetition that keeps the law also narrows it, and the lost upper storeys leave unreadable how the structure above ground stood to the trench.
Roman · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the boy reading a scroll beside a matron at the entrance end, a schoolroom image, and the winged figure raising the rod over the young woman across the room. One law holds them. Every figure, mortal, satyr or god, stands on the same shallow ledge before the same red at the same scale, and each is ranked only by its part in one passage toward and away from the god at the centre. The pastoral satyrs obey it as the matrons do, and the bride’s mirror and the satyr’s bowl answer one another as two scenes of seeing. Nothing breaks the stage, and the range is wide for one room. Held at this figure because ledge, ground and bays are partly the style’s convention rather than the work’s own, and because the damaged centre weakens the point to which the law refers.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the herb-doctor selling his remedies to a sick miser and to a man in pain, and the Moredock chapters, a frontier tale of revenge and solitary hatred told at second hand. One law governs both: whether a man can be trusted, and what follows from extending or withholding confidence universally. The Indian-hater is the confidence man reversed, a man who has made distrust of a whole race his vocation, and the cosmopolitan hears his tale with a professed love of mankind. The slate and the sign are the two poles, and every scene lies between them, to the late scene in which the barber is talked into taking his sign down and is left unpaid, his victory and defeat at once. The range, from farce and metaphysics to frontier tale and Bible reading, is wide. Charged: the China Aster tale and some of the toasts sit loosely under the law, and the change of procedure at the midpoint is a seam.
The Smile · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: unrest under control, rhythms that will not settle held by playing that never loses its grip, with consolation allowed in a few places. The two most distant elements are You Will Never Work in Television Again, a fast, distorted strike, and Free in the Knowledge, acoustic and gentle with strings. They share a voice and a production and are heard as anger and its consolation, two answers to one condition. The range is wide, from near-punk to chamber ballad to motorik groove, and it is held: the players and the sound keep every track under the same grip. Held from the top because the record does not itself make the connection between its farthest songs; the law is kept by the playing more than stated by a governing idea.
Wifredo Lam · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the hand with the scissors at the upper right, a made tool held aloft, and the crescent-faced head near the left, a mask become a moon. They obey one law: everything in the field is hybrid, human, plant, animal and object at once, set vertical and frontal, without ground or sky, in one light. The scissors are held by a hand that is half leaf; the crescent rides a stalk. No realist passage, no recession, no second kind of mark: the law is total. But narrowness is not coherence: one field, one register, one kind of figure. Within it the range, cane to body to sacred head, is wider than it looks.
Bret Easton Ellis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the music chapter on Huey Lewis and the News, a comedy of earnest banality, and a killing in the late chapters, a horror past measure. They obey one law: a consciousness made of surfaces registers everything as product and value, and the same voice appraises an album and a body. The law governs the uncanny too. In a world where persons are interchangeable, even reality cannot be fixed, and the evidence at the end that points both ways is the book’s physics, not a breach of it. The frame, the gate at the opening and the sign at the close, holds the whole. Charged: the satire of the dinners and the pornography of the killings sit under one law but at a distance the book does not always bridge, so that it can read as two books bound together.
Hellenistic (Roman marble copy) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the broken trumpet on the ground and the bowed face. One law governs both. Everything in the work is the moment after the battle: the instrument silenced, the sword laid down, the body letting go, the face turned inward. Every element is under the one force of gravity winning slowly, and the figure’s only resistance, the right arm, is the law’s single exception and its measure. Nothing stands outside the law: nothing decorative, no gesture toward an audience. Held below the top because the range is narrow, one man and one minute, and narrowness is not coherence. The law is held completely over a small territory, and the figure keeps it from every side.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Proserpina’s raised hand and loose hair at the top, and Cerberus’s heads at the base. One law holds them. Everything in the group is force and counterforce, the downward and forward stride of the god against the upward and outward thrust of the girl, with the beast pinning the ground. The drapery obeys the same law, whipped by the movement. Every surface obeys a second law, that each substance be told by its own working, and the two laws agree. Nothing in the group contradicts itself. The range is narrow in kind, one instant, one action, three bodies, and wide in substance, god, girl, beast, cloth, hair and tears; narrowness is not coherence, and the axis is held well short of the top for it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: love makes Rome legible, and the classical world is entered through the present one. Take the two farthest elements, Jupiter’s radiant hall in the elegy of the north and the dry, sour joke about the one plague the lover fears, said obliquely: both obey the law, since both are the lover’s Rome seen from the bed and the street. The ironic pieces about Amor keep the same law in a comic key. The withheld Priapic frame would have widened the range; the published cycle is narrower, and the more consistent for it. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range here is moderate: no grief, and little of the world beyond the lovers and the ruins. That moderation holds the axis at 8.5.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Salammbô alone with the python, and the army eating its dead in the defile. One law governs both: bodies, things and gods are of one matter, desire and hunger are the same force, and the sacred is touched at a cost. The tone does not change between them: the same cold eye, the same weight of things, the same refusal to judge. From the feast to Mâtho’s death the register holds without a single lapse into modern sentiment, which is rare in a historical novel of its century, and the range it holds is wide: politics in the Council of Ancients, Hannon’s leprosy, war, ritual, love. Held below the top because the law is held partly by narrowness of feeling. The book admits no warmth that might test it, and narrowness is not coherence.
Ilya Repin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the old man at the rear right, head down, nearly falling out of the line, and the leader at the front left, upright and composed. One law holds them: every figure is ranked by how it bears the strap, and the strap runs through all. The same light falls on all of them and the same sand is under all their feet; the barge is the load the law names, and the steamer on the horizon is its other term, the machine whose work the men are doing. Nothing in the picture contradicts the law: no picturesque incident, no softening of the light. The range, from boy to old man, from body to machine, is wider than one figure’s state, but it holds one place, one instant and one register.
Li Chun · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the great arch over the river and the small arches over its haunches. One law governs them exactly: the segmental arch at two scales, the small repeating the large, both carrying load and both passing water. The whole is one physics, the arch and its opening, from the abutment to the crown. The carved balustrade obeys the law of the bridge only as ornament set on a parapet, a second and quieter law. What holds the axis is the narrowness of the range: one arch, one type, one material, one purpose. The law holds partly because there is little for it to govern, and narrowness is not coherence. The coherence is complete within a small range.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the garage massacre, men machine-gunned against a wall, and Osgood’s reply at the end. One law governs both: in this world everyone survives by performance, and the only real danger is to be seen as what you are. The gangsters perform too, a speakeasy behind a funeral parlour, a convention of opera lovers, a birthday cake with a gunman in it; the band performs a femininity its two new members do not feel; Sugar performs a refinement she does not have; Joe performs a millionaire. Death and slapstick obey the one law, and the range is wide, from killing to romance to a joke about a man’s marriage. The strain: the gangsters’ comedy sits apart in tone from the love plot at moments, and the massacre’s violence is treated as caper.
David Lynch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pencil factory, a deadpan comedy in which a clerk tests an eraser made from a man’s head and finds it serviceable, and the Lady in the Radiator’s song of heaven. One law covers both: bodies are matter, worked and transformed by mechanism, and what a person is can be bored out, cut, stamped or sung away. The man-made chickens, the falling worms, the cut bandages, the sparking levers and the hiss of every room obey it. The comedy is one of the law’s faces, as at the dinner, where Mr. X’s numb arm and his grin belong to the world of Mrs. X’s fit, and the range runs from farce to cosmic horror to tenderness. The strain is small but real: the planet stands a little outside the world it governs, and the factory’s comedy leans to sketch.
Roman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the sky spread at the top of the breastplate and the Cupid on the dolphin at the feet. One law governs them: everything in the work is an order converging on the man, from heaven to earth to sea, and every element serves the convergence. The same law holds the most distant registers in kind: the god in the bare feet and the Cupid, the hero in the Doryphoros body, the magistrate in the gesture of address, the general in the cuirass, and the historical event at the centre. Read as a mixture they might jar, and bare feet with armour have been thought incongruous. Read as the work’s law they are its point: one body, all the ranks of being. Held below the higher band because the law is imposed, a programme’s coherence rather than a world’s.
Michel Gondry · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Stan and Mary drinking and dancing in their underwear on the bed beside the sleeping Joel, a sex farce, and Joel and Clementine lying on the frozen river, an elegy. One law governs both: memory and forgetting, and what a self is without them. The farce is the clinic forgetting what it does, and Mary’s dance becomes, two scenes later, the discovery that she has been made to forget a love herself; farce and elegy are one story at two distances. The law holds from the comedy of the opening to the grief of the beach house. What strains it: the rules of the procedure bend to the drama, as when Joel hides Clementine in memories where she never was, and dream logic sometimes permits where it should mean.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the documentary voice of a ruined city, answered by a lament that rises. The two most distant elements obey it: the flat spoken vision that opens the record and the gallop of Kicking Horse on Brokenhill are the law at its two ends, the city described and the city answering. The western guitar of The Cowboy, furthest in idiom, obeys it as the lone figure in the ruined landscape, and the string loop recorded during a downpour as weather after the end. Two things hold the figure: Black Helicopter strains the law with a threat the record does not develop, and the range is bounded, everything grave, with no comedy and no small tenderness.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Angermayer the grocer refusing to understand Ali’s German, played as sour comedy, and Ali collapsed in hospital under the doctor’s prognosis. One law governs both: people are treated as their use to others, and the look decides who is a person. The grocer relents because he needs Emmi’s custom; the hospital names the ulcer as the guest worker’s illness. The neighbours’ stares, the children’s fury, the colleagues’ lunch break, Emmi’s display of Ali and her coldness to Yolanda are one law seen from different sides, and the frontal, held stylisation is the same from first scene to last. The range is moderate, one city and one class; the Barbara episodes lean to a looser register.
Guillermo del Toro · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the throne room of the underground kingdom, in gold, and the interrogation of the stammering prisoner in the mill. One law covers both: a rule is given by a power that wants obedience, and the only free act is to break it knowingly. The Pale Man’s rule and Vidal’s are the same rule; the Faun’s command and the captain’s are the same demand. The tone holds its double register without breaking: the fairy tale is as cruel as the war, and the war as patterned as a tale, across horror, war film, family drama and fairy tale. The strain: the guerrilla episodes run at times on genre law, and the chalk door tips the ambiguity further than the balance allows.
Barry Jenkins · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the schoolyard and the slow-motion chair of the second chapter, and the near silence of the diner in the third. One law governs both: what is felt cannot be shown, and the body becomes what others make of it; the chair is the armour forged, the diner the armour seen through. The law holds across Juan’s tenderness and his trade, Paula’s love and her addiction, Kevin’s affection and his blow, and the film’s refusal to judge any of them. Colour, score and framing obey it: sound withdraws at the moments of greatest feeling, and light turns unnatural where the inner life is strongest. The range is real without being wide in kind. The strain: the rehab scene speaks what the law kept unspoken, and the Terrel plot runs on genre machinery.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Henley regatta, Edwardian sport on the Thames in a miniaturising focus, and the drinking-game coding contest in a Kirkland dormitory, where interns are chosen by speed with a shot at each step. One law governs both: every relation is membership and rank, and the excluded build the next club. The twins row for an order that will not protect them; the coders compete to be let into Mark’s. The Ad Board, the Summers scene, the chicken of the Phoenix hazing, Parker’s nightclub and the dilution obey the same law, and the ending applies it to Mark himself, a friend request to the woman who left him. The range, from campus comedy to betrayal, is held. The strain: Henley’s style is a showpiece the rest of the film never uses, and Parker’s arrest arrives as a plot convenience.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs: time reversed in the world, forward in the narrator’s mind, and the moral order inverted by the reversal. Take the two most distant elements, the backward comedy of a New England retirement, a man growing younger among his neighbours, and the backward camp, the dead raised from the fire. They obey the same law with one rigour, across a wide range. The law holds in small things: wounds closing under the surgeon’s hand, money flowing to the shopper, letters received before they are sent. Charged: the division between backward events and forward thought is a rule the book needs and does not always keep clean, since the narrator learns and remembers as he goes and seems at moments to know what the body has done; and his inability to read the man’s thoughts is relaxed when the plot needs it, in dreams and in the flashes of fear he shares.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dog’s mess in the courtyard and the car scraped along the garage walls, domestic comedy, and the massacre in the street with a gun raised at a pregnant woman. One law governs both: the large world presses into the house through its doors, and Cleo absorbs it in work. Antonio’s car and the paramilitaries are the same men’s world arriving at the same doorway; the earthquake, the fire and the sea are the natural order arriving the same way. The strain is in tone: Fermín’s naked display and the costumed singer at the fire edge toward a surreal register the film does not otherwise keep, and the hacienda loosens the law into atmosphere.
Deerhunter · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the past heard through memory’s haze, made sweeter and less exact than it was, with loss beneath. The two most distant elements obey it. Coronado, brisk rock and roll with a saxophone, and Sailing, a near-silent drift, are the same remembering, once of a bright day and once of an empty one. Helicopter’s cruelty and Basement Scene’s sweetness share one wash, and that is the point: memory treats them alike. Pundt’s two songs differ in voice from Cox’s and obey the same law, which is the band’s achievement. The range of form runs from doo-wop and rock and roll to ambient drift, a driving coda and a chiming elegy. The tonal range is held narrow by the production, one haze over everything; the coherence is in the law, not the narrowness.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the world is older than anyone’s plan for it, what is given is taken at a price, and a man is what he does, with no account of himself. Take the two most distant elements: the boys’ banter about Blevins on the ride south, and Alfonsa’s account of the Revolution and the deaths of the Madero brothers. They obey the same law, chance and history deciding what the will thought it had decided; Blevins’s terror of lightning is fate in comic form. The book opens and closes on a funeral, the grandfather’s and the Abuela’s, the ranch’s old order buried twice. The range is wide, picaresque comedy, romance, prison violence, elegy and philosophical monologue under one voice. Charged: the romance of the love affair is sweeter than the book’s law, and the closing search drifts from it.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a heavy black upright near one end, drawn as an armature, and a passage of thinned white spray near the other, which has no contour at all. They obey one law: lateral rhythm, the curve that turns back on itself, paint laid by the swing of the body. The upright is the curve held vertical, the spray the curve released; neither brings a second physics. The law holds from end to end and from the drawn to the flung, a real range, wider than one kind of mark. But narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one rhythm in one register, and the law is held for its size. Some joins between the drawn armature and the colour laid over it read as two operations rather than one, and they keep the axis from the top.
John Everett Millais · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the face of a woman singing as she drowns, and a nettle at the bank’s edge. They obey one law, truth to nature without hierarchy: each is seen at the same distance, in the same light, with the same patience, and the picture’s meaning is that they are equal before the eye. The law holds through the flowers on the water, the robin, the dress and the willow. It costs a step at the join between the figure and the field, where the light is not to every eye one light. And narrowness is not coherence: one register, elegiac, runs from edge to edge. The range of kind, a human death and a botany, is real and held; the range of feeling is narrow.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Harlequin at the left edge, standing in the strongest colour and giving his hand; and the woman at the right, seated in a neutral dress, alone. One law holds them. Every figure stands in the same pale light on the same placeless ground, and every figure is separate in the same way, absorbed and unlooking. The woman’s isolation is the group’s drawn out to its limit, not a second physics. The law of colour holds from costume to ground to sky. The range is moderate: one register, one light, one condition, wider than a single figure and narrower than a picture that holds terror and comedy under one law. Narrowness is not coherence.
Max Ernst · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs: everything solid is subject to the same corrosion. The two most distant elements, the clean blue sky and the encrusted figures, both obey it, the sky by being the one thing not eaten and so marking what has been, the figures by being made of the same matter as the land, armour and flesh indistinguishable from rock. The tone holds from end to end, an unbroken stillness after catastrophe. The range is real but not wide: one register, one family of colour, one process; and the narrowness of a single texture across the canvas is part of why it coheres. The law is complete over a moderate distance.
Thai builders, under Rama II and Rama III · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the most distant elements: the demon bearers at the base and Indra’s elephant at the summit; the Chinese export ware and the Brahmanic gods; the five towers and a single petal of broken plate. They obey one law, the cosmology of Meru, rising level by level, every figure at its station, every surface clad in the same jewelled skin. The Chinese material is not a foreign element but absorbed, turned to the flowers of the heavens; the Hindu gods are not intruders but the Buddhist cosmos’s own lords and guardians. The range is wide, from earth to heaven, demon to god, trade good to sacred mountain, and the law holds across it. Held below the top because the law is the type’s inherited one, and the kinds of space are few: the solid figure and its climb.
Eva Hesse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: a serial order held in material that departs from order. The two most distant elements, the rigid fibreglass and the slack latex, glassy and soft, obey it alike, each a different degree of the same skin hardening or yielding. The eight sheets differ from one another in their drips, their edges and their thickness, and the differences are of one kind; nothing breaks the register. The range is wider than it first looks: industrial resin and household cloth, order and chance, light and opacity, the geometric and the bodily. Held below the upper band because the narrowness of the means helps the coherence: the work does not have to hold together elements as remote from one another as a large painting or a building does.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the softly modelled face with its parted red mouth, and a flat, hard-edged eye-motif on the gown. They obey one law, and the law is the picture’s subject: everything that is not the living person is ornament, and the person survives only where ornament stops. Chair, wall and gown follow one physics, flat leaf and pattern with no depth; face and hands follow the other; and the contrast is a single rule, not a contradiction. The range is narrow, though: one figure, one field, two physics, and narrowness is not coherence. The one seam is the floating discs and flecks of the upper field, which belong neither to a surface nor to the figure and sit outside both laws.
Vladimir-Suzdal builders, under Andrey Bogolyubsky · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the vertical, from the mound to the base, the half-columns, the zakomaras, the drum and the dome. Take the two most distant elements, the earth of the mound at the foot and the carved David in the gable. Both obey it: both lift the church, one physically above the flood, one figuratively over the threshold. The ornament obeys the structure’s divisions, and interior and exterior follow one plan. The charge is that narrowness is not coherence: a small building with one idea holds its law easily, and the range is not wide. The later dome sits slightly outside the first law, and is weighed under survival.
Hadhrami builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the fort and a modest house at the far edge of the city, or a mosque and a merchant’s tower. They obey one law of material, height, coursing, plastering and narrow windows, the same sorting of life by floor, the same turn inward behind one wall. Centuries of rebuilding by many hands have not broken it; the city reads as one thing because every house was made by the same rule. The range is real: domestic, defensive, religious, commercial and agricultural functions all fall under it. Held below the top because the coherence is in part that of a type repeated, and narrowness is not coherence: the range is that of a town’s functions under one technique, not of disparate elements forced into accord.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the most private, one man’s body and one man’s grief, and the most public, a museum’s property, a stranger’s hand, a conservator’s protocol. One law governs both: the body as a quantity given away and restored. The visitor gives the body away by taking; the owner restores it by buying more; the artist gave the law in writing; the dead man is present as a number. The bright wrappers obey the law, since the gift must be sweet to be taken; so does the title, which holds the name inside the anonymity. Nothing breaks it, the work’s life after the artist’s own death in 1996 included. Held below the top because the territory is a single mechanism: narrowness is not coherence.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the great red plane and a narrow white rectangle at the left edge. They obey one law, and it is absolute: every element is a rectangle bounded by horizontal and vertical black, every colour is a primary or a non-colour, every relation is an opposition held in balance. Nothing on the canvas breaks it. But narrowness is not coherence, and the law governs a territory it chose to keep small: one kind of line, one kind of plane, six colours, one field. The wider achievement, one law held across distant materials such as flesh and bark, or a village and a sky, is not attempted. Full marks for the law; held below for its range.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the rust and the blue, the warmest and the coolest things in the field. They obey one law: soft-edged rectangles of thinned colour on a ground of colour, stacked frontally on one vertical axis, with no line, no figure, no diagonal and no second kind of mark. The warm and the cool are not two physics; they are the one law at its two poles, and the law holds the tension between them without breaking. Nothing on the canvas departs from it. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is about as small as a painting’s can be: one kind of form, one direction, two colours. The coherence is complete and held for its size, below Broadway Boogie Woogie at 8.9, whose strict law governs a wider range of beat and block.
Alan Moore · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a medieval chapter at the founding of the town’s sacred centre, and the present-day exhibition of Alma Warren’s paintings; or, in tone, the romp of the Dead Dead Gang and the Lucia Joyce chapter in the asylum. They obey one law: every moment persists and is present to every other, and the sacred is in the low and overlooked. The romp is that law seen by children; the asylum chapter is that law in a mind that has broken out of sequential time. The range is very wide and one physics holds across it, which is the book’s strongest achievement. Charged: Mansoul runs a looser comic physics than the realism around it, and the consolations of the cosmology sometimes contradict the grief the realist chapters establish.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the barber’s pole, a striped and coloured cylinder on the pavement at the left, and the dark block of the taller building at the upper right. One law holds them. Everything is a plain geometric volume under one low light from one side, frontal to the plane, still and emptied of people; the pole and the block both cast or receive that light, and both stand as mute presences in the same silence. Nothing breaks the law: no figure, no movement, no second light, no detail that asks to be read as story. The law is total over its territory. But the territory is one facade at one hour, and narrowness is not coherence: the range from pole to cornice to sky is real and small.
Louise Nevelson · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a turned ornamental finial, once a sign of domestic display, and a raw crate slat, once packing. One law holds them. Everything is reduced to a profile and a depth in one black and ranked only by its place in the order of the wall. The law is enforced everywhere, inside and outside every box, edge to edge, with nothing outside it; even the shadows obey it, since the black makes shadow and object one material. The range is wide in source: furniture, architecture, industry, waste, and the law drowns all of it. Held below the upper band because the law is enforced by uniformity: one coat of paint over everything does work that distinct elements do by relation elsewhere, close to the narrowness the rubric warns against.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the scaled ridge of the roof against the sky and a carved oak door handle on the main floor, shaped to the grip of a hand. One law governs both: form grown rather than assembled, every surface modelled to body, water or light, with no straight line where a curve can serve. It holds across stone, iron, glass, wood and tile; street, stair, salon, attic and roof; public face and private room; and the colour of the front answers the colour of the light well. What bends it: the old house’s rectilinear grid of floors and windows shows through on the upper floors, so that the whole is a body grown over an older skeleton; the turret’s cross is a sign set on the body more than grown from it; and the rear front obeys the law more loosely than the street front.
Pierre Bonnard · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the burning tiled wall at the edge and the pale body under the water at the centre. One law holds them: everything in the room is colour in relation, and nothing is privileged by subject. The body obeys the law that governs the enamel and the floor, and its quietness is the law’s result, not an exception to it. The steep viewpoint, the flattened tub and the lattice of tiles obey the same law of the surface. Nothing contradicts it. But narrowness is not coherence. The territory is one room, one figure and one register of radiant stillness, and the law governs it completely while covering little range. The figure is held for that size.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the black disc in its soft corona, upper left of centre, and a small hard-edged bright disc at the far edge of the field. They obey one law: circles of flat colour in a dark space, acting by size, hue, nearness and transparency, with no line, no angle and no second form. The corona is the one element that bends the law, a radiance rather than a disc, and it is the law’s own extension, a circle’s force made visible. Every other element is the law at some size. The range within it runs from the largest disc to the smallest, from black to white, from emission to reflection, and the law holds. What holds the axis is the territory: narrowness is not coherence, and one form is the narrowest a painting can choose.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the soft-haloed black circle at the upper left, and a small hard-edged chequered grid or a thin acute angle at the lower right. They obey one law, and the canvas states it: every element is a geometric form acting on every other across an open field, each with its own charge, none depicting anything. The halo is the circle’s charge made visible, not a second physics. The law holds through a range much wider than Mondrian’s: curve and straight, closed and open, round and acute, soft and hard, transparent and opaque, warm and cool. Narrowness is not the case here, and that counts for the work. What holds it a step below the top is the middle order, where the law permits rather than governs: many small forms obey it without being required by it, and at points the field comes close to inventory.
Decimus Burton and Richard Turner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the curve set by the rib, at every scale. The largest element, the transept vault, and the smallest, the curved pane, the spiral stair, the scrolled bracket, obey it. The wings are the transept at a lower pitch; the ends are the curve turned in plan. Inside and outside are one surface seen from two sides, and light and structure are one system. The cast-iron ornament of the stairs is the same law in a softer key. The range is not wide, and narrowness is not coherence: the law governs a single material and a single purpose, and its achievement is that it governs them without exception. No element contradicts another; the only foreign thing is the plant, which the law exists to serve.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs: blue as the temperature of the world, the body folded by that world, and the one warm object as the one thing that answers. Take the two most distant elements: the instrument, warm, rounded and made, the colour of wood; and the ground, cold, flat and blank. They obey the law because the picture’s whole sense is the contrast between them; the guitar is the exception the law requires. Head, hands and feet are drawn in one manner. But narrowness is not coherence: one figure, one key and one object make the coherence of a single held note. The woman’s head showing through at the upper left belongs to no part of the law, and is charged lightly because it is faint.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the cool white band at the centre and the warm rose ground around the fields. They obey one law: soft-edged horizontal fields of thinly layered colour, stacked, floating on a ground, each defined by its colour and its edge and by nothing else. There is no line, no gesture, no depicted space and no second kind of form, and nothing on the canvas breaks the law. The range within it runs from cool to warm and from near-white light to saturated colour, wider than a monochrome and narrower than a figured picture. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is small by choice: one schema, a few fields, one key. The axis is held for the territory’s size.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the haymaking of the first hour, children running in the grass, and the yard at Brandenburg where the condemned are led out. One law governs both. The camera moves at the same height and pace through each; earth and sky are in both and do not change for the death; the voice that speaks in the valley is the voice that speaks in the cell. The regime, the war and the court never alter the film’s physics, and that is its argument: the order of the field is the order Franz keeps, and the state’s order is noise laid over it. The archival prologue in black and white stands outside the law, and is shown to. The range is wide, from comedy in the village to torture in the prison. The one strain is the language rule, which follows the film’s moral logic and no law its world keeps.
A. M. Cassandre · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs the sheet: reduction to geometric planes, with modelling reserved for the one thing that must have mass. Take the two most distant elements, the graded black volume of the hull and the flat letterforms at the foot, and they obey it: the letters are planes, the hull is the one body, and the birds, small flat flecks, are planes again. Sea, sky, ship, birds and name are drawn under the same rule of simplification and the same frontal symmetry, and nothing in the sheet belongs to another manner. Within its range the coherence is complete. It is held below the upper band because the range the law covers is narrow, one object, one moment, one register, and narrowness is not coherence.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the plaza at the foot, stone and air, and the lens at the top, a glass dome closing to a point. One law governs both: the circle in plan, the curve in section, the diagonal grid on the surface, and rotation from floor to floor. The plaza is the space the circle frees from the site; the lens is where the curve and the grid meet at a point; the dark spirals between are the same rotation made visible. The law holds from the steel node to the whole figure and from inside to out, a wide range for one rule. What bends it: the office floors answer to the core and the leased floor, so fit-outs cut the spiral voids into tenants’ rooms, and the lobby belongs to a plainer law.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra · Music
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs the whole: the figure is constant and everything else is measured against it. Take the two most distant elements, the bare harpsichord phrase of the opening and the full string climax of the sixth movement, or Sanders’ single overblown cry: each is heard against the same unchanging ground, and the climax arrives without breaking it. The range covered is real, from near-silence to the full orchestra and from tenderness to the cry, which is why the axis stands high. But the law is simple, and a simple law makes coherence easier to keep. Narrowness is not coherence, and part of this record’s coherence is narrowness.
Vyasa (attributed) · Literature
9.1 · Tier IV
Take the most distant elements: the dice game in the assembly hall and the dog at the gate of heaven. They obey one law: an act bears its fruit, dharma is tested where it is hardest, and the test is Yudhiṣṭhira’s. Karma, boon and curse and the turning of the ages govern from the first book to the last, and the war’s frauds and Bhīṣma’s teaching on the law of distress are the same law read from two sides. But the strata obey different laws. Kṛṣṇa is a cunning ally in some books and the supreme god in others; the Śānti sets Sāṃkhya, Yoga and devotion to Nārāyaṇa side by side unreconciled; the didactic books’ confident law sits beside the war’s demonstration that law cannot be known; and the line “ahiṃsā paramo dharmaḥ”
“non-violence is the highest dharma” stands in a poem whose god commands a war. Doublets and contradictions of age, route and sequence are many. Range redeems much; the contradictions hold the axis at 8.4.
Michelangelo · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Take the two most distant elements: Michelangelo’s west apse wall, travertine in one giant order, without colour, a mass carved like a body; and Bernini’s Cathedra, bronze and gilt clouds, angels and a window of light. Inside they are reconciled more than one might expect. Maderno carried Michelangelo’s fluted pilasters through the nave, and Bernini laid one decorative law over the whole interior, which obeys one physics, if a later one. The exterior does not. From the square the façade is a broad screen composed by another rule, and the dome behind it seems to belong to another building. What holds the axis here: the range is wide, and the law fails across its widest part, front against back, joined only in plan.
Paul the Apostle · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant points: Philemon, a private plea about one slave, and Romans 8, the groaning of all creation. One law governs both, the logic of the cross, power through weakness, the old order passing within it, as 1 Corinthians 7:31 says the form of this world is passing away. The range is very wide. But the letters disagree with themselves where it matters. The law is holy in Romans 7:12 and a ministry of death in 2 Corinthians 3:7; Galatians 3:28 abolishes the division of male and female, and 1 Corinthians 14:34, if it is Paul’s, bids women keep silent in the churches; Galatians writes off the old covenant as Hagar’s slavery, and Romans 11 insists that all Israel will be saved; Romans 13 asks submission to the governing powers, while 1 Corinthians 2:6 has the rulers of this age coming to nothing. Some of this is development across occasions; it is still tension within the unit.
François Rabelais · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the tripe and the birth from the ear, and the death of Pan read as Christ’s. One law governs both, and the work names it in the prologue to the Quart Livre: Pantagruelism, “certaine gayeté d’esprit conficte en mespris des choses fortuites”
“a certain gaiety of mind, preserved in contempt of things fortuitous”. Body and soul are both honoured, and laughter is “le propre de l’homme”
“proper to man”. The range is the widest of its century, and the law holds across most of it. Charged: the giants are sometimes giants and sometimes men at a table; the satire hardens in the Quart Livre and turns bitter in the Fifth Book’s Furred Cats, where contempt displaces gaiety; and the books were not written to one plan.
Built for Abbot Suger · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the west block of the 1130s, a fortress-like screen with crenellations, and the Rayonnant upper choir of the 1230s, a cage of glass. Do they obey one law? In part. The law of the building is Suger’s: matter opened to light, brightness as the way to the mind. The chevet states it, the thirteenth-century church perfects it, the façade rose announces it. But the mass of the west front speaks another law, of the gateway and the fortified threshold, and the seams between the lower chevet and the upper choir, and between Suger’s narthex and the nave, are legible. The tombs obey a law of rank and memory rather than of light. What holds it at 8.4 is that: a wide range held under a governing idea, with breaks the visitor sees.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: “Aube”, the dawn embraced in a garden and pursued, and “Démocratie”, the conscripts’ brutal chorus. One law joins them: a consciousness that wills a new world and finds the old one in its mouth, and a syntax that sets images side by side without hierarchy. The voice of vision governs both. But the law is a voice and a method more than a structure. The book has no order of its own, its pieces were written over years whose span is uncertain, and its range runs from rapture to sarcasm to political ventriloquism without the book knowing how they relate. The range is wide, and range is credited; the coherence across it is held by the voice alone. The inner law is real at the level of the voice and loose at the level of the whole.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the St Anne tympanum, a Romanesque Virgin in majesty older than the cathedral and re-set in a Gothic portal, and Bardet’s bronze altar of 2024. The medieval law is strong: the front’s grid of squares, the bay rhythm of the nave and the transept fronts of the 1250s extend the body without breaking it. Viollet-le-Duc’s additions obey that law, or the law as he reconstructed it. What resists: the Vow of Louis XIII, a baroque marble sanctuary at the focus of a Gothic choir, obeys another physics; Le Chevallier’s nave glass and the bronzes of 2024 are of their time by intention, their relation to the law negotiated.
Mary Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the domestic idyll of the Frankenstein household in Geneva, with its adopted children and its gentle father, and the creature on the ice at the north pole promising a pyre. One law governs both: love given or withheld makes what a being becomes, and knowledge without that bond destroys. The Geneva household takes in Elizabeth and Justine; Victor, raised in that love, refuses it to the one being who needs it from him; the De Laceys show the creature what he is denied. The law holds from the first letter to the last. Charged: the book’s physics is loose where the plot requires it. The creature’s speed across Europe, his literacy from overheard lessons, his knowledge of Victor’s movements, and magistrates who move at the story’s convenience ask a tolerance the moral law does not need. Narrow in register, held in law.
Edgar Allan Poe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs the great tales: an intellect turned on itself, in which reasoning and derangement are the same faculty seen from two sides, and the whole of each tale is ordered toward one effect on the reader. Take the two most distant elements, Dupin’s cold analysis in “The Purloined Letter” and the narrator’s frenzy in “The Tell-Tale Heart”. They obey that law: both are minds of method, one reading another, the other betraying itself by the method that was to hide it, and Poe insisted in “Rue Morgue” that the analytic and the imaginative mind were close kin. Even the hoaxes belong, as calculations on the reader. What holds the axis is the wider body: the comic tales and satires of literary fashion run on a cruder law, the joke at the reader’s expense, and the seam between the two halves shows.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Bard’s Song, a cosmic quarrel over a harrow told as a fable of Eternity, and the lark rising over the Felpham garden in Book the Second. One law governs both: what is seen depends on the state of the seer, and the selfhood that accuses must be annihilated for vision to open. Satan’s seizing of the harrow is the selfhood’s error; the lark is the messenger of Los, perception opened. The range is very wide, from Hayley’s commissions to the twenty-seven heavens, and it is held more than not. Charged: the names and their relations are not stable from passage to passage, nor from this book to the other prophecies; the Bard’s Song, a satire half veiled, sits apart in tone from the visionary close; and the copies disagree about what belongs.
Mikhail Bulgakov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the crucifixion at Bald Mountain, and Behemoth with a primus stove in a currency store. One law governs both: Woland’s justice, which exposes the lie and punishes the coward and cannot itself give light, works by the same rule in the farce and in the Passion, and the full moon and the storm cross from one city to the other. The range is as wide as any novel’s, and it is held. What costs the axis is the metaphysics at the top of that law: how Woland and Yeshua divide the world is left underdetermined, and the unfinished state of the work shows in small contradictions of time and detail in the Moscow chapters. A wide cosmos held under one physics, with its first principle left half drawn.
Christopher Wren · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the fabric: Wren’s classical order in Portland stone, the same handling from crypt to lantern, the west towers’ Baroque movement held within the vocabulary of the dome’s calm. The range is real, from the restraint of the nave bays to the theatre of the towers. What strains the law: the Latin cross and the central dome are two designs reconciled, and the building shows where they meet; the screen walls make the outside state one structure and the inside another. And the later fittings are part of the one work and are charged here: the Victorian mosaics of the choir, rich in colour and gold, answer another law than Wren’s white and grey interior, and the post-war baldacchino stands at the focus as a twentieth-century object.
Venetian builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Byzantine crossing dome and the Gothic crowning of the façade, with its ogee arches, crockets and statues. They obey different laws, and the building’s answer is a third law over both: accumulation under one patron and one relic, the gold ground and coloured marble running through everything. Inside, that law holds well; the gold unifies mosaic of the eleventh century and of the seventeenth, and the domes order the whole. Outside, the façade is coherent as a collage, not as a system, over a very wide range of Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Roman work. Held at 8.4 because the later mosaics break the law of the surface.
Lu Xun · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the major stories: the gaze of a people on its own victims, and a narrator who sees and cannot act, or acts too late. Take the two most distant elements, the classical frame of the madman’s diary and “Village Opera” at the close, a remembered night on a boat watching a play in the countryside. They obey the law loosely: the opera is another spectacle and another memory the narrator cannot return to, but its warmth is a different physics from the cannibal feast. The tones range from horror to farce, in “The Double Fifth Festival”, whose official shelters in “差不多”
(much the same), to idyll, and the light pieces of 1922 sit outside the law rather than bend it. Coherent across a wide range, but not across the whole of it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the theatricals (I.11), comic and festive, and the flogged men in the hospital (II.2 to II.3); or the goat Vaska paraded by the convicts and the murder of Akulka. One law governs them: what men do with whatever scrap of freedom is left them, and what is done to them when even that is taken. The play, the money, the vodka, the animals, the escape, the grievance and the killing all obey it, and the range is wide: comedy, horror, ethnography, essay, confession. Charged: the frame breaks its own law, since the introduction’s narrator is not the narrator of the notes; and the essays on the people at times speak in a register the scenes do not support, the later novelist’s thesis entering the witness’s book.
Anonymous · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the courtly maiden of the opening strophe, at a festival of silk and jewels at Worms, and the woman who has her brother beheaded and strikes off her enemy’s head after the hall has burned. One law joins them, the law stated in the first âventiure, that joy is repaid in sorrow, and with it the law of triuwe and êre, which governs festival and massacre alike. Charged: the poem’s sympathies move between the halves without the poem owning the move, so that Hagen the murderer and Hagen the loyal hero are joined by the plot more than by a conception; the supernatural is admitted and then disappears; and the Christian frame sits beside the heroic ethic without being made to judge it.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Varlaam’s drunken song at the border inn and Boris’s dying counsel to his son. They obey one law, the play’s one physics, power made and unmade by what people say and believe. The monks at the inn are agents of rumour as the boyars are in the Kremlin; the holy fool’s taunt and Shuisky’s intrigues are one force in two registers. Even Marina’s ambition is a form of power by opinion, since she will love the pretender only as tsar. What holds it here is the Polish scenes: at the fountain Marina plays a game of ambition and romance nearer in tone to romantic comedy, and the pretender’s sudden confession of his true name to her pulls the play toward a love drama it does not otherwise want. The range is wide and the law holds across most of it; that one region obeys it loosely.
Luo Guanzhong (attributed) · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Zuo Ci’s sorceries at Cao Cao’s banquet and Guan Yu’s ghost at Jade Spring Hill on one side, the logistics, alliances and grain lines of the northern campaigns on the other. One law holds them: Heaven’s mandate works through human choice, and portents announce what strategy and character bring about. The marvellous is admitted as a historian admits omens, not as a second physics, and the opening sentence governs the last chapter. The range covered is very wide, and that is credited. What holds it here is the strain between the book’s moral law and its historical law: it loves Shu and must let Shu fall, and Zhuge Liang’s prayer to lengthen his life by the lamps at Wuzhang stands beside the cycle’s indifference rather than becoming one with it.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs: the observer who watches and cannot join, the genteel world and the street at evening, desire meeting a social surface and failing. Take the two most distant elements, the cold sublime of “La Figlia” and the laugh of Mr. Apollinax, like an “irresponsible foetus”: they obey it. The title’s “Observations” names the law, and the book keeps it from the first poem to the last. No poem contradicts another; the satires sit at a lower pressure than the lyrics, which is a difference of intensity, not of law. The charge is width. The range runs from lyric to squib but stays inside one sensibility, one class and the two halves of one world, Boston’s drawing rooms and the streets of the “Preludes”; narrowness is not coherence, and the coherence here is partly that of a narrow world.
Apuleius · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the matron of Corinth bedding the ass, and the initiate at midnight seeing the sun. The book’s case is that one law governs them: servile pleasure and curiosity make the beast, and the goddess’s grace unmakes him. The priest names the law, and Psyche’s tale, the Actaeon statue and the long-promised roses have prepared it. The range is very wide, from bawdry and slapstick through murder and grief to theophany, and the law is legible across it. But it is announced at the end more than felt throughout: for long stretches of the middle books the stories obey the Milesian law of pleasure, and the break of tone at Cenchreae is the most argued question about the work. The voice holds across the break, for the convert still counts his fees and is pleased with his shaven head, and that keeps the axis well above the floor.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Assembly’s hyperboloid and the Secretariat’s long screened slab, a sculpted sacred vessel and a block of offices. They obey one law: raw concrete, the Modulor’s proportions, forms generated by the sun and by the passage of people, ramp, portico and brise-soleil, each building a mass set on open ground. The High Court and the Assembly answer each other across the plain, parasol to canopy, and the Secretariat stands as the base line. The range is wide and the law holds in the buildings. What fails it is the ground. The plain should be the law that binds, and at its scale the relation between the buildings is felt as separation; its monuments are of uneven power, some, the Open Hand among them, emblems placed rather than parts of the whole; and the composition’s head is missing.
Limbourg brothers · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the zodiacal lunette at the head of a month, astronomical and geometric, gold on blue; and Hell, a vision of fire and torment. One law holds them. Every page shows a creature in its place in a created order, from the heavens through the ranks of society to the fallen, and the calendar’s sky and the Hours’ theology are one ordered cosmos seen from two sides. The range is very wide, from snow in a farmyard to the fall of the angels, and across twelve months the calendar keeps its law completely. Charged because the law is kept more surely in the brothers’ pages than in the book: Colombe brings another manner and another scale of crowding, and the change of hands within the calendar itself is visible. Wide range, one physics, an uneven hand.
The Beatles · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
One law is proposed: a farewell made of finish and fragment, under a warm, close sound. The two most distant elements are “I Want You”, a heavy blues ending in a hard cut, and “Because”, a still madrigal of three voices; they obey one law as sound, the same studio and the same care, and as the record’s two extremes, of wanting and of peace. Side two obeys its law closely: the medley’s themes return, and its parts are one passage. The range is wide: blues, music hall, a children’s song, a ballad, a pastiche of the 1950s, a madrigal, a suite. What holds the figure: side one sets four writers’ songs side by side, and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “Octopus’s Garden” belong to a lighter record. The halves are joined more than fused.
Norman builders, under William II · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gold Pantokrator of the apse and the shaded cloister with its figured and foliate capitals and inlaid columns. They obey one law: the king’s foundation, the enclosed and ordered sacred world, ornament as the substance of the wall, colour and pattern drawn from three traditions and made one by repetition. Within, the gold ground binds Latin plan and Byzantine image; without, the apses in the Arab manner belong to the same idea of a surface wholly worked. What breaks the law: the join of Latin nave and Byzantine sanctuary, felt in a shift of proportion; the nineteenth-century roof; and, as part of the one work, the Baroque chapel of the Crucifix and the later porticoes, which speak another law in stone and stucco. Narrowness is not the issue; the range is wide and mostly held.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the order of loves. Take the two most distant elements, the jeering at the gods of the cradle and the threshold in Book IV, and the vision of rest in XXII.30. They obey the same law: the gods are mocked because they are loved wrongly, and the vision is the end of right love. The peacock and the salamander of Book XXI serve the argument that God’s power can hold bodies in fire; the antipodes of Book XVI are weighed by the unity of Adam’s race. The range runs from Roman antiquities to the angels, and the law holds. Charged: tensions stay open. Roman virtue is praised and dismissed (Book V); the earthly peace is both a good and a counterfeit; the mixed cities sit uneasily with the clean division at the end.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Timur’s winter campaign and the wit of “Einlass” at the gate of paradise; or the grumbling at critics in the Buch des Unmuts and the creation myth of “Wiederfinden”. One law holds them, polarity and renewal, what Goethe elsewhere calls Steigerung. Everything divides and returns: East and West, poet and beloved, death and becoming, the breath taken in and given out. The masks hold the range, since Hatem can grumble, love, drink and pray because he is a role. The law is plain in the framing books and the Suleika book and thinner in the middle, where the maxims stand under it without expressing it. The range is wide and largely held; the looseness of three or four books holds the axis at 8.4.
The Doors · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
One law: the night as a place of passage, entered through pleasure and found to be death. The two most distant elements are Twentieth Century Fox, a quick satirical pop song about a fashionable girl, and The End, an eleven-minute rite, and they obey the same law from opposite sides: the Fox is the daylight world the record wants out of, sung from inside that world, the room before the door. Alabama Song, a Weimar cabaret number in search of the “next whisky bar”, obeys it surprisingly well, and its fairground lurch is the record’s sound; Back Door Man brings the blues trickster into the same night. The range, cabaret, blues, bossa-rock, ballad and drone, is wide and is credit. What holds it: the short songs of side two follow their borrowed genre as much as the law, which is a mood more than a physics, though a mood kept with unusual consistency across that range.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the book: the modern mind takes surface for substance and wind for spirit, and calls the result progress. Take two of the most distant elements, Peter’s papal bulls and the critic descended from Momus, or the clothes philosophy and the conquests of Henri IV that Section IX traces to a vapour: they obey the same law, and the range is wide, from church history to Grub Street to the psychology of delusion. Charged: the speaker’s law wavers. The hack narrates a tale whose sympathies, Martin’s care with his coat, are Swift’s own, so that in the tale sections the voice is often simply the author’s, and the reader is asked to trust a speaker the digressions have taught him to distrust. The Apology admits the seam when it divides the targets between the two kinds of section.
Eugenio Montale · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs the title section and “Meriggi e ombre”: the dry world, the wall, the varco not found, the self kept apart and lucid. Take the two most distant elements. “Corno inglese” and “Minstrels” are musical and impressionist, Debussy in words; “Arsenio” and “Casa sul mare” already speak the narrative, addressed lyric of Le occasioni. They share the coast and the wind but not quite the physics: the first are moods, the last are arguments with a “tu”. “Riviere”, closing on a reconciliation with the coast and a hope of renewal, sits uneasily beside “ciò che non siamo”. Held at 8.4 because the range is moderate, and the law, which holds over most of it, bends at both ends.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the play: knowledge is made by bodies with appetites inside an economy, and what it does depends on whom it serves. The two most distant elements obey it: the washstand demonstration for a boy in the first scene and the robing of the Pope in the twelfth are both lessons in how a world-picture is held, one by a child’s eyes, one by power in vestments. The ballad-singer’s carnival, the Venetian arsenal, the Medici court’s refusal and the peasants of the Campagna all fall under it. What strains the law is the graft of 1945 onto 1938: a play built to show a cunning survivor is turned, in its penultimate scene, into his condemnation. Played as dialectic it holds, but the seam shows.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Opal’s farcical tour of the car lot and the school buses, and the shooting at the Parthenon. One law governs both: everyone is performing for an audience, and the performance replaces attention to the person in front of them. Opal narrates the city into a microphone without seeing it; Kenny ends one performance with a gun, and the crowd is handed another. The same law covers Haven’s household, Sueleen’s striptease, Triplette’s campaign and Tom’s seductions. Only Linnea, signing to her deaf children, stands outside it, and the exception confirms the law. The range runs from revue comedy to assassination. The strain is at the margins: the cameos and Opal’s broadest moments obey the satire rather than the law, and the Tricycle Man belongs to the director’s signature rather than to the world.
Reed and Stem, and Warren and Wetmore · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gold constellations on the vault and the loop track on the lower level. They obey one law, the law of passage: the building is a sequence from street to room to platform, and every part, from the clock at the centre to the ramps to the tracks, is placed by the movement of people through it. The Beaux-Arts order, axial and symmetrical, governs the head house and the concourse, and the oak and acorn run through the ornament from the front to the light fittings. What bends the law: the building has two physics, the masonry monument above and the steel and electric machine below, joined by circulation but not by one language; the two firms' hands are, by report, seams in the plan and the dress; and the dress is a borrowed costume over a modern structure. Coherent over a wide range, with a visible join.
Carlo Scarpa · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the chapel, a square volume set at an angle in its pool, dim and liturgical; and the open lawn with its inclined wall and the fields beyond, bright and secular. They obey one law: the stepped edge, the pairing of two circles, two sarcophagi and two paths, water as the medium of passage, and a slow, measured route. The same profile governs a hinge and a wall. The range is wide for so small a precinct: sacred and secular, enclosure and view, water and earth, the grave and the garden. Held lower because the whole is a sequence of separately invented pieces joined by a route rather than a single geometry, and its sources are absorbed but not wholly melted.
Reginald Ely, John Wastell and others · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the plain east end, built under the founder’s wish for an unornamented church, and the Tudor antechapel crowded with heraldry; or the Gothic fabric and the Italianate screen. They obey one law in part. One bay system governs the whole length, one vault covers both halves, one typological scheme runs through every side window, and the Renaissance glass sits in Perpendicular tracery without breaking the grid. The law strains where the screen speaks another idiom, where the heraldry contradicts the founder, and in the Victorian west window and the east end of the 1960s. The range is wide; the unity is a grid strong enough to carry disagreement.
H. G. Wells · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole, and it is the book’s subject: the laws of evolution and of energy, applied without exception to man. Take the two most distant elements, the Richmond dining room with its lamps and port, and the shore more than thirty million years on under the red sun. They obey one law: what is comfortable now is a stage in a process that does not care for it, and the dining room, like the garden of the Eloi, is a moment in a decline. The tone, curious, ironic, then grave, moves without a break. The internal logic of the far future is kept: the Morlocks’ fear of light, their eating of the Eloi and the hollow pedestal of the Sphinx all follow from the premise. Held below the top only because the range, wide in time, is narrow in people.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs: every relation is a transaction, the sentimental included. Take the two most distant elements, Peachum’s morning chorale over his ledgers in the first scene and the mounted messenger’s pardon at the gallows. They obey the same law, since the beggar’s trade and the crown’s mercy are both business in the form of piety. Between them the wedding in a stolen stable, the police chief’s barrack-room friendship with the man he must hang, and the whores who sell Macheath for money as he sold them all hold to it. The law strains in two places. The love songs between Macheath and Polly sing a feeling the law has no room for, and the play does not decide whether they are parody. The Victorian setting and the Weimar target sit together by convention rather than by law. The range is real and mostly governed.
Sly and the Family Stone · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The two most distant elements are Family Affair, a hushed and grave hit, and Spaced Cowboy, Sly yodelling over the rhythm box, the record’s joke. They obey one law: slowed time, a dry box beneath, the voice at a distance, feeling held under. The joke is deadpan in the same key as the grief, and the remade Thank You brings the band’s old world into the record under the record’s new physics. That is real coherence. The range covered is narrow by design: every track is moderate or slow, much of the sound is one colour, and narrowness is not coherence. Just Like a Baby and (You Caught Me) Smilin’ stand a little apart in brightness. Kind of Blue and Low govern halves further apart.
Olmec · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs all seventeen: a frontal head with no body, a close helmet, a face kept within the contour of the stone, eyes under a heavy brow, the mass never cut through. Take the two most distant members, the finely modelled San Lorenzo Monument 1 and the closed, schematic face from La Cobata, made in another place and perhaps centuries apart: they obey the same law, and the range between them, fine to severe, smaller to colossal, individual to near type, is covered without a break. But narrowness is not coherence, and this law is narrow: one subject, one pose, one register. The coherence is real and wide in time and place, and limited in what it holds together, which places it in the middle of the eights.
Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stadium roof sweeping over the west stand at its full height on its tallest masts, and the low net over a footpath between the venues. One law governs both: the saddle, the mast, the edge cable, the anchor, the 75 cm mesh, the same clamp, the same cover. The law runs across very different scales and purposes, which is a real coherence and a wide one. Two things bend it. The enclosures of the hall and the pool stand under the net in another physics, walls of glass and frame that the net neither shapes nor carries; and the stadium bowl obeys the law of the ground, a landform, against which the roof is an addition over one side. The law is the roof’s, and the work is more than the roof, so the coherence holds over the unit and loosens at its edges.
Buscheto and Rainaldo · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the blind arcades of the apse and the gallery façade at the far end of the nave. They obey one law: arcade on column, banded marble, lozenge and rosette in the spandrels, the wall treated as layers of arcading. The same law governs nave, aisles, transepts and galleries, and Rainaldo kept it across a century’s interval, which is the strongest evidence that it governs. It breaks at a few joins: the upper loggia of the dome speaks a Gothic language; the gilded coffered ceiling of the post-fire campaign is a late Renaissance surface over a Romanesque body; the doors from the circle of Giambologna are another century’s sculpture. Its range, from the sober flank arcading to the airy façade, counts in its favour.
Workshops of Qin Shi Huang · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a general, tall, in fine armour, hands crossed on a sword, and a horse of the second pit. They obey one law. Everything in the pits is made by one system, mould, joint, hand finish and paint, and placed by one order, rank, type, arm of service and the facing east, and the man and the horse are equal products of it. From the infantry rank to the command pit, from the kneeling archer to the charioteer, nothing contradicts that physics. What holds the axis below the top is the rubric’s warning that narrowness is not coherence. The range is wide in rank and arm and narrow in kind: it is an army, and only an army. The courtly, the sacred and the natural, where the mausoleum holds them, lie in other pits, outside the unit.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the opening, a sulking child in a car with a bunch of farewell flowers, and the dragon’s flight with the scales falling away. One law governs both: the world of spirits is real, and it has rules. Eat its food, keep your name, work or be transformed, do not look back. The comedy of Boh and the terror of No-Face live in one physics, and the range is wide: farce, horror, labour, grief, rapture. The strain is in the middle, where the rules of the seal, the curse and the twin witches are announced as they are needed rather than found, and in an ending that leaves Haku’s fate under Yubaba’s contract open by assertion.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the orthogonal stone blocks toward the city and the curved titanium volumes toward the river and under the bridge. They obey one law, the meeting of a rational box and a free surface, and the atrium is the hinge where every material meets. The law can be stated: order toward the city grid, freedom toward the water. It holds across a wide range of scale, from the tower beyond the bridge to the glazing of the atrium, and every part of the building takes its place on one side of it or at the hinge. What holds the axis is that it is a law of contrast rather than of derivation: the curved forms follow no rule a visitor can find, and the coherence rests on composition and the eye, not on a geometry from which the least part follows.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stream at the dacha in the first minutes and the minute without gravity in the library; or Berton’s grey testimony and Hari’s revival. One law governs them: what is loved and wronged returns, in memory or in flesh, and knowledge is possible only through conscience. The Earth of the first part is already full of what the station will reproduce, the house, the horse, the father, the photograph of the dead wife, so the coda obeys a law laid down at the start. The range is wide: domestic drama, institutional procedure, science fiction, love story and religious parable, held in one register of slow attention. Held below the top because the drive stands half outside the law, more a mood than a step in the argument, and the commission obeys the film’s logic but not its manner.
Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Herland’s oak roof over the eleventh-century walls of Westminster Hall, and Pugin’s gilt canopy over the throne in the Lords. One law reaches both: the Gothic of England, from its oldest surviving royal hall to its most worked fitting, and Barry made the Hall the first room of the new building so that the law runs from the eleventh century into the nineteenth. Pugin’s detail governs every surface, and the Commons in plain oak and the Lords in gold obey the same law in different registers, which is the law of rank. What bends it is the fact Pugin named: a symmetrical classical body under Tudor detail and a picturesque skyline, two laws laid over each other and joined by ornament rather than structure. Scott’s chamber holds the law in a quieter dialect.
Anthony Burgess · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gleeful violence of the first chapter, “the old ultra-violence”, and the quiet of the last, Alex at eighteen imagining a son. One law governs them if the book’s law is growth against mechanism: the free creature may do evil and may outgrow it, and the clockwork the state makes of him can do neither. Read so, the last chapter completes the law rather than breaking it, and the plan of three holds the satire of the state, the prison and the home in one physics. The near-future world is consistent and lightly drawn. What costs the axis is the turn of tone in the last chapter, which many readers feel as a change of key rather than a resolution, and the coincidence engine of Part Three, which bends the world to the scheme.
Willa Cather · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law: the land makes the people who work it, and what is lived is kept only as memory, which is both a possession and a loss. Take the two most distant elements: Peter and Pavel’s wolves on a Russian road, a tale of horror inside Book I, and the fruit cave of Book V, a scene of abundance. They obey one law: each is a story of the land and of what is sacrificed or born on it, told to Jim and kept by him. The law covers Mr Shimerda’s suicide, Wick Cutter’s attempted assault and his murder and suicide, Lena’s prosperity, Tiny Soderball’s Klondike fortune and Cleric’s Virgil. Charged: Book III’s Lincoln is ruled more by Jim’s sentiment than by the land, and the town comedy of Book II sits lighter than the law asks. The range is moderate, from the dugout to the lecture room, and held.
Utagawa Hiroshige · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant sheets: the eagle over the white plain of Susaki, a cosmic height with no human figure, and the cat on the sill at Asakusa, a domestic interior in the pleasure quarter. They obey one law: a famous place of Edo, at a season, seen from a body’s standpoint, a near motif set against a far one. The range under that law is wide, from interior to sky, festival to empty field, snow to fireworks, day to night. The law is broken where the run falls back into the older horizontal composition set upright, without near and far, and where the late plates by another hand differ in touch; those sheets obey the genre’s looser law, not the series’ own. One physics for most of the run, with lapses.
Clint Eastwood · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Munny falling face down in the pig pen, and Munny shooting Little Bill on the saloon floor. One law reaches both: what a man was and what he says he is are never the same, and the stories told about him do not fit what he does. The farce of Beauchamp and English Bob obeys the same law as the canyon: the legend is false, the act is squalid. The whiskey, the storm and the threat to the town set the end apart as the return of what his wife had held down. The strain remains: in the saloon Munny shoots with a luck and accuracy the film had denied him, and the genre’s physics briefly overrides the film’s own.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Falk’s shambling comedy at a coffee stand, sketching extras and talking to a presence he cannot see, and the newsreel of 1945, the ruined city and the dead children. One law governs both, the worth of the particular, mortal thing seen from its edge: Falk is the law’s comic face and the footage its tragic one, and the circus, the library, the dying motorcyclist and the Wall obey it. The fall is a change of physics the film announces and keeps: after it come colour, weight, blood and time, and Damiel is not given his powers back. The strain is the tonal break after the fall, where whimsy and declamation do not always share the first movement’s world, and the concerts, which belong as much to the director’s taste as to the law.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs: the stain is in everyone, and every effort to be clean of it, by a man, a college or a nation, ends in cruelty. Take the two most distant elements, a boy boxing in a gymnasium in the 1940s, told not to mention that he is coloured, and a Vietnam veteran on a frozen lake in the Berkshires drilling a hole for fish. They obey the same law: each is a man the American order made and then disowned, and each carries what was done to him into what he does. Coleman’s secret, the president’s scandal, Faunia’s dead children and Delphine’s ambition sit under one physics, and the range is wide, from boxing to the Iliad. Charged: the satire of the college runs on a looser law of caricature than the tragedy of the Silk family, and the plot leans once or twice on coincidence.
Michael Cimino · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the drunken, comic reception, men singing at the bar, and the last roulette in the Saigon den. One law governs both: rite holds men together, and the same rite, emptied, destroys them. The wedding is rite, the hunt is rite under Michael’s code of “one shot”, the roulette is rite emptied of meaning and filled with chance, the funeral and its song are rite after loss. The comedy of the reception and the terror of the cage both obey it, which is why the first hour does not belong to another film. The range runs from a dance to a death. The strain is in the middle: the Vietnam movement obeys a thriller’s law of capture and escape, and the Saigon of the brothels and the French gambler belongs to a looser fable.
John Crowley · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the family: everything that happens is the Tale, and the further in one goes, the bigger it gets. Take two distant elements, Doc’s animal stories for children and Hawksquill’s memory palace, or a picnic at Edgewood and the riots of the City: the book binds them under one physics, that the small contains the large and that stories are lived before they are understood. The range is wide, from domestic comedy and fairy tale to Renaissance magic and near-future politics. The law holds less firmly at the political pole. Eigenblick is joined to the fairies’ design, but the tonal law of the political chapters, satire and thriller, is not the law of the house, and the seam shows where the two plots meet. Held in the middle of the eights for that seam; the floor is met with ease.
Prince and the Revolution · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: desire and salvation in one voice, the body and the soul asking the same thing. The two most distant elements obey it. Darling Nikki, the most profane track, and Purple Rain, the most devotional, are the same hunger, met once in a hotel lobby and once in a hymn. Let’s Go Crazy’s sermon and its party obey it inside one track, and I Would Die 4 U joins the lover and the saviour in one offer. The range is wide: funk, synthesiser pop, power ballad, rock and gospel hymn. The law strains at Take Me with U, which obeys by sound more than by meaning, and at Baby I’m a Star, which serves the persona’s display rather than its hunger. Two strains, and no break.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the canon of No. 2 and the Largo of No. 5, or the Emperor hymn and the Alternativo of No. 6. One manner governs them: motivic economy, four voices as partners, wit and learning in one texture. That is a style, and it holds across a wide range. But the axis asks for one physics across the whole unit, and the set is six physics of one maker. Each quartet obeys its own law, No. 2 its fifths, No. 6 its scale and its variation theme, and nothing binds No. 1 to No. 6 but the hand. Op. 131 and the Goldberg Variations, each at 9.6, are one law in one work.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Harrogate in the melon patch, a slapstick of the body, and Wanda dead under the fallen ledge, a tragedy of the earth. One law holds both: the body and the earth take everything, and what lives is what persists, laughing or grieving, in the time it has. Harrogate’s comedy obeys the same physics as the river’s drowned men; his schemes end in the jail and the sewer as surely as the river ends in its dead. The range is wide and held: the workhouse and the mountains, the bars and the remembered Catholic childhood, the Black quarter and the father’s study. Charged: the mountain vision and the fever’s delirium turn the book’s law toward the hallucinatory without full preparation, and some episodes stand in the book on the strength of their prose rather than of the law.
Vakataka · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the cavalry and war elephants of Simhala’s conquest in cave 17 and Padmapani’s stillness in cave 1. They obey one law. Every being, Bodhisattva, king, ogress, naga princess, sailor or servant, is drawn in the same pliant body and swelling line and held in the same moral field, where the giving of the self is the measure. The range runs from the court’s pleasures to their renunciation. What resists: four halls and many hands, so that the law is a shared style and plan rather than one design; a finish that varies, in a campaign that on one account was cut short; and ceilings whose ornament, animals and figures obey the line but sit loosely to the moral field below.
Aldous Huxley · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs: conditioning, and the stability it buys, explains everything from the decanting of embryos to the death ward and the crowd at the lighthouse. Take the two most distant elements, the clinical comedy of the Hatchery and the Savage’s self-scourging at the end. They obey the same physics, for the crowd that comes to watch him whip himself comes for the feelies’ reason, and it ends in the orgy-porgy. The Reservation, a world of dirt, pain and religion, is not exempted from the satire: it is the World State’s opposite and equally deforming, and the book holds both in one judgment. What holds the axis there is a wavering of the law in two places. The tone shifts from satire to tragedy without settling which the Savage belongs to, and the Controller, the system’s voice, is granted a wit and a doubt that the system should not have made.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs: every institution and every person is judged by whether they treat another person as a person or as a function, and the law holds from the Easter night to the Siberian barracks. Take the two most distant elements, Missy Korchagina’s salon in Moscow and the étape where Kryltsov is dying of consumption. They obey it; so do the court and the church, shown as one mechanism in different dress. The range is wide. Held at this figure because the law is the author’s verdict as well as the world’s physics. Maslova moves by a novelist’s law, slow, contradictory, partly unreadable even to Nekhlyudov, while the officials are fixed in advance by a satirist’s; and the ending’s turn to the Gospel resolves by citation what the action had governed by observation, a slight change of physics at the close.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a key or a nail pressed into the thick ground, inert matter, and a fine white skein flung across the top layer, all speed. They obey one law: everything on the canvas is deposited, not depicted. Paint poured, paint knifed, objects dropped and pressed: each is a thing laid down on a surface lying flat, and the surface is nothing but the sum of what landed on it. The law covers a wide range for one canvas, from metal to the thinnest line, from rest to motion. What resists is the underlayer: the brushed ground, and the figure reported beneath it, were made under another law, depiction, and the pour covers that law rather than absorbing it. The contradiction is concealed rather than resolved: where the brushed ground shows through, two physics sit in one field.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the open book at the corpse’s feet, at the lower right, and the face looking out at the top of the pyramid. One law holds them: everything in the room is ranked by its share in the act of knowing, and light is the measure. The book is the authority the body is read against; the corpse is the object, and the brightest; Tulp is the voice, apart and darker; the attending heads are graded by attention, from the three who lean in to the one who looks out, who extends the law to the viewer. Nothing contradicts it. The resistance is a double obligation: some heads obey the portrait’s law, to be seen, rather than the scene’s, to see, and the painting does not wholly reconcile the two.
John Huston · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Howard’s jig on the mountain and Dobbs’s death at the waterhole. They obey the same law, the one Howard stated in the flophouse: the mountain gives and takes, and men’s conduct is ruled by what they hold. The comedy is not relief from the tragedy but its other face, and the end proves it, when the loss of everything produces a laugh that is neither bitter nor false. The bandits, the federales and the villagers belong to the same world, one in which possession is always provisional and violence is its ordinary price. The range is wide, from begging in Tampico to healing in the village. The figure is held by the pull of the score and of the village interlude toward a sweetness the law of the rest does not grant.
Abbas Kiarostami · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dusty, quarried hill of the day and the green, crowded hillside of the coda. One law governs both: earth is moved, and a man is helped or not by those around him. By day, labourers and machines move the earth Badii wants put over him; in the coda the same hill holds soldiers at rest and a crew at work, and the man who lay in the grave smokes among them. The listeners from the margins, the longer road and the museum’s preserved dead obey the same law, that a life is chosen in relation to others. The coda keeps the law in meaning and breaks it in medium, a real fracture, and outside it the range is narrow.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
One physics governs: fate is weather, and the weather is fog. Take the two most distant elements, Yamada’s stillness in the manner of the Noh and Mifune’s naturalistic violence. They could have split the film, and they do not, because the law is that the still will moves the thrashing body, and each scene keeps to it. The supernatural and the military obey the same law: the spirit’s prophecy and the messengers’ reports both arrive from outside the frame and are believed, and the forest that walks is at once a prophecy fulfilled and a camouflage of cut branches, given no second explanation. What holds it is the rubric’s own caution, that narrowness is not coherence: no comedy, no common life, no country beyond the forest and the castle, so the law has less to hold together than in a film of wider compass.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the princess with her jewels at a waterfall, lit as an old palace drama, and Tong in a monk’s robe in a hotel room watching television. One law governs both: a self is not one thing, and forms pass into each other without ceremony. The princess becomes the lover of a catfish; the monk becomes a man in a T-shirt, and is also still seated. The ghosts at dinner, the son become an animal, the dream of a future without memory and the doubles obey the same law, and the even tone that gives a ghost and a dialysis bag one weight is that law applied. The strain: the hotel and the dream belong to it more by argument than by feel.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the sergeant at the right, alone, attending to his rifle, and the onlookers above the wall, crowded and curious. One law holds them: everyone in the picture looks elsewhere than at the death, and no one, the painter included, raises his voice. The squad looks along its barrels; the sergeant looks down at his gun; the onlookers lean in; the victims are hidden in smoke. Manner and meaning obey one physics: the even light, the flat values and the absence of a privileged face are the same law as the indifference of the act. What resists is twofold: the scale and placing of the onlookers on the wall, which belong to another, more anecdotal register; and the spatial logic, which breaks to put the muzzles at the victims’ chests. A law held over a moderate range, with two strains.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the record: the riff and its weight, desire as force, light against heavy. Take the two most distant elements, the abstract middle of Whole Lotta Love, rhythm dissolved into noise, and Thank You, an organ-lit song of devotion: they obey the same law more than first appears. Both are about a man undone by love, one in body and one in gratitude, and both use dynamics as their means, collapse and return, the false ending. Ramble On brings Tolkien and acoustic guitar under the same physics of light and heavy. The range is wider than a heavy record’s. What holds it: Moby Dick obeys only the concert, Living Loving Maid only its genre, and Bring It On Home frames the band’s riff with a pastiche of its source.
Nick Drake · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the record without exception: one voice, one guitar, say it and stop. Take the two most distant elements, the piano-coloured title song at the opening and Parasite’s long descent late on side two, or Horn’s wordless line against the four lines of Know. They obey the same law, and the record never breaks its own rule. From the Morning’s turn toward light is the one place the range widens, and the law holds there too. But narrowness is not coherence. The range the law governs is small in instrument, register and tempo, and to hold one law over a narrow range is less than to hold it over a wide one. Within that range the record covers more than its means suggest: an omen and a morning, a descent and a rising, a song of four lines and one of nearly four minutes, a piece with words and one without. The coherence is complete and the span it covers is short but not slight, and that sets the figure.
Lina Bo Bardi · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the brick shed of the 1930s under its timber trusses, and the concrete court tower of 1986 with its unglazed holes. One is found, horizontal, warm and old, the other made, vertical, grey and new. They obey one law: material shown as it is, nothing applied to finish it, everything sized for heavy common use, and red wherever the hand of the new building touches, in frames, lattices, pipes and signs. The same law governs the river’s stones, the hearth, the wooden chairs and the deck. What bends it: the towers’ scale and fortress gesture stand apart from the domestic register of the halls, so that the complex is two moods joined by a street and a law of material.
Built for King Kashyapa I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the strict symmetry of the water gardens on the plain and the wild irregularity of the boulder gardens and the summit, set on the rock’s own contour. One law governs both: build with the site, order the approach, and let the made world yield to the given one as the ascent rises. The symmetrical garden is the human order; the boulder garden is that order meeting nature and bending to it; the summit is nature taken as the king’s seat. That is one physics over a wide range, and the range is the achievement. Held below the top because the later monastic layer reused parts of the site to other ends, the phasing of the gardens is uncertain, and the summit keeps its part in the law only in plan.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the breakfast talk of shares and the expulsion of the creature from the shuttle. One law covers them: the human is cargo in systems that want something else. The crew is first seen as underpaid labour and last as one woman throwing a thing out of an airlock with nobody coming. Ash’s revelation, which could have been a twist from outside, belongs to the same law: the company was inside the crew from the start, as the creature was inside Kane. The tone holds from the first tracking shot to the end credits. Held from the top because the range is narrow, a horror film keeping one register throughout, and narrowness is not coherence; and because the cat, the plot’s hinge twice, sits a little outside the law that governs the rest.
Neil Young · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the record: an unguarded voice facing what can be broken, love, the land, a region’s conscience, and answering with tenderness or with anger. The two most distant elements, Southern Man, five minutes of electric accusation, and Birds, a piano ballad of parting, obey it: both are a young man’s grief at what has been done to what he loves, once in public and once in private. The title song carries the law to its widest range, from a lovers’ record to the fate of the earth, and it holds. Oh, Lonesome Me, slowed to a lament, is brought under it. Two songs obey by temperament rather than condition, and the means are narrow.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of Travis learning from the maid how a rich father walks, and the confession through the mirror. One law governs both: Travis can approach the people he loves only through a performance or a barrier, and the film holds each person at the distance from which they can be seen. The desert and the booth obey it, and so do the Super 8 screen and the walkie-talkies in the pickup, which let father and son talk without facing each other. The barrier is the film’s law for everyone, not for Jane alone. The tone runs from deadpan comedy to grief and never breaks. Held below the top because the Los Angeles household runs by a family drama’s ordinary rules, and Walt and Anne’s claim on the boy is raised under one law and dropped unanswered.
Alice Munro · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the book: a life is shaped by chance and desire more than by intention, and the mind revises what happened so that it can go on. Take the two most distant elements: two schoolgirls forging love letters in a small Ontario town, and an old man watching his wife, in a care home, love someone else. They obey the same law. In each a deception, the girls’ or Grant’s own long one, produces an outcome no one intended, and someone lives inside the result. The law holds across the ages of life, from childhood in “Nettles” to old age in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”, and across the decades the stories cover. Charged: the milieu is narrow, small-town and suburban Ontario and British Columbia, mostly one class and one people, and the tone runs within a cool band. The law is never broken; it is tested over a field narrower than its span of time.
Joseph Paxton · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the Hyde Park building more completely than almost any building of its age: the bay of 24 feet, the pane and the gutter, from the smallest part to the whole plan. The two most distant elements, the flat ridge-and-furrow roofs of the nave and the semicircular vault of the transept over its trees, obey it: the vault is set on the module, three bays wide, and glazed in the same system. The law is tested at Sydenham, where Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Pompeian, Alhambra and Renaissance courts stand inside the iron frame. Read one way, the neutral frame contains all styles and its law is the law of the museum; read another, two physics meet, system and historical representation, and the building does not reconcile them. The range is wide, and that tension holds the figure.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the last dream’s beach, a girl, water and sunlight, and the newsreel of Berlin with the burnt bodies of the Goebbels children. One law governs both: children are what war destroys, and the world is divided between a light that belongs to childhood and a dark that belongs to war, each interrupting the other. The well, the hanged scouts, the Dürer horsemen and Ivan’s game in the church obey it. Kholin and Galtsev are older children in the dark; Masha is the one figure from the light who has strayed into it. The range runs from documentary to dream. The strain lies in the birch wood’s romantic key, which the film does not otherwise use, and in the comedy of rank in the dugout.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: O’Bannion swinging a paddle at a freshman, broad and brutish, and Cynthia, Tony and Mike in a car, talking about the decades and whether the eighties will be better. One law governs both: every young person in the film is negotiating a place in a group and in time, waiting for life to begin while a custom tells them how. The paddling is the custom enforced; the talk is the custom questioned; the pledge is the custom written; Wooderson is the custom outlived. The law reaches the parents and the coach, across a range from farce to elegy that is wide for a comedy. What holds the axis: the farce at points belongs to a cruder film, and the ending gathers the drift into two cadences of release.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bright straw near the base of the field and the name written high on the canvas in the painter’s hand. They obey one law: the name is the hair’s, the hair is the straw, and the straw is the field. Take the gold and the black: one matter in two states, the burning of the one into the other, which is the law of the whole. Nothing brings in a second physics: no figure, no architecture, no perspective space beyond the field, no colour outside straw, earth, grey and black. What holds the axis is the size of the territory, one motif and one turn, for narrowness is not coherence. The range runs from material to word and from gold to ash, wider than it looks, and the law holds across it.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dinner at the Millses’, comic and warm, the apartment shaking each time the train passes, and the execution in the desert under the pylons. One law governs them: the city’s indifference has an architect, and everything ordinary is material for him. The apartment was cheap because of the train; the cheapness and the warmth are what the killer will use. The rain, the library, the photographs and the box obey the same law: the world is a design, and the detectives read it too late. The law strains in two places. The killer’s foresight exceeds what any man could arrange, so the design leans on the author’s luck; and the investigation runs on genre logic while the ending runs on allegory. The range is narrower than it looks: one week, one city, one scheme.
Almohad builders, under Abd al-Mu'min and Yaqub al-Mansur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the minaret’s upper face, open and richly arcaded, and the long plain arcades of the hall’s outer aisles. They obey one law. Ornament is drawn from structure, the arch, its lobes, the net of lozenges that intersecting arches make, and it is spent by rank: most at the top of the tower and at the qibla end of the hall, least in the ordinary bays. The same few motifs serve tower and hall, and the tower’s four faces are four answers to one rule. The law holds across the whole. What holds it: the range is narrow, one register, grave and restrained, and the two physical systems, a tower and a hypostyle, are joined by that law rather than by any structure that binds them. Narrowness is not coherence.
Neutral Milk Hotel · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the body and the dead held in one ecstatic grief, sung too close and too loud. The two most distant elements obey it. The Fool is a slow brass dirge without a word; Holland, 1945 is fuzz-punk at speed; both are laments, one grave and one in a rush, and both use the same brass. The King of Carrot Flowers, a family’s ruin seen by a child, and Two-Headed Boy, Pt. Two, a voice letting a dead girl go, obey the same law of love spoken past what it can bear. The range is fair: folk song, waltz, march, drone, punk, lament. The law strains in two places: the drones of Communist Daughter and the untitled piece obey it as atmosphere more than statement, and the shouted Christ of the opening sits ironically against the later sincerity.
Winslow Homer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the canvas: the indifference of the sea and the weather to the man, under one light and one sky. Take the two most distant elements, the jaws in the foreground and the ship at the horizon. They obey the same physics and the same logic of chance, death and deliverance as equal possibilities at different distances. The range is moderate: from close physical terror to far weather, from the realism of the hull to the near emblem of the spout. One point blurs the law: the red in the water, read by some as blood and by others as cane or as colour, where what the picture means by it is not settled by the picture.
Jean-Pierre Melville · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs: procedure in place of desire, for the killer and the police alike. Take the two most distant elements, Jef’s visit to Jane, where he asks for an alibi and nothing else, and the superintendent directing the hunt in the Métro from a map. Each is a method applied to a person, and neither side has anything else. The bird obeys the same law, reacting to intrusion as Jef does, and the ending is the law’s last application, a man using the police’s method to end his own life. But the range is narrow: the register is held at one temperature from the first shot to the last, and narrowness is not coherence. Small strains hold it too: the coincidences of the third movement follow a looser law than the procedures they serve.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Cho’s flying kick into a suspect, played for laughs in the station basement, and the schoolgirl’s body under a tree with the bandage on her back. One law governs both: men who cannot know substitute force for knowledge, and the violence that is comic in the station is the same blindness that leaves the girl unprotected. The comedy of the bathhouse and the shaman obeys the law that breaks Seo at the tunnel. The range is wide, from slapstick to rape and murder, and the film holds it in one physics. The strain is real: in places the comedy runs on its own momentum, in the girlfriend’s scenes and some of the station business, and the epilogue’s move to 2003 is a change of register that the body of the film prepares only through the prologue.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the turbaned head at the upper left, turned in profile, and the folded foot and the props at the lower right. One law holds them: everything is contour and smooth surface, edges closed, light even, cold blues and warm whites set side by side; the curtain falls in the same long curves as the back, and the feathers of the fan repeat the figure’s lines. The distortion of the body obeys the picture’s law. One seam remains: the accessories are painted to a precise descriptive truth, every pearl and fringe correct, while the body is allowed to break the truth of anatomy, and the two standards sit side by side unreconciled. The range is narrow, one figure, one couch, one moment, one register, and narrowness is not coherence. The law is held completely over a small territory.
Thomas Cole · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the storm on the wild crest at the upper left and the smoke rising from a clearing on the plain at the lower right. One law governs them: the land is ranked along a single line from the untouched to the used, and weather, light, vegetation and human sign are all sorted by it. The river obeys it by belonging to both halves; the painter obeys it by sitting on one side and looking across. Nothing in the picture contradicts the law, and the range it covers is wide for one view: weather, wild and cultivated, near and far, the maker and his ground. Held below the top: the law is a binary, and a binary once grasped is complete. The coherence is clear more than rich.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stone bench at the friars’ feet and the lantern over the dome. They obey one law. The same grey order carries at one height from the seat to the springing of the dome, and the axis that runs from the cloister through the door to the altar passes through the centre of the dome. Circle and square govern everything inside, from the roundels to the pendentives to the dome, and the coloured terracotta keeps to the frames the stone gives it. The law bends twice: in the corners, where the order folds to fit; and at the front, where the portico speaks a richer and heavier dialect of columns, colour and attic than the room. Held below the top because the range is narrow, one room in one register, and narrowness is not coherence.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the tallest open shell on the lagoon side and the planted Kanak path on the ground. They obey one law, that of a culture’s settlement along a way, its houses standing in planted ground; the walk links the villages as the path links its stages, and timber, plant and wind are the common matter. The three heights and the varied spacing of the slats are one system in variation. What holds the axis: the low range is governed by a different law, that of a modern institution’s rooms, glazed and serviced, and it carries the cases as a plinth carries objects; the join of the two is resolved in plan but felt in use. The range covered is moderate, and narrowness is not coherence.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the street fighting in the Kraków square, police and demonstrators in the public history of 1990, and the puppet theatre in a French school. One law governs both: beneath events runs a correspondence that the people inside them only feel. Weronika crosses the riot to see her double, and the history passes her by; the puppet show is the same law staged, a made life dying and rising before a woman who has just survived a death she does not know. Ball, glass, string and gesture obey it, and the light is one light in two countries. The strain is in the clue-trail, which follows a thriller’s law of cause and pursuit rather than the film’s law of intuition, and in the touches of the old woman crossing outside a window, which are the director’s signature as much as the film’s. The range is moderate: two lives, two countries, art and death.
Mastodon · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: riffs in irregular metre that turn without warning, drums leading as a voice, and weight as the element everything moves through. Take the most distant elements. The barked sprint of I Am Ahab and the slow climb and release of Hearts Alive obey it; so do the sludge of Aqua Dementia and the country-picked figure inside Megalodon, which is no joke dropped in but is played in the same tuning and metre logic and resolves back into the weight it interrupted. Joseph Merrick’s quieter register keeps the band’s harmonic language. What holds the figure is range: tempo and density vary widely, timbre and register less, and the vocal law, a roar, rarely changes.
Paolo Uccello · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
One law, geometric order imposed on tumult, governs the foreground of all three panels: armour as faceted solid, horse as sphere and cylinder, lance as line, death as orthogonal. Take the two most distant elements, the foreground stage and the background hills. The hills are built on a different plan, steeply tilted and dotted with small hunts and running figures, closer to the tapestry and the Gothic landscape than to the measured box. One can read this as law, a near stage of measured space against a far world of pattern, which is the opposition the work is about, and that reading is credited in part. But it is also simply a gap: the perspective stops at the hedge. Across the three panels the law holds, the same armies, the same palette of reds, golds and blackened silver, the same frieze: wide range in subject, a single manner, one real seam.
Antonín Dvořák · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the Largo’s D flat stillness and the finale’s E minor march. One law governs them: the pentatonic and modal melodic idiom, the horn theme that recurs in both, and the chorale that leads from the first movement’s E to the Largo’s D flat. The scherzo’s drones and the first movement’s flute theme in G minor obey the same melodic physics. The range is moderate: a forty-minute symphony with one dominant colour, open-air and nostalgic. The tension is in the finale’s coda, where themes of every movement are brought together; the joins there are by juxtaposition, and the law holds by idiom and recall more than by derivation. Narrowness is not coherence, and part of this work’s coherence is the coherence of a consistent idiom.
George Saunders · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: consciousness is made of language it did not choose, and a moral act is a break in that language that the language cannot account for. Take the two most distant elements, the prison laboratory of “Escape from Spiderhead”, a speculative world of administered emotion, and the realist winter morning of “Tenth of December”. They obey the same law: Jeff and Eber each find, against the voices that run them, the protocol and the rehearsed deathbed speeches, one act that is theirs, and it is an act for another person. The diarist, who never breaks his language, confirms the law by failing it. The range is wide for a story collection, from the speculative to the domestic. Held where it is because the law is applied to each story somewhat separately, and the book is unsure in places whether its world is satirical exaggeration or the present plainly seen.
Greek (Classical) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: A’s turned head with its parted mouth, and B’s lowered, quieter head; the young man in force and the older man at rest. They obey one law: the body balanced on one leg and turned toward an event outside the figure, with the same side carrying the weight and the same direction of gaze. The range runs from tension to repose and from youth to maturity, and the law holds across it. Within each figure the physics is entirely consistent: every muscle answers the distribution of weight. Held below the top on two counts. Narrowness: two standing men in one stance is a narrow range, and narrowness is not coherence. And the law that unites the pair is the law of a period, possibly honoured by two hands at two dates, rather than a law the work set for itself.
The National · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the album: pressure held under a calm surface, private shelter set against a public world, in a sound that withholds release. The two most distant elements obey it. Fake Empire, the record’s public statement, and Gospel, its most private, share the same hush, the same low voice and the same refusal to rise until the end. Squalor Victoria, the loudest and most driven track, is still pressure held: the drums push and the voice does not break. The range runs from party to bedroom, office to kitchen, drive to hush, and the law is unbroken across it. What holds the figure is that the range is narrow in tempo, register and subject. Nothing breaks the law; little strains it.
Maqsud Kashani (named in the inscription) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the lamps near the ends of the field and the outer guard stripe of the border. They obey one law. Every element is drawn from one vocabulary of palmette, lotus, cloud band and arabesque, laid out on one mirrored grid. The breaks in the symmetry, the unequal lamps and the single inscription, obey the law of orientation the carpet sets for itself, that it is entered from one end, so they confirm the law rather than break it. What holds the axis is the range. All of it is ornament, narrow in kind, and narrowness is not coherence.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the flat rings of red, yellow and blue, a sign without depth or person, and the four faces, bodies in three dimensions, taken from a life. They obey one law: everything in the work is given, not invented. The target is a public design; the faces are cast, not modelled; the newsprint is found text; even the brushwork is the given vocabulary of the school the work answers. Each given thing is then handled, and the handling makes it a work. The range across that law is real, from emblem to body, flat to solid, public to intimate. What resists is the charge the faces carry, a psychological weight the target refuses, so that the two halves can read as two physics, the sign and the uncanny. The pairing is the work’s argument and holds it, though not for every viewer.
William Hogarth · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the miser father’s dark, hoarding house in the first scene and the bright, crowded madhouse in the eighth. One law holds them: everything in this world is governed by money and display, and every room is a market where the man is weighed. The hoard becomes the levee, the levee the tavern, the tavern the debt, the debt the marriage, the marriage the table, the table the prison, the prison the madhouse; and the ladies who come to Bedlam to look close the circuit of spectacle the levee opened. Sarah is the one figure outside the law, who gives and asks nothing, and her place at the edge is consistent: the law is shown by its exception. Held below the top because some detail obeys the law of the joke rather than the work.
Bob Rafelson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Bobby on the freeway truck, playing to a stalled traffic jam, broad and joyful comedy; and Bobby in the field before his mute father, weeping. One law governs both: he performs where it cannot reach anyone, and leaves before it can, and every encounter ends with his departure. The truck carries him away playing; the diner ends with him thrown out; the island ends with Catherine’s refusal; the field ends in a confession to no listener; the gas station ends with the truck going north. The range is wide for a small film, from bowling-alley comedy to chamber drama in a house of musicians. The strain is in the satire: Samia and Palm are played broader than the law quite governs.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bare table at the lower left and the man’s cropped profile at the right edge. They obey one law, that everything is placed and coloured as separation; each is an edge of the woman’s solitude, one before her and one beside her. The mirror closes the room behind on the same law, and the dulled palette keeps it in the colour. Nothing in the canvas contradicts it. Held where it is because narrowness is not coherence: the range covered is one room, one hour, one relation and one register, and a coherence that is complete is complete here over a small span.
Henry Moore · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the small turned head at one end, nearly a sign, and the opened mass of the raised legs at the other, nearly a landscape. They obey one law: every part of the body is a mass that is also a terrain, shaped by the same curves, swelling and hollowing in the same rhythm, and every void belongs to the figure as much as the stone does. No part is anatomy only and none landscape only, and nothing departs from the law; the bedding of the stone runs with it. Held because narrowness is not coherence: one figure, one pose, one stone and one register of calm are a small territory, smaller than a work that holds many figures or many moods under one physics. Within it the law is total.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bowl’s concave rim open to the sky and the towers’ sheer vertical slabs. One law governs both: pure white closed volumes set against a single horizontal, each defined by one curvature or one straightness, opposed in pairs, convex and concave, vertical and horizontal, the solid towers and the open terrace, and held in balance across the axis. The law reaches the pools that double the towers and the ramp that joins the terrace to the ground, and it is visible from every distance. What bends it: it is a narrow law, five figures on a plane, and narrowness is not coherence; inside, the plenaries, the foyers and the offices follow the ordinary laws of their uses.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the fresh head in full bloom with its clean petals, and the bald seed head with its ragged fringe. They obey one law: each is the same object at a different hour, painted in the same key, with the same contour and the same weight of paint. Take the wall and the vase: different substances, one colour, told apart by tone and touch, never by a change of physics. The blue line and the signature are the one exception, and the same law governs them, as the complement that lets the yellow be read. Nothing contradicts. But narrowness is not coherence: the range is one vase, one table, one wall and one colour, and the law governs that narrow field completely. The figure is held for the size of the field.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the blurred rose haze of the left centre and the sharp black lines of the right. They obey one law, and the law is the painter’s: colour and line as forces with an inner sound, set in counterpoint, contrast as the structure rather than its disturbance. The soft and the hard are the two voices of one event, and the diagonals between them are the law in motion. The range is wide for one field: warm and cool, wash and line, dissolution and violence, the near-empty and the crowded. Two things resist. The vestiges of depiction the literature reads, the waves and the oars, belong to an older law, the picture of a thing, and sit in the field as a second physics half erased; and at the densest crossings counterpoint gives way to noise. Narrowness is not the limit here; residue is.
Built for Yajnavaraha · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the laterite enclosure of the outer court and the carved pediment of Kailasa. They obey one law, a progression from plain to rich and coarse to fine as one moves in toward the god. The same red stone, the same idiom of flame-edged frame and dense foliate ground, and the same close scale run from the gopuras to the central cella, and the concentric order holds from moat to sanctuary. The work of the eleventh-century campaigns keeps the law. What holds the axis at 8.4 is the range covered: this is one register held over a small work, and narrowness is not coherence.
Geoffrey Bawa · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
One law: the pavilion under the pitched roof, set on a base and opened by a verandah, governs the whole from the smallest outbuilding to the chamber. Take the two most distant elements: the causeway’s arrival at the water’s edge and the chamber at the heart of the cluster. Both obey the same order of shade, roof and column, and the step in scale from one to the other is continuous. The range is wide, landscape, water, approach, institution and ceremony, and the law holds across it. The tensions: the sealed, cooled chamber breaks the verandah logic on which the rest depends, and the copper roof language, taken from domestic and royal timber building, sits on a concrete frame whose own nature it hides. These are tensions within a coherent system, not contradictions.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the executives haggling over Baxter’s calendar like men booking a squash court, and Fran unconscious in his bed on Christmas Eve. One law governs both: everything is lent, borrowed, rented or exchanged, keys, apartments, women, a hundred-dollar bill as a Christmas present, a promotion for a key. The only acts outside the law are the ones that refuse an exchange: the doctor’s care, Baxter handing back the washroom key, Fran’s flight from the restaurant. The neighbours’ comedy, the brother-in-law’s punch and the gin rummy obey the same law, so the range from farce to near death is very wide and held. The strain: the law relaxes in the comic set pieces, where broadness serves the laugh, and the resolution comes by a secretary’s revenge, from outside Baxter’s own choice.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole: consequence, which no one escapes and no one controls, and which arrives whether or not anyone is there to see it. Take the two most distant elements, the coin toss at the gas station and Bell’s dream of his father. Both are about what comes and who goes before it. Chigurh’s law, the word kept and the path completed, is the book’s law stated by its worst man, and Bell at the end accepts the same law as its best. The range is a chase and a lament, wide in tone, and the book never contradicts itself. Charged: narrowness is not coherence, and the coherence here is won partly by narrowness, one region, one year, one pattern of pursuit.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the circuit board, an object of the 1980s, and the stepped pyramid, a form of the third millennium before Christ. They obey one law. Everything on the canvas is a remnant set in burnt ground and joined by one line, and the board is put at the apex, where the pyramid’s own logic points, so that the newest object takes the oldest form’s highest place rather than contradicting it. The range is wide, five millennia and the sacred against the technical, and nothing breaks the law of fragment and connection. Held because the junction is made by placement and by wire more than by one physics of making: board and shards are found objects in a painted world, and the two kinds of making meet at a seam the work shows rather than closes.
Vladimir Shukhov · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Does one physics govern the whole? Entirely. From the foundation ring to the top platform every part obeys one law, the ruled hyperboloid of straight members held by rings, repeated at six scales and stacked. The two most distant elements, the broad base section planted on the ground and the narrow top section carrying the antenna, are the same idea at different radii, and the joints between sections, where one hyperboloid’s top ring meets the next one’s base, are resolved in the same terms. Nothing is foreign to the law. But narrowness is not coherence: the range governed is one structural idea in one material for one purpose, with no interior, no programme and no setting brought under it.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the world goes on past a man, indifferent, and the uncanny belongs to it as plainly as the trees and the trains. Take the two most distant elements: the attempt on the Chinese labourer on the trestle in 1917, historical violence told as fact, and the wolf-girl at the cabin decades later, a thing that may be grief’s invention. They obey the same law in the same voice: each is told without comment, each passes, each leaves Grainier with something he cannot say. The fire obeys it too, a catastrophe that comes, takes everything and passes, while the century goes on. The range is wide for so short a book, from the frontier of the 1890s to the America of the late 1960s, from labour to haunting. Charged: the closing witness stands outside the law of a single life, and the book does not wholly prepare the turn; a narrow consciousness keeps the range below its span.
Ovid · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs: the teacher’s voice and its premise that love is an art to be learned and practised. Take the two farthest elements, Icarus falling to the sea while his father calls his name, and the instruction on which arm to show when combing one’s hair. They obey the same physics, because the pathos too is made a lesson and the teacher never leaves the frame: Procris dies, and a few dozen lines later the poem closes on how women should behave in bed. The range, myth, city, religion, war and grooming, is wide and held by one voice. Charged: the wobble at the start of Book 3, where the teacher of men turns traitor to his pupils with only a joke for reason, and Procris, whose near-straight pathos strains the law. Narrowness is not coherence, and part of this coherence is one premise’s narrowness.
Buster Keaton · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the boy in the parlour, too shy to hold the girl’s hand, and the detective on the handlebars of a driverless motorcycle crossing open country. One law governs both: a man whose wishes outrun his competence, in a world indifferent to him, survives by exact adjustment to its mechanics. The waking boy is defeated by social mechanism, the planted ticket and the price of candy; the dream detective is saved by physical mechanism, each catastrophe arriving just as it is needed. The last shot joins the two laws: the screen’s mechanism of romance meets a man who cannot follow the cut. The range is wide for a comedy of 45 minutes. The strain: the dream’s middle runs on a looser law, where any impossibility is permitted, and the girl’s waking detection sits outside both laws, a convenience of plot.
Harappan builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a modest house’s bathing floor in the Lower Town and the Great Bath on the western mound. They obey one law: the same brick at the same ratio, the same care to seal a floor, the same drain carrying water out to a public channel, the same orientation to the cardinal points. The law runs from a single room to the city, and across centuries of rebuilding that kept the lines. That is coherence across a wide range, not narrowness. Held at 8.4 because the law is chiefly one of material and water: it does not visibly govern the Lower Town’s blocks, irregular in size, into a single designed figure, or reach upward into elevation; the range it governs is wide in extent but narrower in kind.
Mughal, under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs from the bottom step to the finial: red sandstone carrying white marble, the cusped arch, strict bilateral symmetry about the qibla axis, and the domed pavilion as the crowning unit of gate, corner and minaret alike. Take the two most distant elements, the rough public stairs at the street and the inlaid marble panels over the arch of the hall: they belong to one graded order of ascent from the common to the sacred. The range is wide, from urban platform to sanctuary, and the law holds across it. What bends it: some ornament on the gates and corner pavilions is more conventional than necessary, and the shallow hall stands as a screen against the court more than as its culmination.
Court of Benin · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the still, inward face of a woman, and the tiny bearded heads of foreign traders on her crown. One law holds them. Everything on the object is ordered by the court’s cosmology, in which the king’s power comes from the land and from Olokun’s sea, and the mother stands as its guardian. The Portuguese obey the same law as the mudfish; the ivory obeys it as the carving does; the iron marks place her in the same order of rank. Nothing on the object contradicts the law or stands outside it, and the range is wider than the size suggests, from a face to a picture of the world, from Edo to Lisbon. But it is a small territory of form, one face and its frame, and narrowness is not coherence.
Massive Attack · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the full string section and Nelson’s voice in Unfinished Sympathy, and the dub-weighted crew rap of Five Man Army. One law governs both: a slowed break, a deep low end, space around the voice, a source borrowed and remade. The same law takes in a 1974 soul cover, Horace Andy’s reggae tenor, a jazz-funk bassline and a hymn. The range is wide, soul, rap, reggae, string elegy, and the law holds across it, which is the record’s chief achievement. What holds the figure: the law is a sound more than a structure, a few tracks, Be Thankful above all, obey it by treatment rather than by necessity, and the coherence is that of a producer’s ear, strong and a little narrow.
Ansel Adams · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the moon, high in a black sky, light from the cosmos; and the crosses at the foot, light falling on the human dead. They obey one law. The picture is made of lit things in a darkening field, each element a light against dark, ordered in horizontal bands that rise from village to range to cloud to sky. The cloud bank and the snow range carry the same law between the poles, catching the last sun as the crosses do, and even the dark middle ground serves it as the interval between the lights. The range is wide in kind, cosmic and human, far and near, sacred sign and natural body. Held below the top because the law, once seen, governs one tableau of four bands.
John Cage · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the wind outside the hall at Woodstock and a listener’s angry exit, or a cough and the performer’s closing of the lid. One law governs them all: whatever sounds within the frame is the work and is heard as such. The range is, literally, every possible sound, and the law holds without exception. That is wide coherence, and the axis rewards range. What holds it below the elder pages is that the law is satisfied without resistance. No element strains against the frame and is brought under it, as the march in Beethoven’s Ninth is brought under its key plan. A law that admits everything is total, but it is never under pressure.
René Magritte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pipe, an illusion of a solid thing, and the sentence, a line of script. They obey one law, and the law is the picture’s argument: both are paint on one ground, both are signs, and neither is what it shows. The handling is one handling throughout, the same clean, impersonal finish for object and letters, and the plain ground gives them one space that is no space. There is no second rule anywhere in the field, no passage painted otherwise, no element that steps outside the claim. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is about as narrow as a picture allows: two elements, one tone of making, one idea. The law holds without strain because it is asked to govern almost nothing.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs: American culture is a fusion, and its truest art turns hard experience into form without denying either; the vernacular is the ground of that art. Take the two most distant pieces, “The Way It Is”, a report from wartime Harlem in 1942, and “On Bird, Bird-Watching and Jazz”, of 1962; or the review of Myrdal and the essay on Mahalia Jackson. They obey the same law: the people who suffer also make, and the making is the truth of them. The range is wide, fiction, film, jazz, gospel, sociology and autobiography, and the law holds across it. Charged: the earliest piece is in a Marxist register Ellison later left, and the book does not fully reconcile its early and late voices, though the introduction admits the change. The law holds there with strain.
Sei Shōnagon · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole: everything that enters the book is judged, and judged by the same eye. Take the two most distant elements: a list of the names of rivers, and the last reminiscences of the Empress in her decline. One law holds them, the law of what is fitting and what delights, applied to a place-name for its poetic echo and to a mistress for her grace. The range of tone is wide, from the farce of the pedantic official whose gate was too narrow for the carriages to the yamabuki petal, and the voice never breaks its rule; even the silence about the fall obeys it, since ruin is not “okashi” and is not admitted. Held off the top: the law is a taste rather than a vision, and narrowness of class is part of its coherence.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the cold geometry of steel and glass, and the rotting head in its blood, the most formless thing in the case. They obey one law, the containment of a cycle. The geometry holds the process so that it can be seen; the rot is the process. Every other element obeys it: the box gives life into the case, the partition orders its passage, the head feeds it, the killer ends it, the glass keeps the viewer outside it. Nothing serves another purpose and nothing contradicts the law, not even the appliance, whose blue light is the one artificial colour in the case and death’s instrument. The range between geometry and putrefaction is wide. Held below the top because the territory is one case and one cycle, and narrowness is not coherence.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the magazine interview of the first episode, a comedy of self-satisfaction, the couple performing their happiness for a journalist and a photographer; and the beating on the office floor in the fifth. One law governs both: what these two say to each other is always less than what they feel, and the pressure of the unsaid comes out sideways, as complacency in the first and as violence in the second. The camera obeys the same law, holding the face while the words fail. The range is wide for a chamber work, from the comedy of manners at the dinner with Peter and Katarina through the flat procedure of the divorce papers to the tenderness of the last night, but it is a chamber work’s range. And the law strains at two points: the closing tenderness has been read as softer than the law allows, and the second episode’s office scenes lean towards illustration.
Honoré Daumier · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the old woman, lit and monumental at the front, and the dim heads in top hats at the back. One law holds them: every figure in the carriage is enclosed in itself, pressed into the same box, carried by the same machine, and ranked by the light and by finish. The crowd’s anonymity and the substance of the three are one physics, attention falling off with distance; even the sleeping boy, the one figure turned away, obeys it, his sleep the furthest point of withdrawal. Nothing in the picture contradicts the law, and no figure acts or performs. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: one compartment, one register of fatigue and endurance, governed completely over a small range.
Ana Mendieta · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the body itself under flowers in a stone tomb in Oaxaca in 1973, and an empty outline of burned gunpowder in an Iowa field years later. They obey one law: a woman’s figure, at her own scale, set into the ground and given to time. Every piece follows it, across flowers, mud, sand, water, blood, fire and smoke, across two countries and eight years, with the body present or only its absence. The shift from presence in the tomb to absence in the outline reads as a development of the law, not a break in it. The range of material is wide and the law never bends. Held below the top because the range is of material and site more than of kind: one figure, many grounds, and the narrowness of the motif does part of the work of the coherence.
Elena Ferrante · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs: everything is weighed on Elena’s scale of Lila, and the violence of the quarter governs every relation, from the dolls to the wedding. Take the two most distant elements: the fairy tale of the ogre in the first part, and the commerce of shoes, groceries and the Solaras’ car in the second. They obey the same law of power, money and the girls’ measurement of each other, and the one turns into the other without a break. The tone never breaks either: the plain, rapid voice holds from the cellar stair to the wedding. The range is moderate, one quarter, one decade and one voice, and that holds the figure short of the high eights.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the lowered face, the most intimate passage in the picture, and the stair treads, inert architecture. They obey one law: the same soft passage of the brush, the same photographic light, the same remove. Every part of the field stands at one distance from the viewer, and the law reaches past the surface to the relation of subject and means: wife, photograph and paint are held at a single distance, near and unreachable together. The colour keeps the law, the warm body against the cool ground, with no passage in another key. Nothing resists. What holds the axis is that the range is narrow, one figure, one setting, one light and one procedure, and narrowness is not coherence: the coherence achieved is that of a small field.
Antonio Vivaldi · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the festive E major ritornello of Spring and the F minor chattering of Winter, or the sleepers of Autumn and the Summer storm. One law governs them all: the season is the ritornello and the event is the episode, and the sonnet’s letter names each event in the parts. Every concerto keeps the plan of fast, slow, fast, and every slow movement is a scene of rest, sleep or shelter between scenes of action. The range is fairly wide: pastoral, labour, feast, hunt, fear, cold and comfort. The law holds in the plan and the programme more than in the material: the four share no theme and no tonal plan.
Russian carpenters · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the log, the octagon, the barrel gable, the dome and the shingle, repeated and diminished. Take the two most distant elements, the low refectory at the west, broad and earthbound, and the crowning dome at some 37 metres. They obey the same law: horizontal logs, the same notching, the same gable and the same silvered surface, the refectory the root from which the mass climbs. One covering of shingle runs over every dome and gable. The range is of degree, from ground to crown, within a single register. What breaks the law is the interior: the painted ceiling and the iconostasis belong to another order, an enclosed, coloured and pictorial world under a lid.
Georgia O'Keeffe · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pale, almost weightless curl of an upper petal at the top edge, and the black depth at the core. They obey one law: tone graded continuously across folded planes, no line drawn and no mark shown, the light coming from nowhere in particular and the dark arising from the fold itself. The law holds at every point of the canvas. There is no second kind of mark and no break of register between abstraction and description. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is small: one flower, one range of tones from pale to black, one way of making a form. Within it the range from weightless to abyssal is wide and the law holds across it. The figure is held for the size of the territory.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the white margin, bare and exact, and the grey field, all hand and movement. They obey one law: the canvas is an object divided once, its fields bounded and the bound stated. The margin states the bound at the edge; the edge between black and grey states it inside; the grey’s brushing is the one freedom the law allows, and it stays inside its field. Across the series the law never breaks: no canvas adds a third field, a curve or a colour. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is very small: two colours, one direction, one division. Within it the range, from flat black to moving grey, from a high edge to a low, is real and held.
Denys Lasdun · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the long horizontal terrace on the river front and the dim interior of the studio at the back. One law governs both: board-marked concrete, horizontal strata, and the vertical mass set against them. The law holds from the river walk to the auditorium walls, from the towers to the foyer balustrades, from the Lyttelton’s front to the Olivier’s fan, which repeats on plan the same layered rising of floors the terraces show in section. The range is wide: three kinds of theatre, public foyers, terraces and a production plant obey one physics. What holds the axis: the law comes near to monotony in places, and narrowness is not coherence; and the hexagonal geometry of the Olivier meets the orthogonal strata uneasily in the planning between them, which is where the labyrinth arises.
Nok · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a near life-size head with a towering coiffure, and a small figure of an animal or a body bowed by sickness. They obey one law. The eye is cut the same way; the head is the seat of the being; the surface is treated with the same economy of planes and incisions; adornment and posture place each figure in one order of status and attention. The law holds across a wide area of central Nigeria and over many centuries, which is range and not narrowness. Held at 8.4 because the range of subject is still limited, chiefly the adorned human figure, and because the unity is a convention’s, kept by repetition as much as by a governing idea. Level with the Olmec Colossal Heads and the Terracotta Army.
The Walkmen · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
One law holds the record: reverb, rolling drums, a voice at strain, and the feeling of a man at the edge of a change. Take the two most distant elements, the drunken swing of Dónde Está la Playa and the brass hymn of Red Moon, or the driven elation of In the New Year and the hushed slow songs that follow: they obey the same physics, the same room and the same voice, and nothing contradicts. The law binds every part tightly, from the bar to the hymn, from elation to quiet. What holds the figure is the span it covers: one tempo band and one palette, and the record seldom tests its law against anything far from it, so some of the coherence is narrowness.
John Huston · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Spade grinning as he slaps Cairo and takes his gun, and Spade’s face as the elevator takes Brigid down. One law governs both: every person is a player in a bargain, and Spade’s mastery is that he plays the game better than anyone while declining to be owned by it. The comedy of Cairo’s perfume, Gutman’s courtliness and Wilmer’s humiliation, disarmed by Spade and then handed over by his own master as the “fall guy”, obeys the same law as Archer’s death and Brigid’s arrest, and the law reaches the bird itself, a bargain counterfeited. The range runs from drawing-room comedy to murder and renunciation, wider than the genre usually holds, and the tone never breaks. What holds the axis: the law governs a few people in a few rooms, and Dundy’s police strain it, belonging to a plainer picture.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of the corset, Mathieu fumbling at knotted laces in the dark, and the explosion that ends the film. One law governs both: desire and violence are endlessly deferred and then discharged without warning, and the comfortable go on talking through both. The two actresses obey it, whichever is in the frame: the refusal is the same refusal, and Mathieu’s response is the same. The bucket obeys it, opening and closing the account; the bombings, the radio bulletins and the compartment’s polite audience belong to the same physics of distraction. What holds the axis here is range and strain: comedy of manners to sudden violence in a narrow social world, the sack and some surreal intrusions sitting loosely, and the frame’s listeners a convenience more than a law.
John Constable · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark, close wall of the cottage at the left, lit by light thrown up from the water, and the far sunlit meadow under the right-hand sky. They obey one law: one hour, one sun from the right, one atmosphere of moisture, and every element is rendered as how it takes that light. The cart in the water, the smoke from the chimney, the haymakers in the distance and the clouds are governed by one weather. Nothing contradicts it; even the inherited framing masses at the sides are painted as shade, not as stage wings. But narrowness is not coherence. The range held is one valley at one hour, house to meadow and water to sky, a span the law covers completely without being tested by extremes.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the back flag’s outer margin of stripes, a band of red and white that is barely a flag at all, and the front flag’s canton, whole and nearest the eye. They obey one law: the flag, given, coincident with its support, laid in wax by one touch, at three sizes. Nothing on the object breaks it. There is no field, no figure, no second kind of image, no mark that is not the flag’s. The relief obeys the same law, since each projecting edge is a flag’s edge, and the reversed perspective is the law carried out into the room. Held because narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one emblem at three scales, and its widest range, from a margin of stripes to a whole canton, is real but small.
Tokugawa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gilt Karamon at the entry, loud with carving and colour, and the Shiroshoin at the inner end, small and quiet. They obey one law, the law of rank and approach: display diminishes as intimacy increases, and the loudest surface is the one seen by the man of lowest admission. The same law places the paintings (tigers outside, the pine at audience, quieter rooms within), the floors (the upper floor raised, the corridors lower), the garden, composed for the halls of audience and the visiting emperor, and the walls, outermost display of all. The range runs from fortification to private chamber. What bends the law lies outside the unit or its period.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the swordsman in the Cairo market, flourishing his blade until Jones shoots him with a shrug, and the opening of the Ark, where fire from heaven melts the faces of the men who presumed to look. One law governs both: every flourish of human power is undone by something simpler and stronger, a pistol, a boulder, a sunbeam, a snake, God. The comedy and the terror obey it alike, and the film plants its supernatural end from the lecture on, in the illustrated Bible, the headpiece branded into Toht’s palm and the Ark burning the swastika from its crate, so that the last act fulfils the law rather than changing genre. The range is wide. What holds the figure: the submarine passage suspends the physical law the rest obeys with care, and the tone between the brutal, the propeller at the flying wing, and the jaunty is sometimes uneven.
David Mackenzie · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the old waitress at the steakhouse, asking the Rangers “What don’t you want?” in broad comedy, and Tanner dying on the ridge after killing Alberto. One law governs both: a country stripped of what it had, where the old live on habit and the young leave, and where everything is taken from someone who took it from someone else. The waitress who keeps the robbers’ tip because it pays her rent, the cowboy who says no one young will do this work, the citizens who draw on robbers, the casino and the bank all obey it. It reaches the brothers and the Rangers as pairs, and the end, where the bank’s own trust holds the land. The strain: the comedy sometimes plays as comedy alone, and the ambiguous close eases the law’s verdict.
Talk Talk · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: longing for renewal, carried by space and patience, set against comforts that are taught and do not hold. The two most distant elements obey it. Life’s What You Make It, a hard, repetitive pop song, and April 5th, a near-silent pastoral, are the same claim seen from two sides: the slogan that does not save, and the waiting that might. The range runs from pop single and soul-inflected rock to pastoral, hymn and something near gospel. The law strains at Give It Up and I Don’t Believe in You, where the band’s earlier pop manners return and the record obeys its law by lyric and timbre more than by form. No break; two soft places.
Jane Campion · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the castrating of bulls at the start, broad daylight, men’s work, Phil’s knife and bare hands; and the last scene, Peter at his window in a quiet house, watching George and Rose embrace below, with gloves and a rope under his bed. One law governs both: power belongs to whoever can handle the body without flinching, and the hand that cuts is the one that rules. Phil’s hands without gloves and Peter’s hands in gloves are the same law turned. The landscape, the house, the piano, the rabbit and the paper flowers lit for Phil’s cigarette all obey it. The strain is in the Governor’s dinner, a social comedy in a slightly different key, and in Rose, whose suffering is shown in a register of melodrama the rest of the film avoids.
Gordon Bunshaft (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the long horizontal block lifted over the ground at one storey, and the vertical slab rising from it. One law governs both: thin planes of glass in a stainless grid, set at right angles, every volume read as a light box held off the ground or off the block below. The same law runs from the court open to the sky to the slab’s flat top, and from the lobby’s glass to the spandrels of the highest floor; horizontal and vertical are one proposition stated twice. The range is narrow by intention, one material language and one grid, and narrowness is not coherence: the building is coherent because it is spare, and cannot be credited with holding wide contrast under one law. The altered ground floor and court bend it slightly.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the face, the one point of feeling, and the ground behind the figure, the least charged area of the field. They obey one law: everything is a photograph’s grey, translated by hand, and everything is softened by the same pass of the brush, so the uncle’s face is given no more focus than what stands behind him. That equality is the work’s ethic and its physics, and nothing breaks it: no colour, no detail sharpened for emphasis, no mark that belongs to the painter rather than to the method. The law also holds across the gap between a private snapshot and the history it carries, which is the work’s real range. Held where it is because narrowness is not coherence: one figure, one tonal scale and one operation make a small territory, and the law holds partly because there is little for it to hold.
Mary Cassatt · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the painted chest at the upper left, all flat floral pattern, and the child’s modelled foot in the water at the bottom. One law holds them: everything in the room is arranged to converge on one act, and flatness and modelling are ranked by their nearness to it, pattern at the edges, the fullest modelling at the centre where the attention falls. Pattern and form, Japan and Paris, the sacred group and the daily task obey the same law of converging attention, and nothing stands outside it or contradicts it. But the range is narrow: two figures, one room, one instant, one register of quiet. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure records a law held completely over a small territory.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: a stencilled abbreviation set crisply in a small eastern state, and a wide passage of loose colour across the West, where the borders are long straight lines and the paint crosses them freely. They obey one law: a given schematic sign, its lines and its names, laid flat to the edges of the canvas, and a painted field that neither illustrates it nor ignores it, but colours it in and runs over it. Every element is that law at some scale; there is no depicted space, no second subject, no mark that is neither given nor gesture. The range is wider than in the single emblems before it: many compartments, many words, small states and large, coast and inland border. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is still one sign and one manner of painting it.
Roy Lichtenstein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the caption box, words in a calm first person, and the explosion, a shapeless thing of fire and light. They obey one law. Everything, speech, sound, fire, smoke, metal and sky, is converted into the code of the printed page: black contour, flat primary, field of dots and drawn lettering. Even the sound is a drawn shape, and even the fire has an outline. The law holds across the join and across the range from text to event, from the narrator’s words to the thing he narrates. Held below the top because the territory is narrow by choice, one code governing one moment, and because the law is given by the source medium more than discovered by the painting.
Maurice Ravel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs the whole without exception: one melody, one rhythm, one key, one direction of growth. Take the two most distant elements, the solo flute at pianissimo in the first statement and the collapse in the last bars. They obey the same law, for the collapse is that law’s consequence and not a break from it: growth that cannot change must end. That is real coherence. But the rubric’s warning applies with force: narrowness is not coherence. The range this law governs is very narrow. The Rite of Spring, at 9.3, keeps one law across a whole rite; this work keeps its law across one tune, and the figure is held down on that ground alone.
Hakka builders (Jiang clan) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the outer wall, blind earth facing the world, and the ancestral hall at the centre, an open timber room facing the gate. They obey one law, the circle and its centre, and the rings between them grade the passage from defence to dwelling to worship. The household rooms, the corridors, the roofs and the court all follow the ring; the gate axis is the one line that crosses it, and it runs to the hall. Nothing is set against the geometry. The range is moderate, dwelling, storage, defence and worship under one figure, the range of a village and not of a world, and the inner rings are less ordered than the outer. Strong, not total.
Roman, under Augustus · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs it: the Corinthian order and its module, carried without a break from the free-standing columns of the porch to the half-columns of the rear wall, and from the column base to the cornice and the pediment. Take the two most distant elements, the open porch and the closed back of the cella: they obey the same rhythm under the same entablature, and that is the point of the pseudoperipteral scheme. The ornament agrees with the order at every level. The range governed is narrow, however: one order, one volume, one approach. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure stays below the marks of buildings that hold a wider range under one law.
Agnes Martin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the shimmer of the gold seen from across a room, where the grid is a haze, and a single incised line seen close, an exact cut with its small wavers. They obey one law: an even, hand-ruled order held inside a field of light, the measure and the radiance inseparable. Every element is the law at one distance or another; there is no second kind of mark, no colour but the gold and the line, no incident, and nothing contradicts it. Its range across distance, structure close and light far, is real, and the law holds across it. But narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one field, one mark and two directions, and the law, once grasped, governs a small world. Held for the territory’s size.
Beach House · Music
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs the whole without strain: a slow sway, a bed of organ, a doubled voice, a swell that lifts and does not break. The two most distant elements are Lazuli, bright and climbing, and the unlisted coda after Irene’s silence, small and close; both obey the law, one by ascent and one by withdrawal, and the silence between Irene and the coda is governed by it too, a swell withdrawn rather than broken. The record never contradicts itself, from its first keyboard figure to its last small return. Held from the top by the rubric’s warning that narrowness is not coherence: the range the law governs is one tempo band, one palette and one feeling, and the record never tests its physics against anything that might break it.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs the building: the triangle, derived from the site. It holds from the outline of the building to the coffers overhead, the floor underfoot, the plans of stairs and towers, and the tetrahedra of the skylight and of the prisms on the plaza. The two most distant elements, the great court and the small tower galleries, obey it, as do the blade outside and the study centre’s library. The marble ties the building to the West Building and the triangle ties it to the city’s diagonal, so the law reaches past the walls. What holds the figure: the range is wide in scale and narrow in kind. The law is geometry, and what it does not reach, the art, the lighting of the lower galleries, the rooms of 2016 with their different temper, stands outside it.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the older man in shadow at the lower right, working the ropes, and the lover in the sunlit roses at the lower left. One law holds them: everything in the garden takes part in a single erotic intrigue and is ranked by its share of the light and of the knowledge. Stone takes part as flesh does, the Cupid hushing, the putti looking up; the trees enclose the secret; the sky opens only above her. Nothing in the picture contradicts its law or stands outside its play. But the range is narrow, one garden, one instant, one register of amused delight, and narrowness is not coherence. The figure records a law held completely over a small territory, and is held below the top for that range.
Muqi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the darkest fruit and the fruit given in outline only. One law holds them: a thing is shown as a degree of ink on empty paper, by the brush, without setting. The stems and calyxes obey it as the darkest accents of the same ink. Nothing on the sheet contradicts it or stands outside it: no colour, no ground line, no second manner. The law is total. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is very small: one kind of object, six instances, one medium, one tonal scale. Within it the range from black to nothing is the widest the medium allows, which is why the figure stands as high as it does, and below laws that govern wider fields.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the midnight song of the fourth part and the Ass Festival a few sections before it, or the Prologue’s sermon in the market and “Das Nachtlied”. One law is claimed for them, laughter and the affirmation of all things: “Ich würde nur an einen Gott glauben, der zu tanzen verstünde”, I would believe only in a god who could dance. The comedy is meant to belong to the sublime, and mostly it does. But the law shifts as the book goes. The Übermensch, which governs Part I, recedes behind the recurrence and is hardly the centre by Part IV; the higher men are first mocked and then made the audience of the culminating song; and the contempt of the polemical speeches works against the affirmation the book ends on. Some of the tension is designed, the teacher outgrowing his teaching. Not all of it is.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the curtain-puller at the left, in profile, her body flat and ochre, her face an Iberian schema with an Egyptian eye; and the squatting figure at the lower right, back and face at once, hatched in green and red. Do they obey one law? In part. The law of the space holds across the whole: every surface, body, curtain or fruit, is a plane tilted toward the viewer, and nothing recedes; flesh and drapery are one substance. The law of the face breaks: three manners made at two moments, the right side repainted after the rest. Read as the picture’s subject, a law in the act of changing, the break earns some credit, but the axis asks whether one physics governs, and here two govern side by side. The range is wide; narrowness is not the problem, seams are.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, Papageno’s strophic folk song and the Armed Men’s chorale. One law governs them, the law of the initiation, which places each character by how far he can go; the E flat frame and the three chords bind the musical world, and the range covered is wide. What holds the axis at 8.3, with The Encompassed the lowest of the twelve, is the plot’s break. In Act I the Queen is a grieving mother and Sarastro a tyrant; from the first finale the values reverse, and the work never fully reconciles its two acts. The flute, the bells and the Boys, given by the night, work for the day without explanation. Read as the design of an initiation, the reversal is a lesson in appearances; read as libretto, it is a seam. Both are credited, and the seam is charged.
John Ford · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the wedding brawl between Martin and Charlie, played as knockabout with the guests cheering, and Ethan’s attempt to shoot Debbie in the dunes below Scar’s camp. Ford’s law is meant to hold both: the community’s rituals, its dances, funerals and fights, are the order Ethan protects and cannot join, and the comedy shows that order alive. In large part it holds: the funeral hymn and the dance belong to the world of the massacre. But the comedy is not always governed by it. The Look scenes turn from slapstick to a corpse in the snow without the film deciding what it meant by the slapstick, and Charlie’s courtship plays in a register the search never touches.
Sigmund Freud · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One law governs a wide range. Wish, censorship and dream-work explain the plain dream of a thirsty night in the third chapter, the family hatreds of the fifth, the absurd dreams of the sixth, the reading of Oedipus and Hamlet, and the model of the mind in the seventh; the most distant elements, Freud’s political humiliations and the theory of primary process, obey the same law. Two fault lines are charged. The symbol key, fixed meanings for umbrellas and staircases, sits uneasily with the method of individual association on which the book is founded: Freud says symbols must be used with the dreamer’s associations, but the catalogue pulls the other way. And the wish thesis, stated as universal, is strained by the anxiety dream and the punishment dream, which the book absorbs by ingenuity more than by law. The coherence is real and wide; its seams show.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of Aunt Pullet’s bonnet and the flood that drowns brother and sister. For most of the book one law holds them: character and inheritance shape fate slowly, by the habits of a family and a town, and the Dodson comedy and the Tulliver tragedy are the same law seen at different distances. The river runs through both as a physical and a moral fact, a real coherence of wide range. The break is at the end. The book’s own law, stated with Novalis, is that destiny unfolds through character and circumstance; the flood is circumstance of another order, an act of nature that resolves by reconciliation what the moral law had left in deadlock. St Ogg, the river and the mill prepare it, so it is not a contradiction; it is a change of physics in the last chapters.
Catullus · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The two most distant elements are the obscene threat of 16 and the Alexandrian epyllion of 64, and in large part they obey one law. One code governs the book: the urbane, the witty and the charming, lepidus, venustus, urbanus, against the boorish and the dull; and fides, foedus and pietas as the bonds of love and friendship, whose breach calls down the invective. Poem 64 ends on mankind’s loss of faith, brothers killing brothers and the gods withdrawing; the personal poems are about a broken foedus. That is one law across a wide range, and narrowness is not the reason for the score. The charges are three: the translated Lock of Berenice (66) and the dialogue with a door (67) sit under the law only loosely; the arrangement’s authority is uncertain, so the book’s coherence is partly the reader’s; and the Lesbia poems, scattered across the book, do not form a sequence the order confirms.
Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola and Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the sober grey pilasters of the front and the gilded sky of the nave vault with the damned falling from it. One law governs both, the law of the axis: everything in the church is placed and scaled to converge on the altar and, above it, on the Name, and the front is the threshold of that convergence, its centre heightened over the door. The chapels, the transept altars and the dome keep the same symmetry. What bends the law is time: Vignola’s restrained body, a seventeenth-century Baroque surface and a nineteenth-century skin of marble are three physics laid one on another, and the seams show on the pilasters and in the transepts, where Pozzo’s altar overpowers the arm that holds it. The range is wide and mostly held.
David Lynch and Mark Frost · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Lucy and Andy’s comic romance, and BOB born from the atomic cloud in Part 8. One law covers them at the work’s best: innocence and horror are not opposites but one surface and what lies under it. The law is stated in the pilot, holds through the film, which shows the same world from underneath, and extends in The Return to the country at large. The range is enormous, and range is what the axis rewards. The breaches are real. The second season’s middle obeys no law but expedience: Little Nicky and the Civil War delusion are not the surface over the horror but filler beside it. The cosmology changes its rules between parts, the White Lodge and Windom Earle against the Fireman and Judy, and the film and the series strain in places.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Profane on the alligator patrol under New York, and the siege party at Foppl’s farm in 1922. One law governs both, the animate tending toward the inanimate, by indifference in the street and by violence in history, and the human who prefers objects. The slapstick obeys it too: Profane is at war with objects, Esther is remade by a surgeon, and SHROUD, the synthetic man, tells Profane that people will become like him. The range is wide and mostly held. Charged: the Crew’s comedy sometimes runs on a looser law than the book’s, gags for their own sake, and the refusal to say whether V. is one being lets incompatible tones sit side by side without collision.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the still life at the lower left, worked hard and precise, and the bather in the stream, loose, too large and sketchily placed in a stage wood. Do they obey one law? In part. One law governs much of the canvas: flat frontal light, value set against value rather than modelling, quotation openly assembled, the present set inside the past’s format. Under that law the disjunction of figure and ground is consistent; the picture is made of pieces and says so. But the handling divides into two systems, the foreground finished in studio light and the background half-painted in another key, and the space between them is not one space. Whether that division is the law or the place where the picture is unresolved stays open. The range is modest: four figures, a wood, water, a meal.
Paul Celan · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the commanded dance of “Todesfuge” and a private love poem of the last section. One law governs both, and the title names it: love and speech are made under the memory of the dead, and every embrace has the mother, the ash and the night inside it; the poppy of sleep and forgetting and the memory that will not sleep are paired throughout. “Corona” is the law’s clearest statement, a love poem whose time is the time of the dead and the stone. The law holds from litany to dream to fugue. But the early surrealist pieces obey a law of the image more than the law of memory, and here and there the book reads as a gathering of a poet’s first decade rather than one physics.
William Makepeace Thackeray · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law runs through: everyone in the Fair is buying or selling, and the narrator holds the goods of the drawing room and the death on the field in one ledger. Take the two most distant elements, the Vauxhall farce of Jos and the rack punch and the bullet through George’s heart. They obey the same law: George dies having just tried to buy Becky, and Amelia’s grief is spent on a man who was not worth it. That is a wide range held. The law slips in the narrator’s own physics. He is the puppet master who knows all, then a sentimentalist who weeps over Amelia without irony, then, in the late numbers, a traveller who met these people at Pumpernickel and heard the story from Tapeworm. The comedy absorbs much of this, but it is a change of rules in mid-play, and the tone toward Amelia is not settled from part to part.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs: the self persists while the age, the sex and the clothes change, and the biographer’s fact is always outrun by the life. Take the two most distant elements: the boy slicing at the Moor’s head in the attic, “for there could be no doubt of his sex” (ch. 1), and the woman of thirty six in a department store lift in 1928, among her selves. They obey the same law, and the first sentence’s certainty is the very thing the book undoes. Charged: the rules of the fantasy are loose by design, the trances, the immortality and the absent ageing never governed; and the register moves from romance through allegory to something close to the inward method of the serious novels, so that the book ends in another key. Read as the law itself, each age with its prose, the shift earns most of the axis.
Pirro Ligorio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the intimate, mossed walk of the Hundred Fountains and the triumphal frontispiece of the Organ, with the rustic grotto of the Oval between them in tone. They obey one law: water falling from the town’s height through a grid that makes the slope legible. The strains are three. The palace obeys a different law, a convent’s, inside its new fronts. The seventeenth- and twentieth-century works, the cascade and the Neptune pools at the foot, are of a heavier and more scenographic logic than the sixteenth-century episodes. And the set pieces are a sequence of marvels more than one composition. Coherent, wide and not seamless.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant parts: the cool, correct city front, French in its planning, and the Venetian sky within, where painted figures spill over the cornice. In the ceremonial core one law governs: compression and release, a rise toward light, architecture opening into painting and painting returning to architecture at its edges. The law reaches the Hofkirche, which compresses and releases in its own ovals. It does not reach the exterior, whose even rhythm tells nothing of the route within, nor the later rooms, which obey another taste. The range is wide, engineering, planning, fresco and stucco from several nations held in one sequence, and narrowness is not the reason for the figure. Held at 8.3: the whole is a palace of several campaigns and several designers, and the seams can be found.
Middle Byzantine builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Within the katholikon one law governs everything from crypt to dome: the vertical order of the sacred, each zone given its material, stone, marble or gold, and its persons by height. The crypt’s fresco and the upper church’s mosaic differ in medium and manner and keep one programme. The two most distant elements in the unit, though, are the two churches, and there the law is shared in purpose and not in form. The smaller church is another type, of another scale, with a differently dressed exterior, and on any dating a separate campaign. The two answer one cult and share one masonry tradition, so they do not contradict each other; but they do not obey one plan. Coherence is high where the design is single, lower across the pair.
Roman, under Diocletian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take two distant elements: the Roman protiron and a seventeenth-century Venetian house front, or the mausoleum’s octagon and a modern shop in a vaulted bay. They obey one law, and it is the palace’s own. Every later building keeps to the enclosure, the crossing streets and the line of the walls; the town is a long variation on a plan it did not draw and never broke. Within the Roman work the law is strong in the southern half, in axis, symmetry and the facing of tomb and temple, and slack in the north. The charge: across thirteen centuries the coherence is of plan and material more than of form, and Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and modern fronts meet without a common order.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pencil trick at the mob meeting, a joke with a body, and Gordon’s elegy over Batman’s flight. One law governs both: every person is put to a choice that shows what they will do when the rules are gone, and the order of the city is what is left after the choice. The comedy of the Joker’s entrances and the tragedy of Dent obey the same law, and the range, from heist film to civic tragedy, is wide. The strain is real. The film’s realism, a modern city by daylight, sits uneasily with comic-book licence, the sonar machine, the voice, a half-burned face on real streets; and the Joker’s claim to have no plans sits against a plot in which every plan of his succeeds.
Built for Bishop Bernard de Castanet · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the sheer brick rampart of 1282 and the Flamboyant stone baldaquin of the early sixteenth century on its flank. They do not obey one law: the porch is lace hung on a fortress, and it says so. Between those poles the law largely holds. The shell is one physics, wall pillar and vessel. The choir and jubé, far from the shell in idiom, obey the citadel’s logic of enclosure within enclosure, and the contrast of severe outside and rich inside can be read as the building’s own law, the keep that holds the treasure. The tower keeps the shell’s language. The range is wide and the law stretches across most of it; the porch is the clear break, the restored crown a smaller one.
Christina Rossetti · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant things in the book: the goblin men, one cat-faced, one tramping at a rat’s pace, in their riot of fruit and voices, and the bare devotional lyric of a soul asking to be quickened. One law governs both: desire is real, its present object deceives or withholds, and satisfaction is deferred to a love that costs the body or to death and what lies beyond it. Renunciation is the volume’s physics, and the title poem, which looks like its exception, is its fullest statement: Laura’s indulgence is punished, and Lizzie’s refusal to eat is the saving act. The range is wide, from fairy myth to ballad to sonnet to hymn. Held at 8.3 because the ballads’ jilted brides and bitter sisters run on stock causes rather than that law, and “Jhansi”, an incident of the Indian rising, sits outside it.
Chen Kaige · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the boys’ first escape, comic and wide-eyed, eating sugar haws in the street and gazing at the stage, and the bonfire forty years later. One law governs both: the stage gives these people their only self, and every power that comes over the stage, the master’s rod, the eunuch, the patron, the occupier, the tribunal, the Party, takes that self as its due. The sugar haws lead to a hanging, the stage leads to the fire. The occupiers and the Nationalists, the opium and the foundling obey the same law. The range is wide, from a children’s school to a national catastrophe, and the law holds across it. The strain: Juxian stands partly outside it, her death a melodrama’s more than the law’s, and the trial’s farce sits loosely against the gravity around it.
Frank Capra · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stars conferring in heaven over a second-class angel’s wings, and George drunk and bleeding at Martini’s bar, praying for the first time. One law governs both: an account is being kept, and no one in it can see the whole book. The Building and Loan’s ledger, the honeymoon money counted out to the dollar, the lost $8,000, Clarence’s wings and the bell are entries in one reckoning of what a life is worth, and the comedy (the pool under the dance floor, Uncle Billy’s strings tied round his fingers) obeys it as much as the despair. What holds the figure is strain: the frame’s whimsy sits uneasily against the noir of Pottersville, and the ledger is settled by gift, which the film earns in theme but strains in tone.
Stevie Wonder · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
One law is announced in the first track and claimed throughout: love as the governing principle of a person, a family, a people and the world. Take the most distant elements. “Contusion” is a fusion instrumental of fast guitar and synthesiser unisons; “Village Ghetto Land” a string pastiche over a lament for the poor; “Ngiculela” is sung in Zulu, Spanish and English; “Black Man” is a classroom drill; “Isn’t She Lovely” a father’s song over a bath. They obey the same law more often than not, and the voice and the harmonic language join them, so the range is very wide and the coherence real. Narrowness is not the problem; dispersion is. “Contusion” and “All Day Sucker” obey the sound more than the law, and the law is made in words, not built into every part.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Jasper in his house in the woods, smoking, joking, playing records, telling a “pull my finger” gag, and the street in Bexhill under tank fire. One law governs both: the world is continuous and indifferent, private kindness persists inside it, and neither stops the other. Jasper’s joke is his last act before he is shot, and the war in the camp is suspended only by a cry. The ping-pong ball, the cows and the camp obey the same camera that will not leave the moment, from domestic comedy to massacre. The strain: the Fishes’ plot runs on thriller rules the rest of the film suspends, and the ship that comes out of the fog at the last is grace by arrival, which an indifferent world does not quite license, though it is kept ambiguous.
James Ensor · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs: everything is spectacle and everything is mask. Take the two most distant elements, the halo in the middle distance and the painted faces of the front rank. They obey the same law, and that is the point: the halo is one more emblem in a parade of emblems, a sign carried along with the banners, so that the holy is taken into the carnival rather than standing outside it. The officials on their stand are masks too, as are the clerics, the bandsmen and the skeletons. The range is wide, sacred, political, festive and deathly, and the law holds across it. Held below the upper band because the coherence is partly that of one register, the satiric grotesque, and narrowness of register is not coherence; and the stand sits slightly outside the street’s physics.
Ovid · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the single letters: a voice writing to an absence, at a fixed moment, from inside a story whose end the reader holds. Take the two most distant: Penelope’s patient reproach of a husband who will come home, and Medea’s threat to a husband she is about to destroy. They obey the same law, the writer’s ignorance or knowledge of the end measured against the reader’s. The range of tone inside it is wide, from the near comedy of Phaedra’s arguments to the horror of Canace’s. The double letters bend the law: the exchange, the lighter and more erotic register of Acontius and Cydippe, and the later date are felt as a second book attached to the first, though Hero and Leander keep the singles’ shadow of a death ahead. Sappho, a historical figure among mythical ones, is a further wrinkle. That seam holds the axis here.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a Secession-style exhibition hall of 1915, gutted by the bomb, and a louvred modern slab of 1955 on legs. They obey one law because the line governs both: the ruin is held as the end of the axis and the slab as its gate, and neither is styled toward the other. The cenotaph’s arch belongs to the same law, scaled to frame the far object, and the pond and the flame sit on the line and keep it. The law is wide, joining a found ruin, a modern building, a prehistoric form and an open landscape. What bends it a little is accretion: the park has gathered many monuments off the axis, and the hall beside the museum to the west is larger and of another manner. Within the unit, the law holds.
Edward FitzGerald, after Omar Khayyam · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs the poem: one voice, the drinker who has argued and lost, and one argument, that the question has no answer and the hour is all. Take the two most distant elements: the opening summons to the tavern at dawn, and the theodicy of the Book of Pots, where pots dispute their potter’s justice. They obey the same law. The pots are the drinkers in clay, and their talk ends as the moon of Ramazan rises and the porter brings the wine. The close returns to the moon, the garden and the guests on the grass, and the frame shuts. Held at this figure because the range is narrow, one mood with variations, one register in a darker and a lighter key, and narrowness is not coherence: this is the coherence of a short lyric sequence, achieved over a modest range.
Romano-Egyptian painters · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: an early second century encaustic head of a young woman, modelled in depth with gold at the neck, and a third century tempera head of a man, flat, outlined and staring. One law holds them: the face of a particular person, at life size, frontal, made to be laid over the face of the dead and to meet the living. Across men, women, youths and children, across Greek, Egyptian and Roman sitters and two and a half centuries, nothing breaks that law, and the range in persons is the body’s strength. But the range of form is narrow, one format repeated, and narrowness is not coherence; the change in technique over time is a change of execution under the same law, and is charged lightly.
Hermann Hesse · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the opening, a realist account of a lodger on a clean staircase seen by a respectable nephew, and the close, a theatre in which a man kills a woman with a knife, is tried before the Immortals and is laughed at. They obey one law because the book lays it down between them: the Treatise has said that the self is a theatre of many figures, and the theatre is that law made visible. The music runs through all of it, from Haller’s Bach and Mozart to Pablo’s saxophone, and is reconciled by Mozart himself listening to Handel through a radio. The strain is at the level of event: is Hermine real, is the killing real? The book’s answer, that it does not matter, is a choice some will find evasive.
Patti Smith · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Redondo Beach, a light reggae lilt over the story of a girl drowned after a quarrel, and Land, nine minutes of assault, vision and frenzy. They obey one law: in each, desire and death meet at the edge of the water, and the voice testifies to what it saw. The same law holds Gloria’s refusal, Kimberly’s storm, Birdland’s ascension and Elegie’s lament: the poet as witness and seer, passing through the body to vision. The range is fairly wide, from reggae and lounge piano to garage rock and incantation, but the band’s narrow palette does part of the binding. Break It Up borrows the law rather than enacting it, and Free Money’s dream of money for a mother sits at the edge of the frame.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the twist at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, a dance in a theme restaurant, and the pawnshop basement, rape and murder. One law governs both: a world in which every act is a performance of a role borrowed from pop and genre, and in which chance breaks through the performance and asks for a real choice. The dance is the role played well; the basement is the role become monstrous; Mia’s overdose breaks the first, and Butch’s return breaks the second. A single deadpan register holds farce and horror in the same key, and the chaptered form makes the range a design rather than a drift. The strain: the Wolf’s comic procedure obeys the law only loosely, and Jules’s conversion, which the ending needs to bear the whole, is set in a tone the film has spent two hours teaching us not to take seriously.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the desert apparitions and the old man’s house with its children. One law governs both: the sacred is shown with the same physical, unidealised realism as the body, so that miracles, visions and the domestic dream obey one camera, and the dream’s passing for life is that law applied without exception. The split in speech, the Jews in plain American English and the Romans in British accents, is a rule kept throughout, empire against province. Strain shows at the edges. The desert visions sometimes slip into a stagy literalism the rest of the film avoids; Stanton’s Paul plays close to comedy in a sequence that otherwise holds its gravity; and the colloquial idiom, consistent in principle, wobbles in tone from scene to scene.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the death of the girl’s father, shot in a street demonstration, and a jailbreak foiled by a man who cannot tell what he has eaten. One law governs both: violence and accident come from outside without reason, and the Tramp survives by a body that cannot be made to fit. The sound rule holds from the first reel to the last: machines and authority speak, people do not, until the song. The dream of a house with a cow at the door obeys the film’s hunger. The law breaks at the edges: the closing resolve, an intertitle that begins “Buck up”, meets the material conditions of the whole film with a change of mood its law has not earned, and the episodic stations obey the comic law more than the social one.
Orson Welles · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the night man at the Mirador, twitching in comic panic, and Tana’s quiet elegy over Quinlan’s body. One law governs both: a border world where everything is contaminated and grotesque, where the law decays from inside and every figure is distorted by the frame. The comedy is grotesque and the elegy is the grotesque made tender; Grandi’s toupee and his strangling obey the same law. No one stands outside it: Vargas, the clean one, puts a wire on a broken man and turns his friend’s voice against him. The strain is in tone and in casting. The gang’s drug party in the motel tips from grotesque into exploitation, a law of its own, and Heston’s Vargas stands in the film from another kind of picture, a Hollywood hero in an expressionist world, which the film uses but does not wholly govern.
Evelyn Waugh · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the London society comedy of the first chapter and the forest captivity of the sixth. They obey one law, mostly, and the book takes care that they should. Mr Todd is a host who keeps a guest by the forms of hospitality, as Hetton kept Tony; the forest is Tony’s Gothic delusion made literal, and his fever sees the City as Hetton, making the link inside the book itself; the narration keeps one impassive register throughout. The range is wide, London flat, country house, Brighton hotel, Atlantic liner and Amazonian forest, and the law holds across most of it. What holds the axis at 8.3 is the forest chapters’ lean toward the adventure story and toward allegory, and a change of world abrupt enough that a long line of readers has felt the book break in two. The book answers that objection more than half way, not wholly.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Tuco’s slapstick, in the bath and in the gun shop where he builds a revolver from parts and robs the owner, and the war hospital of amputees and the dead at the bridge. One law governs both: an irony that sees every man, soldier or bandit, as a figure in a game of chance, rendered as a comic spectacle that turns grave without changing its manner. The beating in the camp, played under an orchestra of prisoners ordered to cover the screams, is the clearest proof that the comic and the cruel obey the same physics. Strain shows where cynicism and sudden pity meet without quite meeting, and the war’s scale sometimes outruns the fable that uses it.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the tiled columns of the street front and the muses of the stage wall. They obey one law: flora and figure grown out of the building’s own materials, brick, tile and glass, the structure frankly shown and then clothed. The floral rule runs through every scale, and the idea of light governs the walls and the ceiling alike. The range is wide: structural iron, popular song, Wagner, Catalan flowers, the muses. Where the law slips: the proscenium groups, Gargallo’s especially, are in a more agitated idiom than the rest; the composers on the front are a more academic programme than the room; and the extension, deferential and well judged, speaks a later and drier language, so that the work, taken whole, has a seam.
Kanye West · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the record: glory and self-disgust in one breath, the boast that turns into confession. The two most distant elements obey it. All of the Lights is a triumphal fanfare over a man barred from his daughter, and over his own failures; Runaway’s distorted coda is the boast collapsed into sound; both are grandeur shadowed by ruin. The range is wide, from Bon Iver’s falsetto to Raekwon’s verse, from rap swagger to choir, from a comic skit to a political poem. What holds the figure: the law loosens in the middle, where So Appalled and Hell of a Life obey appetite without the turn, and the skit and the coda are joined by placement more than by law.
Thomas Carlyle · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Editor’s comic bewilderment over paper bags labelled with the signs of the zodiac, and the Everlasting Yea; or the mock scholarship on aprons and the vision of the generations in Natural Supernaturalism. They obey one law: everything visible is a garment over the invisible, and the garment is both comic, since it is only cloth, and sacred, since it is the only way the invisible appears. Book II is the philosophy of clothes applied to one soul; Book III applies it to church and society; the frame applies it to the text itself. The range is wide, farce, satire, autobiography, sermon, prophecy and prose poem under one physics. Charged: the irony is not held evenly, and in parts of Book III the Editor’s distance collapses and Carlyle preaches in his own voice, breaking the book’s own law.
Marc Chagall · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the geometric circle at the lower left, a piece of Orphist abstraction, and the inverted peasant woman in the upper band, a folk anecdote. They obey one law, and the law is memory: everything is scaled, placed and turned by its weight in the remembering mind, and the geometry is the mind’s own grid laid over what it recalls. The circle can be a sun and the axis of a wheel because nothing here is measured from outside. The range is wide for one canvas, from the cosmos to a pail of milk, from a church to the inside of a cow’s head. What resists: the imported faceting at times reads as a second idiom laid over the first, a style rather than a physics, and the small figures of the upper band, at their own scale and finish, sit somewhat apart from the two great heads.
Leonard Cohen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: a low voice addressing women, and through them the sacred, over a repeating acoustic figure, in grave tenderness without irony. Take the two most distant elements: the hushed devotion of Suzanne, and the end of One of Us Cannot Be Wrong, where the singer lights “a thin green candle” to make a lover jealous and the song breaks into wordless howling. They obey the same law: devotion turned sour is still devotion, and the breakdown is the restraint giving way, not a second physics. Otherwise the range is narrow, from waltz to dirge, and narrowness is not coherence: the record holds its law partly because it rarely tests it. The added colour sometimes pulls against the law, and that holds the figure.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a red stain on the snow at the bottom and a name in white among the branches at the top. They obey one law: everything in the picture is a mark made on the forest. The blood is what the battle wrote, the names are what the nation wrote afterwards, and both lie on the same ground. The range runs from AD 9 to the modern century, from a bodily trace to a literary roster, from depth to flat inscription, and it holds; the range is real, across time and across kinds of mark, and narrowness is not taken for coherence. What holds the axis is the seam the eye feels between the two spatial registers, deep path and flat script: the law that joins them is conceptual, and is read more than seen.
Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
One physics governs the whole, stated early and kept. Take the two most distant elements, Neo at his cubicle and Neo flying past the camera at the close: one law covers both, that the Matrix is a program whose rules bend for those who know it is one, in proportion to their belief. The agents’ powers, the exits by telephone, the death in the program that is death in the chair, the Sentinels’ race against the ship: all hold. The range is wide, from office drama through philosophical dialogue and martial arts to war film, and one cool register holds across it. Two seams show. The resurrection by Trinity’s love lies outside the stated rules, and the battery premise is a stated falsehood the film does not mark as the machines’ lie or its own.
Shona builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the hill’s walls, rough-coursed, threaded between boulders and following the rock wherever it goes, and the Great Enclosure’s outer wall on the open valley floor, finely coursed, freely curved, crowned with the chevron. They obey one law: granite laid dry in courses, battered, curving, enclosing; the wall as the means of separation, never as roof or frame; the rounded terminal at every door. The valley wall is the hill’s law released from the rock, the curve kept where no boulder demands it, and the law holds from a narrow climbing path to the great ellipse. Held at 8.3 because the law is narrow, one material and one structural act, and narrowness is not coherence.
Franz Marc · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the deer at the centre, flung back in blue under the falling trunk, and the boars at the far left in their dark, closed zone. One law holds them. Everything in the field, creature, tree and air, is cut by the same lines of force and lit by the same broken light, so that animal and world suffer the same fracture; the law is the picture’s meaning, and it reaches from the cosmic shafts to an animal’s eye. What resists: the animal drawing keeps some of its earlier roundness and in places sits against the faceting as a second law rather than inside the first, and the colour logic, so strong at the centre, loosens toward the edges. The restored third is not charged here; Klee’s drawing follows the painter’s law.
Sebastião Salgado · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the widest view of the pit, in which no man is larger than a mark, and the close picture of a single carrier’s face and shoulder. They obey one law: the body in the earth, rendered in one tonal key, in which flesh and mud share a value and ascent is the direction of every effort. Every picture is that law at a different distance, and the confrontation with the policeman obeys it too, two bodies at the edge of the pit with the state’s weapon between them. The range is wide, from the mass to the face, from labour to rest to dispute. Held below the top because the order varies across showings and no single sequence fixed by the maker is known, and because the law is partly a style, the same in Salgado’s other projects, rather than one found here.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the wedding signed in the rubble, the bride dragging the registrar back to stamp the paper, played half as farce; and the house going up on the day of the World Cup. One law governs both: the marriage exists as a document, and every feeling in the film is converted into an exchange that can be signed. Bill is paid in body and in lessons in German, Oswald in work and nights; the mother takes Wetzel for comfort; Hermann sells the years to Oswald; the radio sells the nation its rebirth. Comedy and death obey the same law, across a range from a farcical wedding to a killing. The strain is slight: the coda answers to a different law, the essay’s rather than the drama’s.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the whole figure seen as a thin line from Illinois, and a seam in the steel at the foot of a leg. One law governs both: the curve of weight, the taper of the section, the one material. The tilting tram obeys the curve, and the slot windows are cut where the section is smallest. No element contradicts another, and the hardest test the arch meets, keeping a 192 m figure and the hand’s scale of its seams under one law, it meets well. What holds it: narrowness is not coherence. The range is narrow, one figure, one material, almost no rooms and no programme of uses to reconcile. A wider work holding more under one law would score higher; this holds little, perfectly.
Can · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the group as one organism, with no part in front, held by repetition. The two most distant elements are Bring Me Coffee or Tea, a gentle song, and Aumgn, a side of chant and noise. They obey the same law at the level of method, the voice inside the sound, the pulse as the ground, the take edited into a span, and the sequence makes them two ends of one descent. The range is wide, from song to groove to ritual to collage, and the law holds most firmly where the pulse holds. What holds the figure is the strain at the far end: Aumgn and Peking O suspend the pulse for long stretches, the law there is the descent’s argument rather than an audible physics, and a listener may hear two records, a disc of grooves and a disc of experiments.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs: money is the medium of everything, and everything in the book is bought, sold or owed. Take the two most distant elements: Self at the Shakespeare in London, where his father bills him for his childhood, and the chess game in which the novelist who made him beats him. They obey the same law: the father prices his son, the author owns his character, and both relations are money. The con, the film, the pornography and the hangovers are one physics, and the metafiction stays within the law rather than breaking it, which is the book’s best formal stroke. Charged: the range is wide in tone but narrow in kind, one appetite in two cities; and the comic exaggeration that governs the New York scenes sits at a distance the book does not quite bridge from the near-realist pathos of the end.
Jonathan Demme · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Catherine in the pit, a bucket lowered to her on its rope, and the last shot, Lecter in a tropical street walking after Chilton into a crowd. One law governs both: everyone in the film is appraised and consumed by someone with more power or more sight, and the strong eat the weak, in cells, in offices and in the pit. The lift at Quantico, Chilton’s office, the Senator’s grief used by her own advisers, the moth fed on honey and nightshade obey it. The range is wide, from comedy of manners in Chilton’s office to captivity and murder. What strains: the coda’s comic tone sits loosely on the law it ends, and Gumb’s household, styled for a different film, obeys the law of appetite but not the film’s restraint of manner.
Inca, under Pachacuti and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the greatest block in the lowest salient, and the small stones in the upper courses or round a gateway. They obey one law. Each stone is fitted to its neighbours along its own outline, battered, pillowed, without mortar, and the saw-tooth line holds across all three tiers. The law reaches from a block of more than a hundred tonnes to a stone the size of a fist set in a corner, and that range of size under one rule is a real achievement. Held at 8.3 because the range is of one material and one kind of construction, a wall, and so narrow in kind; and what the summit buildings were, and how they answered the walls, is lost, so the whole cannot be tested.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Jeffrey’s comic tour of the asylum, with its television and its theories of germs and consumers, and the boy at the airport watching a man die. One law governs both: what is true is decided by who believes it, and knowledge that cannot be shared looks like madness. Jeffrey’s rant is a parody of Cole’s warning, his germ theory and his Army a parody of the plague, so the comedy sits under the tragedy’s law rather than beside it. The scientists of 2035, with their chorus of overlapping voices, are the asylum’s doctors made grotesque, and the animals loose in 1996 rhyme with those of the empty city. The range is wide. What gives: the family dinner and the zoo release play nearer farce.
John Barth · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a London coffee-house of fops in the first chapter, and an Indian village in the Maryland forest where Burlingame finds his blood; or the laureate’s Hudibrastic verse and the political plot of Coode and Baltimore. One law governs them: every person is a role, every record a forgery made by someone with an interest, and innocence is the one posture that cannot see it. The coffee-house wits and the forest village obey it alike, and the verse and the politics are two forgeries of one province. The pastiche voice holds a very wide range, from bedroom farce to colonial politics, piracy, slavery, theology and poetics, without a seam. Charged: the law runs on comic physics, coincidence and exchanged identity, and when the book turns grave, at Joan’s end and in the hero’s late reckoning, the physics shifts under it; and the treatment of violence as farce sits uneasily with the cost the book claims to disclose.
Woody Allen · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Alvy drawn as a cartoon, arguing with a cartoon wicked queen, and the quiet last meeting on the Upper West Side, seen in long shot and held without a joke. One law governs both: everything is Alvy’s memory, and memory obeys his comic, anxious consciousness, which can summon McLuhan from behind a poster, walk into its own childhood or simply watch. The law is wide, from fantasy to plain realism, and it holds. The subtitles, the split screens, the figure stepping out of a body in bed and the passers-by questioned on the street are licensed by it, not added. The limit: the Los Angeles satire is broader than the rest, so that the city is mocked by the film more than by Alvy; and the law is one man’s subjectivity, which makes the coherence partly a narrowness, since Annie never has the film’s eye.
Walter Pater · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the medieval French tales of Amis and Amile and of Aucassin and Nicolette at the start, and the eighteenth-century German scholar Winckelmann, with the Conclusion’s physiology of perception after him. One law governs both: the Renaissance as an outbreak of the human spirit, its love of the things of the senses and of the intellect, recurring wherever that temper appears and read through the impression it makes on one sensibility. The Preface announces the law, every study obeys it, and the Conclusion carries it from history to the conduct of a life. The range is wide in time and medium, romance, philosophy, painting, sculpture, poetry and scholarship, and the voice does not alter across it. What holds the axis at 8.3 is that the coherence is partly the uniformity of the manner, and the law a temper rather than a structure, held more firmly in the frame than in the middle studies.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the yellow flame of the lamp at the top centre and the dark back of the girl at the bottom centre. One law governs them: everything in the room is earth in lamplight, ranked by how much light it receives. Faces, hands, potatoes, walls and kettle are painted from one mixture under one light; the darkest figure and the brightest point stand on one vertical; the coarseness of the heads is the coarseness of the potatoes and the beams. Nothing contradicts the law, and the failures of drawing are failures inside it, not breaches of it. But the range is one room, one instant, one family, one temperature, and narrowness is not coherence: the figure records a firm law over a small territory.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Ionic capital under her chin and the fissured plain at the horizon. One law holds them: everything in the picture is a structure broken and still standing. The column is cracked and bears the head; the body is split and upright; the earth is riven and runs on to the horizon; the corset straps what would fall; the face weeps and holds. The nails are the law’s punctuation, pain driven in at every scale. Classical, Christian, medical and Mexican signs, which might pull apart, all obey it, and nothing contradicts it. Narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one figure and one ground in one register, and the law, total within it, governs a small range.
Cass Gilbert · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the copper pinnacles of the crown, 792 feet up, and the corbel of Woolworth counting coins in the lobby. One law governs both: the vertical Gothic of the late medieval north, applied as a single system from the caisson to the lantern, the ornament scaled to distance and the piers running unbroken. Base and tower read as one because the piers run through both; the crown gathers the shaft and ends it. The range is wide, from structure to caricature, from the skyline to the arcade. What bends the law: the lobby’s vaults and mosaics are more Byzantine and Romanesque than Gothic, a second physics inside the first, close in spirit but not the same; and the back of the base, round the light court, falls to the plainer law of the rental block.
James Cameron · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of the police station, Silberman’s jargon and Vukovich’s jokes, and the field of skulls in 2029. One law governs both: the present does not believe the future until it arrives, and the machine is indifferent to what anyone believes. The jokes are the disbelief, and the massacre answers them. The machine’s one line of wit, “I’ll be back”, obeys the same law: it is literal, and the joke is the viewer’s. The loop is internally consistent; the film never breaks its own causation, down to the travellers arriving naked and unarmed because only living tissue can pass. The range runs from comic romance to apocalypse. The strain is the love scene, scored as conventional romance in a register the rest of the film does not use.
Henri Cartier-Bresson · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the standing figure behind the railings, still and almost unnoticed, and the leaping man in the foreground, all motion. They obey one law, the law of rhyme and suspension: everything in the picture answers something else. The man answers his reflection and the dancer on the posters; the ring in the water answers the ripples; the stillness behind answers the leap in front; the ladder points to where the leap began. Nothing contradicts that law, and even the debris, read slowly, falls into its circles and lines. What holds the axis below 8.5 is the rubric’s own warning that narrowness is not coherence: one patch of flooded ground in one instant, governed completely, is still a small territory.
Sawai Jai Singh II · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the towering Samrat and the sunken Jai Prakash bowls; or the single great gnomon and the twelve small zodiac dials. They obey one law: every form is the geometry of the celestial sphere at this latitude, projected onto a wall, a bowl, a cylinder or a plane. The physics is literally one, and the range of shapes it governs, triangle, hemisphere, cylinder, ring and plane, is wide. The law governs material and finish too: plaster and stone, scales and stairs, all in one idiom. What holds the axis: the law governs each instrument, but the ground is laid out by siting more than by composition, with no single axis or order relating the instruments to one another, so that the coherence is of a family of objects, not of one building. Narrowness is not the problem; dispersal is.
Maya, under Jasaw Chan K'awiil I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the tomb at the base, dark, enclosed, below the plaza, and the roof comb at the top, a crest against the sky. One law governs both, the vertical axis of the mountain from the underworld to the sky, with the king at its root and his image at its crown. The terraces repeat one profile nine times; the stair, the doorway and the comb sit on one centreline; the temple is the mountain’s mouth on that line. The pairing with Temple II carries the law across the plaza as an axis from east to west. What bends it is narrowness: one register, one axis, one figure. The building holds one thing steadily more than it holds distant things together, and narrowness is not coherence.
Egyptian (Old Kingdom) · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the eyes, the most alive and particular things in the statue, and the crossed legs, the most schematic and bound to the block. One law holds them. The whole body is gathered toward the act of taking down a word, from the lap that is a writing surface to the head lifted to listen, and every part, schematic or alive, takes its place in that gathering. The colour obeys the same law, a man’s materials set out plainly, and nothing contradicts the figure’s purpose. What holds the axis is that narrowness is not coherence: one figure, one posture, one register of alert stillness. The law is complete over a small territory.
Han Gan · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the sheet: force held by restraint. It holds in the horse, pull against post; in the line, tension against the blank; in the wash, mass against paper. The two most distant elements, the rigid post and the flaring mane, obey it: one is restraint made a line, the other force made a line, and the tether joins them. Nothing in the field contradicts the law. But the range it spans is small, three elements on one small sheet, and narrowness is not coherence. The quieter hindquarters, where the pull slackens, loosen the law a little. A law held over a small field, and held almost everywhere in it.
Félix Candela · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the lifted outer point of a lobe in the light, and the groin rib meeting the ground in shadow. One is the thinnest edge and the other the thickest part; one rises and the other descends. They obey one law: the same four hypars, one ruled surface read from its free edge to its valley, so that the eight lobes are one law repeated round a point, and every line of formwork, every curve of edge and every rib follows from it. Few buildings are as single in law. What holds the axis: narrowness is not coherence, and the range is narrow, one surface, one material, one gesture; and beneath the shell the enclosure and service obey a second and plainer law, set under the vault and not generated by it.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the approach from the road under the high edge, and the glass on the field under the low one. They obey the same section. One law governs the whole, tension resisted by lean, from the largest element, the roof’s sag between rows of unequal height, to the lean of each pier and the set of the glass; at the work’s original reach the mobile lounges and the control tower shared its vocabulary. The extension keeps the law precisely. Two things hold the axis: the range is narrow, one section repeated, and narrowness is not coherence; and the counters, screening and signage inserted under the roof break the law locally, and as part of the one work they count against it, a little.
Timurid and Ashtarkhanid builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the cut-mosaic star geometry of Ulugh Beg’s portal of 1420 and the painted lion, deer and human-faced sun of Sher-Dor’s of the 1630s, aniconic geometry and figural emblem, two centuries apart, facing each other across the square. One law governs both: the tiled pishtaq on a brick court, framed in bands of script and pattern, on a common scale and a common axis, the later builders submitting their figures to the earlier frame. The range is wide (240 years, geometry and figure, college and mosque, glaze and gold) and the law holds. What bends it: Tilya-Kori’s long, lower front obeys a different proportion from the two tall facing portals and reads as a closing wall, not a third equal; the drop in tile technique shows at close range; and restoration has evened surfaces that once differed.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bodies sealed in the walls of a suburban house in Arizona, and the boys’ football match in Juárez that stops for gunfire and goes on. One law governs both: violence is the material of the place, sealed into its houses and heard at its games, and what people do is live inside it. The convoy, the tunnel and the dinner obey the same law: the state’s agents and the cartel use one method, and the frontier dissolves the difference. The tone holds from the title card to the last frame, and the Silvio scenes obey the main plot’s law from the other side of the line. What holds it: the range is narrow, one register with almost no comedy or warmth to test the law against, and Ted’s scene and Graver’s explanations bend toward a thriller’s conventions.
Tarsila do Amaral · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the vast foot at the lower edge, nearest the viewer, and the sun at the upper right. One law holds them: everything is a rounded, swollen, smoothed volume in a few pure colours, set in a world without shadow or texture and weighted toward the ground. The foot obeys it, the cactus obeys it in its segments, the sun obeys it as a disc, and the sky is one flat field. Nothing stands outside it but the pose, head on hand, borrowed from the melancholy of a European thinker, and the law absorbs it by shrinking the head. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is small: four elements, one being, one noon. The achievement is complete and narrow.
Alfred Stieglitz · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the iron of the ship, the gangway, the chains, the funnel or mast, and the domestic life of the lower deck, the washing, the shawls, the child. They obey one law, the law of the divided structure, in which every form is either a line of the ship’s architecture or a body placed by it, and every person is above or below. The gangway is at once a shape in the composition and the boundary of a class; the shapes of the machinery and the forms of the people answer each other in the same light. Nothing in the frame breaks the law. What holds the axis is the narrowness of the field, one deck, one instant, one division, and the loosening of the law at the crowded edges.
Francisco de Zurbarán · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the soft, light-filled fleece and the black void above it. One law holds them. Everything in the picture is a thing in the same light, set before the viewer for contemplation, and the void is the absence of everything that is not the offering. The hard cord and the soft wool, the stone and the flesh, obey the same physics of light and weight. Nothing contradicts the law and nothing stands outside it. But the range is narrow: one creature, one surface, one light, one register of hushed attention. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure is that of a law kept perfectly over a short distance, not one that binds distant extremes.
Brian Eno · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole record without exception: sparse events, no pulse, no goal, unsynchronised recurrence, quiet. The two most distant elements, the human grain of 1/1’s piano and the electronic drone of 2/2, obey it fully; so do the voices of 2/1, and 1/2 is the law demonstrated by combining two of its cases. There is not one breach. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range here is very narrow: one tempo, which is none, one dynamic level, one mood, four timbres. The law is easy to keep over so short a distance. The achievement is perfect consistency over a small field, above Zooropa at 7.6, whose law strains, and below Remain in Light at 8.5, whose law holds over a wider span.
Tulunid, under Ahmad ibn Tulun · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the minaret in the north-west ziyada, with its Mamluk finial, and the qibla halls with their Tulunid stucco. One law governs most of the range: the pointed arch on the brick pier, the square, the orientation to the qibla, repeated from the outer ziyada wall to the court, and the minaret’s spiral answers the court’s level by turning it upward. Lajin’s fountain dome and his mihrab of marble and glass mosaic bring a later and more colourful idiom into the austere frame; they are absorbed, not reconciled. What holds it: the range is narrow by intent, one bay, one material, one direction, and narrowness is not coherence. The building is coherent over a narrow range.
Roman, under Caracalla · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a service gallery under the platform, low and dark, for carts and fuel, and the frigidarium, the most splendid hall in the building. One law governs both: the axis and its mirror, brick-faced concrete and the vault, the route of the water. The galleries run where the rooms above require them; the precinct’s exedrae answer the block’s apses; the libraries and the stand over the cisterns sit on the bath’s own axis. The range runs from furnace to garden, and the law holds across it. What bends it: the precinct, completed by later emperors, is looser than the block and ordered by symmetry rather than by any need of the bath, and the block’s two halves duplicate, so part of the coherence is repetition.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: a man of surfaces in a world of surfaces, where danger is real enough to kill, Townsend at the United Nations, Leonard at the cliff, and is always met with wit. Take the most distant elements, the mother’s laughter in the hotel lift and the hand slipping on the stone, or the drunk drive played as slapstick and the silent menace of the prairie: they obey the same physics, in which terror and comedy are both performances watched by someone. The range runs from farce through romance to suspense and spectacle, and Grant holds it in one key. The law bends at the hospital escape, played as near-pure farce, and the bend is felt; the tunnel at the close is the law’s own wink rather than a breach of it.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the squabble at the dinner table, the children bickering about the father and Elliott’s rude word, and E.T. dying in a house wrapped in plastic under men in spacesuits. One law governs both: the child’s world is the true one, and the adult order, a father gone, a mother overwhelmed, a state in masks, breaks it from outside. The comedy of E.T. in Gertie’s clothes, the frog liberation and the drunk creature obey it, each a child’s freedom from adult rule. The range is wide, from bathroom words to death and resurrection. What strains: the flying bicycles are prepared by the moon and keep the law, but the comic police of the chase belong to a lighter film than the one that has just shown a death.
Andrew Stanton · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: WALL-E alone in his trailer at night, watching a couple join hands on an old tape, and the slapstick chase of escaped repair robots through the Axiom’s corridors. One law governs both: every being follows its directive until something it notices turns it. WALL-E’s directive is to compact, and he collects; EVE’s is the plant, and she turns to him; M-O’s is to clean, and the comedy of his pursuit is that law played fast; AUTO’s directive, A113, is the law refused any turn, and the villain is the machine that cannot notice. The passengers follow their screens until one of them looks up. The range is wide, from silent pastoral to farce and mutiny. The strain lies in the second half’s tempo, which bends to cartoon rules the first half refused, and in passengers who, after centuries without walking, stand and walk at the end because the plot needs them to.
George Stubbs · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the white eye turned on the viewer and the flat, featureless ground. One law governs both: everything in the picture is the horse’s presence, and the ground is the space that presence makes, an absence so complete that attention has nowhere else to go. The anatomy and the animal’s alarm obey the same law: the body is shown as a working thing, and the rearing is the body’s own response, not a pose given it by a rider. Nothing in the canvas contradicts its law, and the bare ground is carried to its edges. But the territory is narrow: one animal, one instant, one ground, one colour key of chestnut, cream and buff. The law is held completely over a small range, and narrowness is not coherence.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the porcelain object, a thing of industry, and the act of submission, a thing of an institution. They obey one law, which is displacement. The object is moved from washroom to exhibition hall; its orientation is turned so its use is lost; its name is moved from urinal to fountain; its maker is replaced by a pseudonym; a manufacturer’s name is moved into the author’s; and the work itself has moved from the object into its photograph and then into replicas. Every element makes the same move, and none breaks it; even the work’s afterlife follows the law. Held because narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one object, four marks of choice and one act, and the range between its farthest elements, while real, is small.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the faint, crowded planes of the first states at the upper left, and the dark, heavy ground at the lower right where the stair turns and the figure arrives. They obey one law: hinged, faceted planes in a single range of brown, read as states of one moving body on a falling diagonal. The dotted arcs belong to the same law, marks of motion and not of form. The lettered title, in the corner, is the one element from another order, word and not image, and the painting holds it rather than setting it against itself, since the picture is about what the word names. There is no second kind of mark, no second key of colour, no break in the diagonal. Held because narrowness is not coherence: one figure, one stair, one tone, a small and chosen territory.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Max releasing bees into Blume’s hotel room and cutting his brakes, a cartoon war; and Max showing Blume his mother’s grave, quietly, in the cold. One law governs both: grief and wanting are converted into performance, and performance fails when it meets the real. The war is a play staged on a real man; the grave is the fact the plays were covering. The aquarium, the lie about his father, the stage version of Serpico and the last play obey the same law, and the ending resolves it by turning performance into a gift. The range is wide for a short comedy, from slapstick to mourning. The strain: the war brushes against a violence the film treats as weightless, and the reconciliation comes fast.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the head, a closed mass of patterned rows with no feature, and the vulva, carved with anatomical particularity. One law governs them: every part of the body is rendered as rounded volume, or as a surface of carved pattern subordinate to volume, and nothing is drawn by line alone or given a separate scale. The head obeys the law of the volumes, one more round mass bowed onto the breasts; the bracelets and the hair obey the law of pattern on volume; the navel is a volume turned inward. Nothing contradicts the whole. Held because narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one figure, one register and a hand’s breadth, and the law holds completely over little.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the plain metopes of the west flank and the carved east front. They obey one law. The Doric module governs from platform to cornice on every side, with the Ionic frieze admitted only over the porches and subordinate to it, and the difference between plain and carved is a law of orientation, not a contradiction. The Christian vault and apse obey another law, but they are alterations made for another use; they are weighed under survival and not charged here. What holds the figure from the upper band: the range the law covers is narrow, one order and one type in a modest building. Coherent and consistent throughout, and narrow.
Tiwa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs: an earth cell under a viga roof, stacked and set back. Take the two most distant elements, the highest terrace of the north house and a single family room on the ground, or the kiva below the ground and the roof terrace above it: both pairs obey the law. So, in their own way, do the church, the ovens and the wall, all of the same earth and the same hand. The Catholic church stands furthest from the village’s own law in meaning, yet it is built by the same means and has been absorbed into the village’s year. The range is narrower than a cathedral’s, and narrowness is not coherence; but the village is not narrow. It holds dwelling, ceremony, defence and a foreign faith under one physics.
Norman Rockwell · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the white dress and the red smear of the tomato. One law holds them, the law of the walk: everything in the picture is either the procession or what the procession passes, and is placed by that line. The marshals’ bodies set the beat and the child keeps it; the wall is the still ground the movement crosses; the slur and the stain are the mob’s acts, left behind as the walkers go on. Even the cropping obeys the law, cutting at the height where movement and anonymity meet. Nothing stands outside it. Held below the top because the territory is narrow, one wall, one walk, one instant, one register of grave clarity, and narrowness is not coherence.
Kara Walker · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the sphinx’s white, refined, monumental surface and the brown boys sinking into the floor. They obey one law, sugar’s: the refined product endures and is displayed, the raw labour is used up and swept away. The same law governs the building, a refinery about to give way to housing; the title, an homage to the unpaid, paid on the occasion of the plant’s demolition; and the audience, who consumed the image as the product was consumed. Nothing in the work contradicts it, and it covers a wide range, from the court banquet to the cane field to the real estate of 2014. Held below the upper band because the law, once grasped, is single and is stated by the title, and the range is held by concept as much as by sight.
John Singer Sargent · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the hard, bright profile at the top and the dark skirt dissolving into the ground at the foot. One law holds them: every element is subordinate to the silhouette and ranked by its share of light, so that flesh is the event, black the frame, brown the void. The crescent is the one bright point that is not flesh, and it obeys the same law as an accent of the head. Nothing in the canvas contradicts it; the corrected strap, by its lack of incident, keeps the law cleaner than the Salon state did. But the range is one figure, one register, three colours, and narrowness is not coherence. A law held completely over a small territory is held there.
Philip Johnson · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the glass room on its bluff, open on every side, and the Brick House’s vaulted bedroom, closed, lined and lit from small round windows. One law governs both: a pure rectangle, set symmetrically, its interior given one figure, the cylinder or the vaults, and paired with its opposite. The cylinder in the glass room is the brick of the other building brought inside, and the court between them is the axis on which each is the other’s answer. Furniture, floor and the painting on its easel obey the same quiet geometry. The range is wide for so small a territory, from exposure to enclosure, but narrowness is not coherence: two rooms are a small field, and the law is simple enough that keeping it is not hard.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs: an image made and then covered, the surface the record of the covering. The two most distant elements are the photograph at the bottom of each canvas and the abstract skin at its top, a document of 1944 and a painted field of 2014, and they obey the law exactly, since the second exists only as the covering of the first. Across the four the law holds without exception: one height, one method, one key, one photograph each. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory the law governs is narrow: four equal panels in one idiom and one range of colour. The distance held, in time and in kind, raises the figure; the small visible range holds it.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs the whole: sustained tone gathering into mass, sound held until it becomes force or decays. The two most distant elements, the unison riff at the climax of Mladic and the slow drone that ends the record, obey it: one is mass in motion, the other mass at rest, and the drone is what the roar becomes when it stops moving. The dark mode of Mladic and the bright ascent of We Drift obey it too, and nothing breaks it. What holds the figure is range: from drone to riff to euphoric ascent it is real but narrow, narrower than that of records holding song, recitation and noise under one law, and narrowness is not coherence.
Arnold Böcklin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the white figure in the boat at the lower centre and the black interior of the cypress grove above. One law holds them: everything is still, frontal and silent, and everything is ranked by light, the dead and the mourner in white, the tomb in pale stone, the interior in black. Water, rock, tree and sky obey one physics of suspended motion; nothing moves except the implied oar, and even that is stopped. Nothing in the field contradicts the law. But the range is narrow, one register, one instant, one tone of hushed dread, and narrowness is not coherence. The law covers little distance: here the most distant elements are not very far apart.
Charles and Ray Eames · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs the whole: the bay, the frame and the panel, carried without exception through residence, court and studio, so that the two buildings are one grid with a gap in it. Take the two most distant elements, the bare industrial frame and the dense, collected, hand-arranged interior. They obey the same law, for the interior is the other half of the frame’s neutrality: the grid takes no position so that the things can, and the makers arranged the things by the same rule of selection from what exists, found objects as found steel. The meadow and the trees, left as found, belong to it too. The range is wide for a small building, from industry to the handmade, from landscape to a shelf of toys. What holds the axis: the law is permissive, a frame with a principle of selection rather than a structure of necessity, and a permissive law is easy to keep.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant kinds of element: a name set squarely and legibly against a patch of a contrasting colour, and a name cropped by the edge and nearly lost in strokes of its own hue. One law governs both: a name and a colour put in the same place, each testing the other, with match and mismatch both possible and neither privileged. Every element in the field is that law or its ground; there is no second kind of mark, no figure and no motif outside it. Even the title obeys it, a name given to the painting that does not describe what it shows. The law is total. But narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one opposition, word against colour, in one register of loose oil, and the range between its farthest elements, though real, is not wide.
Peter of Illyria, under Pope Celestine I · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the outer brick shell, bare, and the marble interior, white and coloured. One law joins them: the wall is a container for light and for the colonnade, and the exterior says so by showing only its windows. Another pair: the ninth-century schola, reassembled, and the fifth-century nave; the schola sits low in the nave and obeys its axis. The side chapels and the bell tower are the main breaks, and they are held to the margins. What holds the axis is the narrowness of the range it governs: one room, one idiom, one effect. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure says so.
Sesshū Tōyō · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the hard, nearly dry black accents of the shore and the pale wash of the mountain dissolving into blank paper. They obey one law. Everything in the field is ink at one wetness or another, and a form’s nearness and solidity are its darkness and its dryness: the roof and the banner are the same ink at its most definite, and the mist is the paper. Nothing contradicts the law, and the range is real for one sheet, from black to white, from human sign to emptiness. The writing above extends it, the same brush in another use. But the territory is one village, one weather and one register of quiet, and narrowness is not coherence. A law held completely over a small field.
Doris Salcedo · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
One law: division in the ground, given by a word. The two most distant elements are the hairline at the entrance and the mesh at the deep end, and both obey it, the one as the division not yet seen, the other as the division shown for what it is. The title from Judges and the concrete of a London power station obey it too: a test at a crossing, and a break in a house. Even the filling and the line left after it, which the work did not choose but accepted, obey it: a border papered over that still shows. Held at 8.3 because the law is narrow and its range small, one material, one gesture and one register throughout. Narrowness is not coherence.
Andrew Wyeth · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the woman’s dark hair and pink dress at lower left, close and soft, and the grey clapboard of the house at the top edge, far and hard. One law holds them: the dry light of one afternoon, one palette of grey, gold and pale pink, and one degree of finish from foreground to horizon. Nothing contradicts it, and there is no second manner. But narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one field, one figure, one cluster of buildings and one hour, and the law holds over a small range by choice. Held below the top for the size of the territory, and for the faint dissonance in the figure, whose back and arms do not read as one age.
Nam June Paik · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs the whole: everything in the work is in the loop, and nothing outside it. Take the two most distant elements, the old figure and the electronic image. They obey the same law, since the image is the figure, and the figure exists in the work only to see itself. The comedy and the contemplation are one fact, not two tones in tension, and the viewer who intrudes obeys the law too, becoming part of what is shown. The coherence is complete. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range governed is small: three things and one relation. Coherent across a short span.
Amrita Sher-Gil · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the most inward face, modelled, lit and withdrawn, and the flattest passage of saturated cloth at the lower edge. One law holds them: everything in the canvas is ranked by how much interior life it is given, from the faces down through the hands to the patterned cloth, and the dark ground holds all of it in one shallow space with no outside. Nothing contradicts the law: no anecdote, no prop, no glance out of the frame breaks the stillness, and the colour keeps one key from edge to edge. But the range is narrow, three figures, one register, one dark ground, and narrowness is not coherence. The figure records a law held completely over a small territory.
Sumerian · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the dead under the chariots at the foot of the War side and the lyre player at the head of the Peace side. One law holds them. Everything moves in file toward the ruler, ranked by height in the field and by size, and every figure is a silhouette of shell on a lapis ground. Violence and music, captives and cattle, soldiers and bearers obey the same direction, the same scale and the same materials, and the two sides answer register for register: vehicles and beasts below, men in file in the middle, the ruler above. Nothing breaks the law but the ruler, and his breaking it is its apex. Held a step down because the ends sit loosely to the scheme.
David Hockney · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the splash, the only irregular, moving thing in the picture, and the flat sky, the most regular and still. They obey one law, and the picture states it: a world of fixed, flat, horizontal and vertical planes in which exactly one event is allowed, an exception that proves the rule. The same law governs the house, the terrace, the pool and the border, each a flat band, and the board’s diagonal is the law’s single permitted direction, toward the event. Within the field the coherence is complete. Held for narrowness: the range runs from a flat plane to one burst of water, and the law, once grasped, governs a small territory; and the house, drawn closer to illustration than the planes around it, is of a slightly different kind.
Egon Schiele · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the dark, angular, cut mass of the jacket at the lower edge and the round, warm husks beside the head. One law governs both: everything in the field is a shape set against emptiness and charged by contour, and everything obeys the same tension of angle, tilt and isolation. The plant is drawn in the same nervous line as the hair; the broken colour of the flesh is picked up in the husks. Nothing in the picture contradicts its law, and the pendant, where it hangs, obeys it too. But the territory is small: one figure, one plant, one register, a ground with nothing in it. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure records a law held completely over a small and deliberately emptied field.
Lucian Freud · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the sleeping face, the one place of a person’s inwardness, and the worn upholstery of the sofa, the most inert thing in the picture. They obey one law: everything in the room is examined with the same unsparing attention and given the same standing as matter under light. Skin, fabric, floor and hair are all surfaces with a history of wear, and none is idealised or caricatured. The law reaches the title, which names the sitter by her work with the flat exactness the paint gives her body. Nothing in the canvas contradicts it. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: one body, one sofa, one register of scrutiny, and the law, once grasped, governs a small territory completely.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the bottles and grapes at the front left, and the sails on the river beyond the railing. They obey one law. Everything is made of light laid as coloured touch, and nothing is outlined against its ground except where the near heads begin to firm. Glass, flesh, cloth, leaves and water are one substance under one afternoon. The social law is one too: every figure, banker or boatman, is painted with the same affection and placed by the light, not by rank. Two things hold the axis lower. A second law intrudes in the firmer contours of the near heads, which sit slightly apart from the dissolved handling of the far group. And the space obeys two systems, the tilted table and the receding railing, which do not fully agree. The range is a balcony, a meal and a river.
Bridget Riley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: a full square at the left edge and a sliver at the crease. They obey one law, the same unit under the same progression, the sliver only the square at another place in the rate. Every element is that law; there is no exception, no second mark, no accident. The law is total. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory here is about as small as painting allows: two values, one shape, one direction of change. Within it the range runs from rest to collapse, from a calm grid at the left to a surface giving way along the fold, which is wider than the means suggest and lifts the figure above a merely consistent pattern.
Alphonse Mucha · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
One physics governs the sheet: flat colour bounded by contour, a frontal and symmetrical architecture, the figure treated as ornament and the ornament as image. Take the two most distant elements, the lettering at the top and the mosaic at the foot: they obey the same law as the face, surface pattern made to bear a presence. The decorative and the sacred are fused, not set side by side. But the range the law governs is moderate, one figure, one setting, one mood, and narrowness is not coherence: a single still figure is easier to hold to one law than a crowded scene. That holds the figure below the upper band.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, The Thinker’s stillness and the falling bodies of the leaves. They obey one law, bodies under the pull of desire and gravity, rising from the material and returning to it with no ground: the falling is what the mind above sees, and the stillness is the strain of seeing it. The Shades stand at the edge of the same pull, bowed toward it. The wide range, from Dante’s named episodes to nameless lovers and the poet, is held. Three things resist: the pilasters, lintel and cornice obey an older, calmer law than the field they frame; the named episodes and the generic figures are not fully reconciled; and The Thinker’s scale is a hierarchy imposed rather than grown.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the shells’ exterior and the interior of the Concert Hall. The exterior obeys one law more strictly than almost any building of its kind: every shell from one sphere, one rib system, one tile. The podium is that law’s partner, heavy under the light roof, as platform and roof require. Inside, a second law governs. The halls are rooms set within the shells and unrelated to them, in another material and geometry, and the glass walls hang from the shells’ mouths in a language that is neither the roof’s nor the podium’s. The visitor passes from one law to the other at the foyer, where the ribs meet the glass. The Utzon Room and the loggia restore the first law at two points. The range is wide; the whole is two hands.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Micawber’s comic letters and Martha by the river in the London night. One law holds them, the remembering voice of a man looking back on all he has seen, and in the first half the comic and the dreadful share a physics: the Murdstones are grotesque and frightening at once, and the warehouse years are both farce, in the Micawbers’ lodging, and shame. The law weakens later. The Emily plot is told in a register of stage melodrama the rest of the book does not obey; Agnes stands outside the comic world as an emblem; and the close disposes of the cast by moral desert, the colony for the good and the prison for the bad, under a law of reward the early chapters did not hold. The breaks are structural, not local.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the satiric comedy of Offendene and Diplow, the archery meetings, the Arrowpoints, Mr Gascoigne’s prudence, and the prophetic idealism of Mordecai’s last chapters. One physics governs both in part: inheritance, what a person owes to the people and the past that made them, and whether the self will serve it or only itself. The Arrowpoints’ heiress marrying Klesmer against her parents is the comic form of the Alcharisi’s revolt; Grandcourt’s estate passed to his illegitimate son is the profane form of Deronda’s inheritance. But the registers do not fuse. The two halves are written as two kinds of novel, one tested by irony and the other mostly exempt from it, and the law holds at the level of idea more than of tone.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the lay figure hung like a martyr in the shadow of the left wing, and Baudelaire reading at the right edge. They obey one law in part. The law the painting proposes is that everything is brought into the painter’s studio to be seen and placed by him, types and friends alike, and that the allegory and the real are one substance. But the picture runs on two physics: on the left a symbolic order of types, props and ciphers; on the right a portrait order of named individuals; and at the centre a third, the act of painting. Scale, light and touch differ between the wings. The range is very wide, death and love, the poor and the patron, nature and the studio, and narrowness is not the problem; the strain is in holding that range under one law, which the title asserts more than the surface achieves.
Henry of Reyns and successors; Henry VII Chapel by Robert and William Vertue (attributed); west towers by Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Purbeck shafts of the 1250s and a Georgian marble monument of the 1760s, draped figures before a pyramid, set against them in a nave aisle. They obey no common law of form. One law does govern the fabric: the thirteenth-century design ruled the nave for a century and a half, Hawksmoor’s towers defer to it, and one liturgical axis holds the range from the shrine to the Tudor vault. A second law, the church as the burial ground of the realm, governs the accretion and explains it: the monuments obey the work’s purpose if not its form. Held well below a single-campaign chapel because one physics is asked of the whole, and the whole is a Gothic church crowded with Baroque and neoclassical sculpture, a Tudor chapel of another idiom and a Georgian front.
Christopher Marlowe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Robin and Rafe conjuring Mephistopheles from Constantinople with a stolen book, to the devil’s irritation (3.2), and the last hour. One law governs both: the bargain cheapens what it buys, and conjuring raises hell for trifles. The clowns’ scenes are the main plot at a clown’s scale; the pageant of the Sins is a show offered in place of an answer, when Faustus asks who made the world. The law holds at the level of argument across a wide range, from slapstick to terror. It holds less well in tone and kind: the farce at Rome is topical Protestant comedy that the law accommodates more than requires, and the court scenes are looser than either the clowns’ parody or the frame. That looseness holds the axis in the low eights.
Umayyad, under al-Walid I · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Roman temenos walls with their corner towers, and the Mamluk Minaret of Qaitbay or the Ottoman interior of the hall. They obey different laws, joined by reuse rather than conceived together. Within al-Walid’s work one law governs well: the arch on the column, in two tiers, repeated round the courtyard and through the hall, with the transept as the single exception that gives the field its centre. The courtyard front and the porticoes speak one grammar. Against it, the three minarets are of three periods and three styles, the Treasury dome is a small pavilion of its own, and the enclosure’s proportion is the temple’s, not the mosque’s. The range is wide, Roman to Ottoman, but much of it is accretion rather than one law stretched.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Norman arches of the west front and the curvilinear tracery of the south rose, two centuries apart; or St Hugh’s restless vault and the Angel Choir’s calm. Much of the building obeys one law. The thirteenth-century church, from the choir through the transepts and nave, shares one vocabulary of Purbeck shafting, stiff-leaf and rib, and the Angel Choir was designed to match the scale and bay of the nave rather than to break with it. The two roses face each other across the crossing as a deliberate pairing of eras. But the law is stretched: the west front is two buildings in one wall, the towers rising behind the screen on another logic, and the choir and nave vaults are two answers to one question.
John Milton · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the whole: goodness and truth are made by trial against what is contrary, and whatever forbids the trial unmakes them. The two most distant elements obey it. The learned history of the Councils’ indexes at the start shows what the law’s enemies did; the vision of the eagle and the rousing nation at the end shows what a people looks like when the law is kept. The law runs through Osiris, the Fall and the defence of reading. What holds the axis is a contradiction the speech does not resolve. It concedes that Church and Commonwealth must keep “a vigilant eye” on books, and ends by excepting popery, so that the trial it calls the means of virtue is denied to the adversary its audience most feared.
Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant parts: Laurana’s serene courtyard and the towers over the valley, or the courtyard and the studiolo’s crowded illusion. They obey one law in large part: a classical measure of arcade, frame and inscription governs courtyard, rooms and loggias, and the idea of a humane, ordered princely life runs from the arcade to the intarsia. What holds it here: at least two architects worked over two decades on the bones of older buildings, and others added after; the plan follows no one rule, the piazza front stops unfinished, and the passage from the courtyard’s calm to the towers’ picturesque assembly is a change of manner. The law holds in spirit more than in geometry.
Nayaka builders (and earlier) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark granite piers of the inner halls and the painted hosts on the outer towers; or the shops at the edge and the lamp at the centre. One law governs both pairs. The Dravida grammar of pilaster, cornice and miniature shrine runs from the plinth of a hall to the crown of a gopuram, whose tiers are temples stacked; and the law of enclosure and gate, centre and approach, holds from the outer wall to the sanctum, so that commerce at the edge and worship at the centre are two distances on one scale. The range is wide. What bends it: four centuries of accretion, enclosures that do not meet square, outer gates off the axes of the inner shrines, and the colour of the twentieth century set against the stone.
Burgundian Romanesque builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Romanesque narthex, low and dark behind its round-arched portals, and the Gothic choir begun about 1185, pointed and luminous. Do they obey one law? In part. The law of the building is the walk from shadow to light, and the choir obeys it, even fulfils it: two idioms serving one physics. But the idioms are not reconciled. Where the striped round arches stop and the pointed bays begin, the eye registers a change of hand and of age. The capitals range from grave typology to the grotesque under one law of carving. The range is credited; the join is charged, and it holds the axis here.
Wu Cheng'en (attributed) · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
One physics governs much of the range, from slapstick to the sacred. The same law of rank and patronage runs through Heaven, the underworld, the courts of the kingdoms and the demons’ caves, and the same comedy reaches Vulture Peak, where the Buddha’s own disciples ask for a gift. Take the two farthest points, Monkey’s name written on a pillar at the end of the world and the bottomless boat taking Tripitaka’s body: one law holds them, that the self is smaller than it thinks and freer than it fears. What holds it here is the famous charge. The Monkey who routed Heaven’s armies is held for chapters by minor demons and must go for help; the law of force bends to the needs of the episode. The book half answers that the mind alone cannot reach the goal, and the answer is credited in part. The tone holds from first chapter to last; the physics of force does not.
Richard Wright · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law governs the book: fear produces the act that it fears, and the society that produces the fear names the act nature. It holds between the most distant elements. The rat cornered in the kitchenette on the first page and the man sentenced in the cell on the last obey it; so do the blind philanthropist and the newspaper mob, Bessie’s murder and Mary’s. The range is wide, from a single morning in one room to a city in hunt and a state in court. What strains the law is Book Three, where the physics changes from experienced fear to courtroom argument, and Bigger’s last words, which take the act as his own, stand against Max’s case that others made it. That tension may be the book’s last truth; it is also a seam.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the large, slow recliners in the foreground and the small, fast ring in the distance. In colour and contour they obey one law: both are made of the same flat zones and the same continuous line, and the arabesque of the trees runs through the bodies and the dance alike, so that one rhythm governs the field. In scale and space they do not: the figures share no ground, light or measure, the dancers are too small for their distance and the couple too large, and the picture holds several spaces at once. Read as dream logic, that is a law; read on the canvas, the joins show, and the range from the near-academic garlanders to the schematic ring is wide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the defiance of “Self-Reliance”, which would shun “father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me”, and the self-abandonment of “The Over-Soul”, where the individual is a channel for the universal mind. They obey one law, and the book makes it explicit: what the self relies on, when it relies on itself, is the soul common to all, so that the most private act is the most universal. “History”, “There is properly no history; only biography”, and “Art”, “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not”, are the same law at the two ends of the book. What holds the axis: the law is asserted more than shown to govern; “Compensation” balances every account while “Circles” lets none close, a tension left unresolved; and the doctrine that licenses contradiction also excuses it.
Giulio Romano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Sala dei Cavalli, calm and ordered, the duke’s horses standing before painted architecture, and the Sala dei Giganti, the order collapsing. In one sense they obey one law. Both show the prince’s world through an architecture painted on walls, and the whole circuit is governed by one idea, the order known so well that it can be displayed, bent or brought down; the court’s licence and the giants’ catastrophe are the same thought at two scales. But the law is loose. The fronts disagree with one another, the plan carries the irregularities of the stables it grew from, the secret garden apartment stands apart from the main circuit, and the themes of the rooms are a suite, not a system. A wide range held by a temper more than by a law.
Barma and Postnik Yakovlev (attributed) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the axial symmetry of the plan, and the irregular corner church of 1588 with the belfry off the axis. Do they obey one law? In part. The core keeps a strict law of centre and ring, and its variety, each dome patterned differently, is variation within that law, like variations on one figure. The additions keep a looser law, that of a building grown by veneration round graves and bells, and the painted campaigns unify by colour what the plan no longer governs. The range is wide and the law is recognisable through it, but it is two laws reconciled rather than one: the geometric and the accretive. Below Sainte-Chapelle (9.0) and the Villa Rotonda (9.1), which keep one law throughout.
Boris Pasternak · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the chronicle of the Civil War in the partisan camp, with its executions and its political talk, and the twenty-five lyrics of Part 17, with their gardens, snow and Gospel. They obey one law, the law the book states and shows: life is a gift that comes by chance and is kept by attention, and history, which claims to govern it, does not. The coincidences obey that law. They are the book’s providence, and in a book that holds providence they are no breach. Where the law bends is in register: the satiric and political pages, the long conversations and the Epilogue’s flat report sit in a different key from the lyric centre, and the reader hears two instruments. The range is very wide, and the joint between its parts shows.
Lars von Trier · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the wedding party, comic and rough, with the grandfather’s drunkenness and Jan’s friends, and the bells sounding over the rig. Do they obey one law? The film’s law is that what Bess believes acts in the world. On that reading the bells answer the question the whole film has put, and the miracle is the law’s last and plainest instance, prepared by the prayer that seemed to bring Jan home and the accident that seemed to answer her. Against it stands the film’s other law, the handheld world of bodies and medicine, where the doctor’s diagnosis is always available; the ending breaks it, and the film has not quite made the two one physics. The range, from wedding comedy through sexual violence to a miracle, is wide and largely held. Which reading of the bells prevails decides the axis.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
One law, the vertical, governs the most distant elements. The thirteenth-century hemicycle and the sixteenth-century transept facades, three hundred years apart and in different manners, obey it: Chambiges took the choir’s height and module and built the transept to them, so that the interior reads as one vessel crossed by another of the same scale. The fourteenth-century rebuilding kept the elevation and changed the bay. The law holds across Rayonnant and Flamboyant tracery, glass of the thirteenth century and the sixteenth, the chevet’s open skeleton and the transept’s sheer screens. Where it breaks: the closing wall to the west, a plain stop after an interior of the most articulate kind; a crossing built to carry a tower that is not there; the sexpartite vaults against the hemicycle’s simpler rhythm; the bracing in the transept. The building contradicts itself at its ends, not in its core.
Leos Carax · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Merde’s rampage in the cemetery, monstrous and comic, and the hushed song at the Samaritaine, a love story with a death in it. One law governs both: every scene is a role played on schedule, and Merde and Jean are both keeping appointments. The law holds across the father, the double and the deathbed, over a range from monster film to musical, and the wider the range, the more the axis credits it. It strains at the edges, where the film puts its argument: the talking limousines in the garage extend the law from people to machines in a register of whimsy the rest does not use, and the chimpanzee family is either the law’s last joke or a break with it. The law is stretched, not broken.
Kazimir Malevich · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the black and the white. They obey one law, figure and ground in the most elementary relation, and nothing on the canvas obeys any other. The law is total; there is no second kind of mark and no exception. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is the narrowest possible: two values, one form, one relation. A law over two elements is complete because there is almost nothing for it to fail on, and the range a law governs counts with its totality. The craquelure and the colours beneath it now read as a second rule over the black, one the maker did not intend; that is survival, charged elsewhere, and not counted again. Below Autumn Rhythm and the Rothko Chapel, whose narrow laws govern larger territories.
Bernardo Rossellino, for Pius II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the classical travertine front of the cathedral and the northern Gothic hall behind it; or the Florentine rustication of the papal palace and the open loggia of the commune. They obey one law: a single geometry of axis and splay, a common grid on the floor, travertine and pale stone set against brick, each building sized to its rank and turned to the cathedral, a humanist order holding German, Florentine and local Sienese elements in one proportion. The range covered is wide for a small work. Held lower because the join is visible: the classical front is laid over a Gothic body, and the bishop’s palace does not share the finish of the others.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the black steel columns of the living space, with their machine finish and their rattan bindings, and the turf roof and rough log walls of the sauna. One is the modern frame, one the Finnish backwoods. Do they obey one law? There is one, and it is graded: a passage across the site from the made toward the natural, white render to dark boarding to stone and turf, the column to the unbarked pole to the forest’s trunks. Read so, the range is very wide and held. But the law is a gradient, not a physics; much of the house is governed by juxtaposition, materials set side by side, and the reading of it as collage, an order of difference, is as strong as the reading of it as one. Narrowness is not the risk here; looseness is.
Aghlabid builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the heavy, almost windowless minaret at the north end of the court and the jewelled mihrab under its dome at the far end of the hall. One is mass and voice turned outward, the other ornament and address turned inward. They obey one law: the axis of the qibla, which the central aisle carries from the court dome to the mihrab dome, and on which the tower is nearly, though not exactly, set. The hall itself is governed by one law, the bay of column and arch, from aisle to aisle. What bends it: the tower’s offset from the axis, the irregular enclosure, spolia that refuse uniformity, and court arcades rebuilt in different campaigns. One physics governs, with a looseness at its edges.
Attributed to Domenico da Cortona, under Francis I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the ground plan of the keep and its roof. Below, a strict law of cross, square and quadrant; above, a crowd of chimneys, dormers and lanterns that answers to no visible geometry. In part they obey one law: chimneys, stairs and turrets rise from the lodgings beneath them, and the lantern of the great stair holds the centre, so that the roof is the plan made visible in the air. But the roof’s surface obeys a second law, the late-Gothic delight in profusion, and the enclosure, its keep set to one side and its wings of different campaigns, its chapel finished under Louis XIV, sits under a looser law than the keep. The range is wide, from Italian plan to French roof, and the law bends at the top.
Zapotec builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the North Platform, the largest mass, closing the plaza with its stair, hall and patio, and Building J to the south, small, skewed and pointed. One law governs most of the centre: the long axis, the enclosure, buildings facing inward to the plaza, the repeated temple, patio and altar group along the sides. Building J breaks the grid, but it breaks it deliberately, and the plan accommodates the exception by setting it apart on the spine. Twelve centuries of building mostly kept the plan. What bends the law: the fill is uneven, the east side less ordered than the west, and later structures overlie earlier ones, so the law is strong in plan and looser in its parts.
Alan Moore and David Lloyd · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs most of it: a society seen from inside every level, the state’s organs and the people under them, the masked man moving through all of them, and every story turning toward the night of the fifth. The two most distant elements, the pulp night of the first chapter, where V rescues Evey from the Fingermen with a quip and a knife, and the grave austerity of Valerie’s letter, are held by the same rule of what the mask permits. Charged: the seam between the two campaigns, three years apart, shows in tone and in the shift from a revenge plot to a philosophical one; V’s omniscience, his access to Fate and his foreknowledge of each move, is a premise the book needs and never accounts for; and the last book’s riots and succession arrive quickly against the slow build of the first two.
Mark Z. Danielewski · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Zampanò’s dry chapter on the acoustics of echo, and Pelafina’s last letters from the institute. They obey one law: every container in the book is larger inside than outside, and what is inside is absence. The house holds a void; the commentary holds a film that may not exist; Johnny’s notes hold a life emptied by his mother’s madness; the mother’s letters hold a love the institution cannot contain. The horror, the scholarship and the confession run on the same physics, and the range is very wide, from academic parody to terror to grief. Charged: Johnny’s layer often runs on a looser law of excess and episode than the house’s exact menace; some of the apparatus, the contrasting views and parts of the appendices, obeys the joke more than the law; and the seams between the comic parody of criticism and the terror are sometimes visible rather than made to bear.
Christopher Wren, with Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs: symmetry about the open axis. It holds from the river to the colonnades’ ends; every mass on one side answers its twin on the other, and Webb’s block of the 1660s, Wren’s domes, Hawksmoor’s heavier ranges and Ripley’s completion of 1751 all obey it. The two most distant elements, the restrained Palladian Webb block and Hawksmoor’s massive west front of King William Court, belong to different idioms, and the law binds them without making them one manner. The Chapel’s neoclassical interior, after 1779, is of another age, a second break, inside. The range is wide, a palace, a hospital, a church, a refectory and a landscape axis, and it is held, but held by geometry more than by one language.
Wang Xianchen; Wen Zhengming (attributed design) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Within the central part one law holds the whole: water at the centre, halls facing it, depth by concealment, every element set both to be seen and to see. The western part obeys the same law at a smaller and busier scale. Take the two most distant elements, the open lawns of the eastern part and the dense, close sequence of the central part: they obey the one law only loosely, and the relaying of the 1950s belongs more to the public park than to the scholar’s garden. The law is wide in what it covers, architecture, water, plant, stone and text together, and that is a real achievement. But three parts of different centuries, joined at walls, do not make one physics, and the figure records the joints.
Pre-Pottery Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the giant central pair of enclosure D, and a small carved animal on a ring pillar of another enclosure, or a small pillar in a rectangular room of the younger layer. One law governs them: the T-pillar as figure, the ring round a centre, the animal world carved onto the human frame, and the same repertory of species and signs across enclosures built generations apart. That constancy over centuries is a real coherence. Two things bend it. The rough rubble walls belong to another physics from the dressed pillars: the walls look accreted where the pillars look designed. And the rectangular rooms keep the pillar but lose the ring, so the law narrows as it continues. The range is moderate: one type of figure, one plan type, one register.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the loggia on the square and the halls at the back of the hospital. One law reaches both in principle, the column, the round arch and the measured bay, and the cloisters keep the grey and white. But the law is held most strictly at the front; the halls, the remade church and the upper storey obey it loosely, and the bent architrave at the loggia’s end breaks the law at its most visible point, inside the first campaign and so charged to the work. The tondi obey another physics, glazed colour and figure on stone and plaster, but they sit within the circle of the spandrel and are absorbed rather than contradictory. The range the law covers is moderate: a front, two cloisters and a hospital, not a city.
Nan Goldin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a party picture, friends laughing in a bar under flash, and the battered self-portrait. They obey one law: the camera inside the circle, the picture taken by one of its members, in the same light and colour and at the same nearness. The law holds from the bed to the hospital and from New York to Berlin, and extends to the music, which is the circle’s own. The range is wide, from tenderness to violence and from comedy to grief, and the law governs all of it. What holds it below the upper band is a looseness inherent in the form: a sequence revised many times and a book selected from it, so that the bounds of the whole are not fixed, and some frames obey the law only as snapshots do, by being taken there.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the ninth-century arc of Old Bonito, rough and close to its hamlet sources, and the late banded masonry and closing south wall of the early twelfth century. For the most part they obey one law. The later builders kept and enclosed the earlier arc rather than razing it, and the governing law of room block, plaza, kivas and cardinal lines took three centuries under it; the dividing wall, the great kivas and the terraced section speak the language of the room ranks. The range is wide, house, storehouse, sanctuary and tomb, and is credited. What holds the axis is the seams of accretion: rooms blocked and filled, kivas inserted into room blocks, walls abutted rather than bonded.
George Orwell · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comic squalor of the trench at Alcubierre, with its broken rifles and its lice, and the cold analysis of the PSUC’s campaign in the press in chapter 11. One law governs both: the witness tells what he saw and what he knows, and tells it against the interest of his side when the truth requires. The trench is told as it was, not as the posters had it; the press is weighed against what he saw from the roof. The range is real, from comedy to dread to argument, and it holds. Charged: the shift into analysis is announced and stands partly outside the narrative’s law; and the closing return to England, though earned, changes the book’s object at the last page, from Spain to England, in a few paragraphs.
Qutb ud-Din Aibak and Iltutmish; upper storeys by Firuz Shah Tughlaq · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the alternating round and angular flutes of the first storey and the marble and sandstone bands of the fifth. One law governs both, the tapering, banded, ringed shaft, each storey a smaller repetition of the one below and each ring a balcony. In the three lower storeys the law holds closely, and the change of flute from storey to storey is itself lawful, a rule of change. What bends it: the upper storeys change material and abandon the fluting, obeying the scheme of storey and balcony but not the surface law below; and the Indian motifs and Arabic script are made to agree rather than unified at the root.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs: every encounter, waking or dreamt, returns Isak to himself, and past, dream and present obey the same physics, entered without a change of rule. Take the two most distant elements, the nightmare of the coffin and Agda refusing first names at the end of the day; both are Isak meeting what he did to the people near him, one as terror and one as farce. The deaf uncle’s birthday, the Almans’ violence, the students’ wrangle and Åkerman’s gratitude fit the same scheme of witness, and the range runs from expressionist dream to summer comedy. The strain is at the close, and it is not slight. The serenade, the reconciliations and the far shore bring a grace the film’s law has not earned, and the examination’s verdict of loneliness is softened rather than answered: the last movement obeys a gentler law than the dream that judged him.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Bulwer’s classroom, where a carnivorous plant closes on a fly, and the shadow’s hand closing on Ellen’s heart. One law governs both: predation is in the order of nature, and the human world is inside that order, not above it. Knock eating flies in his cell, the hyena at the inn, the rats spilling from the coffins and the town’s commerce, a house sold to death for a fee, obey it; so does the cure, which is not the cross but the sun, a natural law. The strain is of temperature: Hutter’s jaunty departure, the coach in fast motion and Knock’s chase across the rooftops belong to a lighter film, and the comic register is not brought under the law as the lecture is.
Fela Kuti and Africa 70 · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: command and answer, the will surrendered to a call, mocked in the groove that enacts it. The two most distant elements obey it: the fast, comic drill of Zombie, with its barked orders and its chanting chorus, and the slow, heavy sermon of Mr. Follow Follow, where the follower is warned rather than mocked. Soldier and civilian, laughter and warning, fast and slow: the law covers both and binds them, the second side carrying the first side’s diagnosis out of the barracks into the street. What holds the figure is narrowness. The palette is one, the Afrobeat ensemble in two tempos, and a record of two pieces in one form has little range over which coherence must be won. Narrowness is not coherence.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The two most distant elements are the cosmic vision of Africanus and the duck’s quacking retort to the turtle-dove. Do they obey one law? The poem argues that they do: both answer whether private love serves the common profit, one from the heavens and one from the pond. The range is wide, and narrowness is not the issue. The law is real, but it is held by theme more than by tone, and the joins, book to gate and temple to hill, are abrupt enough that the poem’s unity has been disputed for a century. Held where it is because the unity is argued for rather than felt everywhere.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: men to whom something was promised, work, a town, a woman, a country, find it withdrawn and answer with a voice that will not lie down, in anger, joke, vow or lament. The two most distant elements obey it: the title track’s roar and I’m on Fire’s whisper, the one a public loss and the other a private hunger with nowhere to go. Glory Days is the law as comedy, Downbound Train as tragedy, My Hometown as elegy, No Surrender as defiance. Darlington County hides its law until its last verse and then keeps it. The palette is largely one band sound, and the law loosens where the record turns to pure good time, in Cover Me’s generic fear and I’m Goin’ Down’s bar-band complaint.
Muhammad ibn Mahmud Isfahani (attributed), under Timur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the ribbed turquoise dome seen from the city, and the gold chamber round the nephrite stone. They obey one law, the centre. Every line of the building, from the faces of the octagon to the four recesses to the grave in the crypt, points to the place of the dead, and the dome marks that place for the city. The colour law is kept: blue, turquoise and white outside, blue and gold within. Inscription runs as one practice from the giant Kufic of the drum to the genealogy on the stone. What holds it: the double shell means outer and inner are governed by two figures, one for the eye outside and one for the room; the vestibule and gallery sit against the octagon as an attachment the geometry did not require; and the range is moderate, one compact building and one purpose.
James Brown · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the show’s pressure on the hall, rising to release and returning. The two most distant elements obey it. Gonder’s spoken introduction is all promise and “Night Train” is all departure, and they frame the singing as the arrival and leaving of one event. Between them the fast songs, the slow sermon and the medley are each a turn of the same ritual. The law holds without a break, and the continuous running of the bands enforces it. What holds the figure is narrowness, which is not coherence: the range is rhythm and blues pleading in two tempos and one instrumental, with a single mood of ardour, and the law governs a small territory. A wider record held by this law would stand higher.
Frank Sinatra · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: slow tempo, low dynamic, the voice confiding and the orchestra receding. Take the two most distant elements. “Mood Indigo”, Ellington’s blues, and “Dancing on the Ceiling”, a bright Rodgers and Hart stage song, come from different worlds, and both are bent to the law: the blues becomes the singer’s colour, the dance becomes a memory. Porter’s wit in “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and Arlen’s dread in “Ill Wind” obey it too. That is real coherence, and the range of sources is wide. But narrowness is not coherence, and the law here is easy to keep because it allows one tempo and one mood. The range across which it holds is a range of material, not of feeling.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs most of it: a deadpan register in which the comic and the deathly are one tone, and every encounter ends in sudden, absurd violence. Take the two most distant elements, the trappers’ grotesque campfire and the elegy of the crossing from the Makah village. Both obey the law, because the comedy is always on the edge of killing and the elegy is never solemn. The strain is in the parallel track. Cole Wilson’s cannibalism and his boot on a dead marshal’s head stretch the register toward the grotesque, and the cartoon of the three hired killers sits a little apart from the passage of Blake and Nobody, under physics not wholly the same. The range the law covers is wide, and that is credited.
Built for Rao Jodha and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the blank battered wall at the foot of the cliff and the painted ceiling of the last of the palace rooms. One law governs most of the range between them: the one red sandstone rising from rock to lattice, the stone thickening below and opening above, so that the fort reads as one material passing from mass to screen as it climbs. Gates, bastions, balconies and screens obey it, and four centuries of building keep the profile whole. What bends it: the interiors follow the taste of their reigns, Mughal mirror work, eighteenth century painted gold, nineteenth century colour, and the last of them reach for a manner outside the law of the stone. The range is wide, and the law holds more firmly outside than within.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the shop vaults beneath the platform, plain and commercial, and the tiled mihrab at the head of the hall. They obey one logic of foundation, the ground that pays and the paradise it pays for. Above, one law governs from the portico façade to the mihrab: the same palette, the same floral vocabulary, the garden. The strain lies within the tiles themselves. Many designs set side by side give a sampler’s effect in places, and the tile skin and the structure sometimes follow different rules, panels running across members rather than marking them. A hostile eye calls that profusion; a defender calls it the variety of a garden. Coherent across a wide range, with local friction.
Miloš Forman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of the court, the wigs and the young man who crawls under a piano and talks of excrement, and the deathbed dictation and the lime over the bodies. They obey one law, because both are Salieri’s memory, the comedy his contempt and the tragedy his guilt, and the film’s register is licensed by his voice throughout. The American speech is a single convention kept consistently. What gives: the court politics, the Italian faction and Count Orsini-Rosenberg’s manoeuvres, have their own comic physics that the frame does not always govern, and the late turn, Salieri’s plan to pass off the Requiem as his own at Mozart’s funeral, belongs to melodrama more than to the confessional law the rest obeys.
Robert Altman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Stormy Weathers sawing his wife’s furniture in half, played as farce, and the Finnigans at their son’s bedside. One law governs both: people attend to their own grievance and not to the person in front of them, and the cost falls elsewhere. The law holds across the fishermen, the Shepards’ lies, the Wymans’ party and Lois’s calls, and it holds in the sound, where nobody finishes a sentence to someone listening. The range it covers is wide: farce, domestic comedy, grief, suicide and murder. The strain is in the comic strands, whose tone sometimes works against the grief they are cut beside, and in the earthquake, which belongs half to the law and half to a joke about the city.
Teutonic Order builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: brick, in the Order’s Gothic, set to the rule of a religious house that is also a fortress. Take the two most distant elements, the austere convent square and the luminous Grand Masters’ Palace. They obey the same law of material and of hierarchy, the palace refining the convent’s language rather than abandoning it. The range is wide, prayer, government, war, service and burial, and the coherence holds across it. What strains the law is the layering: the High Castle as one sees it is partly a nineteenth century idea of the medieval and partly a twentieth century correction of it, and the seams between surviving fabric and the two reconstructions are visible to a close eye.
Master Enrique and Juan Pérez · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the thirteenth-century glass of the choir and the choir enclosure in the nave with its screen. The church’s law is the dissolution of the wall into ordered light; the medieval body obeys it from the ambulatory chapels to the west rose, and the portals’ sculpture belongs to the same campaign and speaks the same language. What strains the law: the enclosure, a closed room within the open one, which obeys the law of the Spanish choir and blocks the axis; the detached towers of different heights and dates, which make the west front a juxtaposition rather than a resolution; and glass of seven centuries, varying in palette and drawing. The range is wide and the core law holds, which keeps it above 8.0; the contradictions are real and are part of the work.
Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the low F corridor, a passage sized for one person at a time, and the communal dining room, a glazed hall for the whole house. One is the smallest private approach and the other the largest common room, and they obey one law: the frame, the ribbon of glass, and the division of life into private cells and shared space joined by a lit passage. The same law runs through the K flat’s double-height room, the bridge, the gymnasium and the roof terrace; the house is one physics of economy and light. What bends it: the patron’s penthouse on the roof of a house built to shrink the private flat, and an ensemble never fully joined in use, lacking its kindergarten. The range is a household’s, not a world’s.
Qing builders, under the Qianlong Emperor; rebuilt under Cixi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Marble Boat with its Western superstructure on the west shore and the Tibetan-style temples on the back hill; or the audience hall at the east gate and the shops on the Back Lake. One law governs them: the law of the scenic garden, in which each part is a view placed to be seen from water or path and to frame another view, and all are referred to the hill’s axis and the lake. The range is wide: rule, worship, theatre, trade, leisure and water supply fall under it. What bends the law: a garden of quoted scenes is a federation rather than a single physics, and each scene keeps its own; the front hill is formal and axial, the back hill picturesque and enclosed, and the ridge between them is a change of law.
Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the plain red stone of the base at the pavement and the dense foliate terra cotta of the frieze ten storeys up. One law governs both, Sullivan’s law of the tall building: each part takes its form from its place in the vertical, the base solid and open for entry and shops, the shaft repeated, the attic closed and ornamented as termination. The ornament obeys the same law in small: recessive and repeated in the spandrels, gathered and filling in the frieze, one vocabulary of foliage and geometry throughout. The law holds without exception on both street fronts. What bends it: the back elevations, where the law simply stops; and the range, a single building type at one moment, so that the coherence, though complete, covers less ground than the highest figures require.
Raymond Chandler · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: Marlowe’s voice and his code, which hold the comic and the elegiac, the satire of doctors and the rich and the grief for a friend, the gangster and the publisher, in one register of tired, ironic decency. Take the two most distant elements, the gimlets with Terry at Victor’s and the violent unmasking of Eileen Wade: both obey the same physics, since both are about people who live on a borrowed version of themselves. The world’s rules hold from the first chapter to the last: money controls the account of events, and the police are brutal but not the worst of it. Charged for the coincidence on which the joining rests, which comes from outside that law, and for a narrowness of range: a single voice holding a single city is coherent partly because it is narrow.
William Gibson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the book: everything that can be owned is owned, bodies and minds included, and freedom is only the choice of the owner. Take the two most distant elements, the street clinics of Chiba where organs are sold and the cold vaults of Villa Straylight where the clan sleeps through the centuries: they obey the same law, since the clan has bought out death and the street sells pieces of life, and both are subject to the intelligence that rents them all. Even the Zion Rastafarians, who seem outside it, are hired. The matrix and the meat share one physics: what can be recorded can be bought, so the Flatline’s mind is a commodity and Linda Lee survives as data. The tone holds from Chiba to orbit. Held at the figure because the range is wide in place and narrow in kind, hustlers and owners with little else, and because the climax strains the law with plot.
Nick Ut · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the girl at the centre, running, naked, mouth open, and the soldiers behind, walking, clothed and armed. They obey one law, and the law is the road. Everything in the frame moves along it, away from the smoke and toward the viewer, and the difference between running and walking on the same line is the image’s whole meaning; the smoke is the origin of the motion and the viewer its end. Tone obeys the same law: white bodies, grey road, black smoke, in bands from near to far. Nothing in the frame contradicts it. What holds the axis is a narrow territory, one road and one instant, and a law that is the event’s own geometry, kept by the photographer rather than made.
The Kinks · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Village Green’s oboe and strings, a chamber piece of regret, and Last of the Steam-Powered Trains, a heavy blues jam. One law governs both: what survives from a passing world, held with affection and irony. The steam train is the last of the old renegades, preserved and obsolete, and its blues is itself a borrowed old form, so the loudest track is made a relic too. Wicked Annabella’s fuzz and menace belong to the village’s folklore, the witch every green has; the Phenomenal Cat is a fable of the same village. Gentle irony toward what is loved holds across comedy and lament. Monica and Starstruck are thinly tied to the law, and where the comedy loosens the frame the tone slips.
Toyo Ito · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the ground plaza at the level of the street, and the roof where the tubes open to the sky. Both are fields threaded by tubes, and one law, plate, tube and skin, governs them and everything between, from the basements to the roof. The range is moderate. The law loosens where the building chose variety on purpose: each face differs, each floor height differs, and each floor was fitted differently with its own furniture, so that the inside reads at times as several interiors in one frame. The variety is licensed by the concept, but it does not always feel governed by it.
The Stooges · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the body driven past restraint, by riff, repetition and volume. Take the two most distant elements: Down on the Street, a tight riff-song of under four minutes, and L.A. Blues, a noise with no metre and no song. They obey the same law; the second is the first carried to its end, and the sequence makes that visible. Dirt, the slowest track, is the same drive held back, and its restraint is felt as pressure. The saxophone, a voice from another tradition, is bent to the law rather than standing apart from it. What holds the figure is the range the law governs: one tempo of feeling, from tense to frenzied, and one register of sound. Much of the unity is the unity of a narrow range.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the converging grid of the skylight at the top and the floor at the bottom edge, where the room meets the viewer. They obey one law: everything is the hall’s geometry, drawn to one point, and everything is burned matter, the same crust on ceiling, wall and floor. Illusion and surface are reconciled throughout, and no passage obeys a different physics. The law holds across the picture’s second range too, from the far door, the deepest and darkest point, to the near surface where the paper shows. What holds the axis is that the range is narrow: one room, one register, one material treatment, one point of view. Narrowness is not coherence.
John Milton · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Comus’s rout with its “Tipsy dance and jollity”, and the epilogue’s celestial Cupid with Psyche. One law governs them: a Platonic cosmos in which the body’s goods are real and ordered upward, so that the sensuous is not refused but placed, and the epilogue’s chaste love is the right use of what Comus misuses. The Spirit comes down from the spheres and goes back to them; the Lady’s virtue is tried on earth and helped from below, by a river. The range is wide for a masque: grotesque, pastoral, debate, theology, local legend, compliment. The strain is that Comus is given a poetry the law cannot quite contain, so the two speakers seem at times to belong to different poems; and the compliments and country dances sit on the frame, not under the law.
Bichitr · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the European putti in the sky and the patterned carpet under the throne. One law governs them, the law of rank by light: everything in the picture is placed by its nearness to the emperor’s halo, from the putti above to the painter at the lowest edge. Persian flatness, European modelling and Indian portraiture are made to obey that hierarchy, and the gold binds them. Where the law strains: the borrowed elements remain visibly borrowed, the putti and the English face carrying their sources with them, so that the picture is a collector’s order of the world as much as a single physics. The coherence is of an argument assembled with great skill, not of a vision grown whole.
Burial · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the rave remembered alone, its voices and rhythms turned into ghosts by the city at night. The two most distant elements obey it. Untitled, forty-five seconds without a beat, and Raver, the nearest the record comes to the dance floor, are the same memory at two distances, the street and the club, and the record passes from one to the other. In McDonalds and UK, short pieces of atmosphere, obey as places on the walk; Archangel’s tenderness and Homeless’s bleakness are one longing in two moods. Nothing breaks the law. What holds the figure is range: one palette, one tempo for the beat tracks, one mood. Narrowness is not coherence.
Iris Murdoch · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of Gilbert in an apron serving Charles at Shruff End, and Titus dead in the sea. They obey one law, the law of a man who arranges people as a director arranges a cast, and whose arrangements, harmless in the comedy, kill in the tragedy. The supernatural strand, the monster, the face at the window, James’s rescue, his death, is governed by one law of ambiguity throughout, never confirmed and never explained away. The “Postscript” holds the comic and the solemn in one key. The coherence is wide, from domestic comedy to near-mysticism. What holds the axis at 8.2 is that the Buddhist and magical material is pitched in a different register from the social comedy, and the joins, James’s long speeches above all, can be seen.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One law: language orders the world and can kill, and naming is power. Take the two most distant elements: the cult’s murder of an old man with a hammer on the island, and the boy in the closing section who cannot speak in tongues at a revival on the American plains. They obey one law: the first is the letter without meaning, the second the utterance without letter, and the book is the space between. The law also governs James’s work, which turns nations into figures of risk, Owen’s epigraphy, the expatriates’ fluent talk and the marriage, a failure of saying. The range is wide, dinner comedy to ritual murder. Charged: the shooting near the end and the intelligence secret belong to a thriller’s physics of cause, and sit a little apart from the law of language, joined to it by argument more than by event.
Patricia Highsmith · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: the world as Tom sees it, in which people are read by their things, and a sufficiently exact performance of things is a person. The two most distant elements, the shabby New York of the first chapters and the palazzo in Venice of the last, obey it: the same man doing the same thing on a larger scale, with the same terror of discovery at both ends. The tone holds from first chapter to last, a comedy of manners with a corpse under it. The charge is luck. The book’s physics lets chance fall Tom’s way more often than its own realism should allow: the slowness of the Italian police, the credulity of the American detective Alvin McCarron, Herbert Greenleaf’s acceptance of the will. Highsmith makes the luck part of the law, for the world favours the confident, and Tom’s own surprise at it is part of the fear at the end. That is a real answer, and a partial one.
Spike Jonze · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stooping clerks on floor seven and a half, and Craig’s consciousness trapped behind a child’s eyes in the last shot. One law governs both: people are housed in spaces not built for them, and they bend, enter, crowd and occupy; the self is a space that can be let. The workplace comedy, the marriage, the love conducted through a man and the immortals’ plan all obey it, and the deadpan, which treats every marvel as logistics, is the film’s physics. The range is wide and the tone never breaks. The breach is in the rules: the vessel ripens at an age and the portal then leads to a larval host, a rule brought in to close the plot, and the chase through the subconscious runs on a dream logic the rest of the film does not use.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Stranger at the bar, in a cowboy’s voice, musing over a sarsaparilla on the Dude’s place in the scheme of things; and the nihilists in black on a dark car park, an ear bitten off, the ashes in a Folgers can. One law governs both: everyone in this Los Angeles is acting in a story too large for him, and only the man who does not act survives his. The millionaire’s rhetoric, Walter’s Vietnam, Maude’s art, Jackie Treehorn’s talk of new technology and the nihilists’ creed obey it, each a borrowed grandeur over a small appetite. The range is wide, from noir to musical to elegy, and the law holds across it. The strain is at the edges: Donny’s death is the one event the law cannot wholly absorb, and the film half admits it, and the two dreams follow a logic of their own.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the sun, the one saturated note in the field, and the cranes and chimneys at the left, grey on grey. One law governs both: everything is atmosphere at one hour, and differs only in how far the haze has taken it. The sun is the haze at its hottest point, the boats the haze at its nearest and darkest, the port the haze at its densest. The law holds without exception. But narrowness is not coherence: the range is a single tonality at a single moment in a single view, and nothing far from the law ever puts it under strain. Held below Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.9), whose one law governs a much wider field of events, and above the floor with room.
DJ Shadow · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the found sound, made to speak of loss and of the search for it. The two most distant elements are Why Hip Hop Sucks in ’96, a joke about money and the culture, and Blue Sky Revisit, a slow elegy. They obey the law in part: both are the voice of the digger, one turned outward in irritation, one inward in grief, and the joke is about the same market that discarded the records the elegy is built from. The range is wide, from hard breaks to choral wash and film dialogue. The strain is in the showpieces, The Number Song and Organ Donor, which obey the craft’s law more than the record’s.
H. P. Lovecraft · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One physics governs the body: the cosmos is indifferent and vast, man is late and small in it, and knowledge of the true order destroys the knower or transforms him. Take the two most distant elements: the backwoods New England farm of “The Colour Out of Space”, with its well, its rotting fruit and its neighbours’ talk, and the Great Race of “The Shadow Out of Time”, minds migrating across millions of years. They obey the same law. The farm is undone by a thing from outside that has no malice and no meaning for it; the Great Race shows humanity as a brief tenant. The local and the cosmic are one scale read at two magnifications. Held at 8.2 because the range, wide in space and time, is narrow in tone: one register, one sort of man, and the law never tested against love, society or comedy.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the private garden on a box’s roof, a domestic place of plants and sky, and the elevator core rising as a shaft to serve the cluster, an infrastructure of the city. They obey one law: everything is either the box or what joins boxes. Dwellings, gardens, streets and cores all follow the single module, its dimension and its stagger, and the hill is that law applied in three dimensions. The coherence is real and strict. Held lower on two counts. Narrowness is not coherence: one unit repeated is a narrow range, and the law holds most easily where it governs least. And the law bends where the visible physics and the actual part: the boxes seem to rest on one another as a heap while tendons and cantilevers hold them, and the base of parking and services obeys a plainer law.
Etruscan · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the woman’s face, smiling, alive, attentive, and the carved feet of the couch at the chest’s corners, which are furniture. One law holds them: everything in the object is the banquet and the body of the dead at once, the couch a vessel, the vessel a bed, the persons on it feasters and remains. Nothing in the work contradicts that law. The archaic stylisation holds throughout, in the smile, the braids, the folds and the ornament of the couch, and the schematic lower bodies belong to the same law of the type rather than breaking it. But the range is narrow, one couple, one couch, one register of serene company, and narrowness is not coherence. The figure records a law held completely over a small territory.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the book: a thing of infinite or sacred weight enters a finite life and ends it, or is lost. The book of sand, the disc, the third poem, the word Undr, the Congress that becomes the world, the self met on a bench: each is an absolute a man cannot keep. Take the two most distant pieces, “El libro de arena” and “Avelino Arredondo”, whose assassin shuts himself away for months before his act. They obey a version of the same law, a single act prepared in seclusion, an absolute in a small room, but it takes some stretching to say so, and “El soborno” and “Utopía” stand further off. The voice holds the whole across Norse saga, Irish court, Texas faculty and Buenos Aires flat, and that is a real range held.
Joseph Beuys · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the ambulance, a machine of the American city, and the coyote, an animal of its plains. They obey one law, which is Beuys’s own physics of warmth and insulation, of energy kept and exchanged. The felt insulates the man in the ambulance as it shelters him in the room; the room insulates him from the country and exposes him to the animal; the newspapers, as the accounts report them, a country’s printed self, become the animal’s material. Every element turns on what is shielded and what is exchanged, and the departure repeats the arrival exactly. Held below the top because the law is private, a personal cosmology of felt and warmth, and its range stays within one room and one pair of bodies.
Edward Weston · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark of the funnel, the least shaped thing in the picture, and the brightest ridge on the pepper’s skin, the most modelled. They obey one law: light falling on form and turning it in space, the dark there only to make the form emerge. The same law governs the composition, the curves of the lobes answered by the curve of the ground, and the making, since every technical choice serves the modelling of the form. Nothing in the picture contradicts it, and the double reading of pepper and body is not a contradiction but the law’s own result. What holds the axis is that the field governed is one object in one light, and coherence of this kind is reached by exclusion.
Jean-Siméon Chardin · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the cat, alive, alarmed and moving at the left, and the still group of jug, pot and bottle at the right. One law holds them: everything on the ledge is for eating, cooking or killing, and is ranked by its nearness to the cut. The cat wants the fish; the oysters are opened; the knife waits; the pot and skimmer will receive it. One light and one dark ground bind them, and one touch handles fur, flesh, shell and metal. The law is kept. But two registers meet without full fusion: the drama of the hung fish and the cat, and the calm display of vessels, which belongs to another kind of still life. The two halves obey one law, of use, but not one tone. The range is narrow, one ledge and one moment, and narrowness is not coherence.
Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of the sixties, the Tender Trio robbing a gas truck under a low sun and Rocket failing at a girl and at crime, and the war of about 1980, children armed by both sides and the Runts with their list. One law governs both: in the City of God whoever holds the gun holds the place, and every holder is replaced by someone younger. The comedy obeys it, since Marreco dies by it, and the apartment’s chain of owners is the same law told as a joke. The range runs from farce to massacre. The strain: Rocket’s way out through the newspaper is told under a gentler law, closer to a career picture, and the camera’s pleasure in its own speed sits uneasily at times with what it shows.
Woody Allen · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the overture’s rhapsody and the comic bickering at Elaine’s and in the scenes with Jill. They obey one law: the city is grander than the people, and the people make a comedy of their failure to live up to it. That law governs the opening, the bench at dawn, the planetarium, the skeleton and the run across town. The final scene holds it most completely: Isaac’s monologue of beloved things is grand and comic at once, and it ends on a face. The limit: the range is moderate, from satire to romance, not from farce to tragedy, and some comic set pieces, Isaac’s tirade as he quits his television job and the scenes with Jill and her book, play by the logic of the stand-up routine rather than the film’s own. Coherent, and wider than narrow.
Hannah Höch · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: an inert machine part and a monarch’s head. They obey one law, the cut and the turn: every element is severed from its source and rotated into a new relation, so that the machine part and the ruler are both components in a mechanism that spins. The same law governs the dancer cut from her head, the crowds cut from their streets, the words cut from their sentences, and the maker cut into her own picture; it reaches the title, itself a montage of phrases, and the method, which is its content. Nothing breaks it, and its range is wide. Held below the top because the law is permissive: in a montage this dense almost anything can obey it, and the coherence is a swarm’s in motion.
Ovid · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: every situation is the occasion for a performance by a lover who is also, and first, a poet, and the wit that serves the lover also exposes him. The two most distant poems obey it. The lament for Tibullus (3.9) is elegy turned to its oldest use, and it ends in the consolation of poetic survival that 1.15 claims for Ovid himself; the comedy of impotence (3.7) tests the same claim, to make anything into verse, at its most absurd. The abortion poems hold within the law too, as the place where the performance meets a cost. Held at 8.2 because the range, wider than it first appears, is the range of a single genre and a single voice, and narrowness of register is not coherence.
Grant Wood · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: verticality and rhymed form. Take the two most distant elements, the woman’s soft averted face and the hard tines of the fork. They obey it: her long face and parted hair are another upright, her brooch another oval answering the round trees, and the barn and the spire at the two edges are bound in by the same upright logic. Tonally the picture holds homage and coolness under one surface without either breaking it. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range the law governs is small: two figures, one register, one light. A tight law over a small field, below Broadway Boogie Woogie at 8.9.
Gu Kaizhi (attributed) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bear scene, an event of danger in the public court, and the lady kneeling alone in reflection, an inward act with no event at all. One law governs both: conduct is shown at the instant of choice, and the line gives every figure the same restraint, so that courage and contemplation are drawn in one voice. The mountain, the farthest in kind, obeys the same law, stating as cosmos what the scenes state as conduct, and the Instructress at the end gathers the whole into the act of admonition. The range is real: public and private, danger and intimacy, the cosmic and the cosmetic. What resists is the mountain’s drawing, which follows an older spatial convention than the rooms, and the family scene, whose crowding obeys the text more than the scroll’s manner.
Michael Curtiz · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pickpocket working the tourists at the café’s tables, and the aircraft leaving in fog. One law covers them: everything in Casablanca is a transaction, and the question is what a person will not sell. It holds from the croupier’s winnings to Rick’s last choice. The tonal range is wide, from Renault’s farce of shock to Laszlo’s arrest, and the film holds it, since the comedy of corruption and the tragedy of the war obey the same price. The ending’s turns are seeded and hold on return. The break is in the middle. The Paris flashback runs on another law, that of the screen romance, in a softer register than the rest, and for its length the price that governs everything else is suspended.
Chimú builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the city plan of compounds across the plain, and a single frieze module a hand’s breadth across. One law governs both. The frieze is a grid of cells, each holding a figure inside a lattice; the compound is a grid of courts and storerooms holding the ruler inside a lattice of walls; the city is a grid of compounds holding the rulers in sequence. Enclosure within enclosure, the net as figure and as plan. The same law holds from the face of a wall to the whole site, from the living ruler to the dead one, and across centuries of building by successive reigns. Held below the gate because the range is narrower than it first seems: one programme repeated, one material, one register. Narrowness is not coherence, and the law’s reach is long in scale and short in kind.
Paula Rego · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the pale building on the rise and the girl in the ring of three. One is the state’s stone, permanent and impersonal; the other is the beginning of a woman’s life. One law holds them, the law the moon enforces on the whole picture: everything on the strand is fixed in its place by the same cold light, and the dance, which should be free, is as set as the building. The same law governs the woman apart, the couples and the ring; the solemnity is the same in each group, and nothing breaks the night with another register. The range is moderate, one place, one time, one class of subject, and narrowness is not coherence; within it the law holds without a crack.
Balkrishna Doshi · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs: corridor, pergola, court and granite wall, from the academic core to the hostels and the faculty housing. Take the two most distant elements, the library and administration at the core and the residential blocks at the edge. They obey the same physics of shaded passage and stone. The range is wide, teaching, governance, study and dwelling, and the law holds across it. What holds the figure below the high eights is that the law is in places applied by repetition rather than by invention, the same bay and the same pergola set down again where the system needed to run on, and that how far the later additions keep it could not be established.
George Lucas · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: C-3PO and R2-D2 bickering in the desert, a vaudeville pair, and the smoking remains of Owen and Beru outside the burned homestead. One law governs both: in this galaxy the small and the overlooked carry the fate of the large, and comedy and cruelty alike are the serial’s, quick, bright and not dwelt on. The droids carry the plans, the farm boy carries the Force, and the smuggler comes back. The design keeps one physics: the Empire clean and grey, the frontier and the Rebellion worn and patched. The range runs from slapstick to the death of a planet, and it holds because the film never asks that death to weigh more than an adventure can bear. That is also its limit, coherence won by keeping grief light, and the solemn pageant of the throne room sits in a different key from the film’s ironies.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the glass apex in the open court and the coffered concrete ceiling of the hall below. One is light and transparent, in the sky; the other heavy and opaque, under the ground. One law governs both: pure Euclidean figures, square, triangle and circle, set out on one grid and one axis, every surface finished to the same precision. The triangle of the pyramid returns in the pools, the circle in the stair and the lift, the square in the base and the hall. The court of old stone obeys the law by contrast, as its other half. What bends it: the later furniture of ticketing, shops and signs in the concourse obeys commerce more than geometry; and the law is narrow, a few figures in one pair of materials, and narrowness is not coherence. It stands well above the floor.
Wes Anderson · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Fox’s speech to the animals gathered underground, a comic oration by a man in middle age on the dignity of being wild, and the wolf on the ridge, wordless and absolute. One law governs both: the creature’s nature beneath its manners, rising through comedy as appetite, pride and fear. The table manners, the dig, Rat’s menace, Ash’s karate, Kristofferson’s meditation, the farmers’ industrial appetite and the supermarket all obey it, each a version of civilisation and the wild. The tone is held throughout, deadpan applied as evenly to Rat’s death as to a game of whack-bat. The strain: the farmers belong to a children’s book while the foxes belong to a novel of manners, and the last act bends the world’s physics for the plot.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel; completed by Hawkshaw and Barlow · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
One physics governs the whole: tension in the iron, compression in the stone, the rock taking both. Take the two most distant elements, the heavy masonry of the Leigh Woods abutment and the thin rods hung at mid span. They obey the same law: the abutment holds the tower up so that the tower can hold the chain up, and the chain holds the rods. The two campaigns join without contradiction; the completion did not change the governing idea but made it stronger. What keeps the axis from the top is range, one structural idea stated once, and narrowness is not coherence; and the undressed towers carry the trace of a stylistic law never applied, an Egyptian portal without its Egypt, so that the stone speaks a little less clearly than the iron.
Fleetwood Mac · Music
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs the record: love’s ending heard from every side inside one sound, held together by the work. Take the two most distant elements. Don’t Stop is the brightest song, a piano shuffle that refuses the past; Gold Dust Woman the darkest, a slow incantation over a scraping drone. They obey the same law: one voice says go on, the other shows what going on costs, and the same rhythm section, the same harmonies and the same clean surface carry both. Buckingham nervous and bright, Nicks incantatory, Christine McVie warm and plain: the law holds them as three positions in one argument, not three bands. No break anywhere. The range is moderate, which is credit but not much: no song steps outside the couple or the pop rock palette.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the forest of raw posts under the stage, and the hidden image in the dark inner sanctuary. They obey one law: unpainted timber, frame shown as frame, the building made of the mountain’s trees and set on the mountain’s slope, the darkness of the god and the open air of the offering joined by one roof and one floor level. The bark of the roof and the cypress of the stage continue the same material order. The rule is coherent and the building obeys it everywhere it can be seen. The range is not wide: one material, one tradition, one purpose. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure records that the law governs a narrow field.
Roman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the low single-tier arches at the far end, close to the ground, and the two-tiered stretch at the Azoguejo, nearly thirty metres high. One law governs both: the level channel above and the pier and round arch below, sized by the distance to the ground, with the same stone, the same coursing and the same proportion of pier to opening as far as the change of height allows. Even the arches rebuilt in 1484 were made to obey it. The law is exact. What holds the axis is that it is simple and the range it covers narrow: an arcade that repeats one bay over hundreds of metres coheres by having little to reconcile. The niches and images on the attic stand outside the law, and the rebuilt arches do not exactly match the Roman profile.
Alexandros of Antioch (attributed) · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the severe classicizing head and the deep-cut, almost baroque drapery at the knee. They obey one law, the spiral: the drapery is its turning base and the head its last turn back. The opposition of smooth and cut, skin and cloth, is held throughout. The tension critics name, a fifth-century face on a Hellenistic body, is real and is the work’s eclecticism; it is felt as a change of manner, not a break of law. But the range the law must cover is narrow: one figure, one action, one material. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure is held below works that keep one law across a room of figures or a field of incident.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the wet reflecting eye, the most finished point, and the thin brown wash at the edge of the haunch, the least finished. One law holds them: everything is made by the same light from the same window, and everything is a coat of individual strokes over a tonal mass, at every degree of finish. The shadow, the placing of the monogram and the bare ground obey the same law of a single object in a single room, and nothing in the sheet contradicts it. The change of finish between head and haunch is a variation in degree, not a break in law. The figure is held where it is because narrowness is not coherence: the law, held completely, governs one animal in one light.
Joan Miró · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the dark shape and the star in the window, the outside world at night, and the two cats with their yarn on the floor, the most domestic thing in the room. One law holds them: everything is a flat sign, drawn in the same line and the same unmodelled colour, and everything is alive and taking part in the festival. Stars, notes, ladder, globe and insects obey it equally; nothing is modelled, nothing is shadowed, nothing stands outside the play. The law is complete. But its range is narrow, one room and one register of bright glee, and narrowness is not coherence; and the hunger the picture is said to come from is the one element the law does not quite take in, since it reads as one more sign among delighted ones.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the title, a phrase from the altar and the museum of painting, and the cut face of the cow, a thing of the abattoir and the anatomy laboratory. They obey one law, which is division. The title is divided by its parenthesis; each body is divided; the mother is divided from the child; the glass divides the viewer from the body, and the gap divides the body round the viewer; the sacred image is divided from its flesh. Every element makes the same move, and none breaks it. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: two bodies, four boxes and one law, and the range between icon and carcass is held by a single operation repeated.
Christopher Nolan · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the motel clerk admitting he has rented Leonard two rooms, played for comedy, and Leonard learning what he may have done to his wife. One law governs both: Leonard is used by everyone who knows his condition, himself included. The clerk’s petty fraud, Natalie’s manipulation, Teddy’s management and Leonard’s own forged note obey it. The two strands keep their own physics, reverse in colour and forward in monochrome, without a break until the designed meeting. What holds it here: the range is moderate, from dry comedy to grief and murder but in one register of cool anxiety and one man’s knowledge, and narrowness is not coherence; and the Dodd material obeys the rules of the thriller more than the film’s own.
César Pelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the eight-pointed star of the floor plan and the hinged legs of the skybridge, the sign of the plan and the mechanism of the bridge. One law reaches both more often than not. A geometry of rotated squares and circles governs the plan, the stepping of the setbacks, the round columns, and the drums and rings of the crown and pinnacle; and the two towers, mirror images on one axis, obey the law of the pair, which the bridge enacts. The range is moderate, one type, one material system, one figure doubled, and narrowness is not coherence. What bends the law: the bridge’s inverted V speaks engineering’s grammar, not the plan’s; the annexes sit beside the shafts as appendages; and at the base the shopping centre’s law governs.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the configuration in the angular yellow plane at the left and the dark disc in its soft halo at the right. They obey one law: every element is a force of colour and form, with weight and direction, set against an opposite in a field of balanced tension. The near-figure is drawn in the same ruled lines as the abstract forms and brings in no second physics; the disc is the same law at its largest. The range is wider than in the strict geometric abstraction of the decade: straight and curved, hard and soft edge, near-figure and pure form, warm and cool, all under one law, and the law is the painting’s subject. What holds the axis is the small vocabulary, which obeys the law but at times sits on it as an inventory; the chequered patch reads as a sample rather than a force.
James Cameron · Film
7.8 · Tier III
One physics governs. The acid blood forbids firing near the cooling system; the hive’s biology of eggs and hosts runs the colony’s fate; the Company’s logic of profit sets the trap; the machines work until they do not. The two farthest elements, the comedy of the marines’ arrival and the horror of the nest, obey one law, because the comedy is the confidence the horror is there to break, and Hudson carries both. The fight on the Sulaco after the climax below could look like an added act, but it is lawful: the Queen is the mother whose brood Ripley burned, and she follows her. The strains are small and real: the dropship’s crash and the timing of rescues serve the plot more than the world’s law.
SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs the whole: rectangles set in a circle, a thin roof, glass at the edge, white within, every room a box and every passage a street. The two most distant elements, the tall top-lit gallery and the café on the glass ring, obey the same law; so do the children’s rooms and the lecture hall. Nothing in the building contradicts its diagram. But narrowness is not coherence: the range covered is narrow by intention, one material palette and one geometric move, and the law holds partly because so little is asked to obey it. What raises the axis above the floor of easy coherence is that the law also governs use, the free and paid zones moving within the same field without breaking it.
Fariborz Sahba · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs: nine, in rings of nine, a single figure and a single material, white over water. Take the two most distant elements, the outermost entrance leaf turned down over a door and the glazed opening at the crown of the inner ring. They obey the same law, each a petal of the one flower at a different stage of opening, and the pools that ring the podium are the same nine-fold geometry laid flat. The law reaches the use: nine doors, no front, one room. The range is modest, and narrowness is not coherence: one figure in one material in one symmetry, without the play of scales and materials by which a richer building proves its law can hold differences. Inside, where the structure shows unclad, the ribs and stepped surfaces read as another order.
Vilhelm Hammershøi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the bright patch of sun on the floor and the black of the woman’s dress against the wall. One law holds them: everything in the room is reduced to tone and rectangle, held in silence, and ranked by how much light it receives; the dress is the darkest note and the sun the brightest of one scale, and neither breaks the stillness. Nothing contradicts the law: no colour outside the grey family, no gesture, no story, no object that asks to be read. But narrowness is not coherence. The territory is small by choice, one room, one figure, one light, one register of feeling, and the law is held completely over it. The figure records a law total over a narrow field.
Interpol · Music
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs the whole: the two-guitar interlock, the melodic bass, the dry drums and the distant voice hold from Next Exit to A Time to Be So Small. Take the two most distant elements, the organ hymn that opens Next Exit and the pop drive of Slow Hands: they obey the same law, the bass warm beneath and the voice held apart above. So do the long, slow climb of Not Even Jail and the bright short form of C’mere. No song breaks the record’s rules, and the law covers a change of temperature from dark to bright and of tempo from slow to fast. What holds it is the range: the law is kept across one colour, and narrowness is not coherence.
The National · Music
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs the record: a steady voice keeping its composure inside a pressure it cannot master. The two most distant elements obey it. Terrible Love, a private dependency as noise and flood, and Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks, a hymn sung in company, are the same pressure, first suffered alone and then shared; the hymn resolves what the opener only endures. The debt of Bloodbuzz Ohio and the fear of Afraid of Everyone arrive in the same low register as love, and no song breaks the law. What holds the figure is range: the tone runs only from hush to swell, the subject is the settled adult in his house and city, and narrowness is not coherence.
Samuel Barber · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the opening, soft, the line alone over held chords, and the climax, fortissimo, in the top register. One law governs both: the same stepwise line in a narrow compass, carried higher and pressed harder, so that the scream is the whisper under pressure. The return after the silence obeys it, and the open close follows from it; nothing in the work contradicts it. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range here is narrow: one tempo, one character, one theme, one texture of sustained strings. The law holds across a single distance, from soft to loud and from low to high, not across contrasting worlds. That is real unity at a modest range.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the child’s eyes, turned out to the viewer, and the mother’s, turned inward or half closed in the embrace. One law holds them: everything in the picture serves the bond, and the one outward look is the bond made public, the child presenting the pair to the viewer as the mother presents herself to her public. Light, colour, dress and ground obey the same tender register; nothing contradicts it or stands outside it. But the range is narrow, one pair, one moment, one feeling, a plain ground, and narrowness is not coherence. The figure records a law held completely over a small territory, a little below The Swing, whose law holds more parts: statues, a garden, three figures and a slipper in the air.
Anish Kapoor · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the top, where the sky and clouds lie on the steel and the work seems to dissolve upward, and the omphalos, where the viewer’s own image is multiplied and inverted in a closed hollow. They obey one law: whatever meets the surface becomes image, bent by one continuous curvature, convex outward to gather the world and concave within to gather the self. The same law governs the skyline, the crowd, the snow and the night lights; nothing on the object is exempt, since the object shows nothing of its own. The range the law covers is wide in what it reflects, sky, city, crowd and self, and narrow in kind: one surface, one operation. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure is held there. The law is complete, and the finished object never breaks it.
Martin McDonagh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the pub talk of the opening, nearly a sitcom in its timing, and the self-mutilation, the drowned boy and the burning house of the close. They obey one law. The film establishes from its first scene that a sentence said on this island will be kept, and its comedy and its horror are the same literalism at different pressures. The range is wide and held. The seam is small and lies in two places: Peadar the policeman, whose brutality to his son and to Pádraic is played in a cruder key than the rest, and the civil war, which keeps to its own register on the far shore.
Beach House · Music
7.7 · Tier III
One law governs the record and is kept nearly everywhere: love and glamour seen through a haze, slow, bright and remote. The two most distant elements obey it. Runaway, on a drum machine, and Sunset, near acoustic, sit in the same suspended light; the orchestral title track and the synth-pop of Superstar share one voice and one slow swell. The consistency is close to total, held across eighteen tracks and four chapters released apart, which is harder than holding it across one side. Held from the top by the rubric’s warning: narrowness is not coherence. The range the law governs is small, one mood, one temperature and a few tempos, and the record holds it rather than extending it.
Norse · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the enthroned king, with carved throne and drawn sword, and the pawn, an unfigured block. One law governs both: rank is legibility. The more a piece is, the more it is figured; the king is a person, the pawn a stone, and every rank between takes its place on that scale by face, attribute and posture. The manner is one across the hoard, the same eyes, the same stocky proportion, the same compact silhouette, though the pieces come from several sets and probably several hands; the shield-biters, the wildest figures, are made in the same squat column as the calmest warders. Held at its figure because the territory is narrow, one manner and one set of types repeated, and because the mixed sets are less whole than any one set once was.
René Magritte · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
One law governs: everything is ordinary and plausible except one interposition, and that interposition is painted in exactly the same physics as everything else. Take the two most distant elements, the cloud bank at the horizon and the apple at the face. They obey the same light, the same air and the same paint, and nothing in the field is handled otherwise. The law is held without a crack. What holds the axis below the top is the range it governs: a small world of five elements, one tone and one event. Narrowness is not coherence, and the law holds without strain partly because it is asked to govern little.
Robert Motherwell · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: a bar at the edge of the frieze and the broadest oval near its centre; or the black mass and a passage of charcoal line left showing in the ground. They obey one law: heavy forms of one black, round or upright, pressing on and against a light field in a slow horizontal alternation, with the drawing that found them left in view. Nothing contradicts it: there is no second kind of mark, no figure, nothing that breaks the law. The law holds across the gap between mass and line, which is wider than in a pure colour field. But narrowness is not coherence. The territory is small by choice, two forms, two values, one direction. The figure credits a law kept without fault and charges the narrow range it governs.
Berthe Morisot · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
One physics governs: a pale, diffused interior light in which everything soft is translucent and only the mother is opaque. Take the two most distant elements, the black mass of her dress and the white haze of the veil over the child. They obey the same law, light against weight, the watcher and the watched, and the law is the meaning. Tone, temperature and handling hold from the window to the bedding, and nothing in the room breaks the law. But the range it covers is narrow: one room, two figures, one moment, one register. Narrowness is not coherence, and the distance here, though real in value from black to white, is small in kind.
David Mackenzie · Film
7.2 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the opening take, a cool ceremony of power in which everything is in order and in view, and the mud at Loudoun Hill, where order is gone and men drown in a bog. One law governs both: power is held by those who can command the ground, and the ground of Scotland belongs to whoever will fight on it on its terms. The trebuchet and the trench are the same idea seen from two sides. Methven, the killing in Douglas’s church and the guerrilla raids obey it. The law lapses in two places, both at the edge of the spine: the Prince is drawn by the genre’s physics, and his duel with Bruce obeys the epic’s law rather than the film’s; and the marriage, played as tender romance, sits slightly apart.
William of Sens and William the Englishman; nave by Henry Yevele · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the low Romanesque crypt with its carved beasts, and the Perpendicular nave, tall, linear and bare of figure, three centuries apart. Do they obey one law? In part. The law of the whole is the ascent from west to east, nave to choir to Trinity Chapel, and every campaign was set to it: the crypt carries it, the choir rises on it, the nave was rebuilt as its threshold. The stone, the axis and the liturgy hold the parts in one order. What holds this axis lowest of the twelve is that each campaign brings its own physics, Norman mass, French Gothic, English marble and glass, Perpendicular line, and the choir’s inward pinch and the step from nave to choir leave the seams in view. A wide range is held, by purpose more than by form.
The Beatles · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Does one law govern “Good Night” and “Helter Skelter”, “Revolution 9” and “Honey Pie”? The law that governs them is plurality: every idiom of popular music taken up by four separate voices, under a white sleeve that names no frame. Read so, the most distant elements obey it as instances of one survey, and some pairs answer each other directly, “Revolution 1” and “Revolution 9” above all, the song about revolution and the noise of it. The range is as wide as any record’s. What holds the figure: a law of plurality is hard to break, so it does less work than a stricter one, and the record’s turns of tone, from the whimsy of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” to the dread of the collage, are not each shown to be needed.
Peter Jackson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of Bilbo’s party in the Shire and the Sammath Naur. One law covers them, because the design and the score bind Hobbiton and Mordor into one world, and the hobbits’ small comedy is the thing at stake in the dark. The range is very wide, and the world’s physics, material and moral, holds across almost all of it: no film changes the rules of the Ring, of the Eye or of the cost of power. The law breaks in particular places. Legolas’s shield-surfing at Helm’s Deep and his fight on the oliphaunt belong to another genre’s physics; the jokes of dwarf-tossing play against the gravity around them; and the Army of the Dead, a green tide that wins the Pelennor at a stroke, makes victory cheaper than the films’ law makes it anywhere else.
Elvis Presley · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: “Tutti Frutti”, recorded for RCA in January 1956 with drums and piano at full tilt, and “Blue Moon”, recorded at Sun in Memphis in 1954 with guitar, bass and a voice in an echo. They obey one law, and the law is the voice, which reads a Little Richard shout and a Rodgers and Hart standard by one rule, taking each song from its first meaning toward a blend of urgency and hush, across a range wide for a record of its year. Narrowness is not the issue, and the integration holds: one rule governs so wide a range in every track. What holds the figure near 8.0 is the join. The record is two studios joined by a selection, and between “One-Sided Love Affair” and “I Love You Because” the physics of the room changes, though the law of the voice does not.
Michael Mann · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Hanna at a crime scene, shouting at an informant, and McCauley in his bare house looking at the sea. One law governs both: each man is his work, and anything else he holds can be taken. The domestic scenes and the battle obey it, as do Charlene’s choice and Breedan’s death, and the ending enacts it in a single gesture. The range is wide for a genre film, from marital quarrel to urban war. The strain is real. Pacino plays in an operatic key and De Niro in a withheld one, and the film never quite decides whether that is design; Waingro’s killings tip briefly into the serial-killer thriller; Lauren in a hotel bath reads as melodrama by another rule.
Indian builders (Gupta and later) · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the main tower and the Vajrasana with its tree. One law reaches both: the vertical over a centre, and the axis from east to west, the image’s gaze and the seat’s orientation agreeing. Within the building one figure governs. The corner towers repeat the main tower, the niches repeat it again in miniature, and the whole is a single figure at three scales. The range is narrow, though, and narrowness is not coherence: the law is repetition more than range. And the fabric mixes periods, early railing beside nineteenth-century stucco and a gilded top of this century, which the law absorbs but does not resolve.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the animal, organic, dead and once wild, and the steel frame, geometric, manufactured and clean. They obey one law, the law of display: everything is presented, lit, separated and held still for inspection, and the shark is made to obey the box’s order as completely as the glass does. The title obeys it too, the language of a laboratory report applied to a mind. That coherence is complete. But the range it governs is narrow: one animal, one box, one liquid, one sentence. Narrowness is not coherence, and the width of what a law governs counts with its consistency. The one clash, the pose of life against the fact of death, is meant, and it is the work, not a breach of its law. Coherent and narrow.
H. H. Richardson · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the rough granite outside and La Farge’s painted vaults. They obey one law, of weight, warmth and the round arch: the colour of the masonry is answered by the reds and golds within, so that the interior reads as the inside of the same mass. The law is wide, governing structure, ornament, colour and plan together. It breaks at the edges. The porch of the 1890s is more archaeological and more finely carved than anything Richardson built here, a quotation of Arles where he had transformed his sources; the chancel of 1938 speaks another language at the room’s focus; and the windows, from several studios across decades, range from La Farge’s opalescence to the English line of Morris and Co. One physics governs the core; the periphery is assembled.
Jane Campion · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Aunt Morag’s chatter over a chamber pot and her gossip with Nessie, and Ada hanging tethered in the dark sea above her piano. One law governs much: possession against will, the world as a set of titles to bodies, land and instruments, and the self as what refuses title. The pageant, the trade for acres, the Māori refusal to sell the burial ground, the ledger of keys, the finger and the piano put over the side all obey it, from comedy to the axe. The strain holds the figure: Morag and Nessie belong to a lighter film; the Māori are made to obey the law as background rather than as people, so the law bends where it should hold most; and the coda, with its metal finger and speaking lessons, softens the law into reward.
Metallica · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: death arrives from a power the subject cannot resist, and the music is that power’s weight. The two most distant elements obey it. The acoustic prelude to Fight Fire with Fire is calm about to be destroyed, and the eight minutes of wordless dread that close the record are the destroyer heard from far off. Fade to Black turns the law inward, the power now despair, and it holds; Creeping Death turns it round, giving the power the first person. The range is moderate, thrash, march, ballad and instrumental, all in minor modes and one register of dread. Escape, a song of self-assertion in a record about helplessness, is where the law breaks.
John Ford · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Muley’s flashback, where shadow, wind and the tractor make an expressionist dread, and the government camp, where cheerful officials, a dance and a comic committee make a New Deal pageant. Ford’s law is the family’s dignity under pressure, and both obey it: the camp is the family’s first respite, and the dance is where Tom’s farewell is set. But the tonal physics shift. The first half runs under a realist and nearly tragic law, the last movement under a reassuring one, and Ma’s closing speech is written in a key the eviction would not allow. Grampa’s comedy comes from another register again. A wide range, mostly held, with a real seam at the end.
Charles Garnier · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gilded Grand Foyer and the fly tower over the stage, display and machine. They obey one law, the parti, in which every function has its volume and its rank along the axis, so that the plainest workroom and the richest salon belong to one order. A second law governs the surface: polychrome plasticity, coloured marbles, gilded bronze, figure sculpture and curved masses, carried from the front through the stair to the hall, with Venetian, Roman and baroque sources made to obey it. The range is wide. What bends it: the surface law is kept by profusion more than by rule, and in places it blurs into accumulation; and the Chagall ceiling, part of the one work, sets a modern painter’s floating colour and figures at the centre of a hall built to another physics, at the point the eye goes to.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the town comedy of the first hour, the mayor’s salesmanship, the selectmen, the hoax, the son mimicking his father at dinner; and the Indianapolis speech, a survivor’s memory of a war’s last atrocity at sea. One law governs both: what lies under the surface is denied until it takes someone, and men tell jokes about it until they cannot. The comparing of scars passes into Quint’s speech without a break, which is the law at work, and the range is wide for a genre film. The strain comes at the end. The civic plot of the first movement is dropped without resolution, the mayor last seen at the hospital and never again; and the final act moves from the film’s own law of the unseen to an action picture’s law of the visible monster and the lucky shot, a change of physics as well as of register.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the party in advertising talk, flat and comic, and the explosion on the island with Rimbaud over the sea. One law governs both: every experience comes through a sign, a quotation, a picture, a genre, and the man who cannot get free of them blows himself up trying. The law holds across a very wide range, from slapstick and musical to murder and suicide, and the range is the achievement. The strain holds the figure down. The gangster plot obeys no law of its own: its business of arms and money is neither credited nor parodied consistently. Some shifts of tone are arbitrary rather than lawful, as in Devos on the jetty, which answers to no rule but the film’s freedom. That freedom is a law of a kind, but a loose one, and narrowness is not coherence any more than looseness is.
Johnny Cash · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: every song is heard as sung to the condemned, and the room’s response is the test. The two most distant elements are “Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart”, a pun song, and “Green, Green Grass of Home”, an execution dream. They obey the same law: the laughter is the prison’s own, the release of men who also listen in silence to the gallows, and the same voice and the same room carry both. The range is wide, from murder ballad and mining lament to train showpiece, comic duet and hymn, and it holds. The law loosens at “Jackson” and “Orange Blossom Special”, which obey the show’s convention more than the room’s, and the comic run of three strains it. No break; two or three tracks held by habit.
Sumerian, under Ur-Nammu and Shulgi · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark unbaked core and the baked skin, or the solid mass and the converging stairs. One law governs them: everything rises toward one point, and everything serves the mass’s standing. The core is what the skin protects, the batter is what the mass needs, the stairs are the mass made passable, and the triple stair resolves the plan’s single axis into a convergence. The law holds from the drainage slot to the plan. What holds it is range: one material system and one movement, and narrowness is not coherence. The discord between the restored lower facade and the eroded stump above is a matter of survival, weighed under The Imperishable; the design that survives is coherent, and narrow.
William Van Alen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the winged radiator caps on the lower setback and the inlaid lotus on the elevator doors; machine and Egypt, the car’s chrome and the cabinetmaker’s wood. One law governs both, the geometric stylisation of the late 1920s, in which radiating fans, chevrons and sunbursts reduce every motif to rays and steps. The crown’s arches return in the fan patterns inside, and the rising setbacks repeat in small what the spire does at the top. The law holds across a wide range, from industrial product to ancient emblem. What bends it: the shaft is governed by the speculative office floor and by brick, a quieter physics than crown or lobby, so that the whole reads as an ornamented base and top on a neutral middle; and the borrowed motifs, gargoyle and lotus, obey the law by style more than by structure.
Victor Fleming · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Lahr’s vaudeville in the Emerald City, and the hourglass scene in the castle with Dorothy crying for Aunt Em. One is music hall, the other nightmare. They obey the same law, because both are a child’s dream, which mixes the comic and the terrible without apology, and the doubled cast ties every figure of Oz to a figure of the farm. The colour rule holds strictly: Kansas monochrome, Oz in colour, with no leak either way. The range is wide and mostly lawful. Where the law strains: the frame says it was a dream, while the last scene and the farmhands at the bed insist both that it was and that it was not; and the Wizard’s turn from fraud to benign uncle in one scene softens the castle’s danger after the fact.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs: the building’s physical order and the residents’ psychic order are one system, and as the services fail, the restraints fail with them. Take the two most distant elements: the cocktail parties of the first weeks, with their snobberies of floor and car-park space, and the roof at the end, with its killing and its new matriarchy. They obey the same rule, carried through without exception, and the range between drawing-room satire and the primal horde is wide. The charge is the postulate on which the law depends. The outside world is held off by fiat: no one calls the police, the employers do not ask, and visitors and the authorities do not come, while some residents go to work for weeks as the building falls apart at night. The book makes this collusion part of its claim, but it is asserted more than enacted, and at moments the law is the author’s decree rather than the world’s physics.
Shreve, Lamb and Harmon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the granite base on Fifth Avenue and the glass and metal of the mast 1,250 feet above it. One law governs both: verticality, the line carried unbroken from street to top, the steel strips of the shaft and the ribs of the mast the same gesture at two scales. The lobby obeys it too, its end wall showing the tower itself radiating light, the building as its own emblem. The law holds across a wide range of height and a narrower range of kind. What bends it: the mast obeys the law of the record as much as the law of the form, and the antenna added to it obeys neither fully; the office floors are governed by the rental plan and by nothing of the discipline of the exterior.
Master James of St George, under Edward I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the most distant elements: the Eagle Tower at the west end, built first and highest, and the walls of the north side, rebuilt after 1294 and finished later and more plainly. One law holds them: banded walling and polygonal towers run the whole circuit, so that the claim the castle makes is made everywhere it stands. Within that law the range is real, from royal lodging tower to gate to gallery, and all obey the same physics of a single line of strong walls. The charges: the unfinished parts break the law of the design where the gate stops short and the wards stand empty, and the north side is visibly the later and lesser work. Narrowness is not the issue here; incompletion is.
Lauryn Hill · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the student taught by love, speaking in two voices, rap to the world and song to the self, under a faith that orders both. Take the two most distant elements: Lost Ones, a rap of cold anger over a hard drum, and the title song, a slow hymn of self-possession with strings. They obey the same law, since the second is what the first’s lesson becomes, and the same voice carries both. Forgive Them Father brings reggae into the law and keeps it; Final Hour joins rap to prophecy. The range is wide: rap, soul ballad, doo-wop, reggae, gospel, a slow-jam duet. What holds the figure: the coda’s cover obeys only the pleasure of singing it, the injury songs in the middle obey the law by repetition more than by turning it, and much of the law is stated by the classroom frame rather than worked out in the songs, so that the middle borrows its coherence from the edges.
Sufjan Stevens · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the record: everything in the state is seen with the same wonder and the same accounting, so that a sighting in the sky, a massacre, a killer, a stepmother and a wasp are received as marvels and as matters of conscience. Take the two most distant elements: One Last “Whoo-Hoo!” for the Pullman, seconds of a cheer for a company town, and Casimir Pulaski Day, a death and an unanswered prayer. They obey the same law at the level of the voice, the grief sung with the same plainness as the cheer. The range is wide: fanfare, minimalism, banjo ballad, show tune, choral hymn, drone. What strains the law is tone: the whimsy of the middle fancies and of the titles sometimes plays against the gravity of the confessions rather than within it. No break; a seam the record half intends.
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger; Michelangelo; Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Doric arcade of the court’s ground storey and Michelangelo’s window frames in its third. The first obeys Vitruvius as Sangallo read him; the second bends that grammar, with pediments and pilasters that do not do what the orders below have taught the eye to expect. One law, the superposition of the orders from heavy to light, still governs, and Michelangelo’s storey sits on it, so the dissonance reads as a crown, not a contradiction. On the piazza front the cornice changes the scale of the whole and the front absorbs it. The range is wide, from fortress block to garden loggia. Held below the top by the seams four hands leave, in the court and between front and rear.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a fragment of drawn motif in the dense left, a contour that reads as a wheel or a barrel if the reading is right, and an open patch of colour on the light ground at the right. Do they obey one law? Mostly. The law is Kandinsky’s of these years: every element, trace of an object or pure colour, is turned into line and colour acting by its inner sound. The trace is drawn in the same black line as the gestures round it, and the colour has the same floating touch. The divide is part of the law, a structure of contrast, not a break. The resistance is small but real: the remnants of motif obey a second law, that of representation, which the canvas does not fully absorb.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimasa · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the shoin room of the pavilion’s ground floor and the Zen chapel above it, or the private study of the Dōjinsai and the Amida hall at the front of the Tōgu-dō. They obey one law: withdrawal, restraint, the scale of a single person, the turn toward the garden and the moon. The two manners of the pavilion are reconciled by proportion and by a single roof, and nothing contradicts. The charge is range. Two small buildings in a related idiom make a narrow territory, and narrowness is not coherence: the law holds, and it holds over little. Within that territory there is no exception to find, and the figure credits that and no more.
Neil Young with Crazy Horse · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the record: songs played by four people in a room, a thin, high voice over guitars a little rough, and each song allowed to run as long as the feeling lasts. The most distant elements, Round & Round, acoustic and hushed, and Cowgirl in the Sand, loud and long, obey the same law of plainness and duration, and the high, unsteady voices bind them. Running Dry, with its violin, is the furthest out and still keeps the band’s slow drag. The Losing End, a country shuffle with the feel of a pedal steel, sits nearest the edge, a genre exercise inside a record that otherwise makes its own genre. The range is moderate, and narrowness does some of the work of holding it.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimitsu; rebuilt 1955 · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the plain timber and plaster of the court storey on the water, and the gilded Zen storey with its bell-shaped windows. They obey different grammars, deliberately, and the building’s law is that three grammars obey one proportion, one roof and one axis of view. The gold binds the two upper storeys, the reflection binds the building to the pond, and the garden binds both to the hill. The range is real, three manners and a landscape. The charge is that the law is a rule of stacking: the joins show at each floor line, and the gold of the second storey over the bare wood of the first reads, since 1955 especially, as a change of material more than a gradation.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the tobacconist’s comic assault on the boy who tries to lift her, and the mother’s death. One law governs both: everything is seen as it is remembered and retold, enlarged by appetite, by fear and by love to the size the memory gives it. The tobacconist is as huge as a boy’s desire; the death is quiet because grief shrinks the world to a room. The castor oil, the most violent scene, obeys the same law, farce and degradation in one remembered image. The range is wide, from schoolboy flatulence to political violence and death. But the Emir’s harem and the Grand Hotel stories, told by the town’s liars, drift toward the revue, and there the law holds loosely; the strain is felt across the middle of the film.
Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements of Gray’s house: the frame of white concrete above the rocks, and a small swivelling tray on a bedside cabinet. One law governs both: form derived from the inhabitant’s body, privacy and hour, set against the sea, sun and wind. Shutters, alcoves, entrance, terrace, furniture and stencilled words obey it, and the law is wide for a house, running from structure to object. But the work as it stands includes the murals, and they obey another law: large, colourful figurative paintings set on walls designed plain, against the designer’s intent, cutting across the house’s own physics in its main room and elsewhere. They are part of the work and charged to it, not to Gray, and they hold the axis at 8.1.
Donna Tartt · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Julian’s seminar on the Dionysian, in his flower-filled room, and the comic funeral of Bunny in Connecticut, with its family and its reporters; or the snowbound warehouse in Book I and the hotel room at the end. One law governs them. Beauty sought without the moral law claims its price, and the claim is paid in the ordinary world, which neither understands nor forgives. The comedy is that world, which the students believed they had left, coming back; the warehouse is Richard’s exile before admission, the hotel his last share of the expulsion. The range is wide, from campus satire to tragedy, and it is held in one voice. What holds the axis near eight is that Julian’s exit is a convenience as much as a consequence, that the comedy of Book II sometimes runs on its own energy rather than the law’s, and that the tone wavers where suspense, satire and tragedy meet.
Sofia Coppola · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Bob on a Japanese talk show with a manic host, broad farce, and the whisper in the Shibuya crowd, held still. One law governs both: everyone is performing for someone who cannot understand, and real recognition happens only outside performance. The commercial shoot, Kelly’s junket, John’s photo sessions all obey it; karaoke is its best case, performance turned for once into true speech; the bed scene and the whisper are its exception, which is its point. The law reaches from farce to stillness without breaking. The strain is real and holds the figure: the Japanese characters are not only uncomprehended by the leads but made comic by the film, which crosses from showing incomprehension to sharing it, and Kelly is mocked from outside the law, not within it.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Otto’s comic birthday visit, the postman on his bicycle with his map and his anecdotes, and the house burning the next morning. One law governs both: what is given away is the measure of what is meant, and the inexplicable is real. Otto brings a gift worth more than he can afford; Alexander gives everything he has. The prayer and the night with the witch obey the same law, both acts of faith in the inexplicable, and the film refuses to choose between them. The visions and the waking world are shot under one physics, slow, drained and continuous. The strain is in tone: Adelaide’s scenes run in a register of domestic melodrama that the law does not govern, and the household’s quarrels belong to another kind of film.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs: the self is drawn toward its own disappearance, into a crowd, a cult, an image or a hiding place, and the strands are cases of it. Take the two most distant elements, the wedding in the stadium in New York and the hooded followers in Beirut. They obey it, and Bill’s hiding and Karen’s longing for the leader are seen to be one motion. The tone is held, grave, ironic and meditative throughout. Charged: the law is tighter in statement than in action. The bomb in London and the accident in the street are plot events the law does not require, and Karen’s New York runs on a looser physics than the rest. The range is wide in place and narrow in tone, and narrowness is not coherence.
Robert Venturi · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the applied arch on the front, a sign addressed to the street, and the stair that rises to a wall on the upper floor, a private utility made into a statement. They obey one law: the conventional element, kept recognisable and then displaced, doubled or contradicted, so that each part means two things at once. The same law governs the gable split by its slot, the symmetry broken by its windows, the centre shared by hearth and stair, and the large-scale front on the small-scale house. It holds across front, plan and section, public face and private room. Held lower on two counts. Narrowness is not coherence, and a small house is a small territory. And a law of contradiction is a law of how parts relate, not a single physics of material or structure; the house reads strongest as a face.
Robert Rauschenberg · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the goat, an animal once living, organic and shaggy, an emblem of nature and myth; and a printed scrap on the platform, flat, urban, a thing of the press. They obey one law, the one the painter’s statement names: things of the world taken as they come, worn and secondhand, set on the ground of painting without being turned into images. The tyre, the shoe heel, the tennis ball and the goat are all cast-offs of the city, and paint joins all of them, on the platform and on the goat’s face. The range is wide: animal, machine, print, paint, sport, clothing. Held below the top because the law is loose by design, and in the collage it is sometimes indistinguishable from accident.
U2 · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: grace found inside loss, sung plainly by a band in a room. The two most distant elements obey it. Beautiful Day, a public declaration of joy, and Grace, a private benediction, make the same claim, first shouted and then whispered. Peace on Earth, the darkest song, obeys it in reverse, a prayer the dead make hard to pray, and Stuck in a Moment and Kite carry it through a friend’s death and a parent’s. The range runs from stadium to bedside. Held from the top: Elevation’s dance-rock swagger answers to the band’s live purpose rather than to the law, New York’s agitated restlessness belongs closer to the band’s 1990s, and Wild Honey sits at the law’s edge. Nothing contradicts it, but two tracks strain it.
Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the repeated precast bays of the crown and the open brick plaza at the foot of the hill. They obey one law. The plaza’s brick runs into the base; the base’s piers rise into the crown; each tier of the section is the outward form of a tier of the programme, and the materials change only as the programme changes. The ceremonial projections keep the grid of the bays around them. The range covered is wide, from the city’s open ground to a council chamber to a single office, and it is held. What charges the axis: the remade plaza brings a second law, softer, planted and picturesque, to half of the unit; and inside, the clarity of the outer law gives way to a tangle the face does not prepare.
Jean-Michel Basquiat · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the outer contour of the face, which is the edge of a person, and the diagram inside it, an interior no person sees. They obey one law, the one the image enacts: everything is drawn at the same depth, so that the outside and the inside of the head are equally visible and equally made of line. The same law governs the teeth, which are smile and skull, and the eyes, which look and are sockets. The ground obeys it less clearly: it is pressure and colour more than a further case of the law. Narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is one head; but within it the law reaches from skin to wiring, and that is a real range.
David Cronenberg · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: a nervous man in the loft making cappuccino and joking about motion sickness, and the fused creature of flesh and metal on the floor of the same room. One law governs both: what enters the body changes it, and desire is the first thing that enters. The steak, the champagne, the sugar, the fly, the child, the vomit, Stathis’s hand all obey it, and the comedy of the opening is the same law in a gentler key. The telepods are the law made a machine, and the range from romantic comedy to Grand Guignol holds. What holds the figure: the bar and the final action run on genre’s law more than the film’s, and the teleporter’s rules bend where the climax needs them.
Daniel Burnham · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the narrow rounded prow at 23rd Street and the broad flat rear on 22nd; or the rusticated limestone at the street and the cornice at the sky. One law governs them: the tall building as a column, laid in three horizontal zones that run unbroken round all three faces whatever their width, so that prow and rear differ only in length of wall, not in kind. The ornament obeys one French and Italian Renaissance grammar from base to cornice. The law is strict and simple, and the range it covers is narrow: one material, one style, one office use, one shape extruded. What bends it: the tip shop at the prow, which breaks the zones where the figure is sharpest, and the penthouse above the cornice.
Meret Oppenheim · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the hard glazed vessel, made for washing and for the mouth, and the soft hide, made for the animal and for warmth. One law governs them: the surface of the body is laid where the body must not be, and every part obeys it. The cup, which the lip touches; the spoon, which the tongue meets; the saucer, which the fingers hold: each is furred to the same degree, smoothly, without exception or ornament, so that no part breaks the law or merely decorates it. Even the second title keeps it, setting a meal beside a pelt. Held near 8 because narrowness is not coherence: the law governs three small objects and one material, and the range between the farthest elements, sharp as it is, is small.
Louis Sullivan · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the cast iron thicket over the corner door and the plain terra cotta grid of the top floors. One is all growth, the other all geometry. One law governs both, Sullivan’s: the organic and the geometric are one order, ornament grows from the structure it adorns, and each part speaks as its work bids, rich where the street meets it, plain where work is done. The thin band of ornament round each upper window is the hinge that carries the law up from the base, and the extensions of 1906 and 1961 obey it, which is evidence that the law was legible. What bends it: the vertical windows of the corner run against the horizontal law of the flanks, a resolution argued more than achieved, and the lost cornice leaves the law without its ending.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the table group at the centre, talking, and the green face at the right edge, coming out of the frame. One law holds them: everything in the hall is seen under its own artificial light, and everyone in it is turned away from everyone else; the face is the extreme case of that law, not an exception to it. The rail, the oblique floor and the cropped figures belong to one spatial rule, a hall seen in passing. But the strip was added later, and a hostile eye can see two registers, the observed group portrait and the near-caricatural mask, held together by force rather than grown together. The range is narrow, one room, one hour, one tone, and narrowness is not coherence.
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Lina’s screech in the diction lesson and Charisse’s veil, yards long, held in the wind of the ballet’s dream. One law governs both: performance is made, and joy is in the making. Lina’s voice is the made thing failing; the veil, a wind machine and a length of silk, is the made thing succeeding. The flashback, the microphone in the bush, the wind machine of “You Were Meant for Me”, the dubbing and the raised curtain obey the same law, each a showing of the apparatus, and the title number obeys it from the other side, with real water and a man’s delight. The range is wide for a musical. The strain is in the ballet, outside the plot’s world and admitted as a pitch, and in Lina’s ending, where affectionate fakery turns cruel without registering it.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
One physics governs every lancet and every tracery head: the square, the palette, chance. Take the two most distant elements, the foot of a lancet and the cut pieces at the top of the tracery, and they obey the same law. But narrowness is not coherence, and the law is narrow: one unit, one rule. The wider test is the meeting of the window’s law with the building’s, the gridded square against the Gothic curve, and here the window holds. It does not pretend to the tracery’s geometry and does not fight it; the stone draws the outline and the glass fills it by its own rule. That meeting is the widest range the work covers, and it is coherent.
Man Ray · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the photographed flesh, the least made thing in the image, and the marks drawn by hand, the most made. They obey one law, the conversion of a body into an instrument, of a person into a thing to be played. The hidden arms, the closed outline, the smoothness of the skin, the turban that makes the woman Ingres’s model, the marks, and the title that names her a hobby all make the same move, and nothing in the image breaks it. Even the borrowed beauty serves the law, since an instrument must be beautiful to be wanted. Held because narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one back, two marks and a title, and the range between its farthest elements, flesh and sign, photograph and painting, love and ownership, is real but small.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the valve stub and the seams, the marks of the cheapest manufacture, and the mirror surface, the mark of the most costly finish. They obey one law, which is conversion: the provisional made permanent, the soft made hard, the breath made metal, the cheap made precious, the viewer made part of the object. The carrot, the blank face and the scale make the same move, and none breaks it; the object’s later life, from parade balloon to record price, follows the law too. Held at 8.1 because narrowness is not coherence: the range from seam to mirror is real but small, one figure in one material, and the law, once seen, governs a short territory.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis · Music
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs the record: carnage and tenderness held in one space, neither allowed to cancel the other. The two most distant elements obey it. White Elephant’s spoken threat over a battering pulse and Balcony Man’s comic, tender morning are one man’s world seen at its worst and its mildest, and the choir that answers the threat is the choir that hums under the morning. The range is real: threat, hymn, love song, lockdown lament and comic portrait, from programmed pulse to sustained choral drone. The law strains at Old Time, which obeys by mood only, and the two halves are laid side by side more than fused, so that the second can be heard as another record in the same sound. One strain, no break.
Herzog and de Meuron, with Ai Weiwei and Li Xinggang · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the steel lattice at the foot of the facade and the red concrete terrace at the field’s edge. One is grey steel, open, irregular and outside; the other is red, solid, regular and inside. They obey one law: the vessel within the nest, a hard bowl held inside a woven shell, the gap between them made a public ground. The same law governs the roof, whose membranes fill the weave from above; the stairs, which run inside the lattice; and the plinth, cut to the same ellipse. The law of colour, grey without and red within, the red seen through the grey at night, binds them to the eye. What bends it: bowl and shell are two systems in structure and in making, the weave’s apparent randomness masks an ordered frame, and the roof opening was set by a decision of cost, not of design.
Sidney Lumet · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the opening comedy, a rifle hidden in a gift box, a partner who quits before the vault is open, a robber who cannot find the money; and Sal dead on the runway. One law governs both: an amateur improvising a performance before an audience is met, in the end, by a power that does not improvise. Sonny’s bargaining, his turns at the door, his calls and his will are improvisations, and the crowd, the hostages and the police are his audience until the FBI, which refuses to play, takes over. The range runs from farce to love scene to execution, and the tone shifts without breaking. What holds it: the pizza boy’s fame and some crowd antics lean toward a broader satire than the rest obeys, and the closing title cards step out of the film’s law into a documentary epilogue.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the cast of a leg seated upside down on a real chair, and a graded scale of colour. One is the body and an object of use; the other is a system of measurement. They obey one law, the one the title names: each is a thing presented according to a system, the body according to the cast, the colour according to the scale. The same law governs the painted and standing words, the newspaper as print and the profile on a hidden face. The law holds across a wide range of kind, wider than in a single readymade or a single grid. Held below the top because it is held by concept more than by sight: the eye meets a sequence of unlike things, and the question, not the surface, supplies the coherence throughout.
David Fincher · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Tanner Bolt drilling Nick for television with jelly beans thrown at every wrong note, and Amy cutting Desi’s throat in his bed. One law governs both: the self made for an audience. Bolt trains a performance; Amy stages the murder before Desi’s own cameras as a rape and an escape. The diary, the treasure hunt, the vigil, the television interview and the last scene of the couple facing the press obey the same law, and the range is wide: comedy of manners, procedural, horror and satire held together. The strain is weighed in full, and it is in plausibility. The police and legal world of the second half bends to the plot, and the investigation that shaped the first half is all but switched off once Amy returns. The law holds in theme; in the world it slackens, and the film lets it.
Olafur Eliasson · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
One law governs the whole: a natural phenomenon made in plain sight from industrial means, and offered to a public that completes it. Take the two most distant elements, the sun at the end of the hall and the visitors lying on the floor. They obey it: the sun is made from lamps and a mirror, and the crowd’s figures are made from bodies and the same mirror; both are weather produced by people in a building. The mist, the light and the exposed frames carry the same rule. What holds the axis: narrowness is not coherence. The range between the farthest elements is real but small, one effect in one room, and the rule is never strained by anything that might have broken it.
Luis Buñuel · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Spaniards shot by Napoleon’s troops in 1808, and riot police firing on a crowd at a Paris zoo. One law governs both: authority enforces an order whose ground no one can name, and its subjects cry for their chains. It holds across the middle, in the postcards, the toilet dinner, the missing girl, the sniper freed and the two prefects. The second law, the relay, holds without exception: no episode resolves, and each is left by a character passing on. The range is wide, from Goya to bedroom farce. The strain is at the inn, which obeys the looser rules of sexual farce, where the aunt and nephew stand outside the law of authority.
Buena Vista Social Club · Music
7.7 · Tier III
One law governs: received Cuban song forms played in their own manner by an ensemble in one room, unhurried, with room given to the voice and the piano. The two most distant elements obey it. Pueblo nuevo is an instrumental danzón, formal and born in the ballroom; El carretero is a raw guajira, a country singer and his guitar. Between them the descarga of El cuarto de Tula and the close-held bolero of Dos gardenias keep the same patience and the same sound of the room. The range is wide, six Cuban genres across sixty years of song, and the law holds across it. What costs it is the one voice that does not obey: Cooder’s slide guitar, a Californian sound laid over a Cuban ensemble, an addition the record’s physics did not call for.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.6 · Tier III
One law governs the whole, and the range it holds is wide. Farce and horror, a dinner dance and a killing, a hotel and a forest, a city and its shopping centre, are spoken and shot in one flat key and obey one physics, in which every feeling must be legalised by a rule and every rule is enforced on the body. Take the two most distant elements, the comedy of the toaster and the Heartless Woman’s killing of the dog: both obey that law. So do the Hotel’s ballroom and the Loners’ silent dance, which are the same scene reversed. The narrating voice is in the key of the dialogue, and the coherence holds even where the second movement slackens. What keeps it from the high eights is that the range, wide in tone, is narrow in world: the law is one premise and its inversion, and narrowness is not coherence.
David Fincher · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the dry jokes of the voice-over and the bloody fight in Florida. One law governs both, the plan announced and the plan broken, the procedure meeting the world. It holds from Paris, where the creed is laid down and the shot goes wide, to Chicago, where the man who swore to fight only the battle he was paid for spares the one man who caused it all, and on to the epilogue, where calm is restored with a flicker of nerves. Tonal control is complete. What holds the figure is range: one consciousness, one register and the limits of a genre, chosen and kept. Narrowness is not coherence, and the law here governs a small country.
Mark Twain · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the book: the voice of a boy who cannot see what he shows, and a shore whose respectable codes, of honour, piety, property and romance, are each a form of cruelty, set against a raft where two outcasts are briefly decent to each other. Take two distant elements, Emmeline Grangerford’s ode to Stephen Dowling Bots and Buck dead by the river: one law of a sentimental culture that kills holds them both, across a range from farce to murder. The charge is the Phelps farm. The Huck who chose damnation for Jim in chapter 31 defers in chapter 34 to Tom’s games and lets a free man be tormented for romance; the law of conscience is suspended for Tom’s law of books, and the voice, though unchanged, no longer sees what it shows. Jim’s choice to stay with the wounded Tom (chapter 40) partly restores the law.
Romanesque builders; Obradoiro facade by Fernando de Casas Novoa · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Pórtico of 1188 and the Obradoiro of the 1740s, one behind the other. They obey one law in one respect: both are thresholds of the road’s end, and the later wall was built to shelter and light the earlier. The law of procession, from plaza to tomb, governs every campaign. But it does not govern the language. Romanesque granite, a Gothic and Renaissance middle, a gilded Baroque crossing set into a Romanesque apse, and four façades of different centuries on four plazas: the building is coherent as a route and plural as a form. The range is wide and nothing contradicts the structure, but the unity is a place grown over centuries, not one physics.
Seljuk and later builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bare, earth-coloured brick of the north dome, all structure and geometry, and the polychrome tile of the court faces, all surface and colour. In part they obey one law. Both serve one orientation; the court and the qibla axis govern every later addition, and no campaign broke the plan. That law holds for eight hundred years over a wide range. What holds the axis lowest is that the material and the ornament change with every dynasty, the bays of the hypostyle are of uneven date and kind, and the edges of the precinct are irregular where the mosque met the city: a unity of orientation and plan more than of one governing idea.
Erwin von Steinbach and others; spire by Johannes Hültz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the low Romanesque apse and crypt at the east, and the spire of 1439. They do not obey one law. Between them run several laws in sequence: late Romanesque, the transept of the Angel Pillar, a Rayonnant nave after Saint-Denis, the screen front, the belfry stage of the 1380s, the octagon and the pyramid, and a nineteenth-century crossing tower. What binds them is one red sandstone and a lodge that knew what it was continuing; the west front, from portals to spire, holds a family logic of tracery laid over structure. But as one physics the building is a chronicle more than a law: the range is very wide, and the coherence achieved over it is real but partial. That is what holds this, the lowest axis, where it is.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Mignon, the figure of wordless longing who dies of it, and the Tower, the society of rational educators who keep papers on everyone. The book’s answer is that they obey one law, that Mignon’s poetry is what formation must honour and leave behind, and her embalmed body in the Hall of the Past, under its inscription to life, is its attempt to hold both under one roof. Many readers, from the first, have felt that law imposed: that the prose world outlives the poetic one and the narrator sides with it. The comic and the tragic sit together more easily, and the sixth book obeys the law by contrast. The range is very wide; the coherence is real but strained at the join the book makes most of.
Venetian · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Molo front of the 1340s and Rizzo’s east courtyard front of the 1480s and 1490s. They obey different laws. The first is Venetian Gothic, solid over void, a flat patterned wall; the second is an early Renaissance front of stacked arcades and dense classical ornament, its own system. Inside, the rooms of the rebuilding after 1577 are Mannerist in frame and paint, a third law. The Piazzetta wing, repeating the Molo design eighty years on, is a remarkable act of fidelity, and the outer fronts form one figure. What holds the axis lowest is that the whole is governed not by one physics of form but by one institution and one programme, the state: a coherence of purpose rather than of law, its breach visible from the courtyard.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the porch vault inside the front and the lantern of the dome over the crossing. They do not fully obey one law. Front, porch and nave share one, the triumphal arch at three scales, and within the nave nothing contradicts it: every bay, chapel and pier obeys the unit, over a range from the city’s front to the relic’s crypt. But the dome speaks a later century’s language, a high drum and lantern on a building whose law is the low, broad Roman vault; the eighteenth-century decoration lays a softer, painted law over the severe one; and the front answers a different proportion from the nave, as the ombrellone admits. The later work is the work’s, and here it is charged: the law holds over two thirds of the building and bends at both ends.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Roman columns with their spiral narratives and the luminous oval within. At the level of programme they obey one law: one vow, one saint, one emperor, one ascent from earth to glory, running from the column reliefs to the dome. At the level of form the law is additive. The facade sets historical monuments side by side, the columns stand apart from the body, and the oval behind does not answer the breadth of the screen before it. The juxtaposition is the building’s method and is held with discipline, by symmetry and by the dome at the centre of every frontal view. What holds the axis at 8.0 is that it remains a juxtaposition: one law for the meaning, two for the form.
Hart Crane · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Does one physics govern? The law Crane intends is the quest: every poem a station on the way from the harbor dawn to the vision of Atlantis, the bridge its figure. Take the two most distant elements: National Winter Garden, a burlesque dancer in a Broadway house, and Atlantis, the bridge as a visionary absolute. They can be made to obey one law, the body as the debased form of the desire that rises in the vision, Pocahontas fallen and then redeemed, and the book reaches for it: the woman of Three Songs is the Indian bride’s modern shadow. The same law holds The Tunnel and the Proem as inverse images. But the tone breaks. Indiana’s sentiment, Quaker Hill’s moralizing and the apostrophes to Whitman are in a different physics from the visionary compression elsewhere. The range is wide; the law that governs it is strained.
Euripides · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The two most distant elements are the brothers’ near-farcical tug of war over the letter and the girl leading the paean to her own death. One law governs both: wills bend to the unseen many, and each person’s reasons are the army’s reasons wearing his own face. Menelaus’s selfishness and Iphigenia’s sacrifice obey the same physics of public pressure. The range is wide, from comedy of manners to sacred terror, and it is mostly held. Charged: the abruptness of Iphigenia’s change, prepared only through Achilles’ report of the army and left for the actor to carry, so that Aristotle’s objection has force even when answered; and the transmitted close, whose miracle and whose mother’s doubt pull against the human law of the rest.
Adam Lock and others · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The lowest axis, with The Encompassed. Take the two most distant elements: the stiff-leaf nave of about 1200 and the net-vaulted eastern arm of about 1330, with the scissor arches of about 1340 between them. In material, in the level temper and in the English refusal of the French elevation they obey one law: the fourteenth-century masons worked to the earlier church’s scale. What holds the axis is that the law is bent at the crossing, where the strainer arches cut across the nave’s even rhythm with a form of another order, and at the west, where the screen keeps its own law of niches and a breadth beyond the nave. The range is wide; the joins are visible.
Katsuhiro Otomo · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the vocational school, Kaneda flirting and a teacher slapping the boys, and the cosmogony of the close. One law nearly governs both: power, whether of the gang, the teacher, the state or Akira, exceeds the vessel that holds it, and those who hold it are boys. The comedy of the school and the terror of the stadium obey that law, and the range is very wide, from a bar brawl to a new universe. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is the strain. The rules of the Espers’ power are never stated, so that what they can do changes with the scene’s need; the political plot, carefully laid, is abandoned when the metaphysics arrives; and the close passes from the physics of the drawn city to a light in which the film’s own causes are dissolved rather than resolved. One law, held under strain at its edges.
Kyivan Rus builders, under Yaroslav the Wise · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the apse of the eleventh century with its Orant on gold, and a Baroque west gable with its curved stucco crest. Do they obey one law? In part. The interior is governed by one physics, hierarchy by ascent and light from above, with the court placed between the city and heaven; the sacred and the secular cycles both obey it, since the court’s image is given as the image of a heavenly order. The Baroque exterior keeps the pyramid and the many domes, and with them the governing law in mass; but its surface speaks another language, and its domes and gables answer seventeenth-century Kyiv, not the eleventh century. The range is wide and the law holds through most of it, but the seam between inside and out is real, and it is charged here, since the later work is part of the one work.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the north porch, tall and open at the lower level, and the south porch, closed and figural at the upper. Do they obey one law? In part. One Ionic grammar governs, one marble, one finish of carving. The underlying law, that each sacred place is given its own answer, is consistent throughout, and the range is wide, from a door of state to a figural tomb marker. But the axis asks whether one physics governs the whole, and the whole shows its seams: four fronts that do not answer one another, the north porch overrunning the west wall, the west front a compromise between levels. The building is coherent as a principle of response and plural as a body, and the figure is held there.
Ottoman builders, under Mehmed II and successors · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Conqueror’s Pavilion, a fifteenth-century treasury loggia over the slope, and the Mecidiye Kiosk of about 1840, a European-styled pavilion. In style they share little, and between them run the classical Ottoman manner, the tiled pavilions of the seventeenth century and the Ottoman baroque and rococo of the eighteenth, which dresses the Gate of Felicity and many Harem rooms. On style the law breaks. On order it holds: each was placed by the same law of graded access and pavilion in garden, and each takes its rank by its court. One physics governs plan and use; the surfaces obey several. A law that governs placement and not form earns a figure below the unified buildings.
Roberto Rossellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the frying pan in a sick old man’s bedroom and Manfredi’s death in the torture room. One law covers both: the common life of the city, comic and stubborn, goes on until terror reaches into it, and the same people meet terror with the same stubbornness. The priest who fools the soldiers with a frying pan is the priest who will not bless the torturers. The law holds across the film’s Roman world, which is most of the film. It strains at the German end: the salon of Bergmann and Ingrid, with its drink, cocaine and a mannered officer, runs on the law of studio melodrama, so that the film has one physics for its people and another for its enemies, and they meet more by plot than by kind.
William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch and Thomas U. Walter · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Latrobe’s corn-cob capitals in a small vestibule of the old north wing, and the lantern of Walter’s dome nearly 300 feet above. They obey one law, the classical orders turned to a republic’s use, and one grammar of column, entablature and vault spans the scale between them. Walter carried the old building’s order and storey heights through his wings, so that the long fronts read as one elevation, and the peristyle repeats the colonnades below. What bends the law: three architects over seventy years, the sober rooms of Latrobe and Bulfinch beside Walter’s richer chambers and the polychrome corridors of the wings; a dome of iron pretending to be the stone of its base; and, before 1962, a dome that overhung its front. The law holds in grammar more than in spirit.
Haruki Murakami · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Yamamoto skinned alive at the Mongolian border in 1938, told as plain testimony, and a woman in Tokyo in 1984 who calls herself a prostitute of the mind and wears her hair in a style of the early 1960s. They obey one law, mostly: violence and desire pass between persons and between times through holes, wells, dreams and a telephone line, and what was done on the continent is done again in a hotel room that exists in a dream. The range is wide, from war realism to suburban comedy to the occult, and the law holds the war and the marriage together. Charged, and second from the foot of the twelve: the law is never stated and sometimes cannot be inferred; threads end without consequence, Malta Kano and Creta Kano’s Crete among them; and Book Three’s business of healing sits uneasily under the physics of the first two books.
Ancient Egyptian, under Amenhotep III and Ramesses II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the temple: the axial approach from the profane to the hidden, with plant columns, a rising floor and a falling light. Take the most distant elements, Ramesses II’s pylon with its battle and Amenhotep III’s dark barque room with the birth of a king nearby. They obey the same law, royal legitimacy shown through sacred procession, and that is a real coherence across a wide range. The chapel rebuilt in Alexander’s name, a room inside a room, is consistent in kind. Held below by the front: the Ramesside work is in a different hand and a different finish, and its bend is visible as a break in the law of the axis. Over two centuries of building the law holds more than it breaks, and the breaks are at the edge, not the core.
Euripides · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Alcestis’ farewell to her marriage bed, and Heracles drunk and garlanded, telling the servant that life is for the day and for Aphrodite. One law governs both: the house and its hospitality, which Apollo honoured, Admetus keeps and Heracles repays. The range is wide for a short play, from a god’s bargain to a servant’s grumbling, and the law holds the ends together. Charged: the tone is deliberately unstable, and whether Admetus is admired or exposed is left open in a way that some take for a divided law rather than a held one; and the closing tag, “pollai morphai tōn daimoniōn”
“many are the shapes of the divine”, is shared with other plays and settles nothing.
David Cronenberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the boardroom comedy at Civic TV, where Max buys Japanese softcore and jokes with his partners, and the last shot in the rusted hulk. One law holds them: what is watched is entered into the watcher, and the market in images and the body that consumes them are one system. The Mission, the talk show and the torture room obey it, and the range it governs is wide, from the satire of a cable station to a ritual death. The strain is in the conspiracy. Spectacular Optical’s crusade runs on thriller law, with motives stated and sides drawn, and Bianca’s counter-programming sets a good signal against a bad one that the rest of the film, where the image corrupts whatever it touches, does not allow.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the most distant elements: Eteocles’ cool order in the prologue and the brothers’ shared grave in the lament. One law governs both: the city’s good and the house’s curse run through the same acts, and what saves the one destroys the other. The devices, the seer, the iron stranger and the curse all obey it. The transmitted close breaks it: a herald from a council not mentioned before, a decree against burial, an Antigone who answers a play other than this one, and a chorus divided in a way its earlier stance does not prepare. Charged for that, and for the doubt whether the turn at the seventh gate is a law kept or a law changed; the desk reads it as kept.
Michelozzo · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the rough blocks at the base of the street front and the column of the courtyard arcade, the commune’s wall and Brunelleschi’s order. They obey one law: the progression from rough to smooth runs from outside to inside as it runs from bottom to top, so the house grows more ordered the further one enters or rises. The cornice belongs to the same antique order as the court, and the Riccardi continued the elevation exactly, keeping the law outside. What bends it: the courtyard corners, where the module contradicts itself; the baroque gallery and rooms, a second law the first does not govern; and the walled loggia’s later language.
James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the stone drum, open to the sky, solemn and still; and the pink tubular rail along the ramp, or the bulging green glass wall of the entrance. They seem to obey opposite laws. They are meant to collide, and the collision is the law: the classical as a quoted mass, the modern as a coloured instrument set against it, with irony as the medium between them. That law is held from the road terrace to the galleries and the path. What bends it: collage is a law that admits almost anything, and licence is not coherence; at the entrance and the canopies the law slackens into accent; and the inside, calm and classical, speaks with the old museum more than with the outside. The axis clears the floor comfortably and is held at 8.0.
John Vanbrugh with Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gate tower of the Kitchen Court and the painted walls of the Saloon. They obey one law, the stepped and towered Baroque mass, ordered on one axis and one symmetry, with trophy and allegory as its speech; the service courts are composed as fully as the state rooms. Across the main campaign of Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor the law holds with wide range, from a bridge to a library. It bends at the edges of the one work: the chapel monument and the Column belong to a calmer Palladian manner; Brown’s lake answers the formal axis with an informal water the bridge was not designed for; the water terraces on the west are a French formal garden of the twentieth century, on a different law. The range is wide, but the later hands that are part of the work do not all keep its law.
Michael Jackson · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the record: a voice under pressure, running from what pursues it, set in a sound of total control. Billie Jean, the most paranoid track, obeys it fully; Thriller’s camp horror obeys it as play, pursuit made a party; Beat It obeys it as the street’s pressure, and Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ as gossip closing in. The range is very wide, funk, hard rock, horror novelty, ballad, duet and soft rock, and the production holds it as one surface. Held where it is by the two most distant elements: Billie Jean and The Lady in My Life, the most tender track, are joined by the voice and the sheen rather than by the law, and The Girl Is Mine breaks it. A surface is not a law.
Basil Spence · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the burned medieval church and the modern nave. They obey one law: the same red sandstone, the right angle that meets without merging, the porch that is neither old nor new, the screen through which each is read from the other. That range, six centuries and two kinds of building, is wide, and the law holds across it. Within the new church the law weakens. The attached chapels, a star, a drum and a cell, are each designed on their own terms; the exterior mixes stone flank, sawtooth fins, the baptistery’s grid and Epstein’s bronze without a single governing order; and the interior gathers the work of many artists in many manners, which the building frames but does not unify.
Ilkhanid, under Öljaitü · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the structural mass of octagon and dome, and the fine surface of tile and painted plaster. They answer one law. The octagon generates the plan, the bays, the galleries, the places of the minarets and the eightfold geometry of the ornament, and the galleries obey the same law at a smaller scale. What strains it is the building’s layered history within its own making: a second scheme of decoration laid over the first, with a different palette and logic, and a mortuary hall attached to a figure complete without it. Both belong to the work, and both are charged as tension rather than counted as integration. The range is moderate: one room and one geometry, held firmly.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the record: a world gone violent, and the body’s appetites, for sex, drugs and comfort, offered as the only shelter, with need the last word. The two most distant elements are Gimme Shelter, an apocalypse, and Country Honk, a fiddle, a car horn and a barroom joke, and they obey the same law only loosely: the joke is the appetite without the storm, relief rather than answer. Midnight Rambler and You Can’t Always Get What You Want, predator and parable, obey it fully: violence, then the bargain. Love in Vain fits as the old form of the same loss. The range is wide, and the band’s sound holds it more firmly than the law does; Live with Me and Monkey Man obey in attitude only. Strains at three tracks, no break.
Knights Hospitaller builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bare talus on the south face and the Gothic loggia inside the inner ward. One law can govern both: everything in the castle is what the walls make possible, and the loggia’s grace is the inward face of the talus’s severity, the cloister the fortress holds. That law is wide, from the outer wall to the chapel. But it is applied by several hands over a century and more and then by new masters. The round Frankish towers and the square Mamluk towers obey one purpose and two idioms; the loggia speaks the Gothic of northern France in a building otherwise of the Levant; the inner ward and the outer ring were not conceived together. Coherent in purpose, plural in grammar.
Luigi Vanvitelli · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the octagonal vestibule at the heart of the block and the cascade on the hill at the far end of the park. They obey one law, the axis, and that is the work’s chief coherence: a single line governs house, garden and water. But the work holds a second law within its unit. The English Garden, irregular and picturesque, with sham ruins and exotic planting, stands beside the cascade and contradicts the formal geometry by design; and some of the later apartments speak a Neoclassical and Empire language at odds with Luigi Vanvitelli’s late Baroque. Both were made within the one work, so they count against its unity. The range is very wide, and most of it obeys one physics; the exceptions are real.
Henry Fuseli · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the horse’s head at the curtain, outside the room and outside nature, and the table with its ordinary objects, the most domestic thing in the picture. One law holds them: everything in the room is either lit and exposed or dark and intruding, and the light divides the waking world’s furniture from the dream’s creatures only to put both in the one space. The woman, lit and helpless, is their meeting place. Nothing contradicts the law. The tone holds between terror and a near comic grotesque in the incubus, and the picture lets the two coexist rather than resolving them: a small strain, not a breach. But the range is one room, one night, one sleeper, and the figure records a law held over a small field.
Juan O'Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martínez de Velasco · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Mexica cosmogram of the north face and the atom and machine of the east. They obey one law: the same flat, hard edged, densely packed figurative style, the same palette of stones, the same refusal of perspective, so that every age is drawn in the visual language of the codex. The modern world is drawn as if by a Mexica scribe, across a wide range, and that is the building’s achievement. The tension lies between skin and volume. The glazed base and the rational frame follow the law of the International Style; the tower’s surface follows the law of the codex; and the two meet without either governing the other. The volcanic stone reliefs at the base begin to mediate, but only in part.
Alexandre Dumas · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs the whole: every crime returns on its maker, by the agency of a man who believes himself Providence’s hand, and the law is tested and kept. Take the two most distant elements: the Château d’If, written as a chamber of tragedy and initiation, and the Roman carnival or the Danglars drawing room, written as bandit romance and comedy of manners; or the Oriental fantasy of the Count’s household beside the bank, the Chamber and the courts. They obey one physics because the Count is the hinge: the fantasy is his instrument, and the society is his object. The strains are the hashish dream and the operatic Haydée, which belong to another book’s law, and the gentleness of the ending, which half withdraws the doubt the boy’s death raised.
Nina Simone · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the record: trouble met with insistence, the voice holding its ground over a repeated figure. The two most distant elements obey it. “Be My Husband” is voice, handclaps and drum for three minutes; “Sinnerman” is the full band for ten, a trance. Both are built on a stamped, unrelenting pulse and a call that does not yield, and the handclaps of the first return in the breakdown of the last, so the record closes where it opened, in the body. The range runs from field holler through classic blues and ballad to protest and spiritual, and that range is credit. The strain is in the middle: “Tell Me More” is lighter than the law allows. No break; a slackening.
Frank Ocean · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the record: a summer of plenty in which everyone is getting high to escape a want that plenty does not reach, and the singer’s want is a person he cannot have. The two most distant elements obey it. Crack Rock, an addict seen with police indifference, and Super Rich Kids, the boredom of the wealthy, are the same escape from two ends of one city; Pyramids, an Egyptian queen and a modern dancer, and Forrest Gump, an innocent’s love, are both a love that cannot be kept. The range is wide: soul ballad, hip-hop verse, a ten-minute suite, a love song, a jam. The short pieces and Monks obey only loosely, the frame is light, and the law is felt through the range rather than binding it.
Mastodon · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The two most distant elements are the banjo figure that opens Divinations and the grief of the title track with its guest voice; in tempo, the thrash of Divinations against the slow opening of The Czar. They obey one law. The interlocking riffing and the leading drums run through everything, the clean three-voice singing is constant, and the palette of heavy guitars, a warmth of keyboard and a cold minor holds from the first track to the last. The frame joins history, cosmos and grief under one physics, the soul’s flight. What holds the figure is range: the record’s register is narrower than its story, and the paralysed body, the wormhole and the Czar’s court sound alike. That sameness is coherence, but narrowness is not, and the figure stands at its threshold.
Algernon Charles Swinburne · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant poems: the political “A Song in Time of Revolution” and the sleep of “The Garden of Proserpine”, or the medieval “St Dorothy” and “Anactoria”. A law holds across most of the range: the world is ruled by desire and time, the gods, old or new, are cruel or absent, death is the only sure rest, and the senses are the measure. The pagan poems, the erotic poems and the elegies obey it, and the sea, the flower and the blood are one imagery throughout. The ballads and the Christian-medieval pieces, a saint’s legend told with devotion, a Christmas carol, sit outside it as relics of the Pre-Raphaelite years, and the political songs belong more to Songs before Sunrise (1871) than to this book. Where the law holds it is narrow, and narrowness is not coherence.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Yōmeimon, all gold and colour and crowded figure, and the bronze tomb in its plain enclosure in the Okusha. They obey one law, the law of graded approach: ornament as the measure of nearness to the god, and silence as the measure of the dead man’s presence. That is a wide range held under one rule. Elsewhere the law loosens. The precinct holds buildings of different dates and offices, the pagoda of 1818, the storehouses, the stable with its monkeys, Buddhist elements orphaned by the separation; and the carving mixes Chinese, Buddhist and Japanese emblem with no one governing scheme. The rule of the sequence is firm; the rule of the surface is accumulation.
Abraham Darby III; designed by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the crown joint of a main rib, where two great castings meet, and the small rings in the spandrels of the outer frames. They obey one law: concentric arcs of iron in a single plane, repeated five times across the width, the ornament made of the same members as the structure. The deck, plates and railings continue the iron system. What troubles the law is the mixture of logics the bridge inherits, the mason’s arch, the carpenter’s joint and the founder’s material, each coherent in itself and held together in one figure rather than reconciled. The range is narrow, a single structural idea repeated; narrowness is not coherence, and the figure says so.
Wu-Tang Clan · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the clan as a fighting order, rawness as its sound, the film’s code as its frame. The two most distant elements are the second track, Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s comic, unhinged showcase, and the sober memoir of C.R.E.A.M.; or the sweetness of Can It Be All So Simple against the menace of Bring da Ruckus. They obey the same law: each is a voice of one order in one grey sound, and the dialogue between them keeps every turn inside one world. The range is wider than the texture suggests, from clowning to grief, from nine voices to one. The skits sometimes stand outside the law, as sketch comedy rather than rite, and Tearz leans to a plainness the rest does not share. Some of the unity is a shared grey texture more than one law the parts obey, and narrowness of sound is not coherence.
Abbasid builders, under al-Mutawakkil · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the rectilinear enclosure, a long box, and the spiral tower, a cone. They obey one law. Both are burnt brick in mass; the round towers of the wall and the round section of the Malwiya share one curve; the tower stands on the axis that runs through the court to the mihrab, so the vertical sign and the horizontal precinct answer to one orientation. The outer enclosure, of which little stands, carried the law of nested rectangles round the prayer space. What holds it: the range is narrow, one register of mass and extent throughout, and narrowness is not coherence. Nothing contradicts the law; it governs a small span of difference.
Vijayanagara builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dark, plain sanctum and the exuberant open hall; or the monumental gateway and the small chariot. One law governs them: the axial approach to the god’s house, a single carved granite idiom, the same moulded plinths and pier types. A century of additions does not break that law, because the workshop’s idiom held. What holds the axis is composition. The court is a gathering of pavilions rather than a composed whole, and the halls are not proportioned to one another by any visible rule. The coherence is that of a style sustained across a moderate range, not of a design that orders every part from one centre.
Giuseppe Mengoni · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the triumphal arch on the cathedral square, masonry, monumental and Roman in grammar, and the glazed dome of the octagon, iron ribs and light. They largely obey one law. One order of fronts runs from the arch through all four arms and into the octagon, the same storeys, cornice lines and bay rhythm, and the iron and glass sit over them as one system of vault and dome, so that the industrial roof reads as the masonry’s completion rather than its contradiction; the cross places everything about one centre. What bends the law: two physics set one on the other, a palazzo street and a glasshouse, meeting at the springing rather than growing from one principle; the Scala entrance obeys a quieter law than the arch; and the eclectic ornament is one style by consistency more than by necessity.
Gustav Holst · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Jupiter’s English festival tunes and Neptune’s bitonal chords dissolving offstage. They obey one law in part: each movement is a planet’s character, held as a disposition, and the whole moves from the near and forceful to the far and still. Shared means support the law: ostinato as the ground of Mars, Saturn and Neptune; quintuple metre at both ends; bitonality and stacked fourths in Mercury, Saturn and Neptune. The range is wide: battle, love, play, festivity, age, magic and mysticism. But the law loosens where the movements stand alone. Jupiter’s central tune is another world, nationally coloured, its broad diatonic song outside the harmonic language of the other six. A gallery’s unity is a frame’s unity more than an inner law.
Soundgarden · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the record: weight and drift, a voice reaching upward from under heavy downtuned guitars, with the death wish beneath. The two most distant elements obey it. Spoonman, a percussive celebration of a street musician in shifting meter, and Like Suicide, a slow seven-minute elegy, are both built on the riff’s lurch and on the voice’s climb out of it. Black Hole Sun’s psychedelia and 4th of July’s grinding weight are two faces of the same physics. The range is wide, from punk speed to Beatles ballad to sludge, and the law reaches across most of it. Held from the top: Spoonman and Kickstand sit outside the record’s emotional field, and in places its breadth is the breadth of a collection.
Richard Rogers · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the building: served and servant parts set apart, every component made, shown and joined in steel, concrete and glass, from the tower to the bracket to the bolt. The crane on the tower’s top and the escalator in the Room obey it alike. Take the two most distant elements: the stainless ducts on the Lime Street front, and the Adam Room, a Georgian dining room of plaster and painted panels reinstalled on an upper floor. They obey no common law. The Adam Room and the old front on Leadenhall Street are the institution’s relics, kept inside and beside the machine; the building frames them as relics but does not govern them, and as parts of the one work the break is charged. The law holds over most of a wide range, and bends at the shrine.
Alex Proyas · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Bumstead at his accordion in a shabby room, hushed and doubtful, and the duel of wills above the city, buildings rising and walls splitting. One law covers them: the city is a made thing under its makers’ will, and both the detective’s quiet doubt and the duel are expressions of who controls the making. The tuning is established at the first midnight, so its use in the climax is no new physics, and the range is wide, from chamber noir to cosmic myth. The law bends where investigation turns into superhuman combat, a change of register the logic permits and the tone does not fully absorb, and where the coda’s sunny sea answers the dark with a wish more than a consequence.
Mimar Hayruddin · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the abutment buried in the rock of one bank and the crown above the river. One law governs both, the thrust of the arch carried from the crown down the ring into the rock, and the roadway, the paving, the parapets and the spandrels all obey it, so that nothing in the work stands outside the arch. The law is exact and admits no exception, and the material is one stone throughout. But the range it covers is narrow: one element, one material, one gesture, and coherence of that kind comes cheaply. Narrowness is not coherence, and the axis stands well above the floor and short of works whose single law reaches across many parts.
Diane Arbus · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the matching costume, the most uniform thing in the picture, and the faces’ small divergence, the least uniform. They obey one law, the one the title states: likeness that the picture tests, and that at every scale passes and fails at once. The dresses match and differ by a fold; the headbands match and sit a little differently; the arms hang alike and not quite alike; the faces share every feature and do not share an expression. The composition obeys it too, a symmetry nearly kept. Nothing in the picture contradicts the law, and the light, the plain ground and the frontal pose serve it by removing anything else to look at. What holds the axis at 8 is that narrowness is not coherence: the law governs two figures and one relation, and its range, though fully held, is small.
Eddie Adams · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the general’s back, turned to the viewer, unhurried, almost casual in its stance; and the prisoner’s face, the most violent thing in the picture. They obey one law, the line of the arm. Everything in the frame is organised by the vector from the shoulder to the muzzle to the temple, and the soldier at the left leans away from the same line, so that even the witness obeys it. The light is one light, the moment one moment, and nothing in the frame contradicts it. Held at 8 because narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one instant and three figures, the law is grasped in a glance, and the coherence is the event’s, given rather than built.
Byzantine, under Archbishop Ursicinus · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the bare brick exterior in the flat fields and the green and gold paradise of the conch. One law holds them: a plain, even, ascending order that saves its colour for the end, the outer austerity and the inner arcade both leading the eye to the apse, the round tower answering the round apse. Arcade, windows and mosaic share one measured calm. What bends the law: the nave’s present bareness is an accident of 1449, not a law of the building, so the contrast is sharper than the one designed; the seventh-century panels take San Vitale’s idiom; the arch mosaics, built up over centuries, are of other styles and scales; the campanile is a later voice in the same brick. One physics holds through these, but its range is narrow, a single register of serenity, and narrowness is not coherence.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Feyd in the white stadium of Giedi Prime, killing for a crowd under a black sun, and Chani and Paul alone on a dune at dusk, the most private moment in the film. One law governs both: power is made by spectacle and belief, and every intimacy is already watched by the plan it serves. The arena and the council are one shape, a crowd giving a killer its acclamation; the romance is Paul’s last tie to a life outside the prophecy, and he spends it. Jessica’s conversion, the breeding plan, the Emperor’s kneeling and Stilgar’s faith obey the same law, and the range is wide. Strain shows in tone: Stilgar’s faith is played partly for comedy, which loosens the law where it should press, and the battle at points obeys the action film’s law rather than its own.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs the book: the war of the soul with the body and of the word with the act, and the judgment that life must be seized because death is certain. Take the two most distant elements: the farce of Bouboulina, with her parrot, her admirals and her mock wedding, and the killing of the widow at the church door. They obey the same law. In both, desire meets the community and death, and Zorba’s answer, to live and to dance, is tested against each. The narrator’s Buddhist renunciation and Zorba’s appetite are the two poles of one law, not two laws, and the range, from comedy to dread and from the mine to the monastery, holds. Held at this figure because the narrator’s abstract register and Zorba’s concrete one sometimes sit side by side without meeting, and the thread of the letters with Stavridakis runs on another plane.
Yves Klein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the leaping figure, the most charged thing in the picture, and the cyclist, the most indifferent. They obey one law, the ordinary made the ground of the extraordinary. The street, the wall, the suit, the bicycle and the plain daylight are all of one everyday register, and the leap is placed in it without a sign of theatre; even the deceit obeys the law, since the means of safety are removed to leave only the ordinary street. The law reaches the publication: a newspaper, the most ordinary of printed things, carrying the most extravagant claim. Nothing in the picture contradicts it. Held because narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one frame and one gesture, and the range between its farthest elements, though real and well governed, is small.
Peter Eisenman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the stele flush with the pavement at the field’s edge, where a child steps onto it and sits, and the Room of Names below ground, where a recorded voice reads a life in the dark. One is abstract, outdoors and at play; the other documentary, enclosed and in mourning. They obey one law in part: the grid of the field is carried into the coffered ceilings of the rooms, so that the visitor below stands under the stelae, and the passage from the open field down to the named dead is one descent. What bends it is that the field’s law is abstraction and the refusal of meaning, and the centre’s is documentation and narrative; the centre was demanded against the field’s premise, and the two are joined by adjacency and a grid more than by one physics. The field alone is very coherent, and narrowness is not coherence.
Jean Nouvel, with Architecture-Studio · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the north block’s sheer glass curve on the river and the south block’s dense patterned wall, city face and southern screen. They obey one law. The square module and the metal grid govern both, and the building’s single thesis, two faces of one institute meeting at a measured cut, organises the opposition rather than suffering it. Even the book tower turns within the same orthogonal glass. What bends the law: the interiors, rearranged over the years, are less bound by it than the envelope. And the range it covers is modest, two faces and a cleft held in one precise language; narrowness is not coherence. Coherence high, range narrow.
Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren (OMA) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the free corner of the overhang, high over the plaza, and the base of studios set into the ground. One law governs both: the continuous tube, bent in three dimensions, with the density of the diagrid as its visible physics, thick at the base where load gathers and at the roots of the cantilever, open where little is asked. The same law makes the lean of the towers and the hanging mass legible as one system, and nothing on the exterior contradicts it. The range is wide, from ground to sky and from tower to bridge. What bends it: inside, a second law governs, the ordinary office and studio floor, which knows nothing of the loop but its plate; and the plaza and podium are handled with less conviction than the tube.
Cy Twombly · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the list of the Greek heroes’ names, writing at its most legible and cool, and The Fire that Consumes All before It, mark at its most violent and least legible. They obey one law: the hand writing the war on bare ground, where a name and a burst of fire are both marks made at speed, and legibility is only a degree. The same law governs the shield’s circle, the battle scrawls and the faint shades at the end. The range is wide, list to fire, emblem to ghost, Greek to Trojan, and nothing breaks it; the two armies are written in one hand, which is the cycle’s point about war. Held below the top because the law admits thin canvases without testing them.
Harper Lee · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of childhood, Dill’s stories, the ham costume, Miss Caroline’s schoolroom; and the trial and death of Tom Robinson. One law governs both. In each the town makes a story about a person it has not looked at: Boo the monster, Tom the rapist, the Cunninghams as trash, Atticus as feeble, Dolphus Raymond as a drunk. In each the child learns to look. The Halloween farce turns into attempted murder without a change of physics, and the ham costume both saves Scout and is the joke. Where the law weakens: Aunt Alexandra’s arc and some of the school belong to a gentler book, and the black characters are governed by a flatter law of representation than the white.
Snøhetta · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the white stone sliding into the fjord at the harbour edge, and the dark oak of the horseshoe hall at the building’s core. They obey one stated law, the architects’ three ideas held in a single section: an open carpet of stone over everything public, a warm wall of wood that closes the theatre, and a plain factory behind that serves it. The law is legible from outside, where the white roof, the timber glimpsed through glass and the metal box read as three parts of one thing, and it governs the foyer, where carpet overhead and wave wall at the side meet. What bends it: the three ideas are three systems joined by a section rather than one physics, and the fly tower stands up out of the carpet unresolved, a box the roof’s law does not reach.
Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus (OMA/LMN) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs: fixed programme in platforms, free programme between them, one skin over all. Take the two most distant elements, the parking and staff floors at the base and the Reading Room at the crown, or the raw concrete of the spiral and the plant-patterned carpets of the Living Room: they obey the same rule, the stable and the open alternating in section and the skin indifferent to both. The range is wide, from a car park to a children’s library to a reading room above the city, and the rule holds. The strain lies in the interiors, where a deliberate collision of materials, colours and graphics, the red of level 4 and the bright escalators, works as a second, looser law of contrast, and where the net’s uniformity sometimes contradicts the irregular masses it covers.
Sedefkâr Mehmed Agha · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the six thin minarets at the edges of the site and a tulip on a gallery tile. Both obey one law, the classical Ottoman one, in which every part steps toward the centre and the surface clothes a structure it does not hide. Outside and inside answer each other: the domes seen from the square are the vaults seen from the floor, and the court is a smaller, open version of the hall. The range runs from the city’s skyline to the pattern on a tile, and the law holds across it. Two things strain it. The paint of the upper zones follows a looser decorative logic than the tile and the stone. And the piers assert inside a mass that the outside’s graceful cascade does not prepare.
Sigur Rós · Music
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs the record: sound emerging from near silence toward a swell, with the voice as one instrument inside it and wonder as the tone. Take the two most distant elements, the brief, faint opening, which is the law’s seed, and the organ-and-drums push of Hjartað hamast, its most worldly case, which strains the law without breaking it. Ný batterí’s darker, heavier register and the tenderness of Viðrar vel are the same swell in two moods. What holds the figure is narrowness: the range of mode is moderate and the shape of each piece is largely one shape, and narrowness is not coherence.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the scene at the bank, plain and procedural, and the furniture rising in the living room. One law governs both: what holds a household up, a loan, a job, a floor, can give way, and Curtis’s mind and the world obey the same weather. The dreams, the insurance, the sign language, the shelter and the supper all fall under it, across a wide range: domestic realism, clinical study and apocalyptic vision. The law is tested by the ending. If the storm is real, the clinical law of the middle, the mother’s illness, the counsellor and the medication, seems broken; the film keeps the beach within its own physics by placing it as a vision others now share, but the strain is real and holds the figure.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the gom jabbar, a closed room, an old woman and a boy’s hand in a box; and the night assault on Arrakeen, armies, ships and fire. One law governs both: power tests the human by pain and by mass, and the one who keeps still survives. Paul keeps still with his hand in the box, before the hunter-seeker, beneath the worm, in the duel he does not want; the Fremen walk without rhythm so the worm will not come. The law runs through design and sound, and the world keeps its own physics: shields that stop the fast blade and not the slow, water as wealth. What holds it at eight is range: one solemn register.
Peter Gabriel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs most of the record: traditions meeting over a single electronic ground, in a dry, warm acoustic, toward devotion. Take the two most distant elements: Zaar, a trance rite of drums and voices with no Western element, and With This Love (Choir), an English boy choir in a hymn-like line. They obey the same law, because the meeting runs both ways, and the title track joins the two extremes in one piece. The range is wide: trance, lament, hymn, march, drone. What holds the figure: the law loosens in the cues, where some pieces obey a film scene’s need for tension or unease more than the record’s own, and the synthesiser palette sometimes sits apart from the players rather than holding them.
Lev Rudnev · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the star at the spire’s tip and a student’s room in the far wing. They obey one law, a strict bilateral symmetry about one axis and a hierarchy of mass that steps from the residences up to the summit, so that every part has its place by its rank. The sculptural and decorative programme speaks one language, state emblem, wheat, books, students and the instruments of science, from the entrances to the parapets. The range is wide, from the dormitory to the crown, and this is not narrowness. Held at 8.0 because the law is a law of ranking, imposed rather than discovered, and because the vocabulary is eclectic in source, Kremlin tower, American setback and classical order, and the joins between them show at close range.
Erich Mendelsohn · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the dome and coelostat at the top, an instrument among instruments, and the deep window reveals of the rear wing, where people work. They obey one law: a continuous plastic mass, curved in plan and section, every opening pressed into it, every edge rounded, nothing joined or applied. The tower’s swell, the stair’s sweep and the wing’s low body read as one figure from any side, and the law is kept more strictly than most buildings keep any law. What bends it: the law is the skin’s, not the structure’s, for the brick inside obeys another physics; and within, the workrooms and laboratory are governed by the instrument and the ordinary room, so that the whole is a strict outside on a plain inside. The range covered is narrow, one small building and one idea, and narrowness is not coherence.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the woman in the blonde wig shooting the dealer who betrayed her, in the first story, and Faye dancing in an empty flat she has let herself into, in the second. One law governs both: people alone in a city act on feeling through objects and routines, with time measured to the hour and love dated like tinned food. The noir and the comedy obey the same physics of chance and near miss, and the snack bar holds both. The range is moderate, wide in genre and narrow in feeling, from a drug run to a light romance. The strain shows in the first story, whose crime plot runs on genre rules the film otherwise ignores, and at the hinge, where the change of story is a change of rules as much as of people.
Howard Hawks · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the opening banter in Walter’s office and Mollie Malloy’s leap from the press-room window. One law governs both: the job comes first, and everything slower than it is run over. Walter’s schemes against Bruce, the reporters’ cruelty to Mollie and the mayor’s scheme against Earl Williams obey the same rule of speed and appetite, and the film’s comedy is the same thing as its satire. The range is wide for a comedy, from courtship to an execution and a suicide attempt. Two seams hold the figure. The film runs on past Mollie’s leap with barely a beat, and whether that is the law applied or a tonal gap left open is a fair question; and the reprieve, arriving by a comic messenger, resolves the hanging by farce rather than by the film’s own logic of power.
Daft Punk · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the church-like arpeggios of Veridis Quo and the cut-word chant of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger; or the bell and guitar shred of Aerodynamic and the near-whisper of Something About Us. One law governs them: remembered pop pleasure passed through the machine, with the human touch audible inside the processing. Every voice obeys it, the guest singers included, whose voices are processed into the record’s world. The range is wider than the genre: house, disco, soft rock, the rock solo, baroque pastiche, garage and lounge. The law loosens in the loop tracks, which obey the genre more than the record’s idea, and Too Long tests it by turning pleasure into endurance, a turn partly intended and partly slack.
Pierre Koenig · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
One law runs through the house: a steel module, the frame stated, glass where the view is and solid wall where privacy is, the roofs flat and level, the pool and terrace on the same plane as the floors. Take the two most distant elements, the closed street front and the hovering glass corner: they obey the same rule turned through ninety degrees. Nothing in the house contradicts its premise, from the carport to the edge of the pad. What holds the axis at 8.0 is the range the law governs: two wings, one material system and one programme. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure credits a complete consistency kept over a small field.
Antony Gormley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the human body, cast from one living man, and the wings, flat engineered planes like an aircraft’s. They obey one law. Everything is rendered in the same steel, built in the same ribbed sections and weathered to the same skin, so that flesh and machine are one material and one method, and the body becomes a made thing in the region’s own trade. No element of the work contradicts another; the rust that might seem a defect is part of the plan. Held at 8.0 because narrowness is not coherence: the law, once grasped, governs a small territory, and a single standing figure has few distant elements to reconcile. Coherent, and narrow.
Jenny Saville · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs: pressure. Take the two most distant elements, the impasto of the knees in the foreground and the small, thinly carried head with the scratched text near the surface. Both obey it: the flesh pressed by the hands, the viewer pressed by the scale, the woman pressed by words she must read backwards. Theory and paint, the cerebral and the carnal, stand within the same physics, an achievement given how far apart they are in kind. Yet the range is narrow, one figure, one register, one effect, and narrowness is not coherence. Where the coherence is tested at its widest, the text against the flesh, it holds; but it holds by addition rather than by fusion, and the figure stands for a law held over a small territory.
Adrian Smith (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the piled raft under the desert sand and the steel needle at 828 m. One law governs both and everything between: the three-lobed plan round a central core, giving up its lobes in a spiral as the height rises, until the core alone goes on as the spire. Plan, section, the vertical lines of the cladding and the shape of the setbacks obey one geometry, and the law can be read from any distance. What bends it: the law is narrow, one plan, one rule of setback, one skin, and narrowness is not coherence. The podium entrances, the hotel interiors and the public deck follow the law of luxury fit-out and the tourist attraction, not the tower’s own.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the brushed steel sail curving over Grand Avenue and the fir ceiling billowing over the platform. One is metal, outside, in the sun; the other is wood, inside, in the dark. They obey one law: surfaces bent as if by wind, lifting and curling away from a centre, a law that also governs the organ’s splayed pipes, the garden’s enclosing walls and the curved forms of the foyers, from street to room and from metal to wood. What bends it: the auditorium is an orthogonal box under its canopy, governed by acoustic law, and the envelope is a separate system standing off it, so the whole is two physics joined by a style, with a residue between that neither rules, on a garage that obeys a third and plainer law.
George Saunders · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs the book: the man at the bottom of a failing enterprise is made the agent of its cruelty, and his decency, which he cannot afford, is the one thing in him the enterprise does not own. Take the two most distant elements, the ghosts of the 1860s family in the title story and the caste of the Flawed in the future America of “Bounty”. They obey the same law: past and future are both for sale, and the bodies in them are counted as stock. The ghosts are given the same procedural flatness as the gate receipts, so the supernatural and the economic share one physics. What holds the figure is range: the tone runs from deadpan to grotesque, the class is one class, and the law, never broken, is tested over a narrow field. Narrowness is not coherence.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs most of the record: a hushed world of strings, piano and soft electronics in which a love ends and the self sinks toward water and sleep. The two most distant elements, Burn the Witch, a staccato song of the hunting crowd, and True Love Waits, pianos and a voice asking not to be left, obey it at a stretch. Both are about being taken, by the mob or by the loss, and the opening blow is answered by the closing plea; but the record places them at its two ends more than it joins them. The range is moderate: a motorik pulse in Ful Stop, a guitar figure near bossa nova in Present Tense. Narrowness is not coherence.
Carl Orff · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the whispered terror of O Fortuna and the drunken abbot of Ego sum abbas, or the roasted swan and Dulcissime. One law governs them: ostinato, stanza and triad, the voice declaiming over a fixed rhythmic ground. The Middle High German dances and the Latin love songs, the comic numbers and the sacred parody, obey the same physics across a range wide in mood: grief, farce, lust, ecstasy, dread. The frame’s return states the law outright, and that is credited. But narrowness is not coherence, and part of the unity here is the narrowness of the means: one law is easy to keep when it has so few clauses.
Ptolemaic and Roman builders · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Do the most distant elements obey one law? The two most distant are the kiosk of Nectanebo I, of the fourth century BC, and the Roman Kiosk of Trajan, some five centuries later, and they do: the tradition’s deliberate archaism kept one canon of form, proportion and ornament through Ptolemaic and Roman hands, so that the whole reads as one Egyptian precinct. The irregular plan does not break the law; it applies it to uneven ground. What strains it is accretion and incompletion: an unfinished colonnade and kiosk, lesser temples set where room allowed, Roman gates of differing scale. The crosses and the defacement of late antiquity belong to survival, not to the law of the making. Coherent over a wide span, which is the achievement; not the single physics of a building conceived at once.
Agatha Christie · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
One law governs the book: everything said is evidence, and the speaker’s interest bends it. Take the two most distant elements, Caroline’s comic gossip over the breakfast table and the hedge, and the doctor’s last pages, alone with his confession and the veronal. They obey the same law. Caroline’s guesses are the village’s form of detection, half right and wholly motivated; the doctor’s narrative is the same thing done with intelligence and to deceive. The comedy and the death share one physics, and the range from mah jong to suicide is held. Two charges. The range is narrow: one village, one week, one class of household. And the frame strains once examined: why the murderer would write a narrative of the inquiry so made that it convicts him, and keep it to its end, the book answers only with his vanity, which it has not shown enough of.
Paul Klee · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
One law governs the whole. Take the two most distant elements, the most iconic and the most accidental: the frontal symmetry of the figure, the stance of an icon, and the smudges and stray marks of the transfer. Both obey the sheet’s one law, the sacred figure rendered by means that undo its authority. The comic and the terrible obey it too: the curls and the claws, the teeth and the wings, are drawn in one idiom of the child’s hieroglyph, and none breaks register. The ground does not illustrate a place but gives the figure its aura, and figure and ground agree. The range governed is narrow, one figure, one idiom, one tone of startled unease, and narrowness is not coherence.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: a butterfly flying in a warm white room, and a butterfly fixed in gloss in the other. One law governs both, the cycle from hatching to fixity, and every element obeys it: pupa, flight, feeding, mating, death on the floor of the living room, and the finished death in the painting. The title holds the law in a phrase. What holds the axis: narrowness is not coherence. The range is one cycle, one creature and one support, and the distance between the farthest elements, though real, is short. The two rooms are opposed by design, and the opposition is the law, not a breach of it. Coherent, and narrow.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of the opening, a woman fished out of the river and held upside down, and the cliff at sunset where she asks to die. One law governs both: her hope is renewed, the world takes what she offers, and the camera is with her and never above her. The same law holds the film star’s villa, where she is kept in the bathroom while the star makes up with his mistress, the sanctuary, where the miracle is a cripple falling, and the stage, where her girlhood is a turn on the bill. The range is wide. The strain is weighed: Lazzari’s episode keeps its own glossy register, and the fable of the last road arrives in a key the street scenes did not prepare.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Alicia’s drunken party in Miami, a woman drinking to forget her father, and the poisoned coffee in the Sebastian house. One law governs both: drink as the medium of trust and betrayal, and love as a test conducted under watching eyes. Alicia drinks to wound herself; Devlin forgets his champagne at the agency; the champagne at the party runs low and sends Sebastian to the cellar; the wine bottles hold the ore; the coffee holds the poison. Every scene is watched, by Devlin, the agency, the mother, the guests below the stair, and even the flirtations are performed for observers. What strains it: the agency office plays by the plot’s law more than the film’s, and the Rio postcards stand outside it.
Minoan · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the static ornamental border and the bull in full gallop. One law holds them, the palace’s language of pattern and curve. The border’s rows of variegated stone and the bull’s mottled hide are the same order of decorated surface, and the arcs of horns, vaulter and tail repeat one rhythm. The three bodies obey one convention of colour and proportion; the empty blue ground holds everything in one plane of action. Nothing contradicts the law. The range is narrow, one act and one register of poised energy, and narrowness is not coherence: the figure records a law fully kept over a small territory.
P. G. Wodehouse · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the newts and the baccarat debt, or the scripture-knowledge prize and the chef’s notice. One physics governs them, and the whole, without a lapse: this is a world in which nothing can really be harmed, every engagement can be broken and restored by teatime, and every crisis is answered by a contrivance. The registers obey the same law, from Bertie’s slang to Jeeves’s Latinate deference. The law never breaks. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range the law has to cover is small: it holds across a country house and a school hall, in one tone. The coherence is complete and the achievement is bounded by what it is asked to cohere.
Frans Hals · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the dense, deliberate embroidery of the sleeve and the quick, open touches of the face. They obey one law. Everything in the canvas is a man presenting himself, and the handling is ranked by what each part contributes to that presentation: finery fixed and exact, the person alive and moving. The elbow, the brim, the lace and the bare ground all serve one claim of assurance, and nothing in the picture contradicts it or stands outside it. The light is single and consistent. But the range is narrow, one man, one moment, one register of amused self-possession against an empty ground, and narrowness is not coherence. The law is held completely over a small territory.
Yayoi Kusama · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the visitor’s body, the one large and living thing in the room, and a single diode, the smallest and most mechanical. They obey one law: everything in the room is repeated into a field until it is a point among points. The lights are multiplied by the mirrors; the field is doubled by the water; the body is multiplied and reduced to the scale of the lights; the change of colour, sweeping through the field, treats every point alike. The title obeys it too, the souls counted in millions and set at light years. Nothing in the room breaks the law, and the door, the one place where it is broken, is where the visitor enters and leaves the work. Held where it is because narrowness is not coherence: the law governs one room and one effect, and the range between its farthest elements is small.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the plaza where the ground first lifts, and the interior of the auditorium. One law governs both, the continuous surface without corners: it rises from the plaza, folds over the roof, enters through the glass, becomes the lobby’s floor and ceiling, and returns in the timber bands of the hall. Few buildings of its kind hold one law so strictly from outside to inside. Two things hold the figure. The range is narrow, a single gesture, and narrowness is not coherence: the strictness is partly that of having one thing to say. And the law stops at the doors of the museum and galleries, conventional rooms set inside the envelope as boxes in a shell, while the flat, gridded glass where the surface opens speaks another language.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant pairs: the clean modern packaging and the old apothecary bottles; the sterile order and the honey with its dying insects. They obey one law, the pharmacy itself, a type that has held the alchemist’s coloured bottles and the manufacturer’s boxes in the same window for two centuries, and whose whole business is the body’s struggle against decay. The insect-killer belongs to the shop as hygiene and to the work as death; the honey is food, an old remedy and a lure. Every element is something a pharmacy could hold and something the work needs. The range is not wide, and narrowness is not coherence, but within its range the law governs without exception.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.5 · Tier III
One law governs the record: a voice dissolving in noise and fear is answered by voices joined. Take the two most distant elements, Age of Anxiety I, a synthesiser pulse and a voice trapped in its own loop, and the title song, a gentle, almost acoustic close. They obey the law as its two ends: the first is the I at its most enclosed, the last the plural reached, and the hinge between them is placed inside one song so that the law is heard changing state. The range between, electronic rock, piano ballad, cumulative anthem, folk-rock and bright pop, is joined by the frame. The law strains in Unconditional II, which obeys its genre more than the argument, and in the cosmic leap the second half never answers.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the black steel stair floating across the atrium and the concrete fins of the roof over a far gallery; or the window at the end of the cantilever and the floor of the lowest band. They obey one law: lines drawn from the site, running parallel, bending and crossing, so that wall, stair, roof beam, lighting track and floor follow the same streams from street to roof. Few buildings hold a single law so far through. Two things bend it. The retained barracks block obeys an older law and is set against the new rather than taken into it, and the partitions exhibitions build inside the bands obey a third, the room’s. The law is consistent over a narrow range, and narrowness is not coherence.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: a narrow gate on a footpath in a wooded corner of the north of the park, and the widest gate on a broad promenade in the south, seen by crowds and from the towers. They obey one law: a gate set across the walk at the walk’s width, one colour, one hang. The law holds through every gate and every view, from the ground to the air, and through the work’s time, shown for a fixed span, removed, the ground left as found. The process obeys it too: no sponsor, no public money, nothing left behind. Nothing breaks the law. What holds the axis: narrowness is not coherence, and a law that governs one repeated unit is easily kept. The range is vast in space and small in form.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Nativity façade, Gaudí’s naturalism of the 1890s to the 1920s, swarming with plants, animals and figures cast from life; and the Passion façade, Subirachs’s angular figures from the late 1980s, deliberately foreign to it. Their surfaces obey no one law, and the building does not reconcile them. Add Villar’s neo-Gothic crypt below, Gaudí’s late geometry in the interior and towers, and a main front that is a building site. A deeper law does run through: the ruled-surface geometry and the equilibrated structure govern the interior and the towers, and the continuation has held to them, so plan, section and silhouette obey one physics. The range is very wide, which counts for the axis. What holds it lowest is the breach at the façades, the parts most seen.
W. H. Auden · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: “Calypso” or “O Tell Me the Truth About Love”, and “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”. One law can be named: private feeling and public history are read by the same diagnostic intelligence, which finds love, neurosis and politics continuous, and the lullaby and “September 1, 1939” obey it. But the book gathers poems from a period in which Auden’s beliefs were changing, and it contradicts itself in ways it does not govern: “Spain 1937” accepts “the necessary murder” and ends on a history that “cannot help nor pardon”, while “September 1, 1939” and the Freud elegy turn to love and to a forgiving reason. The tension is fertile, but it is a record of transit, not a law the book holds. The range is wide, and that counts for it.
Matthias of Arras and Peter Parler; completed by later hands · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Wenceslas Chapel of the 1360s, dim, square and walled in gems, and the west front of the 1920s with its rose and bronze doors. Do they obey one law? In part. The completion took Parler’s choir as its law and extended it, so that the interior from west door to apse reads as one Gothic vessel. But the range is held by imitation rather than by a governing principle: the tower climbs from Gothic to a Renaissance gallery and a Baroque helmet, and the silver tomb, the marble mausoleum, the oratory’s branch-work and the twentieth-century glass each bring their own physics. One law governs the main vessel; the rest are accommodated.
Ming builders (and earlier dynasties) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Laolongtou’s masonry in the sea and the earthen fort at Jiayuguan in the Gobi. One law can be stated for both: a continuous line, held by intervisible towers, closed at passes, built of what the site gives. That law reaches across more than eight thousand kilometres and from sea to desert, a range no other building on the desk spans. But the law is loose and was never one design. Many commands made the work over two hundred and seventy years; it doubles near Beijing, gives way for long stretches to trench and natural barrier, and changes section, material and finish without a rule that predicts the change. The coherence is of a type repeated, not a whole composed.
Jack Kerouac · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements, the comedy of the Mill City barracks and the last paragraph by the river at sundown. One law governs both: joy is motion, motion exhausts what it touches, and what remains is loss. The law holds across the five parts, and the coda follows from it. Charged on two counts. The range is moderate, one tone of excited recollection with an undertow, and narrowness is not coherence. And the book’s moral law wavers: it celebrates Dean as a saint, “the soul of Beatific”, in one chapter and records his cruelty in the next, without settling whether it knows the difference. The wavering can be taken as Sal’s growing knowledge, but the text does not consistently carry that, and the narrator is unsure of his own law.
Danny Boyle · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant points: the hushed, near documentary walk through the empty city, and the storm in which Jim, half naked and bloodied, kills soldiers in a country house to a pounding score. One law is meant to join them, and largely does: rage is the virus, the virus is in everyone, and the last act shows the uninfected becoming what they fled. At its best moment, Selena’s hesitation over Jim, the law governs completely. What holds the axis is tone. The last act runs on the physics of the revenge thriller, where the hero wins and the villain gets his due, a physics the opening refused; and the cottage coda, with its rescue by jet, sits under a softer law than the film before it.
Mughal, under Akbar · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Buland Darwaza, arched, Timurid, colossal and frontal, and the Panch Mahal, trabeated, Indian, open and light. A law binds them: one stone, one red, one workshop vocabulary of bracket, eave and kiosk, which crowns even the great gate with kiosks. The palace courts keep a grid, and the material makes one surface of the whole ridge. But the law is of material and ornament more than of structure. The mosque and the palace sit at different orientations and are joined by adjacency; the gate dwarfs the mosque it serves; the saint’s tomb, white marble in a red court, follows a different law and knows it. The range is wide and the eclecticism is the point, which is a credit; the evident seams are a charge, and the axis stands second lowest on the page.
Diogo de Boitaca and João de Castilho · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the most distant elements: Castilho’s south portal and Ruão’s main chapel, or the sixteenth-century cloister and the nineteenth-century wing. The Manueline vocabulary of sphere, cross, cable and vegetal ornament governs church and cloister as one law, and the gold lioz binds everything in material. But the main chapel obeys another physics: classical, bare, coffered, a deliberate correction. The upper cloister drifts toward the Renaissance. The neo-Manueline wing imitates the law rather than obeying it, and the long front reads as two centuries stitched together. The range is wide and the law holds across most of it, but at its points of greatest distance it is broken, not stretched.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the most distant elements: the Doric hall, grave and classical, and the fairy-tale lodges with their mushroom roofs; or the rough grey viaducts and the bright glazed bench. Do they obey one law? In part. One principle runs through the structure, follow the load and follow the ground, and the trencadís binds the core in one surface, so that the bench, the stair and the medallions answer one another. But the classical hall and the lodges speak different languages, and the outer park is looser than the monumental zone. The whole reads more as a sequence of brilliant episodes under one temperament than as one physics: coherence over a wide range, not perfect.
The Who · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
One law can be named: the search for transcendence through music, met by the disenchantment of the crowd and the self. Take the most distant elements. Getting in Tune, a song about music as harmony with others, and Won’t Get Fooled Again, a song about the crowd betrayed, obey the law as its two poles; Behind Blue Eyes and Bargain obey it as its inward side. The range is real: piano ballad, acoustic song, synthesiser-driven hard rock, a country-tinged road song. But the law loosens. My Wife obeys only its own comic world, Going Mobile the pleasure of the road outside the search, Love Ain’t for Keeping a love song outside the frame. Three of nine tracks stand outside the law, and the frame that would have joined them all is not on the record.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the beach, where the law is chance and no one is singled out, and the frame and the Washington scenes, where the law is providence, a general reading Lincoln and the camera finding a flag. The film claims one physics covers both, that the one man saved redeems the chance in which the others died, and at Ramelle, where chance kills Miller and spares Ryan, the two laws are briefly joined. Elsewhere they sit apart: the old man’s tears and the flag belong to a different film from the one in which a soldier is shot in the helmet after thanking it for saving him. The range is wide, from the banter of the road to atrocity, and the middle holds it in one tone. Above the floor; the frame is the visible seam.
Pierre Peysson and Jean de Louvres, under Benedict XII and Clement VI · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the plain Cistercian wings of Benedict XII, and the chapel and painted chamber of Clement VI. One law reaches both: the fortress shell, the stone, the machicolated arcade carried round much of the exterior. Inside, two laws hold, an austere monastic one and a courtly magnificent one, and the plan shows the join where they meet at the Cour d’honneur. The range covered is wide, which counts in the building’s favour. What holds the score: the towers obey a defensive logic, not a compositional one, the whole is agglomerated, and the coherence across the range is that of one material and one defence rather than one design.
Wilkie Collins · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Fairlie’s comedy of nerves and the asylum; or Fosco’s opera-buffa geniality and the burning vestry in which Percival dies. One law governs them: a world in which papers rule persons, and only patient, documented testimony can restore a person to herself. The tone holds from the ghostly road to the courtroom manner of the close. Charged: the law strains in the Third Epoch. The Brotherhood that Pesca serves, which conveniently brings Fosco to account, and Hartright’s hardening offstage in the jungles of Central America come from outside the book’s physics, and Percival’s death by his own fire is neat where the rest is earned. Coherent, with visible joins.
Mike Nichols · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the hotel farce of the first assignation, a fumbled room key and a toothbrush, and the church, where Mrs. Robinson screams and a cross is swung. One law governs both: the young man moves through a world of adults that is closed to him, and every gesture he makes against it, timid or wild, is absurd and desperate at once. The bus confirms the law by returning the triumph to stillness. The range is wide, from deadpan satire to near tragedy. The strain is in the second half: the romance with Elaine belongs to a gentler film, and Mr. Robinson’s rage and the arranged marriage to melodrama. The tones meet at the church as much by collision as by law.
Ray Charles · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs the record: the country song carried by one voice into the city, with loss sung as blues. Take the two most distant elements, Hey, Good Lookin’, a swinging big-band flirtation, and Born to Lose, a slow lament over strings and chorus. They obey the same law at the level of the voice, which brings the same grain and the same blues inflection to both, and at the level of the premise, since both are country songs moved into urban settings. At the level of the arrangement they belong to two manners, held side by side rather than under one physics, and the record alternates them rather than fusing them. The range of mood runs from comic to grieving; the range of form is narrow. No break; the seam between the manners shows.
Rudolf Steiner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the west portal and the east stage block. Do they obey one law? Largely, yes: the same faceted, flowing skin, the same refusal of the right angle, the same slate roof falling over the whole. The law is metamorphosis, and the boiler house below, with its flame-like chimney, shows how far it was meant to reach. But it is applied with uneven force: strong at the west, diluted along the flanks, nearly reduced to cladding at the east; and inside the hall the later campaigns set a more decorative, painted and coloured regime against the grey sculpted exterior and the stair halls. One physics governs, and its intensity falls away from the face.
Judy Chicago · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs nearly everything. Each woman is honoured by a place, a runner in her era’s technique, a plate of the central form inflected by her life, and a share of the floor; the order is chronological; equality is guaranteed by the triangle. The two most distant guests, the Primordial Goddess and O’Keeffe, obey it, across a range from prehistory to the 1930s and from myth to modern painting, which is a real achievement of coherence. The law breaks once, and the break matters: the Sojourner Truth plate alone abandons the central form for faces, so that the one Black woman at the table is the one guest denied the work’s own sign, an exception the work does not account for. Lesser strains: mythic and historical guests seated on one footing, the floor’s selection less evidently ruled than the table’s. Coherent across a wide range, broken once at its most consequential point.
Frederick William Stevens · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Venetian Gothic arcades of the wings and the Indian beasts and foliage in the carving, or the pointed gables and the Renaissance dome. Do they obey one law? Largely, yes. Symmetry, polychromy and one consistent scale of carved detail bind them, and the eye reads one building. The range covered is wide, which counts in the building’s favour. But the law is one of accumulation as much as of order: the dome is grafted onto a Gothic body more than grown from it, the binding is decorative rather than structural, and the sheds behind obey a different, purely functional law. One building to the eye, held by its dress more than by its frame.
Sidney Lumet · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Louise Schumacher in her living room, told by her husband that he is leaving her, and the Mao Tse-tung Hour’s negotiation over distribution fees, with a communist revolutionary arguing for her cut. One law governs most of the film: everything becomes programming. It reaches into the bedroom when Diana talks ratings during sex, and Beale’s madness, Jensen’s theology and the boardroom murder obey it; the narrator applies it to the film itself. The range is wide, from domestic grief to farce to murder. The strain is the Schumacher thread. Max and Louise belong to an older realist drama, in which a man’s love can be weighed against the network’s law, and the film is not sure whether he escapes that law or merely leaves.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs, broadly: men live by the stories they tell themselves, the war is the place where those stories are tested and fail, and what survives the failure is damnation or grace, and the book will not say which a man will get. Take the two most distant elements: the Colonel’s operation, a high game of deception run from villas and safe houses, and Bill Houston drifting through bars and ships at the bottom of the same world. Both are lives run on a fiction that collapses, and Kathy’s faith is the same law seen from its other side. Charged: the strands keep their own physics more than they share one, the spy plot running on suspense and withholding and the Houston strand on picaresque drift, and the coda joins them by survival more than by consequence.
Ray Bradbury · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs the book: fire, and the mind’s relation to what it keeps. The two most distant elements, the satire of Mildred’s parlour walls and the pastoral of the book-people by the railway tracks, obey it. One is a culture that has burned its memory to stay comfortable; the other is a remnant that keeps memory in bodies, by a fire that warms. Beatty’s lecture and Granger’s phoenix are two readings of one element. What holds the axis is that the realism of the world is not steady. The war comes from nowhere the book has built; Clarisse’s family, the only household that talks, is introduced and then simply removed; and the register moves at times between satire and lyric without warrant. The range the law covers is moderate, not wide, so its coherence earns little on breadth.
Robert Capa · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the vast empty sky and the small weight of cartridge leather at the man’s waist. They obey one law, which is the instant of falling: the sky is what he falls out of, the leather is the life he was carrying and is dropping with the rifle. The diagonal of the body against the diagonal of the hill, the blur in the limbs against the stillness of the ground, the light shirt against the darker slope: every element serves the arrest of one motion, and nothing in the frame breaks the law. Held below 8.0 because narrowness is not coherence: one figure, one ground, one sky, and a frame made in a fraction of a second does not cover the distance a cycle, a building or a crowded painting must hold under one physics.
Built for Vimal Shah and Vastupala and Tejapala · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Vimal Vasahi of 1031 and the Mahavir Swami temple of 1582, or, within one temple, the bare outer wall and the pendant of the dome. The great pair obey one law, the order of sanctum, halls and ring of cells cut in white marble, the plain shell giving way to a dense interior, and the law holds across two centuries and two donor families. The plain wall and the lace of the dome are one physics: concealment as the condition of the inner wealth. It bends in the later three. Khartar Vasahi carries its figures outside in grey stone, reversing the law of shell and interior; Pittalhar is left incomplete; the paintings of the last temple are another medium. Coherent at the core: a precinct grown, not one design.
Jules Verne · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs: the marvellous made rational, every wonder explained by a cause, every station logged. Take the two most distant elements: Conseil’s comic taxonomy and the ramming of the warship, with Nemo after it weeping before the portrait of a woman and children, “Dieu tout-puissant! assez! assez!”
“Almighty God! enough! enough!”, among the last words Aronnax hears from him. They obey the same law: the order of the Nautilus is the order of a man who has turned from the world, and the darkening across Part Two is prepared from the first, in the coral cemetery, the gold for Crete and the refusal to let the prisoners go. The Maelstrom, an escape by catastrophe, is the one point where cause is suspended, and the book lets it stand as mystery. The range of tone is wide and the law holds; the range of kind, one setting and one method, is narrower than the higher marks require.
Joseph Maria Olbrich · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the gilt laurel dome, organic, open and shimmering, and the closed white cube with its flat walls and right angles. One law governs both: elementary masses, square, cube and sphere, carrying growth set on them as a flat skin. The dome is a sphere made of leaves, the pylons are slabs up which the laurel trees climb, the masks are set in square fields, and the law reaches the lettering and the door. Its range is modest, the law of one front. What bends it is the hall: plainer, governed by light and use rather than emblem, joined to the front at a line, so that the building obeys two laws in sequence. Narrowness is not coherence, and a small building with a strong front is held here.
Wang Shu (Amateur Architecture Studio) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: a Qing roof tile in a wapan course and a panel of new concrete printed with bamboo. They obey one law. Both are surfaces that keep the trace of their making, the hand and the grain, against the smooth new city outside; and base and broken ridge obey a single landscape logic, ground and mountain. The law holds across a wide range of material and period, which is to its credit. What bends it: the law is strongest on the outside, and the galleries do not carry it through; and the relation between the abstract modern figure and the vernacular skin, though worked, is a juxtaposition as much as a fusion. One physics rules the envelope, a looser one within.
Park Chan-wook · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Dae-su drunk in a police station on the first night, a clown in angel’s wings bought for his daughter’s present, and Dae-su in the penthouse cutting out his tongue. One law runs through both. The man who talks too much, careless with words and with others, is the man whose words were the crime, and the punishment comes for the tongue. The comic and the tragic are one physics of speech and imprisonment, and the range is wide for a genre film, from slapstick to incest. The strain is in the joins: the gangland comedy and the hypnosis are governed by plot convenience rather than by the law the rest obeys, and the shifts of tone are sometimes a manner more than a necessity. The coda in snow, ambiguous by design, holds to the law of the whole.
Jordan Peele · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Rod at the police station, telling three officers that white people are taking Black people for sex slaves while they laugh, and Chris in the Sunken Place. One law governs both: a Black man who sees what is being done is not believed, and the one who watches is the one who is powerless. The comedy obeys the same law as the horror; the laughter at the station is the auction’s silence in another key. The range is wide, from comedy of manners to body horror, and the law holds across most of it. The strain is in the last act: the Coagula video’s mad science belongs to a pulpier physics than the satirical realism of the party, and the household’s deaths, one by one, follow the rules of the slasher film rather than the film’s own law of watching.
Joe Rosenthal · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
One physics governs the frame: strain along one axis against weight and wind. The men’s thrust, the pole’s rise, the flag’s pull in the wind and even the slope of the broken ground obey it, and the most distant elements, the trailing hand at the left and the flag’s ragged edge at the top, are joined by the same diagonal. The coherence is complete. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range covered is narrow: one act, one light, one tone, one direction of force. There are no distant elements in tone or meaning to reconcile, no death beside the triumph and no second register. The law is total over a small territory, where Broadway Boogie Woogie, at 8.9 on this axis, lays one law over a wide field.
Billie Holiday · Music
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs the whole: a voice that has lived the song, set against a setting that dreams it. Take the two most distant elements, the bare confession of “I’m a Fool to Want You” and the quicker close of “The End of a Love Affair”: they obey the same law without strain, and so does every track between. There is no break and no seam. But the range governed is narrow: one band of tempo, one mood, one subject, one arranger’s palette across twelve tracks. Narrowness is not coherence. Kind of Blue, at 8.9, keeps one law across five forms, and Low, at 8.6, across funk and liturgy; this record keeps its law across very little distance.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the square tower of four storeys against the rock roof, and a kiva sunk below its court. One law governs both. Each is built of the alcove’s own sandstone, laid the same way, and each stands at the height the section gives it, the tower up to the overhang, the kiva down into the fill. The village is one material and one logic of stepping, from sunk chamber to ledge storeroom, and stone, plaster and alcove are of one colour. The coherence is real. What holds the axis is range, since the elements are few and narrowness is not coherence, and the seams of an accreted plan, where blocks of different dates meet without one order.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs the book: the world is legible to trained attention, and whatever is hidden, a tunnel under a pawnshop, a beggar’s face, a goose’s crop, yields to it. Take the two most distant elements, the comedy of “The Red-Headed League” and “The Noble Bachelor” and the dread of “The Speckled Band” and “The Engineer’s Thumb”. They obey the same law, and Watson’s voice holds them in one register. The moral law is also one: Holmes acts as a private court, and the law of the land is beside the point in eleven endings of twelve. Held because the law is narrow, a genre’s range, and narrowness is not coherence; and because the book’s own law is broken in places, where Holmes guesses while claiming to deduce and the physics fails where the plot needs a snake.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
7.9 · Tier III
One physics governs most of the record: beauty always under pressure from noise, the piano or the acoustic line the fragile thing the treated guitars threaten. Take the two most distant elements, the solo piano and French speech of La Mer and the assault at the close of Somewhat Damaged: both obey it, the same frailty once exposed and once overwhelmed. The range is wide, from near silence to saturation and from ambient instrumental to industrial song, and the law holds across it. It breaks in places. Starfuckers, Inc. is a sneering satire of celebrity, contempt aimed outward in a record otherwise inward, and Into the Void and Where Is Everybody? lean toward a funk and groove that the law tolerates rather than requires.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the husbands and sisters settling the estate in business tones after the funeral, cold and nearly comic in their manners, and the dead Agnes calling out in the night. One law governs both: the living are measured by whether they will touch the suffering, and every scene applies the test. The talk of money and Anna’s dismissal obey it as fully as the return; Karin’s glass and Maria’s mirror obey it; the swing, the one moment the law is suspended, is given only in the dead woman’s memory, so that the exception confirms the rule. The range runs from manners to horror and the supernatural. What holds it here is the strain at two points: the return, which a film otherwise realist absorbs only through the uncertain frame of a dream, and Joakim’s stabbing, louder in register than all around it.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take two distant elements: Tomato, the plainest of the line, and any other of the thirty-one. They obey one law: one product, one format, one viewpoint, with difference allowed only in the name. Every canvas is that law, and where a label carries more words than a name, they are the company’s variation and not the painter’s, so they confirm it. The law holds even through the making, the hand bent to the look of the machine. What holds the axis is that narrowness is not coherence: the range between the farthest elements is a word or two, the territory is one object repeated, and the law, once grasped, governs a field that does not widen as one looks.
Helen Frankenthaler · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: a charcoal line drawn as a contour near the top of the cluster, and a wide pool of thinned blue soaked into the bare canvas. Do they obey one law? In part. The colour and the bare ground obey one law throughout: the stain, transparent, with no edge harder than the weave allows, the light given by the canvas itself. The charcoal answers another, older law: the drawn line of a landscape sketch, an outline that names a form. The two are kept in tension deliberately, and the canvas holds together, but its law is not single; the drawing is the residue of the method it overturns. The range is narrow besides, one kind of mark, one register of colour, one density, and narrowness is not coherence.
Apollodorus of Damascus (attributed) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the hemicycle’s formal curve, symmetrical and faced to the forum, and the irregular upper blocks with the Great Hall set at its own angle on the hill. Do they obey one law? In material and structure, yes: brick-faced concrete, the arch, the vault, the taberna module and the street, from bottom to top. In composition, no: the lower half obeys the forum’s geometry and the upper half obeys the slope and the city’s plots. The law that does govern the whole is the hill’s: every part steps with the ground, and that unifies more than it first seems. A wide range, from monumental curve to working street, held by a common system rather than by one composition.
Duke Ellington · Music
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs the music: the blues and the swing riff, with a soloist set against a composed orchestra that answers and drives him. The two most distant elements obey it. “Jeep’s Blues” is slow, singing and intimate; the interval is fast, repetitive and public; both are blues with one voice over a band, and the three parts of the suite keep the same law. The range is narrow: nearly everything is blues-based, and the tempos sit at the medium and the fast, with one slow track. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure is held there. The second cost is the mixture of studio and festival under one surface: the record’s frame says one thing and part of its matter another.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
7.8 · Tier III
One physics governs most of the film, literally: momentum, orbit, tethers, the inability to stop. Take the two most distant elements, the opening’s long weightless drift and the crushing weight of the shore: one law governs both, and they answer each other, as the film moves from no weight to the full weight of the body. The tones hold too: dread and the scale of the Earth are one register, and the vision of Kowalski is placed as lawful, the sight of a woman starved of oxygen near death. The law breaks twice. Kowalski’s release asks for a force the film’s physics, kept with care elsewhere, does not supply, so the law is given up to sentiment at the turn that most needs it; and Kowalski’s cheerful talk runs on a buddy film’s conventions, a second register the film then drops.
Nas · Music
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs the record: one voice, level and watchful, over a short loop of jazz or soul at a walking tempo, saying what the place is. The two most distant elements obey it. The Genesis is a collage of a train, film dialogue and an old verse; It Ain’t Hard to Tell is a boast over a pop record. The first establishes the place and the voice’s origin in it; the last shows the voice’s power, earned by the nine tracks before. One Love, the most intimate track, and Represent, the most aggressive, are the same observer facing two ways, and five producers do not break the law. What holds the figure below the eight: the palette is narrow, one voice, one tempo band, one kind of loop, and narrowness is not coherence. The law holds because so little is asked to obey it, and the feeling runs from dread to pride with little outside it.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs most of the record: fear sold from above, and the self’s choice between flight and submission, heard through water, screens and church. Take the two most distant elements, the hushed, nearly spoken title track and the exultant coda of No Cars Go. They obey the law: one is the neon scripture, the other the escape it provokes, and My Body Is a Cage binds them by showing that the escape cannot be made from the body. Chassagne’s lead on Black Wave fits as the same dread from another angle. The law loosens where Keep the Car Running, an anthem of flight cheerful in sound, sits early against a sequence that later treats flight darkly, and where No Cars Go, a song of 2003, brings an innocence the rest of the record has given up. The range is moderate, the palette largely dark.
Andrew Haigh · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: a family singing round a Christmas tree in a lit suburban room, and a body found in an empty flat in a tower. One law governs both: the dead are present as long as they are loved, and love offered to the dead is real and cannot hold them. The parents and Harry obey it alike, and the tower’s emptiness, the train journeys and the songs belong to it. The range is wide for a chamber film, from domestic comedy to a horror image to a cosmic close, and the law holds across it. What holds the axis: the rules of the parents’ world are never set, when they appear and what ends them, which the film defends as grief’s logic but which leaves the law loose; and the Harry revelation, though seeded, can be felt as a turn of plot laid over a film that had obeyed feeling, a strain on the law rather than a breach.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.8 · Tier III
One physics governs most of the film: nature indifferent and absolute, bodies breakable and stubborn, and every human party, trapper, French, Arikara and Pawnee, under the same law of need. Take the two most distant elements, the opening battle in the shallows and the last look into the lens, and they obey it: violence seen up close, then a man left alone with his breath. The range is wide, from the documentary density of the crawl to the dream of the church, and the law holds across most of it. What strains it: the visions lay floating figures and symbolic architecture over the naturalism rather than growing from it; Fitzgerald is drawn more as a thriller’s villain than as a man under Glass’s law; and the ending, which renounces revenge and then has it delivered, leaves the moral law ambiguous.
Martin Scorsese · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Rothstein’s order that every muffin hold the same number of blueberries, and Santoro beaten with bats and buried in a cornfield. One law governs both: control against appetite, inside a system that rewards control until appetite breaks it. The muffins are control at its most comic; the cornfield is the bosses’ control applied to a man whose appetite has become a cost. The count room, the eye in the sky, the licensing hearing, Ginger’s hustle and the bosses’ back room obey the same physics: everyone watches everyone, everyone skims, and the house is a fiction of order over greed. The range runs from the comedy of Kansas City grievances to murder and overdose. It strains in three places: Lester Diamond is broader than the law needs, Ginger’s last stretch tips toward melodrama in a film otherwise cold, and the coda’s corporate satire is stated more than enacted.
The White Stripes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
One law governs the record: plainness against complication, the child’s honesty against the adult’s performance, played in the fewest possible means. Take the two most distant elements: Fell in Love with a Girl, under two minutes of distortion and shouting, and We’re Going to Be Friends, a near-whispered acoustic song about school. They obey the same law; both are a feeling given at once, without ornament, one at full volume and one at none. Hotel Yorba’s country stomp, The Union Forever’s borrowed film words and This Protector’s parlour piano also fit, each an older or simpler form held up against the present. What holds the figure: the range is the range of one band’s moods, and narrowness is not coherence; Aluminum and I Think I Smell a Rat obey the sound but not the meaning, and the persona’s irony sits a little outside the record’s sincerity.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: a client grinning for Maurice’s camera, played for comedy, and Cynthia’s cry at the barbecue table. One law governs both: the face a person shows is arranged for others, and the truth beneath it costs to bring out. The studio is the law at rest, the barbecue the law broken open; Monica’s spotless house, Roxanne’s sullen silence and the calm of Hortense, who looks into strangers’ eyes for a living, obey it. The range is wide for a domestic film, from farce to grief. What holds the figure: Stuart’s visit obeys a darker law the film touches and drops, some caricature belongs to a broader comedy, and the garden resolves the law gently.
Robert Altman · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the rescue in Habeas Corpus, Bruce Willis bursting in to save Julia Roberts from the gas chamber, a broad parody of the happy ending; and the killing in the Pasadena lot, a man drowned in a puddle. One law governs both: every event in this world is material for a story, and the story will be given the ending the market wants. The killing becomes a pitch; the execution becomes a rescue; the lunch, the lineup, the benefit and the hot tub obey the same law of conversion, across a range from farce to murder. What holds it: the detectives’ comedy belongs to a broader film, and the romance with June runs on a seriousness the satire does not otherwise permit and does not fully absorb.
Ai Weiwei · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the single seed, a thing for the hand, sculpted and painted by one person, and the field of a hundred million, which reads from the bridge as gravel or ash. They obey one law: the one inside the many, the individual as the unit of a mass that hides it. Material, number, colour, the snack and the political image each make the same move. The afterlife obeys the law too, against the work’s grain: sold by weight, the individuals are a mass again, which is the condition the work disclosed. Held below 8 because the range, though real, from the hand to the hall and from a snack to a state, is governed by one idea that, once seen, covers a small territory; and the visitor’s body on the field was briefly part of the law, then outside it.
Marina Abramović · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the private exchange of a gaze, and the public machinery of the queue, the lights, the cameras and the stream. They obey one law, that everything is looked at: the sitter looks at her, the crowd looks at both, the camera looks at all three, and the photograph returns each face to the world. Even the work’s tensions follow that law. Held below 8 by two breaks: the touch on the first night, where the protocol of stillness gave way, moving and still a break; and the change of set during the run. Narrowness is not coherence, and the range here, from one face to a museum’s public, is real but not wide.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.7 · Tier III
One physics governs the whole, and the film never breaks it. The curse is unexplained and never investigated by the camera; every symptom keeps its announced order; the hospital and the house speak in the same flat register; the sacred music governs the cut from the first shot to the last. Take the two most distant elements, the black comedy of the headmaster’s ranking and the horror of a child bleeding from the eyes: they obey one law, that feeling is never allowed into speech. What holds the figure is range: one register held from start to end, and narrowness is not coherence. One strain: Martin’s mother’s scene and the anaesthetist’s bargain step toward broad comedy, and the film absorbs them rather than requiring them.
Tame Impala · Music
7.7 · Tier III
One law governs most of the record: a single voice set back inside a bright, saturated sound, the world heard from within. Take the two most distant elements: Elephant, a glam-blues stomp with the voice brought forward and a crowd-pleaser’s swagger, and Sun’s Coming Up, a piano song that dissolves into a long, distant coda. Both obey the law in sound, keeping the voice in the same haze and pressing the drums, but Elephant strains it in spirit: its confidence contradicts the self the record otherwise draws. Range is moderate, from motorik push to piano ballad, and the palette is largely one palette. Narrowness is not coherence, and some of this coherence is one producer’s habit. The law holds, with one strain.
The Walkmen · Music
7.7 · Tier III
One law governs the whole: a song heard from a distance, through echo and air, with a voice straining against it. Take the two most distant elements, “Angela Surf City”, fast and driven, and “While I Shovel the Snow”, hushed and nearly still. They obey the same law, since both are set in the same open room and both put the voice at the edge of its reach. “Stranded”, the record’s largest departure in colour, belongs to the law rather than breaking it. Across eleven tracks there is no seam and no lapse of manner; the record is unusually consistent, and that is credited in full. But narrowness is not coherence: one tempo family, one production, one register of feeling. A law held without a break over a narrow ground.
Fleet Foxes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
One law governs the whole: voices in harmony in a large space, singing of an older country, the songs moving forward through sections rather than returning. Take the two most distant elements: the wordless “Heard Them Stirring”, voices as pure texture over a keyboard, and “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song”, one man and a guitar at a grave. They obey the same law: both are communal sound, one by massing and one by the solitary voice that the massed voices imply, and the close of “Oliver James” resolves the two into each other. Nothing breaks the law. What holds the axis is that the range is moderate and the palette largely one palette. Narrowness is not coherence: the record coheres partly by not going far.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
7.7 · Tier III
One law governs most of the record: sound that will not hold still, with the voice as one layer inside it. The two most distant elements, Is This and Yes, a voice over a held keyboard with no rhythm, and Wonder 2, a breakbeat inside a roaring wash, obey it: both keep the voice inside the sound and the tone in motion, one by drift and one by speed. The bright pop of New You strains it, sitting nearer the front and nearer an ordinary song. The range is moderate, the palette largely one palette, and narrowness is not coherence. The joins between the thirds show, though they do not break the law.
The Stooges · Music
7.7 · Tier III
One physics governs: repetition without development, and appetite meeting boredom. Take the two most distant elements, the three-minute riff song of I Wanna Be Your Dog and the ten-minute chant of We Will Fall. They obey the same law: each is a figure repeated until it becomes a state, one hot and one cold. Ann’s slow croon into noise obeys it, and so do the lesser songs, which is why they are weak rather than discordant. Nothing on the record contradicts it, and the tone holds from leering to funereal without breaking. What holds the figure is the range the law governs. Much of the coherence is narrowness: five songs on a few chords and one subject.
Paul Abadie · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Abadie’s domes of the 1870s and the campanile finished decades later under another hand, or the white exterior and the gilt mosaic of the apse made after the war. They obey one law: one Romano-Byzantine idiom, one stone, one dedication carried through every hand, so that a building made by several architects over four decades reads as one design. The whiteness binds outside and inside to one idea of penance and purity, and the Heart governs the apse and the name. Held below 8.0 because the law is narrow, one idiom in one register over a small range. Narrowness is not coherence, and where the composition agglomerates, the parts obey one style more than one necessity.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the Fool’s absurd rite under the earth, Willem Dafoe and Ethan Hawke howling as dogs and breaking wind, and the Valkyrie’s silent ride through a red sky. One law governs both: the world is as the people in it believe it to be, and the film never steps outside that belief to judge it. The same law holds raid, farm, barrow and volcano, from grotesque comedy to epic and horror. What holds the axis below 8.0 is the one strain: Gudrún’s reversal brings a judgment from outside the myth, and the climax returns to the myth’s terms without resolving the two, a seam that may be irony or a split.
Indus Valley (Mohenjo-daro) · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the heavy, ring-laden arm and the light, nearly bare arm set on the hip. One law holds them: everything in the figure serves an attitude of ease against weight. The laden arm hangs and gives the body its counterweight; the bare arm makes the angle that turns stillness into insouciance; the bent knee, the tilted head and the drawn-out limbs obey the same principle, a body balanced and at rest by its own choice. Nothing in the figure contradicts the law, and nothing stands outside it. Held below 8 because narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one small figure and one attitude, and the range between its farthest elements, though real and well judged, is small.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the wide office floor at the foot and the open steel lattice at the tip. They obey one law, the inclined plane of glass that thins as it rises and is left open where planes meet; it is legible from every side and every distance, and it governs use, structure and figure together, over a range that runs from the commuter’s floor to the sky. What holds the axis: the law breaks where the building meets the ground, where the planes give way to a podium and canopies that belong to the station and the street rather than the tower; and the interiors of the hotel and the homes obey the conventions of their trades more than the law of the planes.
Thomas Gainsborough · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the pale, finished face and the brown, scumbled bank at the lower left. One law governs them. Everything is made by the same quick, broken touch and set in the same light from the upper left, which falls on the face, slides across the satin and dies into the ground; the cool figure is set against a warm world by one consistent opposition of colour. The law holds. What narrows it is range: the picture holds one figure and its setting, and its farthest elements are not far apart in kind. The one tension is between the borrowed pose, more formal than the handling, and the free touch. Narrowness is not coherence.
Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza · Film
7.3 · Tier III
One law governs: nothing is shown that the men did not see or hear, and nothing is added that they did not remember. The two most distant elements obey it. The opening, men dancing and cheering at a music video, and the close, the street filled again by the fighters who outlasted the Americans, are both what the men saw, the one before the war arrived and the other as they left it. The credits’ pairing of actors with the real men is the law stated openly. Small breaches, the cuts to the aircraft’s view, which is not the men’s, are carried by the radio that joins them. What holds the figure is range: one house in one day, narrow by design, and narrowness is not coherence; the figure is earned by rigour, not by reach.
Thomas Malory · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Gareth’s comic tale of the kitchen knight mocked by Lynet, and Galahad’s passing at Sarras with the Grail. One law reaches both, the law of worship, in which a knight is what his deeds prove him, and the Grail books test that law by a higher one. The end joins the two measures in one life: Lancelot, best of the earthly knights and failed at the Grail, dies a hermit. But the law does not govern the whole. The Arthur who orders the May children set adrift to destroy Mordred and the Arthur of the last books are hard to make one man; the chronology of the Tristram books and the Roman war does not square with the rest; and the middle’s world of chance encounter obeys a looser rule than the end’s tight causation.
Khmer, under Jayavarman VII · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a woman in labour or a cockfight on the outer wall, and the Buddha in the round sanctuary at the summit. One law governs both: the kingdom ordered by level round its centre, the common life outside, myth within, the faces and the Buddha at the top. The range is wide, and in the idea the law holds. In the fabric it holds less firmly, and that keeps the figure at the foot of the page with The Inevitable. Galleries and chapels of different phases meet badly, the upper terrace is crowded past legibility, and the cardinal clarity of the earlier temple mountains is lost in the press. The later Hindu reliefs and recuttings of the inner gallery belong to the one work and obey another religion’s law. The coherence is of the idea more than of the building.
Gérard de Nerval · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the line of “Vers dorés”, “Un pur esprit s’accroît sous l’écorce des pierres!”, “A pure spirit grows beneath the bark of stones!”, and the soldier’s tale of honour and remorse at Bitche in “Émilie”. They do not obey one law. One physics governs “Sylvie”, “Octavie”, “Isis”, the dedication and the sonnets: the one woman under many names, and the dream that spills into life. “Angélique” connects by the Valois and by its chase after a lost past. “Jemmy”, “Émilie” and “Corilla” stand outside that physics and are bound to it only by the title’s conceit. The range is wide; the law does not hold across the whole.
Daniel Defoe · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One law nearly holds the whole: providence read through the accounting of events, sin punished and mercies tallied, the economic and the religious kept in one ledger. The two most distant elements obey it: the boy who runs from his father’s “middle station”, and the governor who leaves the island to his mutineers and Spaniards. The prodigal is punished, repents, prospers and is given dominion. But the law strains. The providential reading and the mercantile one sit side by side and are never weighed against each other: the speech to the coins and the coins taken, in one paragraph, are irony or contradiction, and Defoe gives no sign which. The sale of Xury after his loyalty sits under no law the conversion later states, and the wolves of the Pyrenees obey only the law of adventure.
Almohad builders; cathedral by Gothic masters · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the brick lattice of the Almohad shaft and the classical stages of the belfry; or the Gothic piers of the nave and the Plateresque dome of the Sacristía Mayor. In the tower one law governs: Hernán Ruiz took the shaft’s division into panels and carried it upward, so that the Almohad and the Renaissance obey one rhythm. Across the precinct the law is weaker, and that holds the axis lowest with The Inevitable: the church obeys the mosque’s rectangle, and its chapels and sacristies obey each their own period, Gothic, Plateresque, classical, Baroque, joined by adjacency and the liturgy. The work holds its range as a city holds its quarters, not as one form holds its parts.
Sienese builders; facade by Giovanni Pisano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the thirteenth-century banded nave and Bernini’s Chigi Chapel, or the dark-striped piers and Pinturicchio’s bright library. The banding is a strong common law, run through nave, crossing, choir and campanile, and it holds much. What holds the figure here is that the law breaks at several joins. The facade’s lower half, Giovanni’s sculptural theatre, and its upper half, a later and flatter Gothic under nineteenth-century mosaics, do not obey one design. The Baroque chapel and the Renaissance library are fine rooms in another physics. The floor’s programme, coherent in itself, is laid over a building whose own geometry does not organise it. The range is wide, and the law that holds it is chiefly the city’s marble.
Japanese, under Emperor Shōmu · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements on the axis: the Great South Gate and the front of the hall. The gate obeys one law throughout, Chōgen’s: exposed frame, inserted brackets, structure as expression. The hall’s front, behind it on the same axis, carries a cusped Edo gable and a doubled roof, a grammar of display set on a frame descended in part from the Daibutsuyō. Between them stand an eighth-century lantern and an Edo gate and corridor: a palimpsest of three campaigns, Nara, Kamakura and Edo, each sound in itself, and the range is not charged. The law they share is the axis and the image, for every part faces and serves the seated figure, and it keeps the whole well above the floor. What holds it lowest of the twelve is that the stylistic laws do not agree: gate and hall read as two buildings on one axis.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the service rooms of the Cento Camerelle and the island of the Maritime Theatre. Both obey Roman concrete and the brick-faced wall, and both answer the ground. Beyond that the law is variety itself: each group keeps its own axis and its own geometry, Greek names and Egyptian episodes stand beside Roman baths, and the parts meet at hinges rather than under one rule. That can be read as a law, the law of the turned axis, and a hidden order has been argued but not proved. But one physics is asked of the whole, and the whole is a collage, the word Rowe and Koetter chose for it. Within groups the law is strong; across the estate it is a manner of joining.
Aristophanes · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the slapstick of the door scenes and the grave contest of poetics. They do not plainly obey one law. Threads run between them: Dionysus’ cowardice and his growth into a judge; the theme of masters and slaves, from the slave under his load to the parabasis’ plea for the disfranchised; and the Eleusinian chorus, present in both halves, which frames the whole as an initiation. Charged: the frogs vanish after their scene; the quest for Euripides is quietly redirected; the lion skin and the Heracles disguise drop out of the second half; and an apparent doublet in the closing political questions shows a seam. The unity of the play is a long critical question because the play gives it reason. The law that governs it is the comic festival’s, wide enough to hold both halves, and loose.
Arnolfo di Cambio (attributed) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bare rusticated front of 1299 and the gilt stucco columns of the courtyard of 1565, or the rough tower and the ducal apartments. Do they obey one law? In part. The law of the building is the seat of power, and every campaign obeys it: fortress, council hall, court and town hall are each the government’s house. But the physics differs. The exterior speaks a hard Gothic of mass and defence, the Salone the language of the Renaissance, the courtyard and the ducal rooms the language of display, so that the passage from piazza to court is a change of law as much as of room. The contradiction can be read as history, the principate inside the commune’s shell; what holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the whole is accreted rather than governed by one rule.
Hans Puchsbaum and others · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Giant’s Door, Romanesque, round-arched, deep and squat, with its beasts; and the Baroque high altar, black marble, a painted martyrdom framed in a classical aedicule. They do not obey one law. Between them the Gothic law governs most of the work: the hall section, the vault nets, the gabled bays of the south flank, the tower’s upward drawing, one physics from choir to spire. The roof is the strongest unifier, putting the whole under one mass. But the north tower breaks off into a Renaissance cap, the nave altars are of several centuries and manners, and the west front is a kept older building with a newer one behind it. The range is wide, much of it held by accumulation rather than law: the figure clears the floor with room and stops short of the buildings that are one design.
Mon and Burmese builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the jewelled orb at the top of the finial and a twentieth-century image house on the platform, its Buddha framed in flashing lights. Do they obey one law? In one sense yes: both are offerings, the law of merit governs every part, and everything on the platform faces or circles the centre. That is a real and wide coherence of purpose. In the sense of form, no: the platform is an accretion of styles, scales and materials, set by donors over centuries with no governing hand, and its crowding works against the clarity of the stupa it serves. The range is wide, but what governs it is the economy of gift, not the design. The stupa alone would hold a stricter law than the pagoda with its terrace.
Anonymous · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bawdy banter of the porter and the three ladies at their supper, and the pious tales of ascetics in the middle volumes; or the Harun anecdotes, set in a Baghdad of named streets, and Bulqiya’s voyage across the cosmos past the serpent-queen. One law reaches most of it: everything that happens is written, and chance is decree; jinn and caliphs, magic and commerce obey the same providence, and the marvel is never set apart from the bazaar. The frame’s law, speech that buys time, governs the early cycles exactly. The range is the widest of any work of its centuries known to the desk. Charged: the compilation’s joints. The romance of Umar al-Nu’man is a war epic of another idiom; Tawaddud is an encyclopedia in dialogue; the frame is forgotten for hundreds of nights.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Coloquio’s witch, anointed and insensible in a courtyard, and La española inglesa’s London, where a Spanish girl taken in the sack of Cádiz is cherished as a Catholic at Queen Elizabeth’s court. The book claims one law for both: exemplarity, honest pleasure that shows the truth, set out in the prologue’s billiard table, and a providential order under which lovers are restored and the dogs may be. In the best pieces the law holds across a wide range, from the gypsies’ camp to the Toledo inn. But the idealist and realist pieces obey different physics: in the romances chance serves virtue; in Rinconete, Vidriera and the Coloquio the world is indifferent and the forms are empty. Pairings can be shown; the design is argued rather than felt.
Mughal court painters · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a flat, patterned Persian page of tilework and rocks laid as a carpet, and a late folio’s recessive street with solid, shaded figures in Indian dress. Do they obey one law? In part. The law that holds the cycle is the episode at its peak, shown to a gathering: everything on the sheet serves the moment of action and is made legible at a distance, and that law runs from the first folios to the last. But two pictorial physics coexist, sometimes on one sheet, the planar and the volumetric, and their meeting is often unresolved: a solid figure stands on a ground tilted up as pattern, a recessive building opens onto a flat sky of ornament. The range, domestic to demonic, is credited; the joins are charged.
Norwegian builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the north portal, beasts in the late animal style, and the crucifixion group and Romanesque capitals inside, with the later fittings beyond them. Do they obey one law? Partly. Timber governs all of it, and the law of the stave frame, post, sill, plank and plate, holds every wall, the reused planks included. But the carving answers to two laws: the open interlace of the north wall, abstract and asymmetrical, and the framed, symmetrical Romanesque of the capitals and the cross. The builders of about 1130 set the older law into their own and did not reconcile them, and the later refitting adds a third. The tension is part of what the church discloses, but under this axis it is a tension, not a law. Held at 7.8 by its seams, with room above the floor.
Mudéjar builders, under Peter of Castile, and later hands · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the lobed arches of the Doncellas and the Italian arcade and balustrade set on top of them; or the Almohad lattice of the Patio del Yeso and the Mannerist rustication of the grotto gallery. Within Pedro’s palace one law governs a wide range, from the court of arms to the private chamber: court and water, stucco above tile, the bent path from public to private. Across the complex a looser law still holds: every campaign builds round courts and gardens with water, and the neo-Mudéjar storeys and much of the Renaissance work defer to the Mudéjar ground. But the Doncellas, the heart of the work, shows two physics stacked, and the collision is at the centre, not at the edge. The law bends where it matters most.
Peter Behrens · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the long side, where the steel frame stands exposed and the glass leans between its members, and the gable end, where heavy-looking concrete corners seem to carry a pediment. Do they obey one law? Partly. The polygonal gable is the roof profile, so one geometry governs both fronts; the batter of the corners answers the lean of the glass; scale and rhythm are continuous. But the law of the long side is to show the structure, and the law of the gable is to show monumentality, whatever bears it, and at the corner where they meet the building visibly changes its rules. The range covered, engineering and temple, counts in its favour; the seam is the price, and it holds the axis at 7.8.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the sandstone corner towers of Wallot’s façade, heavy with ornament, and the glass helix of the dome. The rebuilding’s law is that the new is legibly new and the old legibly old, layered and never blended, and it governs the whole: stripped walls with their graffiti beside white and glass insertions, the dome set in the old dome’s place over the chamber, the courts opened as light wells. That is a law, and the range it covers is wide. What holds it among the lowest of the twelve: the law is one of contrast, so that from outside the building reads as two physics joined by a principle, the light cupola on a heavy pile it does not answer in proportion or weight; and the dome’s form came from a political demand, not from the law that governs the interior. Coherence is achieved in idea more than in figure.
Burnham and Root; south half by Holabird and Roche · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Within the north half one law governs everything: the wall is the building and its curvature is its ornament, and base, shaft, bays, corners and parapet all obey it. That is coherence over a narrow range: one material, one gesture, one colour. Across the whole work, the two most distant elements are the north half’s cavetto parapet and the south half’s projecting cornice, and they do not obey the same law: one is the wall finishing itself, the other a frame wearing a capital. The match of colour, height and bays keeps the block reading as one, and most people see one building; but the joint between the halves is a change of physics, visible to anyone looking, and the work as scored carries it. Scored on the north half alone, this axis and The Living Form would stand higher.
John Ruskin · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the comic portrait of the sherry merchant father in the first chapters and the near ecstatic fireflies of the last page. They obey one law, the voice of an old man recalling with love and selecting for joy, and the law holds through Oxford, the Alps and Turin. What holds the axis there is that the law is broken repeatedly: by the polemicist of Fors Clavigera breaking in, and by the third volume, written closest to collapse, which compresses years, scatters its attention and introduces Rose La Touche only to leave her. The chronology loosens and the tonal control loosens with it. This is where the book’s stop costs most, and the figure is charged for it.
Harriet Beecher Stowe · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One law is meant to govern, and mostly does: a providential Christianity under which every sale is a sin weighed somewhere, every death of a believer a victory and every master’s evasion a debt. Take the two most distant elements, Sam and Andy’s farce on the Kentucky road and the shed where Tom is beaten to death: they obey the same law, since the comedy too is about who controls a slave’s body and time. The law is strained in three places. The Liberian ending, where George Harris argues for an African nation, sits ill with a book whose law is that a slave’s home is where he was made free; the racial theory treats some persons as souls and others as natures; and the recognitions belong to a different physics, coincidence rather than providence.
Bram Stoker · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One law governs most of the book: the old world returns on the new through the blood, and is turned back by faith joined to method. Take the two most distant elements, Harker’s journal in the castle, an enclosed Gothic nightmare, and the solicitors’ letters and railway timetables of the hunt in London. They obey one physics: the Count himself works through the law of property and the railway, and the band defeats him with the Host and the timetable together. The supernatural rules, once set, are mostly kept: the invitation, the earth, the reflection, the hours of change. Charged: the rules are stated by Van Helsing as they are needed and are loose in places, since the Count walks Piccadilly by day; the tone slips from horror into Whitby comedy and sentimental rhetoric without always being held; and the range, though wide in place, is narrower in kind than the highest marks require.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the trolls of chapter 2, Bert, Tom and William, squabbling over how to cook a dwarf, and the siege of chapters 15 to 17, with Thorin’s refusal, Bilbo’s night walk with the Arkenstone and the death of a king. One law governs both: wit and small decency outlast force and greed, and luck is more than luck. The trolls are talked into the daylight, Gollum is beaten by a question, the spiders by taunts, Smaug by courtesy, and the siege by the giving away of a stone. The range is wide and the law holds. Held at 7.8: the register changes faster than the law, so that the comic trolls, the golf joke of chapter 1 and the singing elves of Rivendell belong to a nursery world the last chapters have left; and Gandalf’s absences serve the plot.
Tibetan, under Songtsen Gampo · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: a carved Newar door frame, among the oldest fabric, in a dark inner chapel, and a gilded Chinese roof of a later age above the roof terrace. They belong to different traditions and periods, and they obey one law: everything in the complex is ordered by the centre and the circuit, every addition laid round or over the Jowo’s chapel, none of it turning the building from its axis. One law, the circle round the image, governs the whole across thirteen centuries of hands, and that is an achievement of range. The charge is real: the complex is visibly an accumulation, its halls and storeys uneven in scale and style, its outer parts serving offices and storage as well as worship, and the law governs the plan more firmly than the fabric.
Bob Marley and the Wailers · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
One law governs the sound: the one-drop at a single unhurried tempo band, the Barretts underneath, the I Threes answering, the voice above. The two most distant elements are Guiltiness, judgement on the powerful, and Turn Your Lights Down Low, a bedroom song. Do they obey one law? In sound, entirely: no track is fast, and none is a ballad without the beat. In meaning, only through the theology the record assumes, love as Jah’s and rest as the end of the march. The record states that link once, in One Love, and leaves the listener to supply it across side two. The seam between the sides is visible. The range is moderate, narrow in tempo and texture and wide in subject, and coherence across it is achieved by sound more than by law.
Thomas Bohier and Catherine Briçonnet; gallery by Philibert de l'Orme and Jean Bullant · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Bohier’s block, with its turrets, steep roofs and Italian ornament on a late-Gothic frame, and the gallery, a longer, flatter, classicising front of regular bays. They obey different laws of style, half a century apart. What binds them is real: one material, white tufa under slate; one relation to water, both standing on piers in the river and read with their reflection; one axis across the Cher. From the bank the whole reads as one figure, the block as head and the gallery as body. Close to, the seam is plain, the gallery set against the block rather than grown from it, and the old keep on the forecourt adds a third law. The range is moderate, and the coherence is the site’s more than the design’s.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Who Loves the Sun, a sweet, bitter pop song in Doug Yule’s voice, and Oh! Sweet Nuthin’, a slow street hymn that ends in guitar. They obey one law: every song on the record is about ordinary people in ordinary trouble, set to the forms of the radio, and the record moves from a broken heart to a blessing of those with nothing. The range of idiom is wide (pop, rock, doo-wop, country pastiche, boogie, gospel), and the law reaches across most of it, so that narrowness is not how the record coheres. It loosens on the second side: Lonesome Cowboy Bill obeys only its genre and its joke, Head Held High and Train Round the Bend the radio form without its subject, and two lead voices divide the record’s first person.
Ragnar Östberg · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the bare dark brick of the Blue Hall and the blazing gold of the Golden Hall, a stair apart; or the Venetian arcade and the Nordic timber roof. Do they obey one law? Mostly they do. The law is handicraft and historical memory, and the brick skin carries the whole exterior as one body. But the law is eclectic by nature, and inside it binds by sequence and by craft rather than by a single governing idea; the Golden Hall’s Byzantine splendour stands as a different world from the court below it. The range is wide and largely held, and the figure says both.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Scott’s brick monument of 1963 and the twisted brick tower of 2016. Do they obey one law? In part. Both are of brick, both rise from the same grid of bays, and the extension’s lattice is an answer to Scott’s slit windows and fluted chimney. The conversion of 2000 has a law of its own, to keep the shell and add only light and passage, and that law governs the whole from the river side. What holds the axis: the extension breaks it, adding a new figure, sheared and turned, where the conversion added none; and the bridges across the hall, which join the two parts, cut the void the conversion kept empty. The building is coherent in its material and discordant in its rule of intervention.
Ustad Ahmad Lahori (attributed), under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the red wall at the Lahori Gate and the white marble basin of the Rang Mahal. One law governs both: the Shahjahani grammar of cusped arch, baluster column and bangla roof, in which red sandstone marks the public and the defensive and white marble the imperial and the private, so that the change of material is itself the rule. Aurangzeb’s Moti Masjid obeys it, refined. What bends it: the barbicans mask the gates they were built to guard; the Zafar Mahal in the garden tank is a later, plainer hand; and the British barracks are another physics entirely, set where the courts were, so that the whole now reads as a Mughal law interrupted by a colonial one. A wide range held by one law in the original fabric, broken in the work as it stands.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the dome on the west front and the nailery on Mulberry Row. One law does govern them, the law of the plantation made legible: the classical sphere set on the summit, the work set below and out of the line of sight, joined by passages that the front denies. The terraces carry that law from house to pavilions with real consistency, and the orders, room by room, keep one Roman grammar. What bends it: the house is not one figure but two campaigns joined, octagonal bays and a dome laid on a block that was once a different house; the devices obey a law of ingenuity, not of the orders; and the plantation buildings, of log and frame, belong to another architecture, kept apart rather than governed. The range is wide, and the law holds partly by concealment.
Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Weeping Gorilla panels and the science-hero banter of the first arc, and the crown of the Tree, where Sophie and Barbara pass into light. One law is meant to govern both: everything is story, stories are real, and a billboard gorilla and the divine stand on one continuum. The work states that law and sometimes earns it. The superhero apparatus and the treatise do not always obey it: villains, demons and federal agents drive a plot whose physics is the action comic’s, and the apocalypse is reached as much by the needs of the line’s ending as by the inner law. The range is very wide, which the axis rewards; the seams between the comic and the gnosis show, which it charges.
David Lynch · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the black, near-silent Madison house, where a husband and wife cannot speak, and the sunlit garage where Richard Pryor’s Arnie banters and Mr. Eddy lectures a tailgater at the roadside. One law governs both: a mind makes a world to escape its act, and every world it makes leaks the act back in. The saxophone on the radio, the photograph, Alice’s resemblance, the headache and the night Pete cannot remember obey it, and the comedy is the dreamer’s bravado, the same law in a lighter key. What holds the figure is strain. The police surveillance and the parents’ testimony treat the change as a public fact, which the law of the fugue does not quite govern, and some of the gangster grotesque runs on genre rules rather than the dream’s.
Pallava, under Narasimhavarman II · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs the idiom: the Pallava order of lion pilasters, pavilion friezes, storeyed vimanas and octagonal crowns holds from the tall east tower to the small west one and the rows of Nandi on the walls. Take the two most distant elements: the slender tower facing the sea and the flat-roofed Vishnu cell with its image cut from the bedrock. They belong to one sacred site, but they obey different laws of form, one built and vertical, the other carved and recumbent, and the plan sets them side by side on an axis rather than reconciling them. The reversal of approach, the greater shrine reached last and from behind, follows from the site, not from a law the building announces. Coherent in vocabulary; not unified in its making of space.
Nicholas Ray · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the planetarium lecture on the end of the earth, under a dome of indifferent stars, and the scene in the mansion where three children mock the manners of estate agents and parents. One law governs both: in a universe that does not care, and among adults who cannot stand, the young must make their own shelter, and the shelter is play that becomes earnest. The chickie run, a game that kills, obeys it, as does the close, where the adults arrive with floodlights at a place the children reached first. What holds the figure: the tone runs from teenage comedy through melodrama to tragedy and the joins are not always governed, and the decent juvenile officer stands outside the law, an adult the film’s argument says does not exist.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the boardroom talk of shoe designs in Gondo’s living room, and the addicts in the alley of the drug quarter. One law governs both: height and sight. Everyone stands above or below someone and watches upward or downward; the directors look down on the workman who rose, Takeuchi looks up at the house, the police look down from the hill for the smoke, and the addicts are the bottom of the order. The shoes are the law in miniature, made to be walked in by people below. The chauffeur’s shame and the press asked to keep silent obey it. The strain is in register, and it is wide: the film turns from a chamber play of conscience to a police film with a different centre and a lighter tone, the detectives’ banter and the team’s camaraderie belonging to a genre the first part does not, and Gondo’s absence for long stretches makes the halves feel joined more than grown.
Diébédo Francis Kéré · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs the whole: build from what is here, with the hands that are here, against the sun and the rain. Take the two most distant elements, the industrial steel roof and the hand-pressed earth wall. They obey it: the steel is the least material that had to be bought, used in the smallest sections so that the village could handle it too, and its task is to protect the earth. The same law sets the plan, with its outdoor rooms in shade; the ceiling, earth again, on bars; and the process. The coherence is complete. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range this law covers is narrow: one block, one section repeated, one programme, with no contrast of scale, no rooms of different kinds and no long sequence.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Take the most distant elements: the convict work song over the opening and the farce of the Klan rally, or the baptism in the river and the coffin floating up in the flood. One law governs them: a fable that treats the sacred, the political and the criminal in one comic register, where grace is real and also a joke, and song is the medium of every turn. The register holds from the first frame to the coda without breaking into straight drama or straight parody, across an attempted lynching, a conversion, a jailbreak, a campaign and a family quarrel, a wide range. What holds the figure is that the law is a manner more than a vision: the film keeps its coherence by letting no element weigh too much, and the rally’s terror is dissolved by the same law that permits it.
Aphex Twin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs most of the record: a few looped figures over a soft pulse in a warm, worn haze, music heard from a little distance. Take the two most distant elements, Tha’s slow, dark, nine-minute murmur and Green Calx’s harsh, sampled, comic acid track. Green Calx strains the law: it shares the means and the hiss, not the mood, and a listener hears it as an intrusion, perhaps a welcome one. Pulsewidth’s bright bounce and the brief stillness of i sit within the law. The range is moderate: tempo, density and brightness vary, but the harmonic and timbral world is narrow, and narrowness is not coherence. Coherent across a narrow span, with one track that obeys only the technical law.
Rem Koolhaas (OMA) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the bare white facet on the Rotunda and the blue and white tiled room within, or the gilded hall. Do they obey one law? In part. The governing law is clear and strong: one solid, carved, every space a cut through the mass and every opening a view through it, the hall the main cut and the rest subordinate. Structure, plan and approach obey it. What bends it is a second law in the interiors, deliberate collage, each room finished in its own material and register, tiles, aluminium, gold grain and chequer, a law of juxtaposition rather than unity; and the outline itself obeys the logic of a house transplanted, not the logic of the cut. Two laws, one of mass and one of collage, joined by wit.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Kallmorgen’s brick wall at the waterline, orthogonal, heavy, punched with small openings, and the lining of the Grand Hall, pale, cellular, grown rather than built. They obey one law only as a law of contrast: heavy below and light above, found below and made above, an earth under a crystal with a cave at the crystal’s heart. That law is held consistently. The Plaza’s curved soffits begin the transition; the glass’s cut mouths and bellies answer the hall’s terraces and the roof’s waves; the escalator’s curve and the hall’s crater share a language of the hollowed and the rounded. What bends it: the warehouse is a found object governed by its own builder’s law, kept as a mask over a new interior; the hotel and the flats live in the glass under a third, ordinary law; and the joint between the halves is a style of juxtaposition more than one physics.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs the record: the public lie and the private fear, told as a fairy tale for a frightened child. The two most distant elements obey it. Myxomatosis, all fuzz and pressure, and Sail to the Moon, a piano lullaby, are the oppressor’s judgement and the parent’s reply; Go to Sleep’s folk figure and The Gloaming’s electronic murk are the same drowsiness, once dressed and once undressed. The range is wide, from rock and ballad to a spoken rant over a waltz, and the law reaches across it. What holds the figure is how it governs: by frame more than by sound, so that the guitar songs and the electronic songs are joined by their titles rather than fused.
David Lynch · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the prologue, elephants trampling a woman in slow motion through smoke, and tea in the Treves drawing room, where Merrick shows a photograph of his mother and Anne Treves weeps. One law covers both: to be seen, as a monster or as a gentleman, and the longing to be seen as the mother saw. The fairground, the lecture, the porter’s mirror, the theatre box and the stars obey it, and the industrial sound joins the dream register to the realist one. The strain is in temperature, and it is not small. The villains are cruder than the law requires, the rescue by the performers on the Continent is closer to fable than the hospital scenes allow, and the close’s consolation is warmer than the film’s own account of the gaze.
Frank Darabont · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Bogs and the sisters beating Andy in the projection room, and Red walking along white sand toward a man scraping a boat. One law governs both, endurance rewarded: the beatings are what hope must survive, and the beach is what it earns. The law holds across a wide range: the roof, the library, the opera, Brooks’s death and Tommy’s murder each test it. It bends at the end. Norton’s fall runs on a tidiness the rest of the film does not grant, the ledger, the suit, the shoes, the newspaper, the suicide, Hadley led away weeping, and a world that has shown institutions cannot be beaten closes as a fable in which they are. It is a bending, not a contradiction: the tale is told by a narrator who hopes.
John Barth · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the goat barn of the opening and the inside of WESCAC at the climax, or the farce of Taliped Decanus and the disenchanted prophecy of the Posttape. One law governs them: the world is a university, knowledge is salvation, every distinction is required and none is final. The goat who must learn he is a man, and the man who must learn he is also a goat, obey the same physics as the two campuses that can live neither together nor apart. The campus vocabulary is held consistent from slapstick to theology, which is the law’s strongest proof. Charged on two counts: the one-to-one allegory slips, some figures standing now for a nation, now for a doctrine, now for a person, as the satire needs; and the bawdy farce sometimes works against the mystic claims of the climax rather than with them.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs the record: the self seeking another person through a surface that only reflects, at the party and then in the underworld. Take the two most distant elements, the carnival frenzy of Here Comes the Night Time and the ambient drift that closes Supersymmetry. They obey it: crowd and solitude are the two sides of the mirror, and the end dissolves the party into reflection. Porno and Afterlife obey it closely, and the two discs answer each other as surface and depth. The range is wide, garage rock, disco, rara, synth ballad and ambient, and the law reaches across most of it. What holds it: the law loosens in the middle of the first disc, where Normal Person and You Already Know obey only their genres, Joan of Arc stands somewhat apart, and the turn between discs sometimes reads as a change of mood.
Chuck Palahniuk · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
One law governs most of the book: identity is “a copy of a copy of a copy”, every self is borrowed, and destruction is offered as the only original act. Take the two most distant elements, the narrator at the group for testicular cancer in the first chapters and the hospital at the close: the borrowed illness of the first and the borrowed heaven of the last obey the same law, and the staff who whisper that they look forward to his return close the loop. The twist, once known, governs backward: Marla’s anger, the telephone calls, the bruises all fit. Charged: the logistics of the double strain, since a man who sleeps while running a national network of cells is believed by the book’s speed rather than its law, and the book is unsure whether its world is realist or fable. The range, comedy and menace, is narrow.
Bonanno Pisano (attributed) and Giovanni di Simone; Tommaso Pisano · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements, the blind ground storey of the first campaign and the bell chamber of the third, two centuries apart. Three campaigns and at least three masters kept one scheme: the second continued the galleries as the first had begun them, and the drum reads as one figure from base to top. That fidelity is a real achievement of law. Two strains on it. The bell chamber, a narrower drum with its own rhythm of arches, is a coda rather than a seventh gallery, and reads as another hand. And the curve of the corrected storeys makes the geometry a negotiation: lawful, but a law of repair. The range is narrow, one module repeated, and narrowness is not coherence.
Tang, under Emperor Gaozong · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
One law governs the whole: a square of four equal faces, each storey a reduced repetition of the one below, each face articulated in the same grammar of pilaster and corbel, an arched opening at the centre of each face throughout. Take the two most distant elements, the broad ground storey with its stele niches and the small top storey: they obey the same rule, and the rule is legible from any side. The Ming casing kept the law rather than breaking it. What holds the axis is range. The law holds over a small set of elements, and narrowness is not coherence.
The Beatles · Music
7.7 · Tier III
One law governs the record: the love song in the guitar group’s voice, bright, brief and spoken in the first person to a lover. The two most distant elements test it. And I Love Her, acoustic, tender and hushed, and You Can’t Do That, a jealous threat over a hard guitar riff and cowbell, sit at opposite poles of feeling, and both obey the law: the same two minutes, the same voice turned to one person, the same turn at the bridge. What holds the figure is range: every song is a love song in one idiom and one length, and narrowness is not coherence. Things We Said Today and I’ll Be Back widen it toward time and ambivalence without straining the law.
Chinese builders (Northern Wei foundation, Ming and Qing rebuilding) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the lowest gallery at one end of the chain and the Hall of the Three Teachings at the head of the climb. One law governs them: timber halls on cantilevers, the same red posts and grey tile, the same scale of room, the same passage along the face, the same relation of building to overhang. The law is clear and it is kept, over three religions, several levels, and rooms built out as well as rooms half carved. What bends it is the accumulation of rebuildings, which leaves the composition picturesque rather than ordered: the chain has no governing rhythm, and the halls stand where the cliff allowed. Narrowness is not coherence.
Imre Steindl · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the pinnacled Gothic front and the Renaissance dome; or the river front and the gilt interior of the Dome Hall. Do they obey one law? Mostly. Steindl’s law is symmetry about a centre, and it governs everything from the plan to the river elevation to the matched chambers; the dome is set as that centre, and the Gothic body climbs toward it. Seen from Buda the silhouette holds together, and the mixture of styles reads as one building rather than three. But the law is compositional, not stylistic. The dome remains a different idiom on a Gothic body, and the eye feels the joint where Gothic verticals meet a ribbed Renaissance drum. The range is wide, and it is held by geometry more than by one physics of form.
Soundgarden · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Face Pollution’s two-minute sprint at punk speed and the slow crush of Slaves & Bulldozers. One law governs them: everything is low, tuned down, heavy and pressed, and every song is a body under weight. The voice and the guitar sound are constant, and the darkness of tone does not break. But the law is partly a narrowness of palette, and narrowness is not coherence. The range covered, from punk to psychedelia to dirge, is moderate, and the horns and saxophone sit as colour, not as a widening the law absorbs. One physics holds because it is not asked to hold much.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Neckbone’s comic talk on the island, a boy’s bravado about girls and engines, and Tom firing a rifle across the river into the men who attack the houseboat. One law governs both: men live by stories of love and loyalty that they cannot keep, and boys learn to believe them and then to see through them. The boys’ banter is that law in small, Galen’s women are it in comedy, Mud’s devotion and Tom’s withdrawal are it in earnest, and the shootout is where a story of loyalty becomes literal fire. The range runs from comedy to violence, and the law covers it. What holds the axis: the hunters’ plot obeys genre’s law more than the film’s, and the coda bends the law where it should be tightest.
Takashi Yamazaki · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the creature’s breath raising a mushroom cloud over Ginza, and Sumiko handing rice to Noriko over the fence. One law governs both: the war took everything, and what remains must be lived through and shared, at whatever cost of shame. The minesweeper, clearing the sea of the war’s leftover death, obeys it; so does Tachibana’s ejection seat; so does the operation, a repair made by the men the state spent. The range is wide, from atomic terror to rice across a fence, and the law holds across it. It bends at two places, both in the last minutes: Noriko’s return from a blast the film showed as certain death obeys the film’s wish rather than its physics, and the regenerating flesh and the mark on her neck answer to a franchise’s law, not the film’s.
Louisa May Alcott · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the pantomime of the sisters’ club and its paper, and Beth’s death. One law governs them, from “Playing Pilgrims” to “Harvest Time”: the moral realism of a household in which every act is a small test and every test has a meaning, with comedy and grief under the same rule. The Moffats’ ball obeys it, and so does the Hummels’ cottage where Beth catches the fever. The strain shows in two places: the European chapters, where the book borrows the travel letter and the society novel and the household law loosens; and the ending with Bhaer, which the book’s own logic, Jo’s resistance, half refuses and its moral law, the good plain man, requires, a seam readers have felt since 1869. The range is narrow, one house, one town, one class and its neighbours, and narrowness is not coherence.
Don DeLillo · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
One law governs: everything is turned into information and speed, and Eric moves through a world his systems have abstracted. Take the most distant elements, the cold talk of yen and yield in the car and the warm barbershop at the end, where the old barber talks of Eric’s father. They obey the same law, since the barber is origin and body set against abstraction, and the day is the approach to that choice. Benno’s confessions, in another voice, are the same law seen from its casualty, an employee the system discarded, writing in fragments and grievance. Charged: the tone wavers between satire and solemnity, so that the assassin with a pie and the burning protester share one day without the book settling which register governs; and the rule of Eric’s visions is extended without being explained.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the farce, a falling light, an erection onstage, a door locked on a man in a robe, and an attempted suicide in front of an audience. They obey one law: everything in the film is performance before witnesses, and every humiliation and every act of courage is staged. The magic obeys it too, since it is seen only when Riggan is alone or believes he is, until the last window; the film keeps its own rule about who sees what. The range is wide and governed by the drums and the camera’s even motion. What strains the law: the satire of the critic and the speeches on social media speak in the film’s editorial voice rather than the world’s, and the hospital coda, outside the take, sits on the edge of the system.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Joe and Herbie on the porch, planning each other’s murders by poison and blunt instrument as a hobby, and the uncle holding his niece at the open door of a moving train. One law governs both: murder is a game to those who have not seen the world as he has, and a practice to the one who has, and the town’s innocence is the condition of his safety. The survey men, the bank’s banter about embezzlement and the women’s club obey it, each a joke about what sits at the table, and the doubling applies it to form. The range is wide for a domestic picture. What holds the figure is strain: Graham’s courtship belongs to a cheerier film, and the second suspect’s death brings the law’s resolution in from outside the town.
Alex Proyas · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the flashbacks of Eric and Shelly’s life, warm and domestic, and the carnival of the gang, T-Bird reciting verse, Funboy with his needle, Top Dollar’s banquet of thieves. They obey one law. The film’s physics is grief, and both belong to it, the one as what was lost, the other as the hell that took it. The colour scheme enforces the law, and the crow’s rules, the touch that passes pain and the wound that returns when the bird is hurt, are held to the end. The range is wide for a genre film and the law holds across it. What strains it is the comic tone of the payments: Eric’s quips and the gang’s cartoon cruelty laugh where the law asks them to grieve.
Robertson Davies · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the Baptist parsonage in Deptford in 1908, and the magician’s show in Toronto sixty years later with its Brazen Head; or the trench at Passchendaele and the library of the Bollandists. One law governs them: the marvellous is real, in the mind and in the world, and the act a person refuses to own returns to claim him. The parsonage produces the magician; the war produces the saint’s third miracle; the stone travels from the snowball to the corpse. The range is wide, from village comedy to war, theology and stage magic, and it is held. Charged: the law is enforced in part by coincidence, the plot’s machinery bringing the people of Deptford together across continents more often than the book’s world otherwise allows, so that the hand of the arranger shows.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the brow stone, the most valuable thing on the object, and the teeth, the only part with no market value and the only part that was alive. They obey one law: everything a human skull is has been converted into value, and the one part that cannot be converted is left showing, so that the exception proves the law. Platinum for bone, diamonds for skin, the price for the face, the title’s invocation of God turned into an exclamation: each element makes the same move. The law holds through the work’s afterlife, where the sale itself became a question of what value is. Held below 8 because narrowness is not coherence: the range runs from bone to stone in one object, and the law, once grasped, governs a small territory.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the knotted nozzle at the snout, the smallest and most casual mark of a breath tied off, and the polished mass of the body, standing on four legs. They obey one law: everything slight is made heavy, everything passing is made permanent, everything cheap is made precious, and the surface returns the world to the viewer in the toy’s colour. The five colours obey it; so does each setting, which becomes material for the surface. Nothing breaks the law. Held at 7.8 because narrowness is not coherence: the range runs from rubber to steel in one object and one gesture, and the law, once grasped, governs a small territory.
Andreas Gursky · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the overcast sky, the least made thing in the picture, and the straight path, the most made. They obey one law, the horizontal. Every element is a band parallel to the frame, and everything that would break the law, the vertical of a building, the incident of a figure, has been removed. The law reaches the making itself, since the edit serves the bands, and the light, which flattens every form into a stripe. Nothing in the picture contradicts it. What holds the axis below 8 is that narrowness is not coherence: the territory is five bands of three colours, and the law, once grasped, governs a very small field. Its coherence is achieved by exclusion, which is its point and also its limit.
Robert Zemeckis · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the Libyans gunning Doc down in a mall car park at night, and a high-school dance with a band in white dinner jackets. One law governs both: what is done at one minute determines what exists at another, and every scene is a race against a clock. The farce of the mother’s desire and the menace of Biff in the car are moves in one problem, a son’s survival. The range is moderate, from slapstick to the threat of rape and a death reversed. The strain is at the close: the law says interference endangers existence, and the coda rewards it with a better life and no cost. Coherence holds there by comedy’s rule rather than the film’s own.
M83 · Music
7.5 · Tier III
One law governs: private feeling rendered at the scale of catastrophe, through stacked synthesiser and a slow swell to release. The two most distant elements obey it. Birds is a short passage of rising air and the close is a long storm; Run Into Flowers is a small song inside a large sound, Cyborg a cold textural piece; all are the same feeling heard at different sizes. The coherence is real, and the record never contradicts itself. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range covered is narrow: one register, grand, nostalgic and nocturnal, one method and one emotional temperature from first piece to last. The law is kept because few things are asked of it. This is a consistent record more than a governed one.
Tracey Emin · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Take two of the most distant things reported among its debris: a small soft toy, a token of childhood comfort, and a used condom, an adult act and its refuse. They obey one law: everything in the work is a trace left by one body in one place over a few days, and nothing has been added for the viewer. Bottle, packet, tissue, slipper, the stain on the sheet: each is a deposit, and each says that someone lay here and could not get up. The law holds without exception, and it holds through the work’s afterlife, where even the reinstallations are the artist returning to her own deposit. Held below 8 because narrowness is not coherence: the range is one bed and its floor, and the law, once grasped, governs a small territory.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the prologue’s private night, a girl and a voice, and the plague city in its last days, rats, fires and crowds. They obey one law: the town’s sickness is the girl’s call made public, and the dawn that ends one ends the other. The register is held in one antique key, in light, dress, speech and music, and the supernatural is never explained away or turned into a system, so the film’s physics holds. Two things strain it: von Franz’s eccentric, nearly comic manner sits outside the severity around him, and the gore of the Harding sequence pushes for a stretch toward another genre’s law. The range is real but narrower than it looks, weighed through one register of dread.
The National · Music
7.4 · Tier III
One law governs the whole: a low, steady surface over an unsteady interior, in sound and in words alike. The two most distant elements are Sea of Love, a driven song that breaks into a shout, and Hard to Find, a quiet song that barely rises. Both obey the law: in Sea of Love the surface finally cracks, in Hard to Find it holds over what it hides, and the record treats them as two outcomes of one condition. The words and the sound agree throughout, oblique lines over plain-seeming songs, both concealing their irregularity. What holds the figure is range: tempo, register and palette lie close together, the law is rarely tested at any great distance, and narrowness is not coherence.
Shepard Fairey · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the face, the most particular thing in the image, and the word, the most general. They obey one law. The face is reduced to four tones, and the word stands in the same tones on a band of the same colours; the person and the slogan are made of one stuff, which is the image’s argument. The law extends to the field behind the head, built of the same tones, and nothing is drawn outside it: no line or tone escapes. It extends even to the editions, since the image was built to survive every form of cheap reproduction without breaking. Held where it is because narrowness is not coherence: the law governs one face, one word and four colours, and the range it spans is small.
Keith Haring · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the bright, almost festive orange field with its dancing line, and the subject of addiction and death. They obey one law: the street’s own language turned against what is destroying the street, so that the cheerfulness of the idiom is the means of the warning and not a contradiction of it. Slogan and figures, the face to the court and the face to the highway, are one physics: flat, outlined, legible, public. Nothing on the wall breaks that law. But the range is not wide, and narrowness is not coherence: the coherence here is that of a single register held without lapse, which is real and covers no great span. Level with Rhein II and For the Love of God on this axis, and below The Swing.
Mogwai · Music
7.3 · Tier III
One law governs the record: sound as weather, calm and violence of one substance, held in short spans. Take the two most distant elements, Glasgow Mega-Snake, fast distortion from the first bar, and I Chose Horses, a voice speaking Japanese over slow sound. They obey the same law: each presents a single state without development of material, one at full force and one at rest, and both are made of the same guitars in the same room. Friend of the Night, the nearest thing on the record to a pop song, keeps the law in its steady repetition. The joins are clean, and nothing breaks the law. What holds the figure is range: quiet to loud within one rock palette, and narrowness is not coherence.
Anonymous; Octagon by William Hurley and Alan of Walsingham · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant parts: the Norman nave of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries and the Decorated Lady Chapel of the fourteenth. They do not obey one law. The building is a sequence of styles, each true to its century, joined by a cross plan and a continuous use. The Octagon is the best joint, taking the Norman module and turning it so that the old nave and the new centre speak. But the west front, lopsided with its lost transept and its tower’s later stage, the Galilee in a third manner, the late chantries set into Early English bays, and the Lady Chapel standing off the axis, show a whole governed by accumulation. That is what holds this axis lowest.
George Gilbert Scott and William Henry Barlow · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the hotel’s clock tower, carved and gabled brick and stone on Euston Road, and the north end of the extension, a flat glass roof on slender steel. They obey no common law. Within the Victorian work there are two physics, Scott’s historical masonry and Barlow’s calculated iron, joined only at the shed’s south screen and by the pointed profile of the ribs, which answers the Gothic of the front. The work of 2007 adds a third, deliberately neutral, which defers rather than conforms, and Paul Day’s bronze at the vault’s end obeys none of the three. Each part holds its own law strictly; the whole is three laws in sequence. The range is wide, which keeps the figure above the floor; but the whole is not governed by one physics, as Brooklyn Bridge and the Eiffel Tower, each at 8.7, are.
Claudio de Arciniega and successors; facade by Manuel Tolsá · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: Arciniega’s sober Renaissance piers and the dissolving gold of the Altar of the Kings, or the seventeenth-century portals and Tolsá’s neoclassical statues against the sky. Do they obey one law? Partly. The governing law is the type, a Spanish cathedral of chapter, coro, chapels and principal retablo, and every campaign obeyed it, so that the use is coherent from first stone to last finial. The front is more unified than its dates suggest, because Ortiz de Castro and Tolsá set out to make it so. But the law of style changes four times, and inside, the gold of the eighteenth century and the stone of the sixteenth are set side by side, not reconciled. The range is wide, and is credited; the law across it is loose.
Byzantine, under Justinian · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the sixth-century apse, gold and austere, and the bell tower of the nineteenth century, or the mosque with its minaret. Do they obey one law? In part. The governing law is the enclosure of holy ground, and every later building obeys it: all stand inside the circuit, turned to the life of the community and to the bush. The mosque obeys it too, as the monastery’s accommodation of those who ruled and came. But as a visual and spatial whole the building holds no single physics: a granite basilica of the sixth century, a later ceiling and fittings of many centuries, a bell tower in a Western manner and cells of many dates make a compound rather than a body. The founding law has governed what was added; the forms added do not share it. Coherence of purpose, not of form.
Sex Pistols · Music
7.9 · Tier III
One law governs the record: refusal, sung as contempt over a wall of guitars. Take the two most distant elements, Bodies, the record’s horror, and Submission, its slow and druggy song. Both obey: one refuses the body’s sentimentality, the other refuses seriousness itself. E.M.I. and God Save the Queen refuse the industry and the Crown in the same voice. The law holds without strain across all twelve tracks. What holds the figure is the rubric’s own rule, that narrowness is not coherence. One mood, one sound and one band of tempo leave the law little distance to cover, and a record that obeys one law because it does one thing earns the coherence of a small span.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
One law governs most of the record: war, public or private, answered by surrender, in a hard sound that marches. The two most distant elements are Sunday Bloody Sunday, the public lament, and Red Light, a song of the city coloured by funk, trumpet and added voices. In theme they largely obey one law, since Red Light and Surrender carry the war inward to the lost in the city. In sound they obey it only in part: the funk of Red Light and the dance beat of Two Hearts Beat as One sit at the edge of the record’s physics. The march and the hymn at either end are joined by the repeated question. Nothing breaks the law; two songs strain it, and the strain holds the figure.
Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the glass corner of the main building and the brick chimney, or the closed walls of the warehouse. Do they obey one law? In part. The same yellow brick, the same dark base and the same clean volumes run through the yard, and the partners built most of it, so the complex reads as one works. But the law that governs the main building, the wall as skin and mass withdrawn, does not govern the rest: elsewhere the brick is load and enclosure in the ordinary way, and the later campaigns carry a more decorative manner. And there is a seam the building cannot hide, a modern skin on a plan drawn by another hand to another idea. The range is small, a works of modest buildings, and narrowness is not coherence; within it the law holds on the main front and slackens behind it.
Terry Gilliam · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the shooting in the bar, seen on a television screen, and Parry naked on a lawn in Central Park at night, talking to the clouds. One law governs both: the wound and the cure are of one kind, an act done to a stranger. Jack’s words to a stranger caused the first; Parry’s care for a stranger under the bridge, and then Jack’s for Parry, the second. The courtship, the singing telegram and the dumpling dinner obey it, each a small act for someone else that the film treats as grace, and the law holds across a wide range: massacre, madness, romantic comedy, myth. What gives is strain: the caper at the castle, with its alarm and its comic climb, belongs to a lighter film; the billionaire’s overdose, saved by the theft, is convenient; and Williams’s routines at times break the register a scene has set.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the classroom car, bright and absurd, where a pregnant teacher leads children in a song to the engine and then fires a machine gun, and Curtis’s confession in the dark of what the tail ate in its first months and of Gilliam’s arm. One law governs both: the train’s balance, every person in a place and every life a quantity, kept by ritual at the front and by hunger at the tail. The comedy is that law’s piety and the horror its price; Mason’s shoe, the counted heads, the protein bars and the child in the engine obey it. What holds it: the world’s logic strains where the plot needs it, in the train’s economy, the guards’ supply and Franco’s survival, and the league of Gilliam and Wilford is asserted rather than shown to hold through what came before.
Sahelian builders · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
One physics governs the whole. Everything is of the same earth as the town around it, built by the same craft and kept by the same work, and the most distant elements, the low hall and the sheer tower, obey one law of mass, batter and renewal. The mosque and the town are continuous in material: the building is the town’s earth raised to its highest point. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range here is narrow: one material, one structural logic, one dominant figure and a hall of the common kind. The law holds without strain because it is asked to cover little. The continuity of building and town is credited; the narrowness holds the axis below the eights.
Stuart Rosenberg · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the men cheering as Luke swallows the fiftieth egg, and Luke alone in the church at night, waiting for an answer. One law governs both: the man who will not yield is watched, by the men who need him and the bosses who must break him, and above them by a silence he addresses and that does not reply. The bluff, the fight, the box, the ditch, the escapes and the legend obey it, and the bosses’ silence answers God’s. The range is wide for a prison picture. What holds the figure is strain: the car wash belongs to a cruder film, the mother’s visit sits apart in tone, and the Christ imagery is at points laid over the law rather than issuing from it.
The Smiths · Music
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the fairground swing of “Rusholme Ruffians”, comic, dark and light at once, and the slow funereal title track, without a joke in it. They obey one law in part. The law is the record’s subject, the violence ordinary life licenses, seen by those it falls on: the knife at the fair and the machinery of the slaughterhouse belong to one world, and the voice binds them. The private songs, “I Want the One I Can’t Have” and “Well I Wonder”, fit through the excluded speaker. But tone is not one law here. The record’s best manner is irony laced with longing; the title track abandons irony for denunciation, and the funk of “Barbarism Begins at Home” breaks the sound world without a reason the argument supplies. A wide range, held, with two seams.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Alberto’s raspberry at the road menders and the stalled car, pure farce, and Sandra’s flight with the baby, with Fausto searching the town and the beach at dawn. One law governs both: men who have never had to act, in a town where the season ends and they remain, and every act they attempt rebounds on them. The theft fails, the insult is punished, the hope of a play turns to fear, the marriage becomes a flight. Comedy and sorrow come from the same idleness, and the film lets neither take over. The law strains in two places, and both count against the whole: the Natali episode, whose grotesque and whose threat sit apart in tone, and Moraldo, who stands half outside the law as the author’s watcher, which is design but loosens the one physics.
Terry Pratchett · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
One physics governs the whole, and it is stated: belief makes gods, and what is believed in grows. Take the most distant elements, the slapstick of the Ephebian philosophers and the torture of a heretic in the cellars of the Quisition, or the god’s comic hunger for lettuce and the walk of Vorbis through the desert of the dead. They obey the same law: the jokes are made of the same matter as the horror, and the book does not cheat its premise for a laugh at the end. The range, from farce to the torture chamber to the afterlife, is real and held. Charged: the comic register is sometimes let override weight, a scene of cruelty turned too quickly to a gag; and the series’ furniture, Lu-Tze’s cameo and the gods’ board game, belongs to a larger cosmos the book leans on rather than builds.
Michel Pinseau · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the minaret’s shaft over the sea and the ablution hall below the prayer hall. One law governs both, the Maghrebi decorative order of arches, geometric tile, carved plaster and cedar, carried from the summit of the tower down to the ablution halls beneath the prayer hall, through the hall, the galleries and the doors. The range is wide, from landmark to basement and from stone to wood, and the law holds across it. What bends it: under the law runs a second physics, the reinforced concrete frame, the sliding roof and the laser, which obey engineering and are dressed in the first law rather than governed by it; and the scale strains the law, for ornament made for rooms of human size is here multiplied over surfaces many times larger, so that the same rule yields a different effect. One style, two physics.
Alfred Eisenstaedt · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the pair at the centre and the strangers behind them, a smiling sailor and passers-by. One law holds them: everything in the frame takes part in, or witnesses, a single public release, and every visible face is turned to it or caught in its own pleasure. The light obeys it, falling evenly on a square at ease. Nothing contradicts the law of celebration except what the second reading finds in the posture at the centre, and that is a tension within the image’s subject, not a breach of its order. But the range is narrow, one place, one instant, one register, and the background holds incident that is not governed, a figure walking out of the frame, the indifferent fronts of the square. A law held over a small and partly unruled field.
R.E.M. · Music
7.5 · Tier III
One law governs the record: ringing guitar, melodic bass and crossing voices, a reticent singer at the centre, the South heard through loyalty and loss. The two most distant elements are Time After Time, a near-modal drone, and Rockville, a country song with honky-tonk piano and plain words sung largely by Mills. They obey the same law more than they first seem to: Rockville is the record’s one clear statement of the attachment to a small place that the other songs mumble, and its plainness is a turn in the voice, not a break. Camera’s stillness and Second Guessing’s speed sit inside the law too. The range is moderate, wider than Murmur toward country and no wider elsewhere, and the coherence owes something to narrowness, which is not coherence; that holds the figure here.
Alex Garland · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the stillness of the town where shopkeepers pretend there is no war, nearly comic, and the noise of the White House corridors, where the President’s guards are executed. One law governs both: the gaze of a camera that does not intervene, looking at what happens from a set distance. The shop is seen as a photograph is seen, from outside, and so is the killing of a President. The songs over violence obey the same law, and so do the stills. The range is wide, from wry comedy through terror to the action spectacle. What holds the figure is that the law bends in the siege, where the camera enters the action as an action film’s camera, and in dialogue that tells what the law should already show.
André Waterkeyn; André and Jean Polak · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the top sphere, a viewing room and restaurant on the vertical axis, and a lower outer sphere standing on its bipod. One law governs both: the cubic lattice, the same diameter, the same skin, the same tubes along the bonds, the same angle of the diagonal. The law is exact and admits almost no exception, a real achievement of coherence. Two things bend it. The bipods belong to another physics, the ground’s, and stand outside the crystal they hold up; and the interiors answer to the exhibition hall, not to the lattice. And the law is narrow: one figure repeated nine times at one scale, so that its coherence comes cheaply. Narrowness is not coherence, and it holds the figure where it is.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Art and Tashi’s daughter at breakfast in a hotel suite, domestic and quiet, and the climax in the air above the net, kinetic and erotic. One law governs both: everything is a match, every relation a contest with a score, and the family a training regime, Tashi coaching her husband as she would a client, his schedule, diet and confidence managed. The churros, the sauna, the car, the motel and the hotel room all obey it. The range is moderate: the law holds from a junior tournament to a marriage, but it is narrow in kind, and narrowness is not coherence. It bends where the plot needs a mechanism, the coincidence that brings both men to the same minor tournament, and where the ending turns from contest to embrace.
Deafheaven · Music
7.3 · Tier III
One law governs the record: longing stated in bright, layered sound, with force held back. Take the two most distant elements: Neptune Raining Diamonds, two minutes of keyboard texture without guitar or voice, and the screamed, full-force close of Mombasa. Both obey the law. The interlude is the record’s restraint at its most complete; the close is the held force released at the one point the structure prepares for it. That the most violent moment obeys the same physics as the stillest is the record’s coherence. The range is moderate, wider than a shoegaze album’s by one heavy passage, and most of it is one palette; narrowness is not coherence. The middle songs obey the law by habit rather than necessity.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Club of the Sons’ stadium and the Eternal Gardens, white and frivolous at the top, and the catacombs with their crosses and candles at the bottom. A law joins them: the city is one body, head above and hands below, and everything in it, the gardens, the machines, the cathedral, Rotwang’s magic, the Yoshiwara, is a part of that body out of its place. The futurist tower and the medieval cottage obey the same law, since Rotwang’s sorcery is the old power inside the new. What holds the axis at the foot of the page, with The Unconcealment, is the end, where the law breaks: the images have shown the division to be the city’s structure, and the ending heals it with a gesture between two men to which the film’s own images do not consent.
Philip K. Dick · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Among the lowest of the twelve, level with The Made and The Encompassed. One law governs most of the book: entropy against grace, the world running down and the remedy that must be bought to arrest it. Take the two most distant elements, the corporate comedy of Runciter Associates in New York in 1992 and the funeral home in Des Moines in 1939 where Runciter’s body lies. Both obey the law of decay and the commodity, and the comic economy of the opening is the economy that sells Ubik at the end. What holds the axis there is structural. The rules of the half-life world are not kept: Runciter’s messages and Jory’s power are given terms the plot then overrides as it needs; Pat Conley’s talent, built as the key, is laid aside; and the last reversal unsettles the frame without the book having prepared a law that holds it. The book is coherent in its mood and less so in its mechanics.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the curved shell of the nave, born from the ground, and the tower, its straight sides tapering against gravity, joined to the church by a flat sloping canopy. The vaults obey one law, the parabola run in varied sizes; the tower, the canopy and the screened front obey another, the straight line of the Corbusian vocabulary Niemeyer was leaving. The building can be read as a dialogue between them, curve and line, mass and stalk, and the tower’s widening answers the rise of the vaults; but the dialogue is juxtaposed more than governed, and the tower does not grow from the vaults’ law. The surfaces made for tile and painting do not contradict the architecture. Coherent where the curve rules, looser where it meets the rest.
Taddeo Gaddi or Neri di Fioravanti (attributed) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the stone arches of 1345 and the timber-bracketed back-shops hanging off the downstream face. One is designed engineering, the other centuries of accretion by private hands. A law governs both, the medieval city’s law that structure is a ground to be built upon and let, so that the bridge carries a street and the street grows over the water. The corridor obeys a different law, the regular, planned order of the Medici state, and sits on top in a straight band against the irregular shops below. That contrast is the work’s meaning, and the two laws are legible together as commune and principate. What holds the axis at 7.6 is that they are two laws, not one, and the downstream face is a picturesque jumble whose coherence is that of growth, not of design. The range is wide; the unity is of history more than of form.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Johnny talking with Brian about the end of the world in an empty lit building at night, and Sandra coming home from a holiday to find strangers in her flat, in a farce of bandages and outrage. One law reaches both in part: everyone in the film is alone and talks past everyone else, and Sandra’s broken sentences are a comic version of the same failure of address. The landlord’s strand obeys a different law, a melodrama of a villain who arrives, does harm and leaves, drawn in thicker lines than the rest, and the realism does not hold him. That holds the figure: a wide range, from the apocalypse to farce, held by a real but strained coherence.
John Wood the Younger · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the Ionic columns at the end of the front, and the back of a middle house, with its irregular windows, closet wings and rubble walls. They do not obey the same law. The front is governed by one geometry, the half-ellipse and the order, and within it the law is perfect: every bay obeys it, and the curve resolves the repetition of thirty plots into one figure. The backs are governed by each owner’s builder and budget. The defence is that the disjunction is the building’s subject, a public law over private freedom, a law whose terms include the licence of the backs; it carries weight, and it keeps the axis where it stands. But narrowness is not coherence, and the coherent part here is narrow: one elevation.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the lyric field of the opening and the section of employees turning pages. They obey one law: attention, paid without reward to what is unremarkable, is the human act that remains, and its opposite is the flight from boredom into entertainment or sensation. The law runs through the ghosts, through Sylvanshine’s involuntary facts, attention without will, through Drinion’s rising, attention as grace, through Fogle’s conversion and the civics argument. That is a wide range held by one physics. Charged on two counts. The book’s laws of the real are not settled: documentary realism, metafictional memoir and the supernatural sit side by side without the finished structure that would have reconciled them. And the unfinished state leaves contradictions in fact and in arc that a coherent work would not contain.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the opening’s broadcast slogans and the closing country hymn sung by a man past sixty. They obey one law in part: every voice on the record is a voice in the media city, and the last is the one that has walked out of it, so the extremes stand as inside and outside. The range is wide, croon, techno, falsetto disco and gospel in one frame of irony and longing. But the law loosens in the middle, where Some Days Are Better Than Others obeys only the genre it borrows, and The Wanderer draws some of its force from breaking the law rather than fulfilling it.
John Bradfield and Ralph Freeman (Dorman Long) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the steel arch and the granite pylons. They do not obey one law. The arch states its physics openly: thrust, pin, hanger, chord. The pylons present themselves as the abutments and towers of a masonry gate and do none of that work; they are a second physics, stone appearing to carry steel. The bridge has long been defended on the ground that they compose the arch into the harbour, and that is true; the defence does not repair the contradiction. Between the steel of the arch, the approach trusses and the deck the law holds well, and the bridge is coherent over a wide range of use, rail, road, foot and the ships beneath. The contradiction is in the frame, not the body, and it holds the axis in the middle of the band.
George Gershwin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the clarinet’s laughing smear and the Grandioso’s broad anthem. One law governs them in part: both are blue-inflected song, and the themes share their intervals and their syncopated figures closely. The range is wide, from vaudeville and stride to romantic ballad and toccata, and this work is not narrow. But the law is one of idiom more than of form. The episodes obey the same speech without being required by one another, and the Andantino is reached by juxtaposition, through sequence and cadenza, not by a relation the work works out. Kind of Blue, at 8.9 here, keeps one law across five forms; this work keeps a speech across many episodes, and its law is loose.
Michael Mann · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the love scene on the fort’s rampart, lit in amber and scored as romance, and the massacre on the march, filmed as chaos and slaughter. One law governs both: every feeling in the film is played at full pitch and in the body, so that love is declared at a shout over a waterfall and death comes at a run. The pursuit binds the whole, and the wordless last act completes the wordless hunt of the first, so the film begins and ends in the same physics. The strain is in the middle register: the fort’s politics are spoken in a measured, expository manner that belongs to another kind of film, and the long plea in the Huron village, with Heyward translating, slows into theatre.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The two most distant elements are the seminar’s comedy of male aggression and the rain of frogs. They are put under one law, stated in the prologue: the world produces coincidences too exact to be chance, and the film treats its people as caught in such a pattern. Under that law the sing-along and the frogs are meant as its fullest expressions, and the 8:2 markers bind the last act to the first hour. The range is very wide, from game-show comedy to two deaths. What holds the axis is that the range is held more by declaration than by tone: Kurring’s comedy of the lost gun and Donnie’s braces sit outside the dread of the deathbeds, and the frogs, for all their preparation, can still read as a device placed upon the film rather than grown from it.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Nikolaus Pacassi and Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Fischer’s giant order on the court front and Hohenberg’s Neoclassical Gloriette on the hill, eighty years and a change of style apart. They obey one law, and the axis is that law: everything on the line from palace to crest is placed by it, and the Gloriette answers the garden front across the parterre. Within the palace the law weakens. Fischer’s Baroque frame, Pacassi’s Rococo interiors and the plain fronts of the early nineteenth century are three manners that coexist rather than one physics, and the Chinese cabinets and the Great Gallery do not argue from the premise of the elevation that holds them. The range is wide; its coherence is of placement more than of law.
R.E.M. · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Shiny Happy People, a bright bubblegum chorus sung with Kate Pierson, and Country Feedback, a desolate country dirge. They obey one law in part. The record’s law is an acoustic, string-dressed palette and a theme of love as distance and exposure; Losing My Religion, Low, Half a World Away and Country Feedback obey it fully, and Me in Honey’s forgiving close answers them. Shiny Happy People obeys it if its brightness is heard as irony, a seam rather than a break, though the record gives little to secure that hearing. The range is wide, rap, bubblegum, instrumental, chamber ballad and country, and is held by a shared sound more than one physics. Radio Song’s rap obeys neither palette nor theme.
Lal Chand Ustad · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the jali in the lowest bays at the street and the crest of small domes at the top. One law governs both, the projected bay with its lattice, repeated, stacked and diminished toward the crest, every part an eye on the street. The colour and the painted borders carry the law across the front, and the ramps and galleries behind serve it. What bends it: the rear and the courtyards obey another and older physics, that of the courtyard palace, so that the building is a screen on one face and a plain palace annexe on the other. And the law, however consistently held, is narrow: one module and one purpose. Narrowness is not coherence. The front’s coherence is near complete; the whole’s is not.
Stephen King · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the opening interview with Ullman, a scene of social humiliation in an office, and the ballroom of the dead calling on a man to unmask. One law governs them. The hotel works only through what is already in the man, his resentment of his betters, his thirst and his father, so that the comedy of manners in the first chapter is the same force as the ghost in the last. The boiler joins the domestic and the supernatural at the end without a seam: the plumbing Jack neglected destroys the hotel. The law holds across a fair range, from the office and the kitchen to the topiary and the party. Charged because the supernatural rules are elastic where the plot needs them to be, in what the hedges can do and what the hotel can and cannot touch, and because the warm epilogue in Maine relaxes the law the book has kept.
Arctic Monkeys · Music
7.5 · Tier III
One law governs the record: the night in a northern town seen by a sharp young observer, contemptuous and fond in one breath, at speed. Take the two most distant elements, Mardy Bum, a bright domestic pop song about a couple’s quarrel, and When the Sun Goes Down, the red-light street at night and a predator named. They obey the same law: one voice, one town, one eye for the telling detail, and the quarrel is the night’s morning after. The breach is Perhaps Vampires, whose subject is the trade and the press, not the town; it keeps the voice but leaves the world. The range is narrow, and narrowness is not coherence.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the opening motel room, dark and procedural, and the closing city of light over the coast. One law governs most of the film: the extraordinary is met by ordinary people at ground level. The satellite falls on a petrol station, the boy’s light floods a field at a farmer’s dawn, and the state’s response is a man with a notebook. The family, the sect and the state answer to it, across a range from road thriller to vision. What holds the axis: the end obeys a different physics, the spectacle film’s, in which the other world is shown whole and the witnesses become spectators; and the sect and the state stay at a lower density than the family.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the grave samurai voice over the black cards and the slapstick of the mobsters, the aged soldiers, the gangster who raps, the cartoons on every screen. The film largely holds them under one law. Both are men ruled by obsolete codes, and the deadpan treats each with the same affectionate distance, so that comedy and gravity are one physics of decline. The range is wide, from a child’s reading to a rooftop death to Woody Woodpecker on a mob boss’s screen, and the law holds through it more often than not. It slips where the comedy plays only as comedy and the code’s gravity is lost for a scene, and the ending borrows part of its weight from the voice rather than earning it all by the action.
Guðjón Samúelsson · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the stepped piers of the west front, a figure from geology, and the pointed vaults of the nave, a figure from the Gothic church. They are kin: both are verticals rising to a point, and the pointed arch inside answers the stepped peak outside, so that one law of tall, unornamented, graded uprights governs front and room. Concrete and whiteness bind them, and the organ’s tall case, added in 1992, keeps the law. What bends it: the front speaks the language of the land and the nave that of the inherited church, reconciled by a shared verticality rather than by one law, and the passage from figure to room is abrupt. A church of one material, one colour and one gesture keeps its law over a small territory.
Steve McCurry · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the frayed, holed shawl, the most worldly and particular thing in the image, and the eyes, the most inward. They obey one law, the complementary of red and green, and one register, the frontal encounter. The shawl frames the face and its colour makes the green of the eyes burn, while its holes keep the beauty tethered to poverty. The ground repeats the eyes; the skin mediates between them. Nothing in the frame contradicts the law: no tonal slip, no element that belongs to another picture. What holds the axis is that narrowness is not coherence. The territory is one face and three colours, and the law, once seen, governs a very small field, made coherent by a framing that excludes whatever might have tested it.
Jun Xia (Gensler) · Architecture
7.4 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the foot of the skin, broad and nearly closed round the podium, and the crown, where the notched spiral opens into a thin, rising frame. One law governs both: a rounded-triangle section rotated and diminished at a constant rate, so that every floor of the skin is the same figure turned and shrunk. The law carries up the whole height and round every face, and the notch reads it from every side; the zones and their atria follow a second, regular law, a module repeated at a constant interval. What bends it: the inner tower obeys a third physics, a cylinder on a frame, and stands inside the spiral as another building; the podium meets the ground less surely than the shaft meets the sky; the interiors answer to the office floor.
Kehinde Wiley · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the face, the most modelled and lit thing in the picture, and a flat leaf at the edge of the canvas, the least. They obey one law, which is that they do not share a space: a body in light within a ground that has none, the figure real and the place emblematic. The law is consistent: every flower is coded, every leaf is flat, every part of the man is modelled, and the vines crossing the chair legs, its one passage across the seam, state the law, that the place grows around him, rather than break it. Nothing contradicts it. Held at 7.6 because narrowness is not coherence: the law governs one figure and one surface pattern, and the light on the sitter is accepted by convention rather than placed by the law.
Haddon Sundblom · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
One law governs the body throughout: a warm-blooded, benevolent Santa in a believable interior, lit warm against a cool or dark ground, the product present and plausible, the reader addressed. Take the two most distant pictures, an early one of Santa alone with a bottle and a late one crowded with children, toys and a dog: they obey the same physics, and the body never breaks its manner. But narrowness is not coherence, and this is a narrow law held over a narrow range: one figure, one mood, one purpose, one manner. The figure credits consistency over thirty-three years and is held where it is for that narrowness.
Yousef Abdelky · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the hot, open, white court and the enclosed, carpeted, lit hall; or the Mughal dome and the Moorish arch. They obey more of one law than an eclectic building usually does. White marble, floral inlay and one module govern everything from the pool’s edge to the qibla wall, and the flower carries from the court floor to the carpet, the column and the chandelier. Whiteness and repetition unify. But the law is a law of surface. The sources do not become one grammar: Mughal massing, Moorish arcades and coloured crystal sit side by side, held by finish rather than by a system that generates them, and the colour and gilding of the hall break the restraint the exterior keeps. The range is wide, and its coherence is won more by uniform finish than by one physics.
Maurizio Cattelan · Visual art
6.7 · Tier II
Take the two most distant elements: the banana, which rots in days, and the certificate, which lasts and is sold at auction. They obey one law: the material is disposable and the attestation is the work. The tape is the cheapest attachment; the title calls it a joke; the price is set against the cost. The afterlife obeys the same law exactly: every eating, Datuna’s at the fair in 2019 and Sun’s after the sale of 2024, removes the banana and leaves the work untouched. Nothing breaks it. Held where it is because narrowness is not coherence: the law governs one fruit, one strip of tape and one document, and the range between its farthest elements, though sharp, is small.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the gun whose shell drops at the gunner’s feet in 1918, and the barber at the microphone asking soldiers not to give themselves to brutes. One law reaches both in part: the military machine is absurd, the little man survives it by accident, and the film ends by asking the machine’s men to stop. The double holds Hynkel’s palace and the ghetto under one law, the costume of power. The range is very wide, from slapstick and pantomime to a pogrom and a direct address in earnest, and that width is credited. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is strain at the joins. The ghetto’s terror and the buffet’s slapstick live in different films; the barber of the speech is not the barber of the rest, who has hardly a sentence in him; and the film knows it is breaking its own law and does so on purpose. The breach is chosen, and it is still a breach.
Queen · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Death on Two Legs, a song of real bile, and Seaside Rendezvous, a toy of voices imitating a band. One law can be named: the record as a stage, every song in quotation marks, the band a company playing every turn. Under that law both obey, the curse played as melodrama and the toy as music hall. The range is very wide, eight manners in twelve tracks, and that is credited: narrowness is not coherence, and nor is variety. But the law is the law of the bill, and a bill has no physics beyond the order of its turns. Sweet Lady obeys only its genre; I’m in Love with My Car obeys its writer’s taste more than the record’s. The second side holds together better than the first.
Maya (Puuc) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the Chenes monster-mouth façade of Temple IV on the west and the Puuc fretwork sanctuary at the summit, or the half-buried Temple I at the foot and the oval envelope that swallowed it. Do they obey one law? In one sense they do: renewal by enclosure governs the whole, and each stage is a sanctuary raised on the mountain. In the sense of form, less. The west and east fronts differ in character and purpose, two regional manners meet without being reconciled, and the summit temple and Temple IV read as two buildings at two heights on one hill. The rounded plan imposes a single body on the mixture, and that is the building’s best answer. The law is held more by the mass than by the details, and the figure meets the minimum exactly.
Eduard Riedel and Christian Jank, under Ludwig II · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the plaster stalactite grotto, lit in colour, and the Byzantine apse of sainted kings; or the Romanesque exterior and the Gothic bedroom; or any painted room and the hot-air ducts behind it. One law governs them, a law of the stage rather than of building: each room a scene from a known story, made for its effect on one spectator, its style chosen by its legend. Under it the range is wide and holds. What bends it: the law is a sequence of sets, so the castle coheres as a programme more than as a structure; exterior and interiors are joined by narrative, not by form; the services obey another physics, hidden; and without its keep the composition lacks its centre. At the Universal Minimum, and no higher.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the solo piano of the opening piece and the screaming of Tales of a Scorched Earth, or the music-hall bounce of Lily and the drone of X.Y.U. They obey one law in part. The governing physics is Corgan’s emotional extremity, a self that swings between tenderness and rage, and the day-to-night frame adds a law of descent toward sleep. The best of the range holds under it: Tonight, Tonight and Bodies belong to one temperament. What holds the figure: some of the range is variety for its own sake. Lily, We Only Come Out at Night and Cupid de Locke break the physics into pastiche, and James Iha’s two songs, sweet and modest, sit outside it. The width is credited; the law does not hold everywhere across it.
Steven Spielberg · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the Neary kitchen, shouting, the noise of the television, a father losing his mind in front of his children; and the liturgy at Devils Tower, near silence and music. One law covers both: the visitation is real, and ordinary life cannot hold it. The household’s noise is the world the music overrides, and light runs through both, the refrigerator door, the headlamps, the ship. But the seam is wide. The film plays the destruction of a family partly as comedy and then asks its audience to rejoice when the father leaves for good, and the two judgments do not meet; the government plot, with its false catastrophe and its dead cattle, belongs to a paranoid thriller the ending forgets. One physics, with a seam that holds the axis at 7.5.
Dolly Parton · Music
7.6 · Tier III
One law roughly governs the record: a mountain woman’s voice telling the truth plainly, in tenderness, comedy, loneliness and hope. Take the two most distant elements, “Traveling Man”, a comic tale of a mother who runs off with her daughter’s lover, and “A Better Place to Live”, an earnest, hymn-like plea. They obey the same law at the level of the voice, which carries one candour through both, and the range from comedy to the sacred is wider than many country records of the year attempt. But the Wagoner songs speak in another writer’s manner, darker and more rhetorical, and the side-two songs around them obey the genre’s conventions more than the record’s own physics. The law holds through the singer more than through the songs.
Harold Ramis · Film
7.4 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Phil driving a stolen truck into a quarry with the groundhog at the wheel, as farce, and Phil holding the dying old man in the alley at night. One law governs both: everything resets but what Phil does to himself, and nothing can be kept except what he becomes. The farce is the law tested by appetite, the alley its limit, since some things no number of days can change. The diner confession, the piano lessons and the tyre changed for the old women obey it too, across a range wide for a comedy. What holds the axis at 7.5: the law bends where the genre needs it. The loop ends without its own logic having closed it, and the town’s adoration at the party belongs to a cheerier film than the alley does.
The Cure · Music
7.4 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: In Between Days, a fast, bright pop song, and Sinking, a slow, low descent. They obey one law at the level of voice and subject: the same man, the same fear of closeness and of time, in a fast tempo and a slow one, and the record moves from the one to the other with intent. The range is wide, flamenco guitar, Japanese scale, waltz, saxophone, abrasion, and the voice and the melodic habit of the songs bind most of it; this is not narrowness. But the law loosens in the excursions. Kyoto Song and The Blood obey their borrowed colours more than the record’s own physics, and Screw obeys mainly its bass. Temper holds the eclecticism together more than a single musical law.
Talk Talk · Music
7.3 · Tier III
One law governs the record, roughly: a bright surface over a doubting voice, the self’s claim heard as half a plea. The two most distant elements are Dum Dum Girl, a fast single in the first album’s manner, and Renée, a long, near-still piece of fretless bass and exposed voice. They obey the same law at the level of the voice, which carries one unease through both and binds the record more firmly than its two manners suggest; at the level of the music they belong to two bands, the one Talk Talk had been and the one it was becoming. The range is wider than a synth-pop album’s, which is credit. But the two manners are held side by side rather than under one physics, and the faster songs of side two obey the law by habit. No break; a seam that shows.
Coldplay · Music
7.2 · Tier III
One law governs the record: an earnest voice pleading against time, under a sound that gathers from restraint to release. Take the two most distant elements, Politik’s hammered chords and public list and Green Eyes, a quiet acoustic song to one person. Both are a plea for an answer that does not come, one to the world and one to a lover, the voice at the front and in earnest. The title track obeys too, its violent resolve the same plea turned to action. No song breaks the tone. But the range is narrow, one register, one palette, one dynamic shape, and narrowness is not coherence. The law holds because little is asked of it.
Constantinian, Crusader and later builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Crusader choir, Romanesque, vaulted and Western, and the Ethiopian monastery on the roof over the chapel of St Helena, its cells and its dome in the open air; or the Coptic chapel built against the west end of the Edicule. In style, structure and community they obey no one law. One law does govern where everything stands: the topography of the Passion, each event at its station, and the Status Quo, each place to its holder. It is a real order, and it reaches from the cave below to the roof above. But it is a law of meaning and possession, not of form. What holds the axis here, the lowest of the twelve, is that the building’s physics is a sequence of campaigns, each in its own grammar, with the joins left showing.
Many masters, from 1386; facade completed in the nineteenth century · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the pedimented, classical portals and windows of the lower front, and the Gothic tracery of the apse windows at the other end of the axis. They do not obey one law. The front sets the two idioms one above the other; the Borromean presbytery and choir bring a classical order into the Gothic interior; the nineteenth-century spires are Gothic Revival on a medieval body. What holds the whole is real: one marble, one vertical rhythm of pinnacle and statue, one stepped section carried from the first campaign to the last, a roof read as one field. That law is material and rhythmic, not architectural, and contradiction at the most visible place holds the axis lowest.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the ethereal praise sonnets of the stilnovist years and the tenzone’s jokes about Forese’s wife in a cold bed. Do they obey one law? Only loosely. A single intellect runs through them, always testing what a form and a register can do, and a single question, what love and virtue are, joins the praise poems to the stony poems and the stony poems to the moral canzoni, which argue over the same ground. What holds the axis here, level with the lowest of the twelve: the body has no governing physics. The doctrine that love ennobles, the stony doctrine that love petrifies and wants to wound, and the moral poems’ turn from love to justice stand side by side, uncorrected, because no book reconciles them. The range is wide, and it counts; the coherence is a career’s, not a work’s.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Isla’s death in the ossuary, held still, and the last scene, men in tracksuits and blond wigs leaping and killing infected in a bright acrobatic brawl. One law covers both: each is what a people does with catastrophe, the one making a memorial, the other making a cult out of the culture it was raised on, which the prologue had shown in children’s television and a frightened boy. The archive montage, the feast and the temple obey the same law: people survive by ritual, and the rite chooses what they become. The range is wide, and the law holds across it. What holds the figure is that the law is legible in argument more than in feeling: the coda arrives as a break, in a tone the film has not prepared, and the viewer must make the connection the film does not.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the blinding of Arvind, held off screen by a spoon and a cry, and the dance on the station platform under the credits. One law is meant to govern both: the boy’s life, however cruel, is written toward this end, and the song is the fable’s reward for what the riot and the blinding took. Much of the range obeys it. The comedy of the latrine, the Taj Mahal and the call centre answers to the same law as the riot, for each is a scene in which the boy survives by his wits and learns an answer. What holds the axis is where the law bends: the horror is too great for the comfort the fable gives it, and the realism of place pulls against the fairy tale of plot, so the end feels granted rather than earned.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Hoffman screaming down a phone in a mattress store in Provo, broad farce, and the embrace in silhouette in Honolulu, held still in the light. One law governs both, pressure and release. The world presses on Barry as noise, threat and shame, and each movement builds until it breaks, in rage or in love. The farce is pressure, the embrace release, and the sisters’ party, the wrecked restroom and the slow accumulation of pudding obey the same law. The range is wide for a short film. What holds the axis is that the law bends where the plot must resolve: in the Utah plot, where genre logic takes over, and in the ease of the Provo ending, which the law permits but does not earn.
Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the leaning, pinched glass of the corner tower and the staggered, rippling river front of the block. One law governs both, movement given to a static mass, the front made to sway while answering the row’s lines, and the towers’ opposition, glass and concrete, open and closed, is the law’s own content, the couple, not a contradiction. The law carries round the corner from the bridge view to the river view, which is the building’s range. What bends it: the mesh crown belongs to a looser, more improvised order than the controlled undulation below it; the side and rear fronts on Resslova obey the law weakly; and the interiors answer to the office floor, another physics. The range covered is narrow, a corner and a front, and narrowness is not coherence. It clears the floor, not by much more.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the curving eastern leg sliding down to the podium, and the flat prow of the SkyPark over the void at the north. Do they obey one law? In part. The towers’ law is a straight post and a leaning one meeting, a frame of lean and tension; the SkyPark’s is a horizontal hull laid across three heads, curved in plan and level in section, a different object set upon them. The law that joins them is the trilithon, posts and a lintel, and from the bay it holds. Close in, it divides: the leaning legs, the atria, the glazed slabs and the planted, furnished deck belong to different systems, joined by the figure rather than generated by one rule. A coherent emblem, and a less coherent building.
Chris Sanders · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Take the two farthest elements: the opossum’s slapstick of feigned death and the real death that ends the winter for the old and the weak, or the gosling’s whole family lost under Roz’s foot. One law holds them, the island’s: everything eats or is eaten, and comedy and grief are both ways the island speaks of it. That is a real coherence across a wide range. Two things strain it. The last act brings in a science-fiction physics of tractor beams, lasers and armies of robots that the island film had not prepared, and the register shifts from nature drama to action spectacle. And the comic animals sometimes keep the timing of a sitcom rather than the island’s law.
James Montgomery Flagg · Visual art
7.2 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the starred hat at the top of the sheet and the line for the nearest recruiting station at its foot, the most emblematic and the most practical. One law holds them: everything is addressed outward, to you and to an act. The hat names who is asking, the eyes and the finger find the one asked, the words state the demand, and the station is where it is met. Nothing in the picture turns inward or away; there is no background and no second figure. The law is complete and unbroken. What holds the axis is the rubric’s warning that narrowness is not coherence: the law governs one figure and two lines, and a unity this narrow is easily achieved.
David Childs (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the podium at the street and the mast at the tip. One law governs the shaft between them: square, cut, turned, square again, every face a triangle, every triangle the same glass. The law reaches down into the base, which keeps the square, and up into the parapet, which ends as the square turned. The two extremes obey it unevenly. The podium is a defensive block faced in fins, a different body set under the crystal; the mast is broadcast equipment on a prism, the radome that would have joined it to the shaft’s law omitted. The range governed is also narrow, one geometric figure at one scale, and narrowness is not coherence. It clears the floor, not by much.
Banksy · Visual art
7.0 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the black, faceless, grounded figure and the red, rising, emblematic heart. One law governs both, distance opened between the held and the holder: the string drawn from the hand, the colour withdrawn from the girl and given to the thing leaving her, the composition drifting upward and away. The words of the first wall turn the law toward consolation without breaking it, and even the image’s afterlife keeps to it, in a shredded canvas whose balloon alone stays whole inside the frame. What holds the axis is that narrowness is not coherence: the range between the farthest elements is one figure and one object, and the law, once seen, governs a very small territory.
John Nash · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the Indian exterior and the Chinese interior, or Holland’s classical villa and Nash’s domes. Do they obey one law? The law is fantasy and display, and it holds better than the parts suggest: the serpent, the dragon, the lotus and the palm recur inside and out, and the palm columns of the kitchen carry the same fiction into a working room. What holds the figure is that the two Easts are joined by assertion, not by an inner logic; the classical core shows through in the regular plan and the enfilade, and the domes and minarets sit on the plan rather than growing from it. The range is wide, India, China, the classical house and industrial iron, and the coherence is of taste more than of structure.
Pearl Jam · Music
7.5 · Tier III
One law governs most of the record: a self pressed by what consumes it, answering by fury, by withdrawal or by grief. Take the two most distant elements: Spin the Black Circle, a short punk blast of pleasure in a record turning, and Hey Foxymophandlemama, nearly eight minutes of found voices over a loop. The first is a release from the pressure, the second its dissolution, a record walking out of its own voice into other people’s; read that way the extremes are the law’s two exits, and the medical frame holds them in one case. But the law is stated more than it governs: Bugs obeys it as a joke, Aye Davanita obeys nothing in particular, and Better Man and Nothingman obey an older law, the law of the couple. The range is wide; the seams show.
William Friedkin · Film
7.4 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the dig in northern Iraq, with its heat, its hammers and the statue against the sun, and a bedroom in Georgetown filled with frost. They obey one law, the same plain observation and the same signs, dogs fighting, a clock stopping, the face of the statue, so that the supernatural is never a different physics from the street. The range runs from a film-set comedy to the crucifix scene. The law strains in three places: Kinderman’s comic manner, with his film talk and his cold, sits outside it as relief; the prologue’s link to Georgetown is asserted by cuts more than joined; and the film’s question, illness or possession, is answered in a way the realist first half does not prepare.
Oasis · Music
7.2 · Tier III
One law governs the record: the chorus as communal arrival, every song driving toward a moment a crowd can sing, through ringing open chords and a voice held long. Take the two most distant elements, the near-acoustic Wonderwall and the helicopter and guitar wall of Morning Glory: both obey it, and so do the music-hall She’s Electric and the long Champagne Supernova. The fragments and the framing sea keep the parts under one sky. What holds the figure is range. One tempo band, one harmonic language and one register of feeling, between swagger and wistfulness, give the law little to govern, and narrowness is not coherence. She’s Electric obeys by pastiche, Hello and Roll With It by habit.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
7.0 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the diner, where eight men in suits argue about Madonna and a dollar tip, and the warehouse floor, where Orange lies in a pool of blood for an hour. One law governs both: these men live by talk and by rules about talk, and the rules hold until blood makes them false. The tipping debate is the code, Pink’s refusal to share; the warehouse is the code failing, White sharing everything with the one man who lied. The torture obeys the same law, a performance for a radio audience of one, and so do the commode story and Joe’s list of names. The tone, comic and brutal at once, does not break. But the Joe and Eddie scenes in the flashbacks lean to plain gangster comedy, and the standoff’s logic is looser than the law it closes.
Thomas Heatherwick · Architecture
6.8 · Tier II
Take the two most distant elements: the lowest landing, almost at the plaza, and the top rim, about 46 m above. One law governs both: the same module of two opposed flights and a landing, the same copper underside, the same widening circle. The law is exact and admits almost no exception, and the lift, though another physics, is threaded through it without breaking the figure. Two things hold the axis. The law is narrow, one module repeated about eighty times at one scale, so that its coherence comes cheaply, and narrowness is not coherence. And the mesh of 2024 obeys a different law, the safety barrier’s, laid over the lattice rather than grown from it, so that the upper and lower climbs no longer read alike.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Take the two most distant elements: the Roman front with its arches and columns, and the Gothic nave inside it, with its pointed chapel arches and timber roof. They do not obey one law. The shell is governed by antique proportion and the logic of the wall; the interior by the friars’ plan; and the Malatesta chapels are fitted in a third idiom, their openings framed by carved piers rich, flat and nearer the late Gothic in spirit than Alberti’s mass. Within each part the law is strong: front and flanks are rigorously one, and the chapels are one with each other. The whole is three laws held together by a programme of names and ciphers more than by one geometry, and the unfinished front and missing east end leave even the shell’s law unresolved. That is what holds the axis lowest.
Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements. Outside, one law governs: the same two orders, the same rhythm, the same colour and roofline on every front, varied only to answer the site, and over a large territory it holds. But the work as it stands includes its interior, and there the law breaks. Rastrelli’s Baroque in the staircase and the church, Stasov’s late classicism in the Armorial and St George Halls, Bryullov’s malachite and Pompeian rooms, the Gothic library of the 1890s and the rococo revival of the empress’s rooms obey different physics, and the building does not reconcile them; it houses them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the only law spanning them is the court’s ceremony, a law of use and not of form.
Horace Jones and John Wolfe Barry · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the hydraulic engines and accumulators below the south approach, and the stone pinnacles at the tops of the towers. They obey one law only by convention. The working law of the bridge is steel and water pressure; the visible law of the towers is a castle’s, masonry and defence. The split is legible in the work itself: the painted steel of the walkways and side spans runs into stone towers that pretend to carry it, and the chains disappear into masonry they do not bear on. What holds the axis above its floor is the strength of the composition, a strict symmetry about the centre of the river, two gatehouses and two shore towers, the chains swagging down from tower to shore so that the three spans read as one figure; and the costume is consistent with itself throughout. Coherent as a picture, divided as a structure.
Wes Anderson · Film
6.9 · Tier II
Take the two most distant elements: the bookstore robbery, played as farce around Dignan’s checklist, and the prison yard, played as melancholy in slow motion. One law governs both: the game taken seriously, so that comedy and sadness are the same earnestness seen from two sides. The romance obeys it, a love declared through a translator, earnest and absurd at once; Mr. Henry’s betrayal fits, since the game’s adults are the ones who do not play it. Where the law bends is Bob’s subplot, which tilts toward sitcom with its brother, its patch of marijuana and its household, and the motel stretch, where the tone relaxes into a naturalism the rest does not share. The range is moderate and held; the coherence partly reflects narrowness.
Michael Graves · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the garlands on the Main Street front, flat blue ribbons on a pale wall, and the keystone of dark glass on Fifth Avenue, a mass bearing down the height of the front. One law governs both: classical elements abstracted to flat signs, scaled to the size of the building and coded by colour, earth at the base, the body pale, the order in a deep red. The four fronts are two pairs under that law, and colour carries it round the block. What bends it: the interior answers to another physics, the office floor, so that the building is a figure outside and a plan inside; and Portlandia, modelled and nearly naturalistic, belongs to another world from the drawn classicism she kneels on. The law is narrow, and narrowness is not coherence. It clears the floor narrowly.
Tom Wright (Atkins) · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: the white fabric screen, pale and taut, seen from the sea, and the atrium within it, banded in gold, blue and red, with fountains at its foot. Do they obey one law? Outside, a clear law governs: a sail of white membrane between dark trusses and a steel mast, abstract, maritime, reduced to a few lines and carried from the island’s curve to the spire. Inside, another physics rules: saturated colour, gilded ornament, a palace of display. The two are joined only by the atrium’s void, which the screen closes and the interior fills. They differ in physics and do not contradict each other in structure, but the building is two works under one roof, a figure by the engineer-architect and a palace by the interior designer. The exterior law is exact and narrow, and narrowness is not coherence; the split holds the axis at the floor.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.1 · Tier III
Take the two most distant elements: Lee joking in a bar with Joe Guidry, near drawing-room comedy, and the two men’s bodies passing into each other on a jungle floor. One law governs both, the need to reach another being without the risk of asking, comic in the bar and literal in the vision; the withdrawal, the hands, the shot glass and the deathbed obey it. What holds the figure is that the law bends at the joins. The journey belongs to a looser film; Cotter’s compound plays at a pitch of comic grotesque the film has not set up; and the epilogue moves the law from desire to guilt through an event outside the film’s own story, so that its most distant elements meet partly by the audience’s knowledge of Burroughs. The parts strain; they do not contradict one another.
Jack Vettriano · Visual art
6.5 · Tier II
Take the two most distant elements: the butler at the right edge, upright, in uniform, holding the umbrella out, and the woman at the centre, turned in the man’s arms. One law governs them: everything on the beach serves a single staged romance and is ranked by its nearness to the couple, servants at the edges, the empty shore and the weather around them, the sky a backdrop to the dance. The idiom holds throughout, one period of costume, one tonal key, one temperature of feeling, and nothing breaks it. Two faults are charged. The weather is not one law, since the wind that moves the maid and the clouds does not visibly move the couple, who seem to stand in another air; and the range is narrow, one beach, one instant, one register. Held at the floor.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.7 · Tier II
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of the pool hall, Biff Wilcox’s posturing and Smokey’s opportunism, and the shot that kills the Motorcycle Boy. One law reaches both: the boys act out a legend in a world where the legend has ended, and the stylisation that makes the pool hall a stage makes the death a myth’s close. The flight above the street and the father’s flat obey the same physics of a town seen as a dream of itself. The law strains at both ends of the range. The plain scenes of school and Patty sit uneasily inside the stylisation, as if from the companion film, and the ride to the Pacific is a release that the rest of the film’s law has not prepared.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.4 · Tier II
Take the two most distant elements: Joey Zasa’s press conference and street festa, played near caricature, and Michael’s confession in the Vatican garden. One law reaches both in principle: every step toward legitimacy draws Michael back into killing, and the respectable and the criminal are the same men. The opera, the murders and the Church’s bankers obey it. In practice the law lapses for long stretches. The Zasa hour and Vincent’s swagger belong to a looser, generic gangster picture; the cousins’ romance is played in a sweeter register than the film can hold; the Atlantic City massacre answers to spectacle, not to the law. The end restores it, an old man dying alone in a Sicilian yard as Vito died in his garden, but the restoration comes late.