Axis 12 of twelve · MEG
How many orders of reality does the work successfully hold in one structure? Achieved, not attempted. Integrated, not merely present. Consciousness, the family, labour, the state, history, the sacred, the natural order — held together, not listed.
Ungated with its own floor at 6.0, because short forms cannot reach the upper bands. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
1754 works · ungated · the rubric
Dante Alighieri · Literature
9.7 · Tier V
Every order is present, and one journey holds them all. Consciousness: the pilgrim’s fear, shame and growth. The family: Ugolino’s sons, Cacciaguida’s lineage, Nella praying her husband up the mountain (Purg. XXIII). The state: Florence, Italy as “A ship without a pilot in great tempest” (Purg. VI), the Empire from Aeneas to Justinian (Par. VI). History, the sacred and the natural order: the embryology of Purg. XXV, the optics of Par. II, the storm that carries off Buonconte’s body (Purg. V). They are integrated, not listed: one moral physics places each, and the pilgrim passes through each in turn. Labour is held more weakly, living mostly in the similes rather than as a subject.
Virgil · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Many orders, held by one act, founding. The mind: Dido’s sleepless night (4.522–532), Turnus’ dream-paralysis (12.908–914). The family across three generations, Anchises, Aeneas and Ascanius, repeated in Evander and Pallas, Mezentius and Lausus, Daunus and Turnus, and gathered in Turnus’ last plea, “Thou hadst a father once” (12.933–934). Labour: the bees of Carthage (1.430–436), the woman at her spinning before dawn (8.408–413), the Cyclopes’ forge (8.424–453). The state: Latinus’ council and Drances’ quarrel with Turnus (11.234–444), the treaty and its terms (12.189–191). History from Troy to Actium; peoples and languages, kept by the terms of the peace (12.834). They are integrated, not listed: Carthage stops building when Dido loves (4.86–89). Economy is held weakly, as gold and greed, “auri sacra fames” (3.57).
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Many orders are held by one question, who is guilty of the father’s death: consciousness at its limit, in Ivan’s double; the family, with four sons and three kinds of father; money, as a ledger that balances to the rouble; the Church and the State; the law as investigation, protocol and jury; medicine, in three doctors who contradict one another, and the press; the nation and Europe; class and servitude, from the serf-boy and the hounds to a cook sold “for sixty paper roubles” (Pt. II, Bk. VI, ch. 1); childhood, as a whole order, in Book X; the sacred. They are integrated, not listed: the three thousand is the motive, and the general’s stone is Ilusha’s. Labour and the natural order are held thinly; the factory children are one sentence of a sermon.
James Joyce · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Every order is present, and one day in one city holds them all: consciousness, in three interiors fully rendered; the family, in Bloom, Molly, Milly and the dead Rudy, and the hungry Dedalus daughters, “She is drowning. Agenbite.” (Wandering Rocks, 10); labour, in canvassing, the newspaper’s machines and the undertakers’ trade; the state, in the empire, the viceregal cavalcade and the citizen; history, “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (Nestor, 2); the sacred, in the parodied Mass, Elijah and the funeral; the natural order, in the sea, the stars and the body. They are integrated, not listed. The sacred is the weaker order, present more as parody and residue than as one the book inhabits.
John Milton · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The orders are held in one structure. Consciousness: Eve waking (IV.449–491), Adam waking (VIII.253–282), Satan’s soliloquies. Marriage and the family: the first wedding, the first quarrel, Cain and Abel. Labour: the gardeners’ work is the occasion of the Fall (IX.205–225), the curse is “with labour I must earn / My bread” (X.1054–1055), a smith stands at his forge (XI.564–573). The state: the infernal council, Nimrod’s tyranny, liberty “Twinned” with “right reason” (XII.84–85). History from Abel to the Judgment; creation, astronomy, the seasons tilted by the Fall (X.668–687). One act of disobedience reaches them all. Held short of the ceiling because the world beyond two people is seen in vision, not lived.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Every order the axis names is present, and one structure holds them. Consciousness: Andrew’s sky, Pierre’s dreams, Petya’s fugue, Nikolenka’s dream. The family: four households across fifteen years and three generations. Labour and money: Count Ilya’s mortgages, Pierre’s steward’s books, Dron, who never forgot “a single shock of the whole corn crop” (X.IX), Nicholas’s farming. The state and the court; war from the commander-in-chief to the drummer boy; history and its historians; the sacred from the icon to Karataev’s God; nature from the oak to the frost; death, birth and old age; and the question of freedom. They are integrated: Alexander’s vow to “eat potatoes with the meanest of my peasants” (XII.III) is answered by Karataev’s potato with salt. Held a step down because the peasant order is seen mostly from above, and the French mostly from outside.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The orders are as many as any work holds, and the Vorspiel announces them: from heaven through the world to hell. Consciousness and its division, two souls in one breast (1112–1113); the family, in Gretchen’s mother, brother, sister and child; the town, the church, the university; the state in bankruptcy, the court, money, war and the Church’s share of victory; labour, engineering, colonisation and forced work; science, from geology to the man in the glass; antiquity and the Middle Ages married; art and poetry; nature; the sacred, from the Prologue to the last scene. One life and one wager integrate them. Held a step from the top because in Part Two some orders are exhibited in procession rather than bound into action.
Homer · Literature
9.6 · Tier V
Every order is present, held in one structure. Consciousness: Achilles questioning the economy of honour (IX), Hector’s soliloquy under the wall (22.99–130). The family: Hector, Andromache and the child, Priam and Hecuba, the absent Peleus. Labour: reapers in a rich man’s field (11.67–69), a woman weighing wool “that she may win a meagre wage for her children” (12.435), the ploughmen on the shield. The state: the assembly, Thersites beaten with the sceptre (2.265–266), the elders judging a blood-price (18.497–508). History, the sacred and the natural order: genealogies, sacrifice, and the storms, rivers and beasts of the similes. What is thin is the sacred as a moral order: justice appears only in a simile, against men who “give crooked judgments” (16.387).
Homer · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The orders are held in one structure, the household, and one journey passes through them all. Consciousness: Odysseus deliberating on the breaking raft (V.354–364), Penelope’s dream and her doubt at the bed. The family: three generations armed together (XXIV.514–515). Labour is held better than in almost any epic: the raft built timber by timber (V.243–261), the swineherd’s farm, the weakest woman at the mill praying for the suitors’ last feast (XX.105–119), Laertes digging round a plant. The state: the assembly, the Phaeacian council, the Cyclopes with neither assemblies nor laws (IX.112). The dead fill the eleventh book; sea, storm and garden the rest. The city is held more thinly, its politics settled by fiat.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The orders are many and one question holds them: what a person needs. Consciousness and madness, “O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!” (1.5); two families; the state in partition and invasion; law, “handy-dandy” (4.6); the economy of “shake the superflux to them” (3.4); service and labour, the First Servant who dies stopping a duke (3.7) and the sampire-gatherer’s “dreadful trade” (4.6); sex, “Let copulation thrive” (4.6); age, “Age is unnecessary” (2.4); the gods and the “promis’d end” (5.3). They are integrated, not listed: the storm reaches king and beggar alike. History is held weakly. The setting is legendary and pre-Christian, and the Fool jokes about it: “I live before his time” (3.2).
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Many orders, held by one road and one pair. Consciousness, at the edge of sanity and back. The household: the niece, the housekeeper’s wages paid first in the will, Teresa and Sanchica. Labour and money: Andrés’s nine months’ wages, Sancho’s salary, the lashes priced by the stroke. The state: the Santa Hermandad, the galleys, Barataria’s courts, the expulsion. War and empire: Lepanto, the Goleta, Algiers and its renegades. Class, in Sancho’s grandmother’s “only two families in the world, the Haves and the Haven’ts” (II.XX). The Church, the print trade, animals and death. They are integrated: Montesinos’s underworld runs on money. Held a step down because the natural order is thin and the cities come late.
Herman Melville · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Many orders, held through one body, the whale’s, and one hull: consciousness, “thy thoughts have created a creature in thee” (ch. 44); friendship as marriage (ch. 10); labour, in the line, the try-works and the squeeze of the hand; wages and capital, law and property, the state and usurpation (chs. 16, 33, 46, 89–90); empire and race; five faiths; natural history and the cosmos, “the invisible spheres were formed in fright” (ch. 42). They are integrated, not listed: the old whale’s oil lights “the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all” (ch. 81). Held below the top by the family and women. Ahab’s “girl-wife”, Starbuck’s Mary and the nursery under the boats stay at a distance; inside the hull the book is male and maritime.
Marcel Proust · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Many orders are held in one consciousness and integrated by one law: consciousness, at its most exactly rendered; the family, in mother, grandmother, aunt and father; love and sexuality in every form the work can name; class, from the Faubourg to Françoise’s kitchen; the state and history, from Swann’s lunch at the Élysée to the Dreyfus Affair and the war; medicine; art, in four imagined masters, Bergotte, Vinteuil, Elstir and Berma; nature, in hawthorn, sea and weather; the church whose fourth dimension is “Time” (Combray II). Labour is held thinly: the kitchen-maid appears chiefly as Françoise’s victim, made to prepare the asparagus that gives her asthma. The sacred is held as aesthetic residue, not as an order the work inhabits.
Cao Xueqin · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Many orders, and the household integrates them. The state: a consort at court, the magistrate’s list of families no case may touch (ch. 4), Jia Yucun’s career. The economy: rents, usury, the garden farmed out, funeral allowances. The family: three generations, two houses, legitimate and concubine lines, Tanchun against her own mother. Class and labour: maids, stewards, actresses, the country poor in Liu Laolao. The sacred: Buddhist and Taoist in the frame, nuns, Jia Jing’s fatal elixirs. The arts: poetry, painting, theatre, the garden itself. The body, medicine and desire, desire between men included. Consciousness, in the analysis of the lovers’ quarrel (ch. 29). The cosmic, in the stone and the registers. Held under the top because war, and the field labour that pays the rents, are seen only at the edges, and consciousness is shown more in speech and gesture than in sustained interior.
Vyasa (attributed) · Literature
9.1 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. The family, a dynasty’s quarrel over inheritance across generations; marriage, a wife shared by five brothers, and widowhood; the state, the king’s duty, the assembly, embassy, war and the ruined peace; law, the dispute over a wife staked at dice; labour and caste, the charioteer’s son and the tribal archer; the natural order, twelve years in the forest; the sacred, in gods, sages, sacrifice and liberation; death and what follows; the gods and the cycle of the ages. One action holds them, the succession war, which every order serves and suffers. Women’s fate is no theme set aside but a hinge of the plot: Ambā, Kuntī, Gāndhārī, Draupadī. Held below the top by the didactic books, where orders of reality are surveyed rather than integrated, and by an inner life given in speech and debate, never rendered from within, with labour and ordinary life thin.
Anonymous · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Many orders are held under one question, whether the world is just. Consciousness: sleeplessness and dreams (7:4, 7:14). The family: ten children dead under one roof (1:19), kin estranged (19:13–19), daughters who inherit (42:15). Labour: the hireling (7:1–2), the poor who tread the winepresses “and suffer thirst” (24:11), the miner (28:1–11). Law: an arbiter (9:33), a witness in heaven (16:19), a signed brief (31:35). The city gate (29:7), kingship undone (12:17–25), Sheol and the court of heaven; and the natural order as no other biblical book holds it, from the stars to Leviathan. They are held together, not listed. History is the order held weakly: a timeless Uz, with no nation and no event.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The orders are many, held by one condition, a rot no one can see whole: consciousness; two families broken in parallel; the state in succession, “Popp’d in between the election and my hopes” (5.2), in rebellion, “Laertes shall be king!” (4.5), and at war over “a little patch of ground” (4.4); law, labour and class in the graveyard, “the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier” (5.1); the theatre as a trade (2.2); the sacred, from purgatory to a prayer that fails (3.3). Integrated, not listed: the worm makes king and beggar “two dishes, but to one table” (4.3). Nature is held weakly, “a sterile promontory” (2.2), a frame, not a force.
Aeschylus · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Many orders are held in one action of under 3,800 lines, and they are integrated, not listed. The family: marriage, parent and child, siblings, a curse handed down. War: Troy, and Ares who “barters the bodies of men for gold” (Ag. 437–444). The state: tyranny in Argos, the court in Athens. The sacred: the old chthonic powers and the new Olympians brought to terms. The natural order: the eagles and the pregnant hare, the storm at sea (650–673), the closing blessings on soil, flock and birth. One law of consequence places each. Two orders are held lightly. Consciousness is brief: Orestes deliberates in a line, “Pylades, what shall I do?” (Cho. 899). Labour appears in the Watchman, the Herald’s camp (Ag. 555–562) and the Nurse.
Ovid · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Transformation holds many orders in one structure: the cosmos and its elements (1.5 to 88, 15.237 to 258); the natural order, with sixteen traits surviving nunc quoque, even now, in rocks, birds, springs and a river’s gold; the gods; the family, from Procne and Itys to Baucis and Philemon; sex and gender; art and the artist; the city and history, from Thebes to Rome and Augustus; philosophy, in Pythagoras; and consciousness, in Narcissus and in Medea divided against herself, “Video meliora proboque, / deteriora sequor” (7.20 to 21), I see the better and approve it, I follow the worse. They are integrated, not listed: each enters through a body changing. Labour and the state as an institution are held more thinly; cities enter as genealogy and foundation, rarely as order.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Held, not listed. Consciousness: Anna’s last day, Levin’s despair, Karenin’s chasm, Dolly’s reverie on the road to Vozdvizhenskoe. The family: three marriages, the children, Seryozha’s divided loyalty, a birth and a death nursed. Labour: the mowing, the farm accounts, the peasants’ distrust, the hay. The state: the ministry, the commission on the native tribes, the zemstvo, the elections, divorce law. History: the aftermath of emancipation, the railways, the Serbian war of 1876. The sacred: Karenin’s spiritualism, Kitty’s and Varenka’s piety, Levin’s faith. The natural order: the snipe, the storm, the stars, the bees. All of it passes through two lives and their few neighbours. Held a step down only because history here is a ground, not an agent.
Ferdowsi · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Many orders are held in one structure, and the kingship integrates them. The sacred: God, the glory, Zoroaster’s coming, Mazdak, the Arab conquest. The state and history: succession, rebellion, embassy, war and its finance. The family: fathers and sons above all, mothers in Tahmineh and Farangis, brothers in Salm and Tur and in Shaghad. Love: Zal and Rudabeh, Bizhan and Manizheh, Khosrow and Shirin. Labour and class: Kaveh the blacksmith, the shoemaker refused, the water-carrier who feeds a king in disguise. The natural order: the Simorgh, Rakhsh, the mountain and the hunt. Civilisation: fire, writing, chess and books from India. Consciousness is held more thinly, the inner life spoken, not rendered, and the Sasanian reigns hold their orders in sequence rather than in one action.
James Joyce · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Many orders, held in one family and one night. Consciousness: the sleeping mind, its slips and fusions. The family: father, mother, twin sons and daughter, with Kate the servant and the potman. Labour: the publican’s trade, the postman’s round, the washerwomen. The state and history: Danes and Normans, Cromwell, the Union, Parnell, the Free State, Waterloo and the Crimea, and the world in Vico’s ages. The sacred: the Mass, Patrick and Kevin, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Koran, the Upanishads. The natural order: the river from source to sea, hill, stone, tree, weather and stars. They are integrated by fusion, each order the same family again. Held a step down: the integration rests on allusion more than on lived particulars, and catalogues do part of the holding.
Charles Dickens · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Held, not listed, by one figure: the suit and the fever reach every order. The law and the state: Chancery, the Inns, the law-writer, the solicitors, the government of Coodle and Doodle, an election in Rouncewell’s town. Class: Chesney Wold, the ironmaster’s rising house, the shabby genteel, the brickmakers, Tom-all-Alone’s. Labour: the law-stationer’s trade, the trooper’s shooting gallery, the ironworks. The family, in a dozen versions, most of them failing. Consciousness: Esther’s half entire, Lady Dedlock’s frozen boredom, Richard’s slow ruin. The sacred: Chadband, Mrs Pardiggle, Jo’s dying prayer. Empire: Borrioboola-Gha. The body: the smallpox, the doctor, the combustion. Crime and the police. The natural order and history: the fog, the rain over Lincolnshire, the primeval mud, and the landed order passing at the close.
Victor Hugo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Held, and on a scale few novels approach. Consciousness: Valjean’s night at Montreuil, Javert’s undoing, Marius’s political conversion. The family: chosen fatherhood at the book’s centre, Valjean and Cosette, Gillenormand and Marius, and the Thénardiers’ abandoned sons. Labour: the jet-bead works at Montreuil-sur-Mer that Valjean makes prosper, Fantine’s needlework, the galleys, the fieldwork at Faverolles. The state: police, courts, prisons, the mayoralty. History: Waterloo, the Restoration, the July Monarchy, the insurrection of 1832. The sacred: the bishop, the perpetual adoration of the Petit-Picpus, the deathbed. The city as an organism, down to its sewers and its slang. The natural order is the thinnest, the garden of the rue Plumet and the Seine. Held a step below the top because some orders are set out in essays beside the story rather than carried through it.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.5 · Tier V
More orders are held than in any other work of music, and in one structure, the ring: the natural order of river, forest, fire and earth-goddess; labour and capital, in Nibelheim’s enslaved smiths, the hoard and the giants paid for building; law, in Wotan’s treaties, Fricka’s marriage law and Hunding’s right of hospitality; the family, in a father and his daughters, the Wälsung twins’ incest, a foster-father and a half-brother; the state and war, in the Gibichung court and the Valkyries gathering the slain; consciousness, in Wotan and Brünnhilde; the sacred and its end. They are integrated: the gold’s theft pays for Valhalla, and the god’s contract dooms the family he founds. Held below the literary summit because history appears as myth, not as a society’s time, and the human world is the thinnest.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.5 · Tier V
Many orders are held in one structure, from the first light to the ancestors of Christ: the cosmos of light, sun, moon, plants and waters; the sacred, through creation and fall to the expectation of redemption; the natural order, in the Flood; history, in the generations of Matthew 1 and the four deliverances of Israel, where politics enters as violence; the pagan world beside the Hebrew, sibyls enthroned with prophets; the family; consciousness, in Jeremiah’s brooding and the Persian Sibyl with her book held close. One vertical structure places each at its height. Held below the top: labour appears only as Noah digging, the social world stops at the family, the state is an episode, and everything routes through the body.
Anonymous (the Yahwist and the other sources) · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Many orders, held in one structure, the line of descent. The cosmos and the natural order: the world made, nearly unmade, and a covenant with every living creature (9). The sacred in every chapter. The family over four generations, its marriages, barrenness, favouritism and reconciliation. Labour, from “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” (3:19) to Cain the tiller, Abel the keeper of sheep and Jacob’s twenty years of herding. The nations, in the table of chapter 10. The state, in Pharaoh’s court and in a famine when the Egyptians sell their land for bread (47:20). History as genealogy, from Adam to the seventy souls who go down to Egypt (46:27). Consciousness is the order held most lightly, given in act, not thought: Joseph turns aside to weep (42:24, 43:30, 45:2).
Anonymous · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Many orders are held in one structure: the sacred, from Creation to the Last Judgment; the natural order, in the zodiac and seasons of the Royal Portal; labour, in the labours of the months and the trades in the windows; learning, in the Liberal Arts; the state, in the kings of Judah, the royal heraldry of the north rose, Charlemagne’s window and the counts who gave glass; history, in the genealogy of Christ; the family, in Saint Anne with the infant Virgin and the trades as households; the town, in its economy at the foot of the windows. They are integrated, not listed: one structure places each at its height, and the visitor passes through them in walking the building. What is held weakly is consciousness: the inner life of a person is not here, and the figures are types.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The orders held are many, and the frame integrates them rather than listing them. The estates: chivalry, the Church in all its ranks and parasites, law, medicine, commerce, the guilds, the land. Marriage, argued from four sides. Labour and money: the Reeve’s accounts, the Shipman’s loan, the Canon’s Yeoman’s ruined alchemy. The sacred: the Prioress’s miracle, Cecilia’s martyrdom, the Parson’s penitential. History and fortune: the Monk’s tragedies, Theseus’s Athens, Custance’s Rome and Syria. The heavens: the April sun “in the Ram” (A 8), Chauntecleer’s astronomy, the Franklin’s astrologer. Fairy, in a land “fulfild of fayerye” (D 859). Consciousness, in the Wife and the Pardoner speaking themselves. Only the incompleteness of the whole keeps it below the very top.
Lucretius · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The orders held: the cosmos, the infinite universe, the countless worlds, the birth and death of this one; matter, atoms, void, motion and the swerve; consciousness, mind and spirit, perception, images, dreams and will; the body and the family, desire, conception, heredity, the wife and children who will no longer run to meet you; labour and technique, fire, metals, farming, weaving; the state, kings and their overthrow, law and contract; history, the whole rise of culture from the first men; the sacred, the origin of belief in gods and its critique; the natural order, weather, earthquake, volcano, disease. They are integrated, not listed: one law makes the world and explains the fear of the gods and the end of love. Held at 9.4 because the individual life is thin: there is no character but the poet, Memmius and Epicurus.
William Blake · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one body, Albion’s. Consciousness: the fourfold man divided into warring faculties, his humanity sunk in a sleep like death (plate 74). Sexuality and gender: the emanation, Vala, the Daughters. Labour: Los at the forge, the mills and looms. The state and war: the courts, Tyburn, the Druid altars. History, from British prehistory through Israel to Blake’s London; science and philosophy, in Bacon, Newton and Locke; the city street by street and the nation county by county; the natural order, as Vala; the sacred, from the Fall to the Crucifixion. They are integrated, not listed: each order is a part of the sleeping giant. The family and ordinary private life are held weakly; people appear as powers, rarely as persons.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Consciousness, language and its loss, family, erotic love, labour, class, the state, technology, cinema, disability, madness, the demonic, the sacred and the classical inheritance, held rather than named and integrated by the single register that processes them all. The fourth volume adds a polity, nine seats, six chairs, a covenant, a constitutional record that enters its sovereign’s wound and its own blank fields; it adds the natural order damaged, a culvert, an oil sheen, a dying ash; and it adds the history the earlier page found missing: a register of births kept against a junta in an island kitchen, copied by hand and handed to the colonels’ man over coffee he did not drink, and a family book of bearers from bronze to the New World’s port clerks. Held short of the top because the wider world is an invented geography, and public history enters only through the family’s papers.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Held, not listed, and joined by one question: what a kingdom costs its people and its prince. The state: a usurping king, the rebellion of the Percys, a realm divided on a map, the law in the Lord Chief Justice. The family: two fathers and a son, Northumberland failing his own son at Shrewsbury, Lady Percy’s widowhood. Labour and the commons: drawers, carriers in an inn yard at dawn, the Hostess’s trade, the pressed men Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, Feeble and Bullcalf and the bribes that free the able. War, at Shrewsbury and in its sick aftermath. The body: appetite, age, the pox, sleeplessness, death. Consciousness: the prince’s double life, the King’s insomnia, Falstaff’s wit as a defence against death. The sacred: the crusade, the Jerusalem chamber, “we owe God a death”. History itself is an agent. Held below the top because inwardness is shown through performance, not sounded as in the tragedies.
George Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Held, not listed, by a town. Consciousness: Dorothea’s ardour, Casaubon’s dread, Lydgate’s self-division, Bulstrode’s double life, Rosamond’s will. The family: four households, two marriages anatomised, a child lost when Rosamond falls from a horse. Labour: Caleb Garth’s business, the land and its tenants, the railway surveyors in the fields (ch. 56), Fred learning a trade. Science and medicine: fever, the new hospital, the stethoscope, the profession’s corruption. Money: banking, debt, inheritance, the bailiff in the house. The state and history: the Reform Bill, the election, Catholic emancipation, the cholera. The sacred: Bulstrode’s Evangelical faith, Farebrother’s tolerant Anglicanism, Dorothea’s faith without dogma. Art and learning: Rome, Naumann, the Key. Held below the top because the poor are glimpsed rather than held, at Dagley’s farm and among the labourers, and the nation is a rumour from London.
Valmiki · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and one structure joins them. Consciousness, in grief and desire. The family across three generations: fathers and sons, brothers, co-wives, the mother who exiles her stepson. The state, in succession, regency, alliance, embassy and war. The sacred, in sages, sacrifice, curse and the gods. The natural order, in forests, rivers and seasons, and in animal kingdoms that are also societies. Cosmology, in the descent of the Gaṅgā; history, in the Ikṣvāku line. All are bound by the question of what dharma requires. Held below the top because labour, trade and the ordinary social life of the city are thin: the poem holds the kingdom and the cosmos more fully than it holds the street.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders of reality are held in one structure, and no poem in Persian but the Shahnameh holds more. The inner life of the self, the nafs in all its disguises. The household, and the wife who argues with her poor Bedouin husband. Commerce and labour: the grocer, the merchant, the tanner, the ploughman. The state: kings, viziers, judges, and the slave who is a king’s favourite. Law, medicine and theology argued; animals as fable and as nature; the body and sexuality, frankly; the market, the mosque and the bathhouse; the orders of being from mineral to angel; and the sacred, which governs all of it. They are integrated, not listed, each read as the same drama of the soul. Family and labour are occasions for a moral, and the poem holds little of its own century: the Mongol conquest that drove Rumi’s family west is nearly absent.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders of reality are held in one structure. Consciousness, Slothrop’s and many others’, down to the dead at the séances; the family, Pökler, Leni and Ilse, and Enzian and Tchitcherin as half-brothers; labour and industry, the rocket works and the slave labour at Nordhausen; the state and its war; corporate capital; applied science; colonial history, in South West Africa and Central Asia; religion, from Puritan New England to the Kabbalah of the Herero rocket text and Advent; sexuality; cinema and popular culture; and the natural order as a living Earth, in Lyle Bland’s discovery that gravity binds the living world. They are integrated, not listed: each runs through the rocket, which joins chemistry to sex, the state to the family, the colony to the market. The limit is at the edges, where some orders are present more than held.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. The state: the cloistered emperor against the regent house, and the passage of power from the court to the warriors. History as agent, not ground: an epochal change of order told as it happened to people. The family: three generations of the Taira, Kiyomori and his sons Shigemori and Munemori, fathers and children down to Rokudai. War: armies, strategy and the single combat. The sacred: Hiei and Nara as armed powers, Kumano, Itsukushima, the Pure Land, the six realms. Women: dancers, consorts, an empress, a nun. Exile and the provinces, from Kikai-ga-shima to the Tōkaidō. The natural order: the seasons in every parting, and the sea at the end. Consciousness, in Kumagai, Shunkan, Koremori at Kumano and Kenreimon’in. All held under one law and one cadence. Held below the top because inner life is rendered more by gesture and poem than from within.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. The state: the dictatorship of Guzman Bento, the Ribierist reform, the Monterist coup, the Separation, parliaments and generals. Capital: the concession, the mine, the railway, the financier in San Francisco and the investors in Europe. Labour: the cargadores, the Indian miners and their families, the porters of the harbour. History: three generations, from the veterans of the war of independence and of Garibaldi’s wars to the new republic. The family: the Goulds’ childless marriage, the Violas, Decoud and Antonia, Don José and his daughter. Consciousness: Decoud’s unravelling, Monygham’s shame, Mrs Gould’s sense of waste. The sacred: Father Corbelán and the Church’s claims, the unshriven death. The natural order: the gulf with its calms and its darkness, the snow peak, the sea. All of it turns on one mine. The highest of the twelve, charged a little for the thin rendering of the Costaguanero populace from inside.
Roberto Bolaño · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one structure by Santa Teresa. History: the Eastern Front, the killing of Jews in a Polish village, the Soviet purges in Ansky’s notebook, postwar Germany, the border in the 1990s. The state and its police, failing at every level. Labour: the maquiladoras, their workers, their shifts and buses. Class and race on the border, and in Fate’s Harlem. Journalism, the academy, the publishing house of Mr Bubis. The family: Amalfitano and Rosa, Lola’s flight, Lotte and her son Klaus, Reiter and Ingeborg. Consciousness, in Amalfitano’s breakdown and Reiter’s long life. The sacred, in the Penitent, the seer and the churches. The natural order, in the desert and the sea. Literature itself, as vocation and as blindness. Integrated, not listed: all meet in one city and one century’s violence. Held off the top because the murdered women, the centre, are held from outside, as the record holds them.
Vasily Grossman · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Held, not listed, and joined by the title’s question. Consciousness: Shtrum’s fear and shame, Krymov’s faith breaking, Lyudmila’s grief. The family: the Shaposhnikovs over three generations, a mother dead in a ghetto, a son dead in a hospital. Labour: the front as work, the laboratory, the power station, the labour of the camp. The state, twice: the Soviet apparatus from the commissar to Stalin, the German from the camp guard to Hitler. History: Stalingrad, the famine, the purges, the Holocaust. Science: a theory of matter, and what the state asks of it. The sacred: Ikonnikov, the Tolstoyan holy fool, refusing to dig the gas chamber; the old Bolshevik’s faith. The natural order: the steppe, the winter, the Volga. All pass through one family and its neighbours. Held a step below the top only because the hold loosens where the essays stand.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Nearly every order is held in one structure. Consciousness: the will, the passions and their disorder (Book XIV). The family: the peace of the household, the father’s rule, the slave and its cause in sin (XIX.14 to 16). The state: Rome and empire, justice, the people, war. History: from the creation to the judgement, with Assyria, Israel, Greece and Rome. The sacred: angels, God, the sacraments, the resurrection of the body. The natural order: creation, time, the wonders of nature, the monstrous races and the antipodes. They are integrated under the two loves, not listed. Held below the top because labour is present only as curse and use, and because the living particular is thinner than in the widest novels.
Murasaki Shikibu · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The orders held are many, and one question holds them: what attachment costs. Consciousness, rendered from inside across four generations; the family, as marriage politics; the state, in succession, faction, a regency in all but name, and exile; the sacred, in Buddhist vows, the Ise and Kamo shrines, the god of Sumiyoshi and spirit possession; the natural order, as the season that governs every scene; the arts, in a painting contest (ch. 17), the blending of incense (ch. 32), music and calligraphy; and the provincial governors’ class, through Utsusemi and Ukifune’s stepfather. War is absent. Labour is glimpsed only, in the voices of the poor heard at dawn near Yūgao’s house (ch. 4) and the fishing weirs on the Uji river. History is held weakly: the setting is a past reign, evoked rather than examined.
Plato · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Held, and held in one structure. Consciousness: the tripartite soul, Leontius looking at the corpses against his will (439e to 440a), the tyrant’s dreams. The family: the old father at the threshold, the family abolished for the guardians. Labour: the city begins from the division of labour, the shoemaker who should only make shoes, and justice is generalised from it. The state and history: the best order and its four degenerations, a cycle of decline. The sacred: god good and the cause of good only, the gods of Er. The natural order: the astronomy of Book VII and the cosmos of the spindle. Art: poetry, music and painting. What holds it short of the epics and the great novels is that these orders are held in argument and image, not in lived lives; there is almost no one in the book but speakers.
Walt Whitman · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Held, and mostly integrated. Consciousness: the self’s dialogue with its soul, the dream-world of “The Sleepers”. The body and sex, fully and for the first time in the language. Labour: the trades of the catalogues, the broad-axe, the ferry hands. The city: Manhattan and Brooklyn, crowds and streets. The family: “There Was a Child Went Forth”, with the mother and the father. The state and history: the republic, Texas and Goliad, the sea-fight, the Civil War, Lincoln’s death, Columbus. The sacred: God seen “in the faces of men and women” (§48). The natural order: grass, sea, stars, the hermit thrush. Death throughout, and one “I” to hold them. Held below the top because the catalogue integrates by inclusion: many orders stand in a list beside each other more than they act on one another, and the axis weighs that as less than held.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Many orders, held by one design. Consciousness, in Rosa’s grievance and Quentin’s dread. The family: a dynasty of two marriages, legitimate and repudiated children, brothers and sisters across the colour line. Labour and property: slavery, a plantation built by enslaved men from Haiti, a French architect held captive. Class: the poor white boy at the planter’s door, Wash Jones and his granddaughter. The state and the war: secession, the regiment, the surrender. History, from the western Virginia frontier to Haiti, New Orleans, Mississippi and Cambridge, across a century. The sacred, in the Old Testament frame of fathers and sons. The natural order: the swamp cleared, the house taken back by vines and fire. Each order is a field of the one design. Held a step down because the war is almost wholly offstage, and women’s lives other than Rosa’s are told rather than inhabited.
Teotihuacano · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
The orders held are nine. The cosmos: orientation, mountain, cave, the serpents’ sea. The sacred: the Sun and the Moon, with sacrificed animals and bound men in the Moon’s bodies; the Tepantitla goddess with her mountain of water. The state: the Ciudadela’s palaces, and a plaza for the city. War and sacrifice: the Feathered Serpent’s two hundred soldiers; the armed coyotes and jaguars of Atetelco. Labour and economy: obsidian workshops, the lime and ceramic industries. The family and household: 2,000 compounds with their patios and their dead under the floors. The foreign: Oaxacans, Gulf people and Maya, each in a quarter. Nature: the river bent and the mountain mirrored. History: five centuries legible in the Moon’s bodies. The grid integrates them, placing each on the same axis. What is held weakly is the single consciousness: no person is here; the city made itself faceless, and holds everything but the one.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Many orders, and one condition holds them. Consciousness, in the narrator’s long passage to self-knowledge. Race and its history, from slavery, the free papers in the snow and Brother Tarp’s leg iron, through the Founder’s Reconstruction to the Great Migration. Education and its institutions, in the college and its trustees. Labour and industry, in the paint factory and its union. The state and the law, in the police who kill Clifton. Politics, in the Brotherhood and in Ras’s nationalism. The city, Harlem, in its life and its riot. The sacred, in Barbee’s sermon, Rinehart’s storefront church and the Prologue’s sermon. Sex and the family, in Trueblood’s house and the women the narrator meets. Music, in Armstrong on the phonograph. They are integrated, not listed. Held below the top because women, the family and the natural order are held more thinly than the rest.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. Consciousness: Hans’s education and its forgetting, followed from inside across seven years. The body and medicine: tuberculosis, the X-ray, the temperature charts, the biology of life and decay, the sanatorium as an institution and an economy. Eros: Hippe and Clavdia, the carnival night, the triangle with Peeperkorn. Death: Joachim, the moribund, the dance of the dying. The sacred: Naphta’s theology, death as a cult, the vision in the snow. The state and history: the Europe of 1907 to 1914, the humanist and the terrorist, the nations at table, and the war. Music: Wagner, Schubert, the gramophone. Time, as subject and as form. All of it routes through one young man, is bound by one law, and exceeds him. Held off the top because the world below the sanatorium is thin: labour and the land are present by report, the family is the cousin and the Hamburg line, and the state appears in talk, so that several orders are topics of discussion more than lived matter.
Alessandro Manzoni · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. Consciousness: the Innominato’s night, Gertrude’s girlhood, Don Abbondio’s fear from inside. The family: Agnese and Lucia, Gertrude’s father, Bortolo’s household. Labour: the silk trade, the looms of the Bergamasco, the bakers. The economy: the famine and the price of bread, with Manzoni’s own argument against the fixed price. The state: Spanish Milan, its edicts, its vicario, its police, its war. The Church in all its ranks: curate, friar, nun, provincial, cardinal. Law: the lawyer, the gride, the impunity of the nobles. History as agent and not ground: the war and the plague change what the characters can do. The natural order: the lake, the mountains, the rain. The sacred: conversion, vow, Providence. All of it passes through two humble lives. Held a step below the top only because the inner life of the two lovers is narrower than the world around them.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held in one structure, not listed. A single consciousness under a bargain. The family: the Buchel farm and its mirror at Pfeiffering, the Schneidewein child. The natural order: Jonathan Leverkühn’s experiments, the deep sea and the stars of Adrian’s tales to Zeitblom. The sacred: the theology of Halle, the pact, the hope beyond hope of the Lamentation. The history of music from Beethoven to the row. The state and the nation from 1885 to the fall in 1945, and the war as it is lived in the writing room. Medicine and disease. Each order is bent to the one bargain, and that is what integrates them: the music, the child, the nation and the body pay the same debt. Held off the very top because the labour of ordinary life and the classes outside the educated bourgeoisie are thin.
François Rabelais · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held, and through one figure: the body, the work’s way of holding everything. Birth, food, drink, excretion, sex, sickness and death. Education and the whole of humanist learning. War and the state, in Picrochole and in Grandgousier’s just kingship. The church and the monastery, and their counter-image at Thélème. Law, in Bridoye judging suits by dice. Medicine, in Rondibilis. Marriage, in Panurge’s question. Commerce, in the praise of debts. Philosophy, in Trouillogan’s scepticism. The sea and nature, in the storm and the northern waters; the sacred, in Pan; and language itself as an order. Held below the top because consciousness is thin: Panurge has a self and a fear, but no mind is entered from within, and history is present as allusion rather than as a force on lives.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one structure. Consciousness, in Nick’s guarded interior and Sister Edgar’s fear and faith. The family: the Shays, a lost father, a mother, a brother, a marriage. Labour, as waste management and weapons analysis. The state: Hoover and the bureau, the arms race, the bombers. History, across forty years, through real figures. The sacred: the Jesuits, the nuns, the cloud of unknowing, the apparition. The natural order, altered: the desert, the landfill, the poisoned steppe. Art, in Klara and in Bruegel; comedy, in Lenny Bruce; sport, in the game and the ball; race and the city, in Cotter Martin and the Bronx; crime, in the Mob and Nick’s shooting; the media, in broadcast and videotape. They are joined by the ball, the waste and the bomb, which pass through every part: Nick’s work is waste, Matt’s the bomb, Klara’s art the bombers. Held below the top because some orders are thin, the economy beyond waste and the world outside America except as its weapons reach it, and a few are present more than held.
Salman Rushdie · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: three generations of a family; three nations, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and two partitions; the state, its wars of 1947, 1965 and 1971, and its Emergency; Islam, Hinduism and Christianity, the last in Mary Pereira, the Catholic nursemaid who changes the babies; labour and class, from Methwold’s estate to the magicians’ ghetto and the pickle factory; the body, its nose, its sterilisation, its cracking; language and memory; the city of Bombay; the natural order as jungle and flood. They are integrated, not listed: each is pressed into one man’s body and one telling. Held below Anna Karenina’s 9.5 because the inner lives of others are held less fully than the public world; a tenth above Infinite Jest’s 9.1, because it holds a subcontinent’s history whole.
Giotto di Bondone · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
Many orders are held in one structure: the sacred, from incarnation to judgment; the family, in three generations, a barren marriage; labour, in shepherds and a maid spinning in Anna’s porch; the state, in Herod’s balcony, the priests’ council, and Justice’s well-governed land across from Injustice’s fortress gate; the economy, in the offering refused, the purse, the usurers, the donor; consciousness, in shame, grief, tenderness and greed shown from inside the body; the natural order, in sheep and a dog, a dead tree, the stars. The tiers and the dado integrate them. What holds the axis lowest: the natural world is props, the city a few stage buildings, the state episodes; no sea, no harvest, no crowd of ordinary life.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Many orders are held in one structure: the sacred, in the vertical from the enthroned figure through the dove to the Lamb; history, from the Fall and the first murder to the Annunciation; the social order, every estate converging; the city, in the donors’ civic world and a heavenly Jerusalem of real towers; the natural order, in the meadow, water and sky; the body, in Adam and Eve; music, in the singing and playing angels. The opening and the procession place each, so they are integrated. What is held weakly is consciousness, since the faces are calm, and labour beyond the pilgrims’ road; the family appears only as the donor couple.
Giovanni Boccaccio · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. Death and history: the plague of 1348 in Florence. The city and its commerce: merchants, notaries, usurers, bankers, the trade of Genoa and Naples, the pirates who take Landolfo Rufolo. The Church: friars, abbesses, the court of Rome, sanctity and fraud. Rule: the Sultan, the kings of Sicily and Aragon, the Marquis of Saluzzo, the company’s own elected monarchy. The family: fathers and daughters, marriage, adultery, inheritance. Labour and class: peasants, gardeners, cooks, the painters Bruno and Buffalmacco. The sacred: three faiths and a ring. Sexuality in every form the century spoke of; the garden and the valley of the ladies. Each order is a field where fortune, desire and wit play. Held from the top because consciousness is thin, the self seen in action rather than reflection.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. Consciousness: Stavrogin’s emptiness, Kirillov’s logic, Shatov’s faith, Stepan Trofimovich’s lifelong pose and its breaking. The family: a mother and her son, Varvara Petrovna and Nikolai; a father and his son, Stepan and Pyotr; the Shatov marriage, with a child born and orphaned in a night. The state: the governor and his wife, the administration, the police, the province. History: two generations of the Russian intelligentsia, the 1840s and the 1860s, made agents of the plot. The sacred: Tikhon, withdrawn but present in Part Two’s references, the Gospel-seller, Kirillov’s man-god, Shatov’s people-God, the holy fool. Labour enters thinly, through the unrest of the Shpigulin factory workers, and the natural order more thinly still: those two counts hold it below the top.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. The family: seven generations, marriages, incests, bastards, and the matriarch who outlives most of them. Labour and capital: the founder’s alchemy and inventions, the candy animals of Úrsula’s trade, the banana plantations, the strike and the massacre and its erasure. The state: the Liberal and Conservative wars, the colonel’s thirty-two uprisings, the treaty that ends them, the government that denies the massacre. History: a century of the Colombian Caribbean, from foundation through civil war and the foreign company to ruin. Science and its wonder: the magnets, the ice, the alchemy. The sacred: Father Nicanor, Melquíades returned from death, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, Fernanda’s piety, prophecy. Eros in every form the family can find. The natural order: the swamp, the rain, the ants, the jungle that takes the town back. One law of return and solitude integrates them. What holds the axis there is consciousness: no mind is rendered from within at depth, the women are drawn as types, the matriarch, the beauty, the spinster, the prude, and the Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean lives of the town stay at its edges.
Michel de Montaigne · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one mind and its book. Consciousness at the centre: memory, inconstancy, the body’s moods. The body: the stone, the fall, sex in III.5, sleep, food, age. Friendship, with La Boétie. The household and estate, and the father who had him taught Latin before French. The state: the mayoralty, the Wars of Religion, the use of torture and of law. History and the world: the Conquest of the Americas, the Tupinamba brought to Rouen, the Ottoman and the ancient. The sacred: prayer (I.56), Sebond, faith beyond reason. The natural order: animals in the Apology, death throughout. Education (I.26). Held a step down because the family is thinly held, wife and daughter at the edge, labour appears only as the peasants of III.12 seen at a distance, and one consciousness joins the orders by passing through them, not by setting them against one another in action.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and one argument integrates them. The state: the commune, its council, its justice, its soldiers and its prisoners. Labour in great variety: building, trade, cloth, teaching, ploughing, sowing, threshing, carrying goods to market. The family and the social order: the young dancing, a procession that may be a wedding, a household on the road. Education, in a teacher with his pupils. The natural order: the countryside, and the planets and seasons in the borders. The sacred: Faith, Hope and Charity above the Commune, the vices as the devil’s court. History: Rome’s twins at the Commune’s feet, and war. Consciousness is the weakest order, held in the citizens’ grave attention more than in any inner life, and the integration is by argument across a room, not in one image. Few paintings hold as much in one structure.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders, and one question holds them: what a person will serve. Consciousness, in Hal and in the depressives. The family, the Incandenzas, three sons and two parents bound by evasion. Institutions, in the academy and the recovery house, with their disciplines and their sayings. Sport, as labour and as vocation. Work, in Gately’s duties at the house and the residents’ jobs. Class, in the distance between the hill and the house below it. The state and its geopolitics, in the Organization of North American Nations, the separatists and the American agency. The media and the entertainment economy. The natural order, poisoned, in the Great Concavity. The sacred, in the Higher Power to which Gately prays without believing. They are integrated, not listed: every order is a form of service and of addiction. Held below the top because history is thin, the past reaching the book only as family history, and because women are held less fully than men.
Naguib Mahfouz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. The family in three generations; marriage and the place of women; sexuality and its double standard; religion lived as daily practice and lost in thought; the merchant’s labour and his class; the state, the British occupation and the nationalist movement from 1919 to the Second World War; the quarter, its streets and shrines; the inward life of a doubter. They are held together because they meet in one house and in one family’s decisions: Fahmy’s politics kill him, Kamal’s schooling unsettles his faith, the grandsons’ ideologies send them to prison. The highest of the twelve. Below War and Peace and Anna Karenina in the sacred and the natural order, which it touches less; above most family chronicles in its integration of the political.
Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus · Architecture
9.4 · Tier V
Many orders are held in one structure: the cosmos, as the dome over the square; the sacred, as the rite and the sanctuary, and a second faith’s mihrab and minbar; the state, as the imperial entrance, the court in the galleries, the monograms in the capitals and the sultan’s loge; history, as a church raised after the Nika riot to assert a reign, and the imperial mosaic panels, Constantine and Justinian among them, which put named persons and a dynasty into the fabric; the city, as its cathedral, holding its people under one dome; the natural order, as daylight moving through the windows. They are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what a building holds only through use: consciousness, the family and labour are held weakly, and the labour that raised the church is not represented.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The orders held are many, and one question holds them: whether a man may step across. Consciousness, rendered from within at a depth few novels reach; the family, in two households, Raskolnikov’s mother and sister and the Marmeladovs, whose economies decide the plot; poverty and its trades, pawnbroking, prostitution, drink, debt and the tenement; the state, in the police office, the investigation, the court and Siberia; ideas, as utilitarianism, Napoleonism and socialism argued by persons; the sacred, in the Gospel and the earth; and the city, Petersburg in the July heat, as a moral climate. What holds the axis is what stays thin or absent: the natural order, which opens only on the Siberian river bank; history, present only as Napoleon’s name; the country, the upper classes and war. One city and one consciousness set the ceiling.
Iktinos and Kallikrates · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
The orders held are many, each placed at its distance from the centre in one concentric structure: the cosmos, in the sunrise and moonset framing the east pediment; the sacred, in the gods’ birth, contest and assembly; history in mythic form, four wars standing for the Persian war; the state, the citizen body in procession by rank and age, horsemen, elders, marshals and girls; the land and the natural order, the olive and the salt spring, horses and cattle; and power, a treasury and the allies’ tribute in the fabric itself. They are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis: consciousness is thin, for the faces are impassive by the style’s law; labour is everywhere in the building and nowhere in its images; and the family appears only in the procession.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.3 · Tier V
The Gospel gives the work more orders than most music can hold, and the setting holds them in one frame: the sacred, from the anointing at Bethany to the torn veil; the state and the law, in the high priest’s trial, the false witnesses, the governor and the guard at the tomb; the crowd, which chooses Barabbas; friendship and betrayal, in Judas, Peter and the sleeping disciples; money, in the thirty pieces and the potter’s field; the body, anointed, scourged and buried; the natural order, in darkness, earthquake and the cool of evening; history, in Adam and Noah’s dove; consciousness in the arias, community in the chorales. What holds the axis here is absence: labour does not appear, and the family is thin.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Held through one consciousness, and wider than it first appears. Consciousness and memory, as nowhere before. The family: Monica, Patricius, the son Adeodatus, the companion of some fifteen years sent back to Africa. Education: the schoolroom and its beatings (I.9), the grammar of Virgil, rhetoric taught as a trade in words. Friendship, its sweetness and its complicity (II.9.17; IV.8.13). The state: the imperial court at Milan, a panegyric on the emperor written while a drunken beggar is happier (VI.6.9), Justina’s pressure on Ambrose and the congregation singing hymns through the night (IX.7.15). The sacred on every page; the natural order, creation and time itself in the last books. Held at 9.0 because labour and society are seen from one narrow class and one road, and the social world is a ground for the soul’s journey, not an agent in it.
Sailendra · Architecture
9.2 · Tier V
The orders held are seven. The sacred: the Buddha’s life, the former lives, the bodhisattva’s path. Consciousness: Sudhana’s pilgrimage is the progress of a mind from teacher to teacher, and the foot is desire with its consequences. The family: Maya’s dream and the birth, Suddhodana’s court, the households of the jatakas. Labour and the common life: the foot’s fishers, cooks, potters and musicians, and the ships that carried Java’s trade. The natural order: the volcanoes framing the plan, trees, animals and water in every series. Death and moral law: karma as a ledger of acts and fruits. The state: kings and courts throughout the stories. The path integrates them, placing each at its height. What is held weakly is history and the state as fact: no king of the Sailendras is shown, no court procession, no event of Java’s own past; the orders are the sutras’ orders, made Javanese in dress and setting.
Chola, under Rajaraja I · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Many orders are held in one structure. The cosmos: the world-mountain and its axis. The sacred: Shiva in his forms, the saints of the Tamil hymns riding to Kailasa. The state: the king’s name in the god’s, his conquests in the god’s victories. Economy and labour: the villages, the paddy and gold, the staff by trade and share. The family: the gifts of his sister and his queens beside his own. The arts: dance, music and painting, endowed and depicted. They are integrated, not listed: the institution stands on the base of the mountain, as the record on its plinth. Held weakly: consciousness, with no inward figure, only rite and rank; the delta, which enters as tribute, not subject; and an integration that rests much on inscriptions, which are lists.
Modest Mussorgsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and integrated: the state, in the coronation, the Duma and the boyars’ intrigue; the church, in the convent, the monastery, the chronicle and the chant at the death; the people, as crowd, pilgrims, vagabonds and peasants in revolt; the family, in Boris with Xenia and Feodor; consciousness, in the monologue and the hallucination; history, written by Pimen and enacted; nations and borders, at the Lithuanian inn and in Poland; the sacred in its folk form, in the Holy Fool. The Kremlin scene sets a tsar’s guilt between his children’s play and the state’s news. Held below the top: labour appears only as hunger, nature hardly at all.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one structure by a single question, and integrated rather than listed. Consciousness, in grief and terror of death, told through dreams and speech. Love and friendship, at the centre. The family, in Ninsun’s prayer for her son and her adoption of Enkidu, and in Uta-napishti’s wife. The city and kingship and its abuse: Uruk’s walls, its temple, the elders’ counsel, the young men exhausted by the king. Labour and the made world: the hunter, the shepherds, the felling of cedar and the making of a door, the building and caulking of the boat, bread and beer. Sexuality, as the gate from wild to human. The natural order: steppe, beasts, forest, mountains, sea and the sun’s road. The sacred: the gods’ council, Shamash’s protection, Ishtar’s anger, temple and offering, dreams. Death and the netherworld, from the house of dust to the funeral rites of the eighth tablet. Cosmic history, in the world before the Flood. All of it turns on one man’s discovery that he will die. Held below the top because women appear chiefly as functions, the harlot, the mother, the goddess, the alewife, the survivor’s wife; because labour and the common people are seen from the palace; and because interior life is borne by speech.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. Consciousness: Christmas’s memory, Hightower’s, Joanna’s divided self. The family: the orphanage, McEachern’s farm, the Hineses, Lena’s child, the Burdens’ line of abolitionists. Labour: the planing mill, Byron’s Saturdays, the farm. The state: the sheriff, the law, the National Guard captain who becomes the town’s executioner. History: the Civil War raid, Reconstruction and the killing of Burdens in Jefferson, the shadow of the Klan, the colour line. The sacred: Hightower’s pulpit and his fall, Hines’s God and McEachern’s, the Black church that Christmas invades. The natural order: the road, the August light, the season. All of it is routed through one county and one week, with the past running down into the present through four or five lives. Held a step down only because the world beyond the South enters as nothing.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders, integrated rather than listed. The family over five generations, its white and Black lines one blood. Slavery and its afterlife in tenancy, debt and the commissary. The land as property and as wilderness, and its destruction by the lumber company and the railroad. The Chickasaw dispossession: Ikkemotubbe sold the land, and Sam Fathers is his son. The law: the courts, the sheriff, an execution in Illinois. The sacred: the Nazarene, Egypt, the bear’s standing as a god of the woods. Consciousness, from a boy of ten to an old man near eighty. The natural order, in the seasons of the hunt. All route through the ledger and the woods. Held at 9.0 because its society is one county, and the town and the state enter only at the edges.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held are seven. The cosmos: the pole, heaven and earth, the four directions, built into plan and name. The state: audience, enthronement and the official order in ranks. The dynasty and the family: emperor and empress, consorts and heirs, and the succession, on one axis with the state. Labour and service: the quarters of eunuchs and maids, the kitchens and storehouses, built in though kept at the margins. The sacred: ancestral and Buddhist halls. Nature and learning: the gardens and the library. History: two dynasties in one fabric, and the end of the empire within its walls. One plan places each by its distance from the throne, so they are integrated. What is held weakly is the single consciousness and the common life: labour is present but hidden, and the city enters only as the order that faces the throne.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held are many and integrated. Consciousness at its extremes: the aura, the condemned man’s last minutes, Ippolit’s dying mind. The family: the Epanchins and their three daughters, the decayed Ivolgins. Money and class: the inheritance, the hundred thousand, Totsky’s purchase of a child’s future, the moneylender Ptitsyn. The generation: the nihilists, the boy Kolya. The state in its law and its scaffold. The sacred at its most extreme: the Holbein, faith and its loss, Russia’s Christ against Rome. Europe and Russia, from Switzerland to Pavlovsk. Illness and death. All of them pass through one man and the four people around him. Held below the great panoramic novels because history is a ground and labour all but absent.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one structure by one law of transaction. Childhood and the school, run as a business and taught by machine. Money and the corporation, from penny stocks to a conglomerate. Labour, in the mills of a small town that JR’s paper buys and closes. The state, in senators, contracts and a foreign concession. The arts, music, fiction and painting, each bought, used or abandoned. The family, in the Bast inheritance and the teachers’ failing marriages. Technology, in the player piano and the teaching machine. The natural order, in the land being developed. Held below the top because the form excludes most interiority: consciousness is given only as speech, and the sacred is nearly absent. History reaches the book chiefly through the Bast family’s past and its company.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Held, not listed, through one feud. The state: the Althing, the chieftaincies, the Fifth Court, law as the only common power. The family: marriages arranged and broken, fostering, the wives’ feud, sons who will not be held, a widow’s goading. Labour: the farms, the haymaking, a famine, the theft from Otkell at Kirkjubær that begins Gunnarr’s ruin. History: the settlers’ descendants, the conversion of 999 or 1000, Norway, Orkney and the battle of 1014. The sacred: paganism and Christianity in one generation, the mound-dweller and the missionary, forgiveness and the pilgrimage to Rome. The natural order: the river Markarfljót, the slope at Hlíðarendi, the ice, the fire. All of it passes through two households and their neighbours. Held a step down because consciousness, which the form withholds by design, is the order least directly held.
Émile Zola · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. Labour: the seam, the tubs, the horses, the payment by the tub and by the timbering, the work of women and children underground. The family: the Maheus’ household, three generations in the pit, la Maheude’s arithmetic of bread, Catherine and Chaval. Capital and the state: the Company, the shareholders, the independent owner crushed by it, the gendarmes and the soldiers. Ideas: the International and Pluchart, Rasseneur’s reformism, Étienne’s reading, Souvarine’s anarchism. The body: hunger, sex, drink and heredity. The natural order: the plain, the wind, the canal, the seasons, the earth at the close. The sacred is present by its absence, in the abbé Ranvier’s late Christian socialism and in the Company as the god that has replaced God. The narrowness is of place, not of orders of reality. Short of the top on the inner life only.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The gates hold a world in one structure, and the circuit binds it. The state: kings in procession, the war for the relics at Kushinagara. The city: walled and gated, with watchers on its balconies. Labour and its standing: artisans among the donors named in the stone, the ivory carvers of Vidisha and the foreman of a Satavahana king’s artisans as the records are read. The natural order: elephants, lions, peacocks, rivers, trees in fruit, nagas under the water. The sacred: the Buddhas of past ages shown as trees and stupas, the life of the present one, his former lives. The family: Vessantara’s gift of his wife and children. The railing adds the community of donors, lay and ordained. One circuit round one centre holds it all. What holds the axis is that the breadth is the gates’; the dome holds none of it directly.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. Consciousness at its most minute: Gwendolen’s dread. The family as economy: Mrs Davilow’s ruin, the Gascoignes, the Meyricks, the Cohens. The landed class and its money: Sir Hugo, Grandcourt, the entail, the Arrowpoints’ fortune; gambling and finance. Art and the artist’s vocation: Klesmer, the Alcharisi, Mirah’s singing. Thought among working men at the Hand and Banner. Religion and law: Jewish observance and a father’s will. Nation and history: the English gentry and a scattered people’s hope of a home; and Europe from Leubronn to Genoa. The inheritance theme and the meeting of the strands bind them. Held below the top because labour, the land worked and the state appear chiefly at second hand, and the two halves are not fully joined.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and the Line joins them. The cosmos and science: the transits of Venus, the measurement of the earth, clocks and instruments. Empire and commerce: the Royal Society, the East India Company, the proprietors Penn and Calvert. Slavery, at the Cape and in America. The frontier and the Native nations, at Lancaster and at the war path where the Line stops. Religion: Anglican, Quaker, Methodist, Jesuit. Labour, in the axemen and chainmen of the survey. The founding of the nation, with Washington and Franklin. Friendship, marriage and grief. The family, in the household that listens. Time itself, in the eleven days taken from the calendar in 1752. They are integrated, not listed: each is a thing the Line measures, crosses, serves or excludes. What is thin: the inner lives of women, Rebekah a ghost and the rest types, and the Native peoples, seen mostly from the surveyors’ distance.
Vakataka · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and integrated rather than listed. The state: courts, kings, and a king’s renunciation as an act of state. War and the sea: Simhala’s voyage, shipwreck and conquest. Labour: sailors, servants, musicians and dancers at work. The family: Vessantara’s children given away, Sundari and Nanda. The natural order: elephants, horses, geese, forest and water. The sacred: the Buddha’s life, the seven Buddhas of the past and Maitreya, the Bodhisattvas, the nagas. Consciousness: grief, longing, desire and composure, in faces and hands. One plan places them all: the many lives on the walls, the one realised being in the shrine. What is held weakly is history as history, since every order routes through exemplary story, and the integration is spread across four halls.
Byzantine · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Many orders are held in one structure: the sacred, in Christ twice, the Lamb, angels and martyrs; the state, in an emperor, his empress and her court; the church, in two bishops and a building offered as a model; history, from Abel to a court of the 540s; the family, in Abraham, Sarah and the son; labour and hospitality, in a flock kept and a table served; the natural order, in a garden of fruit and birds; the city, in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Ravenna in a bishop’s hands; the economy, in the gifts and the banker who paid. The altar integrates them. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is nearly absent, the faces masks of rank but for three; the ordinary world is a hut and a flock; no crowd.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Many orders, held in one family’s fall. Consciousness, in three minds, one of them without language. The family across three generations, to the daughter’s daughter. Race, in the Black household of Dilsey, Roskus, Frony and Luster, and their church. Class and money: the pasture sold for Harvard and a wedding, Jason’s job, the cotton market, the money he steals, the bank job once promised by Herbert Head. Sex and the body, in Caddy’s sexuality and Benjy’s castration. The sacred, in the Easter weekend and the sermon. History, in the dead grandeur of a name and a grandfather’s watch. Time itself, as subject. The natural order, in the branch, the pasture, the trees. They are integrated through the family. What holds the axis, with The Unconcealment, at the foot of the twelve: the state and public life are thin, a sheriff in the fourth section; Jefferson is a backdrop; and the Black lives are held only in part.
Matthias Grünewald · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
Many orders are held: the sacred, from Isaiah’s prophecy in the Annunciation through the Passion and the Resurrection; the body in sickness, on the cross and in the Temptation’s corner; the household, in the Nativity’s tub, jug and cradle and the torn cloth round the Child; the natural order, in the desert, the palm, the raven with its bread, the deer and the night sky; the demonic, in the Temptation; the institution, an order with its patron saints and its hospital; consciousness, in grief, astonishment, endurance and the sick man’s question. The openings place each order in one sequence, so they are integrated, not listed. Absent or faint: the state, labour beyond the household, and history between the desert fathers and the present.
Hieronymus Bosch · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Many orders, held in one structure. The cosmos and the sacred: creation, Eden, God, the last things. The natural order: the left wing’s menagerie from giraffe to unicorn and dragon tree, rocks that turn into faces, birds and fruit at impossible scale. The body and sexuality, the centre’s whole subject. The social order, returning in the Hell, which sorts the damned by kind: knight, nun, gambler, musician, the drinkers in the Tree Man’s tavern, the miser excreting coins. History, which is the span itself. One sequence places each, so they are integrated, not listed. Family and labour are held weakly: an absence is not a holding, and the state appears only as armour.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders, held by one question: who owns a self. Consciousness, in Sethe’s, Paul D’s and Denver’s minds and in Beloved’s broken voice. The family: three generations of women, two sons lost to flight, a husband lost to madness at the churn. Labour: the work of Sweet Home, the chain gang, the slaughterhouse in Cincinnati, Sethe’s place in a restaurant kitchen. The law and the state: the Fugitive Slave Act, schoolteacher and the sheriff, the abolitionist Bodwins. History, from the Middle Passage through slavery to Reconstruction. The sacred, in Baby Suggs’s unchurched sermon in the Clearing. Community, in the town’s punishing silence and its rescue. The natural order: trees, the river, Sixo’s night walks. Integrated, not listed. Held a step down because the present action is one house and a few streets, and the larger history reaches it through memory alone.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held, not listed, across a broad field. Consciousness: Frédéric’s long indecision. The state and history, here as agent and not as ground: the July Monarchy, February and June 1848, the Second Republic and the coup, all entering private lives, in Dussardier’s death, Sénécal’s turn and Dambreuse’s politics. Money: Arnoux’s speculation, the faience works, Dambreuse’s finance, inheritances, the auction. Art: Pellerin’s painting, Hussonnet’s journalism, Arnoux’s dealing. Love and the demi-monde: four women of four classes. The provinces: Nogent and the Roques. What is thinner holds it a step down: the family is mainly absent, Frédéric’s mother a figure and Rosanette’s child alive for a page; the sacred appears only as satire; and labour as work done by hands stays offstage.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure: the family across three generations and two continents; immigration and the making of an American; labour, in the grocery job Vito loses to a Black Hand man’s nephew; capital, in casinos, U.S. Steel and the shares in Batista’s Cuba; the state, in a Senate committee and a revolution; the sacred, in a First Communion, a festa, a funeral and a Hail Mary; consciousness, in Michael’s withdrawal. They are integrated, not listed: Havana is at once capital, the state, history and a brother’s betrayal. The absences are the natural order, beyond the lake as a figure of cold, and any inner life for the women: Kay and Connie are given decisions but little interior.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders, and one question holds them: what is genuine. Consciousness, in Wyatt’s long crisis and in his father’s. The family: the Gwyons across three generations, and the Pivners, father and son. Religion, in Calvinism, Catholicism, the monasteries of Spain and the sun cult. Art, as craft, as market and as criticism. Money, in Sinisterra’s counterfeiting and Recktall Brown’s trade. The city, New York in its bohemia and its commerce, against the old towns of Spain and Italy. Literature, in Otto’s play and the novel’s own borrowings. Love and marriage, in Wyatt and Esther. They are integrated: every order is a field of counterfeit and longing. Held below the top because the state and politics are nearly absent, the natural order is thin, labour appears chiefly as the painter’s craft, and history enters as art history and church history more than as the history of a people.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. Consciousness: Thomas’s mask and his night, Hanno’s music, Christian’s hypochondria as a mind watching its own body. The family: four generations, marriages arranged for the firm, divorce, children, the quarrels over the inheritance after the Consul’s widow dies. Labour and commerce: the grain trade, credit, dowries, speculation, bankruptcy. The state: the free city’s senate, its elections, 1848, the city’s joining the customs union. History: the Hanseatic order giving way to the Hagenströms’ new money. The sacred: the pietism of the Consul and his widow, the pastors at table, Clara’s marriage to a pastor. Philosophy and art: Schopenhauer, Wagner. The natural order: the sea at Travemünde, teeth and digestion, typhoid. All of it bound by one law of decline. Held a step below the top because history and the state are ground more than agent, and the poor and the servants stand at the margin.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
One structure integrates many orders. The sacred: the liturgy, the Judgment, the Virgin, the Crown of Thorns. The natural order: the months and the zodiac at the threshold, the oak forest of the frame. The state: the kings of Judah, the kneeling kings of France, a coronation, the Liberation. The city: the bishop’s seat, and the parvis, where the distances of France’s roads are measured. Learning and music: the school of Léonin and Pérotin, sung in this choir. Death: the Judgment and the burials beneath the floor. History: the replaced kings, the fire and its repair. What is held weakly is private consciousness, addressed only in the general terms of judgment.
Thomas Hardy · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. Consciousness: Tess’s from within, her shame, her pride, her love, her numbness at Flintcomb. The family: the Durbeyfields’ feckless dependence on their eldest, the Clares’ vicarage, the brothers. Labour in more forms than almost any English novel holds: haggling and hauling at Marlott, the harvest and the reaping machine, dairying at Talbothays, swede-hacking and reed-drawing on the chalk, the threshing engine and its migrant engineer. Class: decayed blood, bought blood, the rural poor and the new professional son. The sacred: the lay baptism, the parson who refuses burial, Mr Clare’s evangelism, Alec’s conversion, Angel’s lost faith, the May-walking and the sun temple. The law, in the hanging; history, from Norman knights to the milk train to London (XXX). Held a step down because the town and the nation are glimpsed, not held.
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Many orders, and the murders join them. The state and the crown, in the Queen, the Prince and the police. Class and labour, in the East End, the rents, the women’s trade, the coachman’s servitude and the doctor’s eminence. The family, in Gull’s marriage, in Annie Crook and her child, and in the women’s men. Medicine and science, in Gull’s career and in Hinton’s fourth dimension. The sacred, in Masonry, the churches and the gods Gull names. Art, in Sickert, Blake and the architecture of the city. Sexuality, in the trade of the streets. History itself, from the old men of the Prologue to the century in Gull’s visions, and the history of history in the coda. These are held in one structure, not listed: each is a stake in the same act. Held below the top for the narrowness of its consciousness outside Gull and Abberline.
John Steinbeck · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held are many and held together. The land and its weather: dust, drought, flood. The family across three generations, its structure shifting as Pa loses authority to Ma. Labour, wages and the market. The bank, the corporation and the state: the deputies, the border inspection, the government camp, the vigilantes. History: the westward movement reversed. The sacred: Casy’s faith lost and found. These are not listed but meet in the same scenes, as at the peach ranch, where wages, the strike, the deputies, Casy’s death and the family’s hunger are one event. What the book does not hold well is consciousness: its people are seen from outside, and inward life is the order most thinly present. That keeps the axis at 8.9, among the book’s highest, and below the top.
Henry of Reyns and successors; Henry VII Chapel by Robert and William Vertue (attributed); west towers by Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure. The sacred: the office, the saint, the Mass and the rites that followed it. The state: coronation and the monarchy. History: nine centuries of reigns laid in order round the shrine and outward from it. Death: the kings, the poets, the statesmen, the soldier. Art and learning: Chaucer and the poets after him, Newton, Darwin. War and the nation: the Unknown Warrior and the memorials of the twentieth century. The family: dynastic tombs of husbands, wives and heirs. The natural order enters least, through the clerestory light and Newton’s monument. The axis integrates them, from saint to king to nation, east to west. Held off the top because some orders are listed in marble rather than held by the structure, and the common life appears chiefly as commemoration.
Wu Cheng'en (attributed) · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and the road integrates them. The natural order: mountains, rivers, deserts and flames, beasts that become demons. The sacred: Buddhist, Daoist and popular pantheons in one cosmology, with Heaven, the underworld and the Western Paradise mapped. The state: the Tang court and the emperor’s journey to the underworld, a dozen kingdoms with their kings, ministers and usurpers, a kingdom of women. The family: the Bull Demon King, Princess Iron Fan and the Red Boy, a household at war, and Tripitaka’s own origins. Consciousness: the allegory of the mind is the frame. Appetite and the body: Bajie’s hunger and lust, and the monk’s flesh as a feast. What holds it below the top: labour is thin, since the pilgrims beg and walk but the work of the world is little seen; history is myth more than history; and the kingdoms repeat one another.
Sophocles · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
For its size the play holds many orders, and one cause binds them. The plague is natural, sexual, civic and sacred at once: the land is blighted in crops, herds and births (25–27, 171–173), the god’s word names a pollution (97–98), and the king’s marriage is its source. The state is there in tyranny and succession, the suspicion of conspiracy (380–389, 532–542) and Creon’s case for power without the throne (583–602). Labour is there in two herdsmen’s seasons on Cithaeron, ex ēros eis arktouron, “from spring to Arcturus” (1137). What holds it lowest of the twelve is the form: 9,290 words, one day, one house. History beyond the Labdacid line (267–268) is thin, and war is absent.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Many orders, held by one act. Consciousness, the deepest of them, in his imagination and her collapse; marriage, as partnership and estrangement; children and lineage, which are the play’s argument; the state, in kingship, succession, the thanes, tyranny and a realm under terror, “Alas, poor country” (4.3), and the alliance with England; war at the start and the end; the sacred, “Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord’s anointed temple” (2.3); the natural order, in sleep, darkness, the birds, the forest and “the sear, the yellow leaf” (5.3); history, in the show of Banquo’s kings. They are integrated, not listed: each is a bond the murder breaks. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, with The Swerve, is the scale of a single short play. The common life, labour and the people, appears only in glimpses, in the Porter, the Doctor and the Gentlewoman, and Lady Macduff’s house is the only domestic world beside the Macbeths’.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Many orders are held, and held together: eros, from the catalogue to Zerlina’s hesitation; class and its claim on bodies, at Zerlina’s own wedding; labour, in Leporello’s wish in No. 1 to play the gentleman and serve no more; the family, in a father and daughter, a betrothal, a wedding and Elvira abandoned; festival at the ball; appetite at the supper; honour, vengeance and the duel; death, the dead and the sacred. The supper alone holds appetite, music, a servant eating his master’s food, the dead and damnation in one scene. What holds the axis here is absence: history, the natural order and the state do not appear, and justice is left to a ghost.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The Psalter gives the work more orders than the Ordinary gives the Mass, and the setting holds them in one span: kingship, war and judgment, “Dixit Dominus Domino meo: Sede a dextris meis”
“The Lord said to my lord: sit at my right hand”; the poor and the childless, the barren woman made a joyful mother of children; the city and its peace; labour, sleep and the family, “qui manducatis panem doloris”
“you who eat the bread of sorrow”; the natural order, snow like wool and the winter past; the body and desire, in the Song of Songs; the Trinity; power and hunger, in the Deposuit. They are held by the Virgin as the thread and the chant as the ground, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: no particular human life, and the state only as the Psalter’s king.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Many orders are held, and the company’s commerce joins them. The natural order: geology, the desert’s plants and creatures, weather, the stars that fall at the kid’s birth. History and the state: the aftermath of the Mexican War, the filibusters, the scalp contracts of Mexican governors, the Quechan crossing, the bone trade and the fencing of the plains. The sacred: the revival, the expriest Tobin, the penitentes, the gnostic frame, the judge’s theology of war. Knowledge: the judge’s natural history, law and archaeology, and the prehistoric skull of the epigraph. What is not held is deliberate and still counts. The family is a dead mother and a drunken father; love and women are nearly absent; consciousness is withheld by design. The book encompasses the world from outside and the human order thinly, and the axis weighs what is achieved, not what is intended.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders, held by one question, power and its refusal. Consciousness: Frodo’s burden as a slow invasion of the mind; Gollum and Sméagol debating in one body. History as an agent: the Ring’s past drives the plot, and three ages stand behind the war. The state: Gondor under a steward, Rohan under a failing king, the Shire’s near-absence of government, and Sharkey’s rule of gatherers and sharers. Labour and the natural order: the Shire’s farms and gardens, the Ents and the forests, Isengard’s furnaces, Saruman’s “mind of metal and wheels” (Book III). War and death, and the difference between mortal and immortal, carried to Arwen’s choice in the appendix. The sacred, unnamed, in the invocation of Elbereth. Held below the top because the family is mostly fathers and sons, marriage and the body are thin, women are few, and the economy of the world is sketched.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. Consciousness: a mind judging its own past across a lifetime, the child’s terror and the young man’s vanity. The family: Mrs Joe’s hard rearing, the forge household, the Pockets, Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, and the hidden fatherhood that binds Pip and Estella to one convict. Labour: the forge, the apprenticeship, Magwitch’s sheep-farming, Herbert’s countinghouse. The state: the law at Little Britain, the hulks, transportation, Newgate, the trial and the sentence. Class and money: the whole book. The sacred, lightly: Pip’s prayer and the language of forgiveness. The natural order: the marshes, the mists, the river and its tides. All of it passes through one narrator and a few households. Held below the top because history is a ground, not an agent, and the sacred is touched rather than held.
Robert de Luzarches, Thomas and Renaud de Cormont · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and one structure places each. The sacred: the Judgment, the Virgin, the relic of the Baptist, the altar at the end of the axis. The natural order: the zodiac and the months, the year turned in stone at the door. Labour: the months’ work, and the masons named at the labyrinth’s centre. The moral life: the virtues and vices. History: prophets and kings, sacred history to the Last Day. The city and its church: Firmin its first bishop, the chapter in the choir, the people in the nave. Death: the Judgment over the way in. Portal and axis integrate them, below to above and door to altar. What holds the axis is what stays outside: the family, the body except as raised or damned, individual consciousness except as the soul judged, and the city’s politics, present only as donors.
Mark Twain · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders, held by one river and one consciousness. Consciousness: Huck’s conscience at war with itself. The family: pap’s abuse and death, the Widow’s household, the Grangerfords, the Wilks sisters, the Phelpses, and Jim’s own family, the wife and children he means to buy, and the deaf daughter he struck before he knew she could not hear (chapter 23). Labour and property: slavery itself, Jim reckoning that he owns himself and is worth eight hundred dollars (chapter 8), the sale of the Wilks slaves, Jim sold for forty dollars. The state and the law: pap’s tirade, the judge, the reward bills. The sacred: the Widow’s Providence, Miss Watson’s hell, the camp meeting at Pokeville. The mob, the theatre and the fraud; the river; the antebellum South seen from after Reconstruction. Held below the top because the state and history are ground more than agent, and the book holds a valley, not a nation.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The cosmos and deep time: the origin of matter, the forming Earth, the extinction. The natural order: the sea, the creatures, the tree, the river. The sacred: the address to God that runs through the whole. The family, at the centre. Childhood and conscience: the making of a moral self. Labour: the father’s work at the plant, his patents and his ruin. Death and grief, the son’s and the drowned boy’s. Society, in the prisoners and a small Southern town; modern life, in the corporate city. They are integrated, not listed: the cut from grief to the stars makes the cosmos the family’s setting. Held weakly are society and history: the 1950s South appears in glimpses, its race and class at the margin.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one structure, which is a poet’s consciousness opened to the moment. Consciousness, in Blake and in Milton, two minds made one. The family: Milton’s error toward the women of his household, which the usual gloss finds in Ololon and which is the poem’s crux; Blake’s brother Robert in the paired design; his wife at the close. Labour: the harrow and the mills, Los’s furnaces, the engraver’s trade, the harvest. The state and history: Albion, the “dark Satanic Mills”, six thousand years set in a pulsation, the churches. The sacred throughout. The natural order: the lark, the wild thyme, the flowers of Book the Second, the globule of blood. Cosmology: how time and space are made. Held below the top because family and state are held mostly as allegory, not as lives.
Mikhail Bulgakov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. Consciousness: Pilate’s headache and conscience, Ivan’s breakdown and remaking, the Master’s fear. Love: the two lovers, and Margarita’s courage. The state: denunciation, arrest by implication, the disappearances, the housing that men inform for. Literature as an institution: MASSOLIT, the critics, the writers’ restaurant at Griboedov’s. History: Roman Judea and Soviet Moscow, nineteen centuries apart, set in one frame. The sacred: the Passion, damnation, forgiveness. Madness and its clinic, money and its exposures, the natural order in the storm and the moon. All of it passes through a week in one city and a day in another, and the two are made to answer each other. Held a step down because the state is an implied agent more than a shown one, and the domestic order is thin outside the lovers.
Henry Fielding · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one plot. The family and inheritance: two estates, a foundling, a disinherited heir, a forced marriage. The law: Allworthy as magistrate, Dowling the lawyer, the Gatehouse prison. The church and philosophy, in Thwackum and Square and the curate Supple. The state and history: the rising of 1745, the army on the march, Western’s Toryism against his sister’s Whig politics. Labour and class, from the gamekeeper Black George, the servants, landladies, soldiers and gypsies up to Lady Bellaston and Lord Fellamar. Town and country, the road and the inn, the theatre and the masquerade; sex and money throughout; the natural order in the Somerset country and the hunt. They are integrated, not listed: each is a field on which appearance and the heart are weighed. Held below the top because consciousness is thin, every mind given from outside by the narrator, and the sacred is asserted as providence more than lived.
George Gordon, Lord Byron · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Orders held: the erotic and the domestic, in Seville, Julia’s marriage and Inez’s household; the natural order at its most hostile, the sea and the longboat; the idyll and its economy, since Lambro’s piracy pays for Haidée’s feast; slavery and empire, the market and the seraglio; war, at Ismail; the autocratic state, in Catherine; the English state, its parties, its money and its marriages; literature and its quarrels; the sacred, mocked and, at the Ave Maria and in Aurora Raby, not wholly mocked; and over all, the narrator’s consciousness and his age. The voice carries them in one structure, and Juan’s passage across Europe makes the map a moral map. What holds it here: labour and the life of the poor are at the margin, the family is seen mainly as farce, and the characters’ inner lives are thin, so the orders are held from outside more than inhabited.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
History is an agent here, in princes, Tatars, a city’s fall and a famine; the state, in the Grand Prince and his brother, the blinding and the commission of the bell; the sacred, in monastery, icon, Calvary and the hunted pagans; art, in painting, song and casting; labour, in the masons, the pit and the furnace; consciousness, in Andrei’s vow and Kirill’s envy; nature, in rivers, horses, rain and snow. They are held by one man’s passage and joined through it, not listed. What keeps the axis below the top is what is thin: the family is almost absent, the women are a holy fool and a pagan girl, and love between persons is barely held.
Ancient Egyptian · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the cosmos of the plan, the triad of Amun, Mut and Khonsu, the festival year. The state: the king as builder, priest and warrior on every wall. War and diplomacy: Seti I’s campaigns, Thutmose III’s annals of Megiddo, Shoshenq’s list, the Hittite treaty. History: two thousand years of reigns legible in the fabric. Labour and economy: storerooms, priests’ houses, the temple estates that booty lists and offering scenes record. The natural order: the Nile’s axis, the papyrus columns, the foreign plants and animals carved in the Akh-menu. The axis ranks them, from the battle on the outer wall to the god in the dark. Consciousness is held weakly: no inner life, no person, only the canonical figure in its role, and the family only as the divine triad and the royal line.
Luo Guanzhong (attributed) · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one structure. The state, in three courts with their councils, legitimacy and succession. War, at every scale from single combat to the river battle. History, as a century and as a theory of the dynastic cycle. The sacred, in Heaven’s mandate, portents, Taoist magic and the dead who return. The natural order, in the wind at Red Cliffs, the rains and the southern miasmas. Kinship, as sworn brotherhood above blood and the family as an instrument of state: Sun Quan’s sister married to Liu Bei, Liu Bei’s flight leaving wife and child. What holds it below the top is what is thinner: consciousness, given mostly in speech and act; women, who appear chiefly as pawns or exemplars, Diaochan and Lady Mi; and the common people, who appear as the population armies move or starve.
Apuleius · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders, held by one device: the ass passes through the society of the Roman provinces from the top to the bottom and back. Consciousness: a man’s mind inside a beast, and the shame of it. The family: Psyche’s sisters, Charite’s marriage and widowhood, a stepmother’s lust and a father’s grief, the adulterous households of the ninth book. Labour: the mill, the herdsmen, the market gardener, the baker, the pack beast’s own work. The state and the law: the magistrates of Hypata, the soldier who commandeers, the stepmother’s trial, the arena at Corinth. Money: Milo the usurer, the price of an ass, the fees for initiation. The sacred: witches, frauds in the Syrian Goddess’s train, the council of the gods, Isis and Osiris. Nature: the beast’s body, Thessaly, the sea at Cenchreae under the moon. Held a step down because the people met are mostly tale types, and history is a ground, not an agent.
Hilary Mantel · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Held, not listed, and driven through one man’s dealings. Consciousness: Cromwell’s, minutely. The family: Walter, Liz and the children, the household of nephews and wards at Austin Friars, and the king’s own family as the matter of state. Labour and money: the cloth trade, banking, the law, accounts. The state in its making: Parliament, statute, the break with Rome. The sacred: the English Bible, heresy, the monasteries ahead, Cromwell’s own guarded faith. Europe: Florence, Antwerp, the Emperor and France. Death and history as the frame. Held a step below the top because the natural order is present mainly as weather and plague. Level with Blood Meridian at 8.8.
Boris Pasternak · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Held, not listed, across thirty years of Russian history in one life. Consciousness, in Yuri’s perception and his poems. The family: the Gromekos, Tonya and the children, the Antipovs, Lara’s daughter Katya and the lost daughter Tanya. Love, in three marriages or near-marriages. Work: medicine at the front, in typhus Moscow and with the partisans, and the work of the hands at Varykino, the planting and the wood. The state and history: 1905, the war of 1914, February and October, the Civil War, the New Economic Policy and its end. The sacred, in the Gospel frame and the poems. The natural order, everywhere. Art, as the end of the life. Yuri’s perception joins them. Held a step down because society beyond the central lives is drawn thinly, and the peasantry and the city are seen more than inhabited.
Anonymous · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one frame. The state: caliphs, sultans, viziers, police chiefs and the justice of kings, from Harun walking Baghdad in disguise to Shahriyar’s sentence. Labour and craft: the porter, the fisherman, the barber, the tailor, Ma’ruf the cobbler, the merchants of Basra and Cairo, the slave market. The family: brothers, fathers and sons, marriages arranged and broken. Love, desire and the body, in Qamar al-Zaman and Budur and the bawdy tales. Religion: Muslims, Jews, Christians and Magians, saints, ascetics and divine decree. The natural order: sea, desert, speaking beasts. The unseen: jinn, sorcery, the underworld and the heavens. History: the Abbasid caliphate as memory and the Mamluk city as present. Held by the frame and its law of decree, more often set side by side than fused, which keeps the axis below the top.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Many orders, held by the court. Consciousness, in K.’s self-justifying mind. The state and the law, as the court and its officials. Labour and the office, in K.’s post at the bank and his rivalry with the deputy director. The family, in the uncle who comes up from the country and the mother K. does not visit. Sexuality, in Fräulein Bürstner, the washerwoman and Leni, each in some way the court’s. Class and the city, in the tenements where the court sits and the children on Titorelli’s stairs. Art, in Titorelli and his portraits of judges. The sacred, in the cathedral. They are integrated, not listed: each order turns out to be an office of the court, and one structure holds them all. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what that structure leaves out: history and the natural order are absent, the city is unnamed and abstract by design, and every order is seen from inside one consciousness.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Held, not listed, within a narrower circle than the great novels of society. Consciousness: Emma’s, given from within at a depth no novel before it reached, and Charles’s, Léon’s and Homais’s in less. The family: Charles’s two marriages, his mother, the farmer Rouault, Berthe neglected and at the end sent to a cotton mill. Labour and the land: Les Bertaux, the show, the servant’s medal. Commerce and credit: Lheureux’s shop, the bills, the seizure. The state: the councillor, the cross of honour, the medical licences. Science and medicine: the pharmacy, the clubfoot, the arsenic, Larivière. The sacred: the convent, Bournisien’s deafness to Emma’s crisis, her brief piety, the last rites. History stands as ground, in the July Monarchy’s progress and its newspapers. Held a step down because history and the natural order are scenery rather than agents, and because the circle is drawn deliberately small.
Du Fu · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
For a lyric body the reach is near the ceiling, and it is achieved, not listed. The poems hold the state, with the emperor’s flight, the rebel occupation and the court in exile; war and its levies; labour and the farmer; the family, a wife, children, a dead son, brothers scattered by the war; friendship, with the poems to and about Li Bai; history, Zhuge Liang and the ancient sites; and the natural order from the swallow to the Yangzi gorges and the aging body. “Journey North” holds most of them in one poem, ending in the poet’s household and its patched clothes. What holds it here: the sacred is thin, the frame being Confucian service, and a body of short poems holds its orders side by side, not in one structure.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The Ordinary gives fewer orders than a Gospel does, and the setting holds what it is given in one architecture: the sacred throughout; the cosmos, “factorem coeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium”
“maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible”; history and the state, “sub Pontio Pilato”
“under Pontius Pilate”; the human community, “hominibus bonae voluntatis”
“to men of good will”; the body and death, in the Incarnation and the burial; consciousness, in the single voices of the Qui sedes, the Benedictus and the Agnus Dei; peace, as the last word. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, with the Virgin named once; labour; and any particular human life.
Michelangelo · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Many orders are held in one structure: the sacred, as altar, sacrament and grave; death, as the martyr’s tomb at the centre, the popes’ tombs round it and the grottoes below; the state, as the papal monarchy of chair, loggia and arms; history, as a church on the Constantinian site carrying a claim from Peter through Constantine to the popes who built it; the city and the world, as the piazza gathering Rome and the pilgrims; the cosmos, as the dome over the measured plan. They are integrated: the axis sets each in its place, from the square to the chair. Held weakly: consciousness, the family and labour. The person is pilgrim and congregant; the labour and money that built it are not represented.
Khmer, under Suryavarman II · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
The orders held are six. The cosmos: ocean, mountain and the four directions. The sacred: Vishnu and his avatars, the gods and the demons. The state: the king, his ministers by rank, the army and its allies. History and epic: Kurukshetra and Lanka, the wars that found an order. Moral law and death: Yama’s judgment, the heavens and hells, and the king’s own passage. The natural order: water, engineered and symbolic at once. They are integrated, not listed: one plan places each at its height and on its quarter. What is held weakly is the intimate and the common: no family, no labour, nothing like the market and kitchen scenes of the Bayon, no single consciousness. The common people appear in the army, and in the hells.
Paul the Apostle · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held, not listed, in seven letters: consciousness and conscience (Romans 7; 2 Corinthians 4 and 5); marriage, celibacy and sex (1 Corinthians 7); labour, in the instruction to work with one’s own hands (1 Thessalonians 4:11) and in Paul’s own trade; slavery (Philemon; 1 Corinthians 7:21 to 22); money, in the collection; the state (Romans 13); the history of a people and its election (Romans 9 to 11); death and the body after death (1 Corinthians 15); the natural order in its travail (Romans 8). They are bound in one structure, the body of Christ and the new creation. Held below Anna Karenina’s 9.5 and Infinite Jest’s 9.1 because many orders are touched as instruction, briefly and from above, not inhabited as a novel inhabits them: the household and the economy are present as rules.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held: labour and the estate economy, from Korobochka’s hemp to Plyushkin’s rotting stores; serfdom as law and as census; the state in its offices, the civil chamber, the governor, the chief of police, the Board of Trustees; history, in 1812 through Kopeikin and in the rumour that Chichikov is Napoleon; society, at the ball and in the ladies’ gossip; the family, in Manilov’s sons named Themistoclus and Alcides; the nation, on the road; the natural order, in Plyushkin’s garden. They are integrated by the itinerary, which carries one man through all of them. The limits are consciousness, kept thin by design until chapter 11, and the sacred, named in the title and deferred to volumes that do not exist.
William Wordsworth · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders, held by one consciousness, which is the axis’s chief order and which the poem holds as few works do. The natural order: lake, mountain, river, weather, the seasons of a northern childhood. Education and books: the school, Cambridge, Book V’s defence of romance and fairy tale against the system-makers. The city, in London. Labour and the poor: the shepherds of Book VIII, the discharged soldier of Book IV, the blind beggar, the starving girl in France. The state and history: the Revolution, the Terror, England’s war on France, the reason of Godwin. The sacred, as nature’s ministry and the poet’s calling. Friendship, in Coleridge, addressed throughout. They are integrated through the one mind. What holds the axis is what is thin: the family is present chiefly as death, Dorothy enters late, and love, Annette and the child, is displaced into a borrowed tale. The world is held as it touched one man.
Stendhal · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders, held through one life and one year of history. Consciousness, in Julien’s minute self-observation. The family, in old Sorel and his sons, who beat Julien for reading, and in the Rênal household and its children. Labour and money, in the sawmill, the tutor’s wage, the bargaining over his hire, the Valenod’s poorhouse. The Church, in the Jansenists and Jesuits of the seminary, the Congrégation, the bishop. The state, in the mayor, the prefecture, the ultras and the conspiracy. Class, in the whole ladder from peasant to duke. History, as the Napoleonic past pressing on a Restoration about to fall; the law, in the trial. The natural order is thin, the mountains above Verrières a stage for solitude, and the book stands a step below the social novels that take in more than one man’s path.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the archangel, the relics, the pilgrimage. The state: the dukes of Normandy, the king’s gift for the Merveille, the royal order of 1469, the war the rock won, the prison of a later state. The social order: the poor, the guest and the monk on three floors. Labour: the stores and cellars. Learning: the scriptorium and the library. Commerce and the common life: the street of inns and shops below the walls. Death: the charnel. The natural order: tide, sand, sea and the sky over the cloister. The pyramid integrates them, low to high. What holds the score short is consciousness: the inner life enters only as the pilgrim’s climb, and the family hardly at all.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Few paintings hold more orders of reality in one structure. The state, in a king in armour and ermine with his hourglass and his gold. The church, in a cardinal, a pilgrim and the cross on the trap. Justice and its machinery, in the wheels on poles, the gallows and an execution. War, in armies, ranks, signals and fleets. Labour and the common life, in peasants, a woman with a distaff and a cart. Pleasure and art, in a banquet, games, a lute and a song. Nature, in a whole landscape dead, and the sea. The sacred, as absence. Consciousness, in the lovers who do not see and the man who draws his sword. One campaign moves through them all and one law makes them equal before it. Held below the literary summit because they are held as types at a glance, not as lives with interiors.
Romanesque builders; Obradoiro facade by Fernando de Casas Novoa · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and integrated by the route rather than listed. The sacred: the tomb, the Last Judgement, the liturgy. The body: the pilgrim walking, kneeling, embracing, the hands worn into the Jesse column. Labour and the economy: the roads, the hospices, the trades that give the Platerías and the Azabachería their names, silversmiths and jet-workers. The state: the apostle as patron of the kingdoms of the peninsula, the Baroque staging of church and crown. History: nine centuries legible in the fabric. The city: four plazas formed by four faces of the building. The natural order: the western edge of the land, the granite, the rain. What holds it is that procession binds them, not an argument.
William of Sens and William the Englishman; nave by Henry Yevele · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure and integrated by the route. The sacred: the martyr, the Passion in the glass, the daily office. The state: Church against crown in the murder, a king’s penance at the tomb, the crown’s victory in the broken shrine. The community: monks enclosed in the choir, laity in the nave. The common life: pilgrims, and the sick and the poor who came to the tomb to be healed. History: a see from 597, the Norman conquest in the first rebuilding, the Reformation and the Civil War written into the fabric. Death: the martyr’s body and the tombs round it. Labour enters through Gervase’s record of the making; the natural order least, in the light through the glass and the seasons of the liturgy. Held below the top because much is held as the history of an institution rather than as consciousness or household.
Venetian builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The natural order: the Creation in the narthex cupola, its days and its creatures. Sacred history: from Genesis in the narthex to the Gospel in the church. The state: the doge’s chapel joined to his palace, the ceremonies of the Republic. Conquest and commerce: the spoils of 1204 and the merchants who took the body. The city’s own history: the translation of the relic, told in mosaic on the façade. Death and the body: the relic in the crypt and the tombs of doges in the baptistery. The axis from narthex to altar and the joining to the palace integrate them. Held below 9.0 because consciousness and the family enter only as the Bible gives them.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure: the natural order first, as the film’s witness and its question; the sacred, in the village hymn, Witt’s other world and the dying soldier’s prayer; war as the state’s instrument, in Tall’s career and his need for the hill; the family, in Bell’s marriage, remembered and then lost by letter; the self, divided, in the voices; death on both sides, with the enemy given faces. They are integrated: the hill is at once a tactical object, a career, a field of grass and a theodicy. What holds the axis from the top is thinness in two orders: labour and class, which the company only glances at, and history, since the war’s causes and the island’s people are present as setting more than as forces.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders held in one structure and integrated, not listed. Consciousness: Maggie’s from nine to nineteen, Tom’s, Tulliver’s, Philip’s. The family: two lineages, Dodson and Tulliver, as rival moral systems. Labour and trade: the mill, Deane’s rise in Guest and Co, Tom’s work and his trading venture with Bob Jakin, the debts repaid. Law: the Pivart suit, the bankruptcy, Wakem’s purchase of the mill. The town: the opinion of St Ogg’s as a force that condemns Maggie after the drift. Education: Stelling’s Latin and Euclid misapplied. Religion: Thomas à Kempis, and Dr Kenn’s Christianity against the town’s. The natural order: the river, the seasons, the flood. History: the legend of St Ogg and the town’s past, lightly. Held below the top because the state, politics and the larger society, which the widest novels hold, are not attempted.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. Consciousness, in its growth from infancy. The family, in its ruin, its substitutes (the aunt, the Peggottys, the Micawbers) and its marriages. Labour: the child’s warehouse, the clerk’s law in Doctors’ Commons, shorthand and parliamentary reporting, the fishermen’s sea and the novelist’s trade. Class, from the boat-house to Steerforth’s mother’s house; debt and the prison; schooling, from Creakle’s cruelty to Doctor Strong’s kindness; the sea as a natural order that governs lives; the colony as England’s exit. All of it passes through one life and one memory. Held below the top because the state, the law as institution and the sacred are held less than in the largest novels; the sacred is present chiefly as Agnes’s gesture.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and placement integrates them. Labour, in the figures of work at the left and the painter at work. Poverty, in the mother on the floor. The church, in a priest. The state, in the hunter if he is the emperor, and in the jury the picture defied. Death, in the skull and the lay figure. Art in all its kinds: painting, the model, music in Promayet, poetry in Baudelaire, criticism in Champfleury, the collector in Bruyas, the public in the fashionable couple. Philosophy and politics in Proudhon. Love in the couple at the window, childhood in the two boys, nature in the landscape and the animals; consciousness in the painter’s own seven years. What holds the axis below the top is the sacred, present only as the scheme borrowed from it and as a martyr made of wood, and the family, present only in fragments. Integrated by the frieze and its centre, which is a real achievement.
Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Orders held and placed by one plan: the state, governed from the palace; the sacred, the basilica and the perpetual office; death, the crypt and the cenotaphs at the centre; the dynasty and the family, father and son kneeling in bronze with their wives, the line of kings below; learning, the library and the college, the liberal arts painted over the books; war and history, the battle gallery and the kings of Judah; labour, the monastic economy and the building site the record preserves; the natural order, the Sierra, the water and the gardens below the south front; and one king’s piety and grief. The grid places each relative to the altar. The city and ordinary life stay outside the gate.
Diego Rivera · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in the geological strata, the plant and the raw materials; labour, at the centre, as toil and as community; the industrial system and capital, in the plant, the managers and the patron; science and medicine; war, in the gas and the bombers; the races of mankind; birth and the body; agriculture; and the sacred, in the Nativity of the vaccination panel and the idol of the press. They are integrated, not listed: the cosmology of the court places each, and the process of the car binds them. What holds the axis below the literary summit is consciousness: the persons on these walls are types, and no interior life is held, and the family appears only as an emblem. For a work of visual art the range is near the top.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one family across three generations, and the family joins them. Consciousness, in the Swede’s long anguish and in Zuckerman’s own, after his surgery for cancer. The family: the father, the sons, the marriage, the daughter. Labour, in Newark Maid, the glove factory, its craft and its Black forelady, Vicky, who stays through the riot. The city, Newark in its rise and its fall. Class and ethnicity: the Jewish immigrant’s ascent, Dawn’s Irish Catholic origin, the Protestant gentry of Old Rimrock in the Orcutts. The state and history: the war, the riot, Vietnam, Watergate. The sacred, in Dawn’s Catholicism and Merry’s Jainism. Sex, in the kiss, the affairs and Lou’s fury at Deep Throat. They are integrated, not listed. Held below the top because the natural order is thin, the world beyond New Jersey enters only as news, and Merry’s inner life, the hinge of the action, is withheld.
Nabataean · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and the plan of the basin integrates them. The sacred: the high places, the temple of Qasr al-Bint, the betyls, the Byzantine church. Death and the family: family tombs with halls for the funerary banquet. The state: kingship displayed in the Royal Tombs, and Rome’s governor buried among the kings. Trade and wealth: a caravan city, the camel relief in the Siq, the market street. Civic life: the theatre. The natural order: desert, flood and drought, held by hydraulics that are a reading of the land. History: Nabataean, Roman and Byzantine Petra in one basin. The living valley ringed by the cliffs of the dead, with water running through both, holds them in one structure. What is held weakly is consciousness, and the everyday life of the living, which fell with the masonry city.
William Makepeace Thackeray · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
A wide world held in one structure: the aristocracy, from Lord Steyne and Gaunt House to the baronetcy of Queen’s Crawley; the City, with Osborne and Sedley as merchants and the Sedley bankruptcy; the army and the war; the court, where Becky is presented to George IV; the colonies, in Jos’s Indian money and Rawdon dying governor of Coventry Island; the servants and tradesmen who carry the debts; families across three generations; the Continent; and the evangelical and clerical worlds of the Southdowns and the Bute Crawleys. Money integrates them: they are held, not listed. Held below the top because the sacred enters only as satire, labour only as the creditor’s loss, the natural order hardly at all, and no consciousness is opened from within.
Ottoman builders, under Mehmed II and successors · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The state: the Council, the treasury, the mint and the armoury of the outer court. The household and the family: the Harem, the dynasty’s women, the Queen Mother’s apartments, the princes confined there from the seventeenth century. Labour: the kitchens, the stables, the bakeries, the servants and halberdiers. Education: the palace school. The sacred: the Relics, the mosques and prayer rooms, the sultan as caliph. The natural order: gardens, terraces, two seas and two continents taken into the composition. History: the Byzantine acropolis and the conquest. Violence: succession by fratricide and confinement. The gates rank each order against the others. Held below 9.0: the city and the subject’s life are present only at the first gate.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders, held rather than listed. Consciousness: Suttree’s solitude, guilt and fear of death, the twin, the fever. The family: the dead son, the abandoned wife, the mother, the uncle who drinks, the father’s letter, and the Reeses as a family he enters and loses. Labour: fishing the river for a living, the mussel gathering, ragpicking, the workhouse. The state: the police who beat Ab Jones to death, the workhouse, the courts, the city that bulldozes the Flats for an expressway. History: the Knoxville of the early 1950s, its slum and its end. The sacred: the Catholic boyhood, the church, the priest at the sickbed, the huntsman. The natural order: the river through every season, the mountains, the bats Harrogate poisons, the fish. All of it passes through one man walking a city. Held a step down because the state and history stand as ground more than as agents.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure, the landscape. The state: an emperor governing from his estate, with halls for audience and a court housed in the Hospitalia. History and geography: the provinces and places of the empire gathered as names, by the late account. The sacred: shrines and the Serapeum. Death: Antinous, drowned in the Nile and made a god, joined to the estate by the Canopus. The natural order: water, valley, the terraced plateau, the gardens. The body: baths, dining, exercise. Learning: the libraries. Labour: built in, below, by the service network. The self: the island. They are integrated by the walk and the plan more than by one figure, and several are inferred from late names.
Alan Moore · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Many orders, held by one place and one law. Consciousness, in chapters set inside many minds. The family, the Warrens and their forebears across generations. Labour and class, in the trades, lodging houses and poverty of the Boroughs. The state and its planning, in the clearances. History, more than a thousand years of one town. The sacred and the afterlife, in Mansoul and its Builders. Art and its making, in Alma’s paintings. Madness and genius, in the asylum. They are integrated, not listed: each is a face of the one claim that a poor district holds everything. Held below the top because the integration is often asserted through the cosmology rather than achieved in the action, and because the world beyond Northampton is present only as it touches the town.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
The orders held are few: the sacred and the end of time, the wall’s subject; the body, from the skeleton to the risen flesh; consciousness, in the fear among the saints, the despair of the damned man and the effort of those climbing; the Church, judged from inside its own chapel, its master of ceremonies in hell as Minos and its saints shown afraid; kinship as a trace, in a few embraces among the risen. The rotation places each, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no history, no genealogy, no natural order beyond the bare earth the dead leave, no labour, no state. Everything happens in one instant, to one kind of thing, the naked body before judgment.
Virgil · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
For 2,188 lines the orders held are many, and held together: the natural order of soil, weather, stars, plants, animals and disease; labour, the centre; the state, with Rome, Italy, the civil wars, Octavian and the temple of the third book’s proem; history, Philippi twice fought and the iron age; the sacred, Jupiter, Ceres and Bacchus, the rites of the country year, the gods of the dead; love and death across species; and art, in the poet’s own place in the seal. They are held, not listed: the plague joins animal, labour, divine wrath and the state’s disorder in one movement. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the poem does not hold: the farmer has no inner life, and the only marriage is Orpheus’, told in seventy-five lines. Consciousness and the family stay thin.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Many orders, held in one house and one family. Consciousness, fully, in a dozen minds. Marriage and the family across ten years. Art and vocation, in Lily and in Carmichael’s poems. Philosophy, in Mr Ramsay’s work and its doubt. Death and mourning. The natural order: the sea, the seasons, the decay of the house. War and history, in brackets and by design. Labour and class, in the two women who save the house from ruin. The sacred, refused: a pious phrase rises in Mrs Ramsay’s mind and she is annoyed at it. They are integrated, not listed: each order is a field where the act of making order meets what unmakes it. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve: the state, the economy and public life are absent, history enters only as an aside, and the field is one house and some fifteen people. What the form holds is deep, not wide.
George Orwell · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Many orders, held through one apparatus. The state, with its four ministries and its three classes of Inner Party, Outer Party and proles. History, as the thing the state rewrites daily. Language, as an order of reality in its own right, with a grammar. Consciousness: Winston’s memory, his dreams, his guilt for his mother and sister. The family: the Parsons children, the marriage to Katharine, the lost mother. Sex, as rebellion and as a force the Party channels into hatred. Labour: the Records Department, the novel-writing machines of the Fiction Department, the prole quarter. War and geography: three superstates in permanent war. The sacred, as a counterfeit, in O’Brien’s theology of power. They are integrated, not listed: each order is shown as an object of the Party’s grip. What holds the axis lower is that everything is seen through that one apparatus: the natural order appears only in the Golden Country, and the human world outside the Party is thin.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Many orders, held by the measure of man. The state and its politics, in Lilliput’s court and Brobdingnag’s monarchy. War, in Blefuscu and in gunpowder. Law and its corruption, in Gulliver’s account of England. Learning and science, in Laputa and Lagado. History, in the dead summoned at Glubbdubdrib. Mortality and age, in the immortals. The body everywhere, in excretion, size, disease and appetite. Reason and nature, in the Houyhnhnms. Colonialism, in the last chapter. They are integrated, not listed: each world is a single judgment on all of them. Held below 9.0 because consciousness is thin, the sacred is mostly suppressed, appearing as the war of the Big-Endians, and the family and labour are sketched rather than held: Gulliver’s wife and children are kept thin until the end.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Many orders, held in one day rather than listed. Consciousness, in a dozen minds and two at depth. The family: the Dalloways’ marriage and their daughter, Septimus and Rezia. The state: Richard in Parliament, the Prime Minister at the party, Lady Bruton’s scheme of emigration. Empire, in Peter’s India. War, in Septimus and the dead Evans, five years on. Medicine and the institutions of sanity, in Holmes and Bradshaw. Class, in Kilman’s poverty and resentment, Rezia’s lodging and the crowd at the palace gates. Religion, in Kilman’s conversion and Clarissa’s atheism. Sexuality, in Sally, Peter and the unspoken. The city, the park and the June weather; time and death over all. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the book’s size and vantage: labour is barely present, the state is glimpsed through a car window and at a party, and history is a ground rather than an agent.
Attar · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders, held by one allegory. The soul and its passions, in every bird. The sacred in its whole range: law, piety, scandal, gnosis, annihilation. Kingship and power, in the king the birds seek and in the kings, slaves and courtiers of the anecdotes. Love, profane and divine, and their confusion. Society: beggars, merchants, dervishes, shaykhs, madmen. Faith against faith, in Ṣanʿān’s Islam and the girl’s Christianity. Death, repeatedly. The natural order, in the birds, the mountain and the valleys. All of it is integrated, since all of it is the Way. Held at this mark because family, labour and history are present only as occasions for an example, and because every order is joined to the others by being made a figure of the one order, the soul’s road.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held, not listed, and all through the one relation to the castle. Consciousness, K.’s own, close and unrelenting. Eros, in Frieda, and in the women ranked by their nearness to the gentlemen. The family, in the Barnabas household destroyed by one refusal, and in Hans Brunswick’s mother. Labour, in the surveyor’s post that does not exist, the janitorship, the maids of the Herrenhof, Pepi’s stint at the bar and the messenger’s unpaid work. The state, as administration in its full apparatus of files, secretaries and control offices. Class, in the gentlemen and the village. The sacred, implied throughout and never stated. The natural order, in snow and the early dark. What is not held is history and any world beyond the village: there is no outside, and the book’s scale is depth, not breadth. That absence keeps the axis below the higher figures; the rubric weighs orders held, not territory.
Louis Le Vau, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders are held and placed by one structure. The state: ministers’ wings, the council, the king’s body as the seat of power. Society: the court and its precedence, the nobility lodged by rank. Family and dynasty: the royal apartments, public births in the queen’s chamber, the princes’ wings. The body: the lever and coucher, eating in public. The sacred: the chapel and the divine right it stages. War: the Salon de la Guerre and the ceiling’s campaigns. Nature and cosmos: land, water, seasons, the planet rooms and the solar axis. History: the reign on the ceiling, later all French history in the galleries. Labour: the attics, the fontainiers, the water’s cost. Held at 8.6: the kingdom outside enters only as what is excluded, and consciousness only as display.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short novel holds, and it holds more than its length should allow. Consciousness, in Hadji Murat and his dying memories. The family: his mother, his wives, his son held hostage, and Avdeev’s household. Labour and the peasant economy, in the village that sent one son to the army in place of his married brother. The state at every rank, tsar, war minister, viceroy, colonel, subaltern and private, and its rival, Shamil’s imamate. War and history, in the winter raids of the Caucasian War. Religion, in Islamic prayer and Shamil’s authority, the Orthodox world more thinly. The natural order, in the thistle and the nightingales. Each is a place where the one law is seen working. Held a step down by depth: most orders are given a chapter, and Russian society and the sacred are sketched rather than inhabited.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure: the social order of samurai, farmers, bandits and the townsmen who mock the farmers; labour, in the harvest, the ditches and fences and the planting; the natural order of the seasons, rain, fire and the river; war, in strategy, attrition and the gun against the sword; history, the end of the warrior class already in view; the family, in Manzō and Shino, Rikichi and his lost wife, the orphaned baby; love, across a class line that holds; and death, in the burials and the mounds. They are integrated, not listed: the defence of the village places each. What is held weakly is the sacred, present only in burial rites and in the song, and the inner lives of the women.
Insular · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the four Gospels entire, harmonised by the canon tables, from the genealogies to the Passion. The cosmos: the circles of the cross page and the fourfold creatures. The natural order: cats, mice, fish, birds, hounds, snakes, lions and the vine, alive in the text. The human: men in the initials pulling one another’s beards, and the faces at the line ends. History: the generations of Matthew and of Luke, Luke’s set out as a column of names. What is thin is the social world, labour, the state and individual consciousness, and the life of Christ is held as text, not as image, except at a few points. The painted chapels, whose figures carry the human world, hold more.
Samuel Richardson · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Held in one structure: consciousness, minutely; the family as household, money and law, in the settlement, the grandfather’s will and the father’s curse; class, between the new-rich Harlowes and Lovelace’s aristocratic house; the law as it touches a woman, in the arrest for debt, the sponging house and the question of prosecution; London’s underworld, the brothel and its women; religion and the sacred, at full weight in the last volumes; sexuality and power. Not held: labour, the state and politics, war, the natural order; country and city are rooms more than worlds. A world of private life at the greatest depth, by design, as the title page announces. Held below the top because it holds fewer orders of reality, however deeply it holds them.
Honoré de Balzac · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one house and the city it looks down on. Consciousness, in Rastignac’s slow corruption and his scruple. The family: Goriot and his daughters, Rastignac’s mother and sisters in Angoulême who send him their savings, the Restaud and Nucingen marriages. Money in all its forms: the grain speculation by which Goriot made his fortune in the Revolution, the dowry, the bank, usury in Gobseck, debt, inheritance. Class in its layers, from the pension through the bourgeoisie and the new money of the Chaussée-d’Antin to the old aristocracy. Crime and the police, in Vautrin and Gondureau; medicine in Bianchon; the law in the student; the Revolution and the Empire behind the Restoration. They are integrated through Rastignac, who passes through every layer. Held below the top because labour is past and offstage, the sacred is present only as figure, and the natural order is absent: this is the city alone, in one winter.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
For 3182 lines it holds a great deal, and holds it together. The sacred: Creation, Cain, providence, the soul’s going. The state: kingship and succession, the gift-throne, the dynastic politics of five peoples. History: the Scylding line from Scyld’s ship-burial, Hygelac’s fall in Frisia, the Swedish wars, the Geats’ doom foretold. The family: Wealhtheow pleading for her sons’ succession, Hildeburh at the pyre of her son and brother, Hrethel dying of grief because one son killed another and no vengeance is possible. The natural order: sea, moor, mere and headland. What is thin: the inward life, given in speeches and gnomic reflection rather than in a mind; labour, present only as smithing and hall-building; the common life below the warband.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: class, as two houses under one roof; the nation on the eve of war, in a national hero, a General and a radio audience; modernity, in the aeroplane, radio, car and automata; the natural order, in the Sologne marsh and the hunt; love and marriage, in four couples and their codes; art, in the fête, the music and Octave’s lost career; the outsider, in Robert’s origins, Christine’s Austrian foreignness and the poacher taken into service; and death. They are joined through the house and the code. What holds the axis is what is absent or thin: labour is seen only as service, the family has no children and no generations, the sacred is absent but for the dance of death, and history is the eve of war felt, not entered.
Laurence Sterne · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders, held within one house and one voice. Consciousness above all, in Tristram, Walter and Toby. The family, in the Shandys’ marriage, the brothers and the dead son Bobby. War, in Toby’s wound and his campaigns on the bowling green, and behind them William’s and Marlborough’s wars in Flanders. Learning, in Walter’s systems and the scholastics. The body, in birth, noses, wounds, impotence and death. Medicine, in Slop and the forceps. The sacred, in Yorick, the sermon and the recording angel. Time and mortality, in the flight from Death and the narrator’s race against his pen. Each is a hobby-horse or a body, integrated, not listed. Held below 9.0 because the state, labour and class are thin, the women stand outside the book’s consciousness, and the world beyond Shandy Hall is a ground rather than an order the book holds.
El Greco · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, as a whole heaven with its hierarchy; death and the body; society, Toledo’s nobility and clergy painted as themselves; history, a burial of 1323 enacted by men of 1586; the family, in the boy at the threshold; consciousness, in faces turned inward at a death; and art, in a picture that sets its viewer among the mourners. They are integrated, not listed: the vertical from the tomb to Christ runs through every one. Whether the king is among the blessed, and the painter among the mourners, is disputed, and nothing rests on either. What holds the axis is what is absent: labour (no one here works but the priests at their office), the natural order (no landscape, no sky but cloud), and the poor.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Seven orders are held in one structure: the state, in the occupation, the SS and the machinery of transport; labour and economy, in the factory, the essential-worker category, the armaments contracts and the black market; the family, split at the selection, its children hidden, and Emilie Schindler’s marriage; desire and power, in Schindler’s women and in Goeth and Helen Hirsch; the sacred, from the Sabbath blessing to the burial in Jerusalem; history, 1939 to 1945 and then the present, in one frame; and death, mass and single, seen together. The economy of the list integrates them. Held weakly are the victims’ inner world and communal life, politics beyond Kraków and Schindler’s consciousness, and the natural order is absent.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure: a child’s consciousness, given as the work’s point of view; a family over three generations, with its marriages, adulteries and legitimacies; servants and masters at one table at Christmas; trade, in the restaurant, the shop of old things and the money Isak pays; the theatre as institution and livelihood; the established church as household and as power; Jewish mysticism and its house; sexuality; death, and the dead who remain; the question of God. They are integrated: the money that buys the children, the church that holds them and the theatre that receives them back are one plot. What holds the axis here: the state, history beyond the household, labour outside the house and the natural order, one summer house aside, lie outside the frame.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. Consciousness: grief in Blue, humiliation and revenge in White, loneliness and conscience in Red. The family: the dead husband and child, a mother who no longer knows her daughter, the mistress’s child, the brothers in Warsaw. Love and sexuality: a marriage dissolved for impotence, the stripper, the betrayals in Red. Labour and money: the salon, the money changers, the model’s work, weather sold by telephone. The law: the divorce court, the judge who reports himself, Auguste’s exam, Dominique’s arrest. Europe, art, technology, the sacred and chance. The triad integrates them across three cities in three countries, so that no one film carries the whole. What holds the axis here: the state and history are emblems more than orders entered, the poor appear only at the edges, and nature is weather.
James Boswell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The book holds a great deal in one structure. The life of letters as labour: Grub Street, the Dictionary, the pension, and “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”. The church, and the faith of a man who fears damnation. The state, in Johnson’s Toryism, Wilkes, the American war and Scotland. The law, through Boswell’s own profession. A whole society of London talk, in taverns and the Club, with Burke, Reynolds, Goldsmith and Garrick. Consciousness, in melancholy and the fear of madness; death, at the end and throughout. The family is thinner: Tetty is a shadow and Boswell’s own family is offstage. The natural order is barely present. It is integrated through one man, not held as a world in its own right.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Held, and wide. Consciousness: one narrating mind, fearful, mocking and at moments tender, across twenty years. The state: the army, the recruiting, the hospitals for the shell-shocked, where patriotism is prescribed as a cure. Labour: the colonial company, the assembly line, the suburban practice and its unpaid fees. History: the Great War, the empire in Africa, American industrial modernity, the French suburb between the wars. The family: the Henrouilles’ plot against their mother, Bébert and his aunt, the households of the poor seen from the doctor’s side. Love and the body: Lola, Musyne, Molly, Madelon. Death throughout, and the natural order as the jungle and the river. Held below the top because the sacred is present only as its absence, and because these orders are seen almost entirely from one vantage, below, through one voice, so that they are held together but seldom set against each other.
Robert Browning · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as a book of short and middle-length poems, the range held is wide, and it is integrated through the speaking self. The history of painting runs from Lippi to del Sarto, and of music through Galuppi and Hugues. Faith is held at its crises: David before Saul, the first century in Karshish and Cleon, the Victorian unbelief of Blougram, the Roman ghetto of “Holy-Cross Day”. Love and marriage are held in their stages; politics in “The Patriot” and “Instans Tyrannus”; scholarship in “A Grammarian’s Funeral”; the natural world chiefly as a landscape of the mind, in the waste land of “Childe Roland” and the Campagna. What it does not hold: labour, the state in its working, the family beyond the couple. Held, not listed, because each order is held through a person.
D. H. Lawrence · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Many orders, joined by one question. Consciousness, in four lives seen from within. The family: the Brangwens and the Criches, a dying father, an estranged mother, a drowned sister. Labour and industry: the pits, the miners, Gerald’s reform of the firm, a town built on coal. Class: the mine owner’s son and the schoolteachers, Hermione’s country house. Art: Gudrun’s carving, Loerke’s frieze, the African figure. Sexuality and love in every form the book can name, between men included. The natural order: water, moon, snow, animals. The sacred, as an idea sought rather than a faith held. History and the state are thin by choice: the war that ran through the years of writing is never named, and that absence holds the axis below the great social novels.
Percy Bysshe Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Many orders, held through one myth. The cosmos: earth, moon, sun, the elements, the planetary dance. History: Asia’s account of man from Saturn’s reign to Jupiter’s, the gifts of Prometheus, “He gave man speech, and speech created thought, / Which is the measure of the universe”, and the Revolution and the Cross in the Furies’ vision. The state: tyranny, its servant Mercury, its overthrow, and the human made “Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless”. The sacred: Jupiter as false god, Christ, Zoroaster’s double world. Consciousness: the curse, guilt, forgiveness, the mind’s self-enslavement. The natural order: the buried past of the earth in Act IV. Held a step below the top because the family, labour and the ordinary life of persons are absent or only named, held at the height of allegory rather than in particulars.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
For a short book it holds a great deal in one structure. The family and the marriage; sex and its violence; a class order, the house, the village, the tenants and the gentry from outside; the history of England from its geology to the present; the church, in Streatfield and in the barn that is like one; art and its audience; the natural order, cows, swallows, fish and rain; and the war coming. They are integrated through the pageant and the day, not listed. What holds the axis a step below: labour and the state are not held at full depth, and the minds the book enters are glimpsed more than lived. Its scale is a compression of large orders, achieved, though not the full width of a large novel.
Zhang Zeduan · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
For a painting the field is wide, and it is held in one structure, not listed. The natural order: season, river, fields, trees and weather. Labour: trackers, porters, boatmen, carpenters, carters. The economy: grain transport, warehouses, stalls, inns and great shops, goods flowing from the land to the market. The state: the gate and officials on horseback. The family and its rites: the sedan chair dressed with willow, usually read as a party returning from the graves at Qingming. Medicine, religion, entertainment and learning in their places: a physician’s shop, monks, a storyteller’s crowd, a fortune teller. History became explicit in its reception. What it cannot hold is consciousness: the figures’ inner life is never entered, and that keeps the axis below the upper band.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Held, and many orders. The state, as the penal system from the major’s whim to the gauntlet. Labour, as forced labour: the brickworks, the breaking up of old barges on the Irtysh, the workshops, and what labour means to the men. Class, in the gulf between the gentleman and the peasant. Nations and faiths under one roof: Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Dagestanis, Poles, a Jew, Old Believers. The sacred: Christmas, the Lenten fast and communion, Aley’s Gospel. The body, in the bath, the hospital and the wounds. Economy, in the convicts’ trade and smuggling. The natural order, in the animals, the steppe beyond the palisade, the river seen from the work site. Consciousness, in the narrator’s slow change. History is a ground and not an agent, and the family stands only at the edge, in Akulka’s village; that holds it a step below the novels.
Joseph Heller · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The book holds many orders in one structure, and they are joined rather than listed. The army is a state in miniature, with its paperwork, promotions, loyalty and courts. Commerce is Milo’s syndicate, which ends by owning the war it supplies. Medicine is Doc Daneeka, the hospital and the soldier in white; the church, the chaplain’s lost faith and his persecution; sex and money, Rome; the old world against the new, Nately’s old man, the hundred-and-seven-year-old in the brothel who argues that Italy will survive America as it survived everyone; death and the body, Snowden. What holds the axis there is what is missing: consciousness is entered only through Yossarian and the chaplain, and the family and labour, as against commerce, are scarcely present. Wide, held together by the catch, short of the totalities.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders, and most of them integrated. Consciousness: Milkman’s, and also Ruth’s, Hagar’s and Guitar’s. The family, across four generations. Property, rent and class within a Black community. History, from slavery through Reconstruction, when the elder Macon Dead was killed for his farm at Lincoln’s Heaven, to the 1950s and to 1963, with Till and the Birmingham church bombing as Guitar’s motive. The state and its violence. The sacred, through names, ghosts and flight. The natural order, in the hunt and in the land of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Held below the top because white society is present almost only as cause, off the page, and labour beyond Macon’s landlording is thin.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
A whole small society. Its economy: the store, the cotton gin, credit, the trade in land and stock. Its law: the justice of the peace and the trial. Its families: the Varners, the Armstids, the Houstons, the Snopes clan in all its grades. Sex and marriage, madness and idiocy, the animal world, the land itself, and the ruin of an older plantation order in the Old Frenchman place. One movement holds these orders together rather than listing them: the passage of the hamlet’s goods into Flem’s hands. What it does not hold is history at large, or the sacred except as fable; the frame is a hamlet, and the book is the hamlet’s whole world rather than the South’s.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders, held through one action and one consciousness. War: the guerrilla, the offensive, the planes, the cavalry patrol. The state and politics: the Republic, the Comintern, the anarchists, the fascist officers. The village: Pilar’s town and its killings, the bullfighters, the peasant memory of the band. The sacred: Anselmo’s lapsed and returning prayer, Joaquín’s Hail Mary, Berrendo’s prayer for his dead friend. The family: Jordan’s father and grandfather, and the band as a family. Love and the body. The natural order: the mountain, the snow, the horses. History: the American Civil War behind Jordan, Spain’s war in front. They are integrated, for everything comes to the bridge. Held below the top because three days and one place limit the reach: labour and ordinary life enter only as memory, and Spain beyond the mountain is seen chiefly from the hotel.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one estate. Consciousness: Roman’s jealousy, Tomek’s watching, Zofia’s guilt. The family: parents and children in I, IV and VII, marriage in II and IX, brothers in X. Labour: the consultant, the taxi drivers, the lawyer, the post-office clerk, the surgeon, the professor. The state: the court, the prison and the gallows in V. History: the occupation in VIII, and the consultant’s family lost to the war in II. The sacred: the altar and the icon in I, and the watcher. The natural order: ice, illness, impotence, a kidney. They are integrated, not listed: one courtyard holds them. The absences are the public world — the Party, the Church as institution, the workplace beyond the office door, and politics — excluded by design, and recorded here.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one boy’s road. The natural order is the deepest the book holds: the wolf, horses, weather and mountains, given a weight rare in the novel. The family: father, mother and brother, all lost. Labour: ranch work, trapping, horse trading. History: the Mexican Revolution in the blind man’s tale, the Second World War, the bomb. The state, as the border and the draft board, and as a hacienda’s power over the poor. The sacred: the ruined church, the priest’s argument with God, the corrido as a people’s scripture. Each enters through what happens to Billy, so they are integrated, not listed. Held below the top because consciousness is kept at the surface on purpose, Billy seen and never entered; because women and the city are thin; and because the politics of Mexico enter mostly as tale.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Orders of reality held: consciousness, in Wilhelm’s self-deceptions and their slow correction; the family, from the father’s house to Mariane and the son Felix, whom Wilhelm learns late is his, and the fear for Felix’s life that turns him from self-cultivation to care; labour and commerce, in Werner’s ledger and his praise of double-entry bookkeeping; the arts, in the theatre as an institution, criticism, music and the grandfather’s sold collection; the classes, in the Count’s castle, the burgher’s letter and Lothario’s plan to give up feudal privilege; religion, in the sixth book’s Moravian piety; and America and the Revolution at the edge. They are integrated by Wilhelm’s path through them. Not higher because the state and history press mainly from off stage, and the natural order is barely present.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders, held by one question: what the century has done to the human. History is the agent here, not the ground: Fashoda, the Florentine plots of 1899, the colonial wars in South-West Africa, Paris before the war, the Maltese riots of June 1919, the Sette Giugno, and the siege of Malta. The state, as empire and as military; science, in Mondaugen’s sferics and the synthetic men; the sacred, in the Bad Priest, Father Fairing’s converted rats and Fausto’s lapsed vocation; consciousness, in Stencil’s obsession and Fausto’s divided selves. Labour is present, in Profane’s road and sewer work, but lightly. Held below the top because the family is thin, father and son Stencil the one bond the book lives in, and the present line’s people are types more than lives.
Thomas Malory · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one realm’s life. The state: kingship, succession, rebellion, the war with Rome, Mordred’s usurpation, and the commons who desert their king, whom Malory turns aside to reproach for their inconstancy (XXI.1). Law: judicial combat, and the queen sentenced to the fire under Arthur’s own law. Kinship: the feud of the houses of Lot and Pellinore, and the Orkney brothers whose loyalty ends the realm. Love: Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristram and Isode, Elaine of Astolat dying for Lancelot. The sacred: the Grail, its hermits, the penance of the end. The marvellous: Merlin, Nimue, the Lady of the Lake. They are integrated, since each is a cause of the fall. Labour and the common life are almost absent, and consciousness is held in act.
Nayaka builders (and earlier) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Orders held, and placed by one structure. The sacred, in the two sanctums and the sixty-four sacred games of Shiva told round the tank. The state, in the legend of the Pandya queen and in the Nayaka kings and donors on the pillars. The family, in the divine wedding, the temple’s governing story, and in the human weddings performed in its halls. The city and its commerce, in the shops of the outer halls and the processions that carry the temple into the streets. Poetry and learning, in the legend of the poets’ assembly at the tank; music, in the temple’s own players; the natural order, in the open tank and the festival year. The approach integrates them, from market to marriage to the god. Held below the top by what lies outside: individual consciousness, labour as subject, death.
Peter Jackson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders of reality are held in one structure, and most are integrated, not listed. Consciousness: the Ring’s hold on Frodo, Boromir, Bilbo and Gollum, each a degree of one possession. Friendship and service: Sam’s, across the line of gardener and master, the films’ most achieved bond. The state: two kingdoms, a steward’s madness and a king’s return. War: the siege, the charge, and the cost to the young, Éowyn, Merry, and Faramir sent back to Osgiliath. The natural order: Isengard’s furnaces against the Ents, and the land as a character. Death and the sacred: Gandalf’s fall and return, the Grey Havens. Held from the top by what the films compress from their source: history, kept to a prologue; labour beyond Isengard’s; and the corruption of home, cut with the Scouring.
Harriet Beecher Stowe · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Many orders, held and mostly joined. The family: three families broken, the Shelbys, the Harrises and Tom’s, and the St. Clares in their failure. Labour: the cotton field, the household, the hired-out slave, as George Harris is. The market: the trader, the auction, debt as the engine of the plot. The state: the Fugitive Slave Law, and a senator who voted for it breaking it in his own kitchen. The church: the clergy who defend the system, Tom’s Bible, the Quakers. The nation, from Kentucky and Ohio down the river to the Red River and north to Canada; consciousness under domination in Cassy, Topsy and Tom’s despair; the sacred over all. One sale holds them. What is thin is interiority: few persons are rendered from inside, the slaves least of all.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.4 · Tier V
The orders held, and integrated: consciousness, Acts II and III; eros and death, as one order; the feudal order, in tribute and vendetta, a marriage of state to end a war, vassalage and honour, “Tristans Ehre, / höchste Treu’!”
“Tristan’s honour, highest troth!”; kinship, in a father dead before Tristan’s birth and a mother dead in bearing him; the natural order, the sea, the night garden, the barren shore; service, in Brangäne, Kurwenal and the shepherd; the sacred, in negative, as Night. Act I’s politics make the drink necessary, and Act II’s discovery is a feudal breach before it is a marital one. What holds the axis here is absence: labour, history, the city, the family as lived, comedy and any crowd after Act I. Everything routes through two consciousnesses.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.3 · Tier V
The text names more orders than music alone can, and one tune holds them: inner struggle, in the wordless first movement; the natural order, “Freude trinken alle Wesen / An den Brüsten der Natur” (“All creatures drink joy at Nature’s breasts”); marriage, “Wer ein holdes Weib errungen” (“He who has won a gracious wife”); the hero and the soldier; the millions; the sacred, from worm to cherub to the Creator above the stars. What holds the axis here is absence. Labour, the state, history and the family beyond the spouse do not appear, and the first three movements hold an inner life without naming it. They are integrated, but fewer than an epic holds.
Euripides · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
A single play of under fourteen hundred lines, not marked down for its length and weighed on what it holds. In one structure: the sacred, in the god, his cult and its truth; the city, in Pentheus’ law against the rite and Thebes as the god’s denied birthplace; the family across three generations, from the slander of Semele to Cadmus, his daughters and Pentheus; gender and sexuality, in the women’s withdrawal to the mountain and the king dressed as a woman; the natural order of Cithaeron, its animals nursed and torn; the foreign and the Greek; a mind divided against itself. Each is a face of the same refusal and return. What holds it lowest of the twelve: history’s sweep, labour and the long span of a life lie outside one play.
Raphael · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
The orders held in one structure: the intellect, a tablet, a slate, two globes and the talk on the platform; the generations, four ages of men in transmission; the city, in a basilica being built; the sacred as the pagan world had it, two gods in niches and an open heaven; history, a thousand years in one hour; consciousness, in the brooder and the self-portrait’s look; the state, faintly, in a youth in armour listening. They are integrated by the building and the steps, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour, no women unless the youth in white is one, no death, no weather. One hall of men in talk cannot hold what a vault or a chapel holds, and the figure says so.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier V
The orders held are many, and the text joins them: the sacred, in every clause; the cosmos, heaven and earth, things visible and invisible; history, in the creed’s narrative of incarnation, passion and judgment; the state and war, in the trumpets and drums of the Agnus Dei; the community, as a chorus praying; the single consciousness, in the solo voices and in the inner peace the superscription asks for; death and the world to come. They are integrated: outer war and inner peace are set against each other in one movement. What holds the axis here, the lowest of the twelve, is absence and frame: the family, labour and the natural order appear little or not at all, and the world of the Mass is the liturgy’s, given before the composer began.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on what one play holds, and it holds much. The order of the gods, its war, its succession and the threat to its future; the state, as tyranny and its psychology; history, as the whole rise of human culture from mortals who “blepontes eblepon matēn”
“seeing, saw in vain” (about 447) to houses, number, writing, medicine and seafaring; the natural order, from the elements of the first invocation to the volcano and the earthquake; the body, in the chained Titan and the tormented Io; lineage, in Themis, Oceanus and his daughters, and the generations from Io to Heracles; consciousness, as foreknowledge and will. These are held in one structure around one fixed point, not listed. What is absent is the ordinary human life the gifts are for: no household, no city, no labour seen. Humankind is spoken of, never shown, and Io is its only representative.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged at the dialogue’s scale, it holds many orders in one structure: the soul and its divisions; erotic love and friendship; the gods, the Muses, the Nymphs, Pan, Delphi and the art of prophecy; the order of heaven and the cycle of lives; nature, in the river, the plane tree and the cicadas; the city, its assembly and law courts, Pericles and his schooling under Anaxagoras (269e to 270a); medicine, with Hippocrates as a model for the art of speech (270c); and the technology of writing. They are joined by the leading of souls, not listed: the palinode holds cosmos, soul and love in one image. What holds it there is what lies outside the walls: the family, labour, war and history, with women present only as the Nymphs and Oreithyia. Two men on a walk hold more than their length suggests; they do not hold a world.
Giacomo Leopardi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on what a lyric body holds, and high for one, because the orders are many and one law integrates them. Consciousness throughout: memory, boredom, the mind against the infinite. The family, in the father’s house and garden of Le ricordanze and the sister’s wedding. Love, in Silvia, Nerina and Aspasia; death everywhere. The village and its labour: the girl coming home “in sul calar del sole”, at the falling of the sun, the carpenter working by lamplight on Saturday night, the craftsman back at his work after the storm. The nation and history: Italy, Rome, Dante, the buried cities. The century’s creeds of progress; the moon and stars, the volcano and the broom; the sacred, as an absence argued. Held at 8.5: the state and the economy appear only as satire or aspiration, and every order is seen from one solitary vantage.
George Frideric Handel · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held are vast and few. The sacred, wholly; history at its widest, from prophecy to the end of time; the natural order, in valleys raised and mountains made level, darkness and light, flocks and shepherds; the political, in “Why do the nations so furiously rage together”, kings set against the Lord, and “The kingdom of this world” given over; the crowd, in the mob that mocks; death and the body, corrupted and raised incorruptible. They are held together through the “we” of the chorus, not listed. The absences are as plain. No individual consciousness is drawn, because no one is a character and the soloists speak for everyone. The family appears only in the virgin of Isaiah, and labour only in the shepherds.
Chinua Achebe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as what a short novel holds, and it holds a whole society. Consciousness, in Okonkwo’s fear, Nwoye’s grief and Ekwefi’s love. The family, in a polygamous compound, its wives, its sons and its favoured daughter. Labour and wealth, in yams, sharecropping, titles and barns. Law and the polity, in the egwugwu court, the village assembly and war settled by negotiation with Mbaino. The sacred, in Agbala’s oracle, Ani, the chi and the ancestors. The natural order, in harvest, drought, locusts and the forest. History, in conquest, the church, the court, the trading store and the prison. They are integrated: each order is an instrument of the clan’s balance, and each breaks in the same fall. Held here because the scale is one village and one man, and the colonial state appears only at its edge.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders, held by one question of power and its watchers. Consciousness, in Rorschach’s journal and Manhattan’s simultaneous time. The family, in Sally Jupiter, Laurie and the Comedian, and the paternity found on Mars. Sexuality, ageing and the body, in the first generation of masks grown old. The city, in the newsstand and the street, the vendor and the boy, the psychiatrist and his wife, all of them killed. The state and history, in an alternative American century. Science, in Manhattan; commerce and the media, in Veidt’s empire; ethics and the sacred, in the calculus of the end and the god who leaves. They are integrated, not listed: each order is a form of watching. What holds it lowest of the twelve: labour, faith and the inner lives of the ordinary people are held more thinly than in the great novels, and the alternative history is drawn as setting more than as weight.
Jean d'Orbais, Jean le Loup, Gaucher de Reims and Bernard de Soissons · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure. The sacred: the Virgin, the saints, the Passion and the Judgment. The state: the kingdom, its founding in Clovis, its renewal at each coronation. History: sacred history from Abraham and Melchizedek to the Last Judgment, and the history of France from Clovis to the reigning king, each given its place in the programme. The angelic order, in the hosts on the buttresses. The human face, smiling and grieving. Death and judgment, in the Judgment portal of the north transept. One axis and one rite integrate them rather than list them. What holds the axis: labour, the household and the common life enter only as the programme gives them, and individual consciousness only as figure.
Benjamin Britten · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders are many, and the three planes hold them together: consciousness, in the soldiers’ voices; war, as event and as institution; the state and its old men, in the parable; the sacred, as the whole liturgy and its failure; history, two world wars and a bombed cathedral, the second named by the occasion and the first by the poems; the family, in the father and the son; childhood, in the boys; the natural order, in the sun of “Futility” and the stars of “Bugles sang”; and the dead as a society. They are integrated, since the parable makes the family the state and the state the rite. What holds the axis at 8.5 is labour, which is absent, and the domestic, which appears only in glimpses.
Charlotte Brontë · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Many orders, held through one consciousness. The mind: Jane’s from ten to thirty, rage, reason, desire, conscience. The family: three households of kin, the Reeds, the Rivers cousins and the uncle in Madeira, and one unlawful marriage. Institution and class: the charity school, its typhus and its trustee; the governess’s place; the village school at Morton, where Jane teaches farmers’ daughters. The law: bigamy, inheritance, a wife as property. Religion in three forms: Brocklehurst’s, Helen’s and St John’s. Empire: the Jamaican fortune and the Creole wife, the Madeira wine trade, the Indian mission. The natural order: the moors, the weather, the moon. Held where it is because the public world, the state, history and labour beyond the schoolroom, is ground and never agent; empire is present but unexamined; and everything passes through one life.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Seven orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the whole Christian history, from the Nativity to the Passion to the Glory planned, ranked in the towers. The natural order: the forest of the interior, the creatures of the Nativity, the sun’s course through the glass and round the façades. The family: a temple of the Holy Family and of Saint Joseph, the household of Nazareth at the centre of the Nativity. Labour: a building made over generations by craftsmen and gifts, its seams the record of who made it. The city: the Eixample’s grid, the skyline, Catalan identity. Death: Gaudí’s tomb in the crypt and the Passion’s bones. History: Villar, the burning and the continuation, written in the fabric. Plan and section integrate them. Individual consciousness and the state are faint.
Pallava · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, in Shiva, the shrine of Vishnu and the river’s descent; the cosmos, in gods, celestials and the serpent powers of the waters; the natural order, in the animals of forest and river at their own lives; human life, in ascetics, sages and hunters; the family, in elephants sheltering their young and the serpent pair; ethics, in the true penance and the false; and, by the usual reading, kingship, in the Pallava claim the work may carry. They are integrated by the cleft, not listed. What holds the axis below the top: labour appears only as hunting and devotion, history and the state only by inference, and consciousness only as attention. For a visual work it holds an unusual breadth of orders in one structure.
Sigmund Freud · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what a book of prose of thought can hold, and it holds many orders in one structure: consciousness and its underside; the body and sleep; the family, above all father and son, from the infant’s wishes to the dying father who resembles Garibaldi; sexuality; the professional world of Viennese medicine with its rivalries and failures, Irma, Fleischl, Brücke; the state and politics, Count Thun, the revolution of 1848, the ambition of a Jewish student under a Catholic monarchy; history and antiquity, Rome, Hannibal, Oedipus; and literature itself. They are integrated, not listed: each enters through a dream and is held by the one theory. What it does not hold: labour beyond the bourgeois profession, the natural order beyond the body, the sacred except as displaced wish. A broader world than most single books, narrower than the great novels.
Anonymous · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and most are integrated. The state: kingship at Worms, vassalage, whose false claim that Siegfried is Gunther’s man is the hinge of the quarrel, war with the Saxons and Danes, embassy. The family: mother, brothers, sister, marriage, widowhood, and a child, Ortlieb, killed at the feast. History: the Huns, Etzel’s court of many peoples, Dietrich of Bern and his men, Christian and heathen side by side. The sacred: the cathedral door, the chaplain, the bishop of Passau, the question of Rüdiger’s soul. Nature and the other world: the two rivers, the hunt, the bear loosed in the camp, the dragon, the hoard, the sprites. Thin: consciousness, rendered almost wholly from outside, and labour and the common people.
Tibetan, under the Fifth Dalai Lama · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Eight orders are held in one structure: the sacred, in chapels, images and the bodhisattva’s mountain; the state, its offices, treasury and ceremony; the line of incarnation, at once dynasty and doctrine, in the tombs; history, from the cave of the empire’s founder to the tomb of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama; the social order, monks, officials and ruler ranked by storey; the household, the Dalai Lama’s rooms and the monks’ quarters; death, at the core; and the natural order, the hill, the sun chambers, the building as its own mountain. The section places them in one rising order. What holds the axis is what lies outside the unit: labour and the common life, in Shol and in the corvée that built it, with consciousness entering only as devotion. A government, a church and a necropolis are held; the people are not.
Norman builders, under William II · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Held in one structure: the sacred, the whole of scripture from the Creation to the apostles, with the liturgy and the altar; the state, the crowned king, his throne, his tomb and his quarrel with Palermo; history, the world’s time laid out along the nave; the natural order, the days of the Creation and the animals and plants of the Genesis cycle and of the cloister capitals; the common life of a monastic community, its circuit and its fountain; and three cultures, Greek, Latin and Arab, in one surface. The walk to the apse and the cloister’s circuit integrate them. What holds the score is what lies outside the king’s and the monk’s world: labour appears only as Adam’s, the family only as scripture gives it, and the town below has no place in the building.
W. G. Sebald · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Several orders, held by one consciousness and its removes. Consciousness, in Austerlitz’s breakdown and recovery of memory. The family, lost and searched for: mother, father, foster parents, nanny. History: the European nineteenth century of stations and fortifications, through the war and the camps, to the 1990s. The state and its administration, in the ghetto’s bureaucracy and the library’s grandeur. The natural order: moths, nocturnal animals, the Welsh landscape. The sacred, in the Calvinist manse and its emptying. They are integrated by one law, of order and its undoing. Held below the higher reaches because labour, class and community scarcely appear, and everything reaches the book through two solitary men talking; the orders are present as subjects of study and memory more than as lives.
Khmer, under Jayavarman VII · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and the concentric plan places each. The cosmos: the world mountain at the crossing of the city’s axes. The sacred: the Buddha, the faces, the Hindu myths of the inner gallery. The state: the king’s gaze, his army on the march. History: the war with the Cham, on the wall of the temple it occasioned. Labour and the market: traders, cooks, fishermen, builders. The family and the body: a birth, households, games. The natural order: the fish and crocodiles of the great lake, the forest. Foreigners: figures usually read as Chinese. They are integrated, not listed: the outer wall holds the world, the inner the myth, the summit the gaze that watches both. Held by what is absent, individual consciousness and story, and by death, which enters only as war. For a building it is very wide.
Hart Crane · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the book holds, as a lyric sequence. The continent and its history: Columbus, the Indian, the pioneers, the clipper ships, the New England decline of Quaker Hill, flight. The modern city and its labour: the harbor, the subway, the railroad and the men who ride it. Technology, as the bridge, the train and the airplane. The sacred throughout, in the Proem’s prayer and in Atlantis. Sex and the body, in the songs and The Dance. Consciousness, as the poet’s own quest, and childhood memory in Van Winkle. Death, in Poe and Maquokeeta. These are many orders, held in one structure rather than listed, at least in the central poems. What keeps the figure at 8.5: the family and the state are thin, and the integration of history and the present is intended more often than achieved.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Held through two lives, not listed. Two inner lives across fifty years, and a third beside them; a marriage, a family and its social climb, with Lorenzo Daza’s fortune of doubtful origin set against the Urbino family’s old name and the city’s caste; labour and commerce, the telegraph office, the River Company of the Caribbean and Uncle Leo XII Loayza; medicine and public health, Urbino’s campaign against cholera, the drains and the aqueduct; the civil wars glimpsed from the river; the decay of a colonial port; the destruction of the forests and animals of the Magdalena; the church, death and burial; age and the body. Commerce, public health, class and the river’s ecology are the conditions of the plot, not its scenery. What holds the axis there is that the state, history and the sacred are background, not orders the book weighs as it weighs love: it holds a society, not a world, and encompasses less than Anna Karenina or Infinite Jest.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Consciousness, the body, family, love, labour, class, institutions, politics, technology, medicine, childhood, art and the state, held rather than named, and integrated by the one system that processes them all. Labour and class are held best, in a cargo driver’s budget notebook and in a transformer plant whose shift change once put eleven hundred men on a sidewalk, where a painted crossing still runs from the gate to nothing. Family runs across generations, from Andy and Olivia Rose to their sons, from Aeneas’s father at the graveside to the boy on Heloise’s lap, and to Precious, kept more and more by Heloise after her mother’s death. The childhood part earns the scale: without a shared origin the adult worlds would be an anthology of subjects rather than orders of one reality. Short of the highest band because history proper and nation stay at the edge of the frame, a war in Kashmir glimpsed on a smartHub, and every order routes through one gang and one removal.
Constantinian, Crusader and later builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are held and placed. The sacred above all. Death, in the tomb, in Adam’s chapel and in the first-century graves cut in the rock behind the rotunda. The state, from Constantine’s demolition of Hadrian’s temple through the Crusader kingdom to the Ottoman firman. History, seventeen centuries of conquest and rebuilding legible in the fabric. The community and its division, in six churches under one roof. The natural order, in the rock, the quarry and the light from the crown. Labour, in the monks who keep it and the families who keep its door. The worshipper’s own life is present in the route. What holds it: the family and private life are absent, and the integration is history’s more than the form’s.
Frank Herbert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The book holds in one structure the natural order, a planetary ecology argued in detail with its plan for the planet’s transformation; the economy, a resource and its monopolies; the state, an empire with its great houses and its hidden powers; the sacred, a religion engineered and a religion lived; the family, the Atreides household, the father’s death, the mother’s choice to bear a son against her order’s command; consciousness, in prescience, genetic memory and the trained mind; and history, written from after in the epigraphs. They are integrated, not listed: each moves the others. What holds the axis there is the ordinary. Labour is seen in the spice harvest and the sietch, but daily life, the inner lives of the many, and women as more than instruments of lineage are held thinly.
August Sander · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and held in one structure rather than listed. Labour, in the farmers, smiths, cooks, bricklayers and factory hands. The family, in couples, mothers and children, generations posed together. The state and its orders, in officials, soldiers, students in their corps colours and later the uniformed men of the regime. Class, as the governing principle. The city and the country, as the two poles. Art and thought, in painters, writers, composers and architects. The sacred, more thinly, in priests and nuns. Sickness, madness, age and death, in the last people. History, which entered the work uninvited as the Weimar order gave way to persecution and war. One method under one scheme integrates them. Held below the top because the inner life is reached only through the surface of a face.
Almohad builders; cathedral by Gothic masters · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one precinct. The sacred, in two faiths, the earlier kept in tower and court. The state: the Almohad caliphate, the Castilian crown in the Capilla Real, the conquest that joined them. History, laid down in strata from 1172 to the nineteenth century. Empire: the Indies, their trade and their admiral, in the tomb of Columbus and the wealth of the Renaissance rooms. The city: the tower as its sign and clock, the cathedral its civic stage in Holy Week. Death, in the royal tombs and the family chapels. The natural order, in the court’s trees and water and the sun on the tower. Labour is present only as the building’s making. The orders are integrated in the tower and the processional way, elsewhere by accretion.
Robert Penn Warren · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The book holds in one structure the state and its machinery, patronage, impeachment, the highway and the hospital, the courthouse ring; class and region, the red-neck counties against the planter families of Burden’s Landing; the family, the Starks, the Burdens and the Irwins, and the Stantons with their fallen governor; history, both as the Civil War past and as the historian’s discipline; the sacred, as original sin and the Scholarly Attorney’s religion; and consciousness, Jack’s. They are integrated rather than listed, because each order is tied to the others through Jack’s research. What holds the axis where it is: labour and the natural order are present but thin, and race is held almost wholly in the Cass chapter.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one structure. Race and its history in America, from East Orange in the 1940s to the college of 1998. The family: the Silks, a mother renounced, a brother’s ban, Coleman’s own children and their anger. Class, in Faunia’s labour on a dairy farm and as a cleaner at the college, and in Les Farley’s poverty. War, in Les and in the Navy of the 1940s. The academy and its politics. The state, in the impeachment and in the veterans’ hospital. Sexuality and age, in Coleman’s late passion. Consciousness, in five minds entered from within. The natural order, in the cows, the crow and the lake. They are integrated, not listed: each order is a place where a person is made pure or impure. Held below the top because the sacred is thin and the whole is seen from one small town.
Chen Kaige · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 171 minutes holds. The state, in four regimes, each acting on the stage; history across fifty-three years; labour, in the opera school’s contracts, rods and apprenticeship, held fully; the family, in its absence and its substitutes, the mother who gives the boy away, the brotherhood, the marriage, the foundling raised as a son; gender and desire, in the making of a man into a stage woman and in his love; art, in a whole theatrical tradition shown from inside; the sacred, in the school’s shrine to the trade’s patron ancestor and in the opera as rite. The plot integrates them: each regime arrives through the stage. Held from the top because consciousness is one man’s, and the countryside and the poor beyond the theatre are absent.
Ming builders (and earlier dynasties) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and the line places each. The state and its limit. War and its organisation: garrison, signal and supply. Labour, of soldiers, convicts and their families, stamped into the bricks. Trade, at the passes and horse markets. The natural order: mountain, river, loess, sea and desert, the edge of the sown and the steppe. The other, the peoples beyond, whom the wall exists to name. History: the earlier walls it overlaid and the dynasty it failed to save. Death, in the labour and the war. One structure, the line itself, integrates them. What holds the axis lower is what is thin: the household beyond the garrison, the sacred outside the temples at the passes, and the individual mind, present only as the soldier in the tower.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders, held by one event. Consciousness, Oswald’s above all, from within. The family: Marguerite and her sons, Marina and the children, a marriage under strain in a strange language. Labour: Oswald’s jobs, the radio factory in Minsk, the photographic firm in Dallas, the warehouse. Class: the poverty of the Oswalds against the officer class of the plotters. The state: the CIA, the FBI, the Marine Corps, the Soviet bureaucracy, Cuba. History: the Cold War from the U-2 to the Bay of Pigs. Crime, in the mob and in Ruby’s world. The media, as the medium in which the event exists. The sacred, in Ferrie’s mysticism and the language of destiny. They are integrated, not listed: each is a line converging on Dealey Plaza. Held below the top because the natural order is absent, the women other than Marguerite are thinly held, and the Soviet and Cuban worlds are glimpsed.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Many orders, held by one itinerary: consciousness and conscience in Nekhlyudov; sex and its consequences in Maslova’s history; the aristocratic family and its marriage market; the peasant village and the land question; the courts, the prisons, the bureaucracy of Petersburg and the Senate; the church and its liturgy; the revolutionaries, their creeds and their sufferings; Siberia and the penal road; the sacred, in the Gospel frame. They are integrated by one question, who is responsible for this, and by the one man who walks through them. Held below the higher band because the integration is by a tour more than by a society in motion: in War and Peace history moves through the characters, and here the institutions are visited. History as time is thin; the book’s world is a cross-section, not a span.
Sophocles · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
A single play of about 1,350 lines, in one place over one day, and it holds more orders than its size allows. The family: two sisters, two dead brothers, a father and son, a betrothal, a wife and mother, the cursed house behind them. The state: the edict, the ruler’s first speech on the city, the citizen chorus, a war just ended at the gates, the question whose the city is. The sacred: the gods below and Zeus, rite and pollution, prophecy, Dionysus as the city’s god. The natural order of the Ode, and the bodies left to dogs and birds. Each is load-bearing in the one conflict. What holds it lowest of the twelve is the form, and what the form leaves out: labour but for the Ode’s plough, economy, history beyond the myth’s war, the inner life except as spoken.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged at the dialogue’s scale. Consciousness: the soul’s relation to the body, knowledge, recollection, fear. Friendship: the circle, Phaedo, Crito, the two Thebans. The family: Xanthippe and the children, sent away and brought back (60a; 116b). The city: Athens’ sentence, its law and its ritual calendar, the servant of the Eleven. Knowledge and method: the history of Socrates’ own inquiry, natural science and its limits. The natural order: generation and corruption, the cosmology of the true earth. The sacred: Apollo, Asclepius, the Orphic and Pythagorean doctrines, the judgment of souls. One day holds them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, economy, history in the large and the life of the many are absent or seen only as what philosophy turns from, and the family is present only to be dismissed.
Emily Brontë · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on what the book holds, in two houses and four miles of moor. Consciousness, in extremity: Catherine’s delirium, Heathcliff’s last days. The family, across two generations, as the medium of love and of damage. Property and class: the gentry of the Grange and the yeoman house of the Heights, the foundling’s rise by money and law, mortgage and wardship. Education and its denial, in Heathcliff’s degradation and in Hareton’s. Religion, in Joseph’s harsh Calvinism, the sermon in Lockwood’s dream and heaven refused. The natural order: weather, moor, animals, the seasons. The dead, as presences. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the narrowness of the world: the state, history and the wider society are absent, and no war, no politics and no town beyond a name enters the book. The narrowness is chosen, and the figure says what it costs.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The orders held: the state, in the night sitting of the Senate and the threat to Cyprus; war and military rank, the preferment of Cassio, a “bookish theoric” (1.1), over Iago’s years of service; race and the outsider; marriage, sex and the place of wives; class and service, “’tis the curse of service” (1.1); the sacred, in soul, damnation and the oath; consciousness, in Othello’s ruin and Iago’s self-possession. They are integrated, since each bears on the marriage. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the concentration that makes the play’s force. The state withdraws once the Turks drown and returns only as Lodovico’s embassy; history is a ground; the natural order lives in the storm and the Pontic sea. King Lear and the great novels hold more.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
9.1 · Tier V
Many orders are held in one structure: deep time, from the hominids to what follows man; the natural order of desert and planets; technology, the tool as the thread of the whole; the state, in the Cold War and the cover story at Clavius; institutions, in the briefing, the corporation in orbit, the mission’s secrecy; labour, in the routine of the ship; consciousness and death, HAL’s and then Bowman’s; the sacred, implied and never named. They are integrated, not listed: the evolutionary sequence places each. What holds the axis low: the family reaches its members only through screens, in Floyd’s call to his daughter and Poole’s parents’ message; love, sexuality and the social world beyond institutions are nearly absent; women barely speak.
Alban Berg · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The orders held, and integrated: consciousness, in Wozzeck’s visions; the family, in Marie, her child and their room; labour, in the shaving, the cutting of sticks, the pay for the experiment; the state, in the army and its barracks; science, in the Doctor; sex and possession, in the Drum Major; the sacred, in Marie’s Bible and the field’s apocalypse; the natural order, in the field, the moon and the pond; class binds them. They are held in one chain of cause: the Captain’s morality and the Doctor’s diet press on the man who cannot keep his woman. What holds the axis here is scale: an hour and a half, one garrison town, one family, history and society seen only from the bottom.
Friedrich Hölderlin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on what a lyric body holds, and integrated in one structure. The sacred: the departed and returning gods, Christ, the festival. History: Greece, the Persian wars, the course of the West from Asia to Hesperia. The natural order: rivers, Alps, seasons, the night. The homeland and the kin: “Heimkunft”, addressed to the relatives, “Stutgard”, the vintage. Consciousness: the poet’s vocation and the halving of a life. The polity: the fatherland and the peace. They are held together by the one law, not listed. What holds the axis is what is slight in the late body: labour, love between persons and the common life of the city, all stronger in Hyperion, which lies outside the unit.
James Joyce · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Many orders, held in one city and one life’s course. Consciousness: a boy’s, a girl’s at the barrier, a celibate’s, a drunkard’s, a husband’s. The family: fathers who beat, a mother who bargains, a dying mother’s “Derevaun Seraun!”, two aunts and a niece. Labour: the copying clerk, the laundry, the canvassers, the boarding house, the concert trade. The state: the ward election, the Castle, the king’s visit, the Revival’s language and Miss Ivors’s west. The sacred: a priest’s breakdown, a retreat, a convent, the monks who “slept in their coffins”. History: Parnell’s fall and its afterlife. They are integrated by the city and by the order from childhood to public life. What holds the axis at 8.4 is the size of the rooms: the stories are short, history is a memory and not an agent, the natural order arrives only with the snow, and the city’s poor and its Protestant powers are seen at the edges.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Many orders are held, and the rite integrates them. The sacred: a dwelling for the kami. The natural order: sun, forest, river, rice and growth across generations. Labour: carpenters, thatchers and the makers of the treasures. The state and the dynasty: the ancestress of the imperial house, and the high priestess drawn from its family, who is part of the rite. History: generations measured by the cycle, so that a carpenter builds the sanctuary two or three times in a working life. The household: the daily meal set before the kami. They are held in one structure, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what stays outside: the individual consciousness, met only as the pilgrim’s, and the body, the passions and the family as lived.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.0 · Tier V
The orders held, integrated and not listed: consciousness, in Parsifal’s awakening and Kundry’s divided self; the body, in the wound that will not close and in sexual desire; the sacred, as the rite and its failure; the community, a brotherhood wasting without its sacrament; the natural order, the swan, the forest and the meadow, which bloom and die with the community; the family, briefly and with force, in Herzeleide, whose death Kundry tells to her son, and in Titurel and Amfortas as father and son; history, as a lineage of guardians. What holds the axis here is absence: the state, labour and the social world outside the castle do not appear, and the history is legend. The Ring’s range is wider; this work chose depth.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.0 · Tier V
The orders held: the household as a place of labour, with servants who measure rooms, carry letters and tend gardens and are paid in favours; class and estate, in the lord’s rights over his servants’ marriages; marriage at its beginning, in Figaro and Susanna, and in its decline, in the Count and Countess; the family, recovered in the sextet; adolescence and desire, in Cherubino; law, in the trial; the army, in “Non più andrai” (“No more will you go”), which sends Cherubino to war; the village, in the choruses; the natural order, in the night garden. The servants’ wedding is the axis on which law, labour, family and desire turn. What holds the axis here is absence: the state beyond the Count, history, and the sacred, present only as the sacrament of marriage.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
For a print series the holding is wide. The body, in torture, rape, mutilation and starvation; the family, in mothers with children in flight and the famine’s dying together; labour and the peasantry, in the peasants who fight and the peasant of the last plate with his tools and harvest; the state, as the occupying army and then the restored monarchy; the church, in priests killed in the war and clergy burying Truth in the peace; history, in a dated war, a dated famine and a dated reaction; the sacred and the natural order, in Truth’s light, the dead tree and the offered earth. One argument integrates them. What holds the axis here is that no figure has an inner life beyond the moment of terror.
William Shakespeare · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
For a play of a dozen persons it holds a great deal, and holds it together. The state: a dukedom usurped, a dynastic marriage to heal it, the politics of Milan and Naples, and Gonzalo’s ideal commonwealth after Montaigne. The family: a father and a daughter, brother against brother, a father mourning a son. Labour: Caliban’s logs and Ferdinand’s, service bound and service chosen, and Ariel’s term of indenture. A new world and its first inhabitant. The natural order, in the island’s springs, brine pits, berries and weather. The sacred, in the masque’s goddesses and the Epilogue’s prayer. Consciousness, in sleep and dream; art itself; and mortality. Held below the long novels and the great tragedies by compression: the state is a few nobles on a beach, and society beyond the court is only the clowns.
Fernando Pessoa · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as a lyric body, which holds more than lyric usually does. Consciousness, its centre, in three versions. The natural order, in Caeiro, entire: the river, the flock, the sunflower, the hill. The sacred, in Caeiro’s Child Jesus, the indifferent gods and fate of Reis, and the absence of God in Campos. The modern city and labour, in the factories and commerce of the “Ode Triunfal” and the Lisbon of “Lisbon Revisited (1923)”. History and the state, in the sea of the empire in the “Ode Marítima” and in the monarchist exile of Reis. Childhood and the family, in “Aniversário”. Death throughout; love, in O Pastor Amoroso and the Lydia odes, though thinly. One question integrates them: how a self stands to what is. What keeps the axis here is what is absent: the social fabric seen from within, other people as people rather than as occasions of the self, love fully held.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
For a single play, much is held in one structure. Consciousness: Courage’s divided mind, trader and mother at once, and Kattrin’s wordless one. The family: three children by three fathers, and the daughter kept back from marriage and from the Cook’s inn. Labour and trade: the wagon, the stock, prices that rise with the fighting and collapse in the peace. The state: two armies, generals offstage, recruiters and paymasters. History: twelve years of the war. The sacred: Catholic and Protestant flags changed like goods, a Chaplain who loses his calling, the peasants’ prayer in the eleventh scene. The natural order is barely present beyond the seasons. What holds it lowest of the twelve is the form, and the figure describes it: the war is shown entirely through one wagon.
Anonymous, under King Lalibela · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The sacred: eleven sanctuaries, the liturgy and its feasts. The state: a king’s work and a kingdom’s claim to the holy places. History: Jerusalem translated into the highlands, and Aksum remembered in every beam-end. The natural order: the rock itself, the rain the trenches carry, the seasons of the feasts. Death: the tombs, the chapel of Golgotha, the remains of monks and pilgrims laid in the trench walls. The common life: monks and hermits in their cells, priests, pilgrims filling the courts at Genna. Labour is everywhere visible in the chisel and nowhere named; tradition gives it to angels. What holds the axis lowest is what a building rarely holds: the family, the individual consciousness and story are absent, and the complex holds a community more than a world.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Within its limits the orders held are many, and held, not listed. Consciousness: Onegin’s ennui, Tatiana’s love and her self-command, Lensky’s illusion, and the narrator’s own life, exile and memory. The family: the Larins, the mother’s marriage, the nurse who was married at thirteen, a funeral, the marriage market in Moscow. Society in three registers: the capital, the provincial gentry and its neighbours, Moscow; the ball, the duel code. The natural order, in the seasons turned through the year; folk belief, in the divinations and the dream; literature itself, as an order of life; and death, in the duel and the grave by the stream. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: for an encyclopedia of Russian life the book holds little of the state, of work or of the sacred. History is almost absent, the political stanzas having gone into the fire; labour is glimpsed, in Onegin’s light reform of the corvée and the peasants seen from the manor, and the sacred is folk belief at most. It is a novel of the gentry and of three or four persons, it holds less than the great prose novels hold, and the figure says so.
Raphael · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, at the top and as the measure of the whole; the natural order, a mountain; the family, a father, his son and the women of the household; illness, the body under a power it cannot command; the institution, the apostles as the church, with its gestures, failing; consciousness, in the range of response from blindness to dazzlement; and history, in Moses and Elijah, law and prophecy drawn into the event. They are integrated by the vertical, each in its place in the climb from affliction to glory. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no state, no labour, no history of its own time but the patronage at the summit’s edge; one event, one mountain, one afflicted household. Below The School of Athens at 8.5, above The Assumption of the Virgin at 7.6.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on what a lyric book holds, and for a lyric book it holds much, joined by one consciousness and one house. Consciousness, in an old man’s quarrel with his mind. The body, in age, desire and sex. The family, in “Ancestral Houses”, “My Descendants” and “A Prayer for My Son”. The state, in a senator’s view of schools and of a civil war on his road. History as an agent, not a ground: the Irish wars, Troy, the turn from the Greek age to the Christian. The sacred, in the sages of Byzantium and the Christ of “Two Songs”. The natural order, in the stare, the swan and the chestnut-tree. Labour, named once and well, as a labour “where / The body is not bruised to pleasure soul”. They are integrated by one law, not listed. What holds the axis is the vantage: every order is seen from one tower by one man, and the common life and the lives of others, the soldiers, the dead and the women, are glimpsed from its window rather than held.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, in the king and his retinue; labour, on every level of the tower; commerce, in the harbour and its ships; the city, in the dwellings at the tower’s foot; the natural order, in the rock, the sea, the weather and the horizon; the sacred, in the story’s defiance of heaven; history, in the Roman arcades that make Babel an image of empire and its ruin; technology, in the cranes. They are integrated, because one building ties each to the others. What holds this lowest axis at 8.4 is what is absent: the family; the inner life, since no face can be read and no figure thinks; and the body in pleasure or in suffering. A world held as a mechanism rather than as a society of persons.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders, and one figure holds them, more by address than by scene. Consciousness, in Zarathustra’s solitude, fear, nausea and convalescence. The sacred, in the death of God, the last pope out of service, a parody of the Last Supper and the worship of an ass. The state, attacked as a new idol. The body, defended against its despisers. Marriage, children and friendship. Learning, in the scholars and the conscientious in spirit. The natural order, in the sun, the sea, the mountain and the animals. Time and the cosmos, in the recurrence. Held at this mark because the orders are argued about more than held in lives: there is no family, no labour and no history acted out, and almost every person is a type.
Built for Abbot Suger · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders are held in one structure. The sacred: a martyr’s cult, the relics, the liturgy of the abbey. The state: the crown’s patron saint, the oriflamme kept at his altar, the coronation of queens, the royal necropolis. History: a dynasty laid out in stone across twelve centuries, Merovingian to Bourbon, and the Revolution that broke it, legible in the empty tombs. Death and the body: gisants and transis, the dead king as corpse beneath the king in glory. Labour and making: Suger’s books narrate the quarrying of the columns and the search for the timbers. Consciousness: the ascent of the mind by light. What holds it at 8.4: the common life enters only as pilgrimage and procession, not as itself, and the natural order only as light.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
A lyric body is not charged for being lyric, but what it holds is weighed as it is. It holds consciousness at its edge, the self dissolving and returning; friendship and its loss; the sacred; the natural order of sun, moon, seasons, garden and sea; music and the body in the dance; death and resurrection; and something of the city of Konya and its learned men. It holds little of labour, the family, the state or history. The Mongol invasions, which drove Rumi’s family from Balkh and shook Anatolia through his lifetime, barely enter, and the social world appears only as a scandal the lover rises above. What it holds it holds in one relation, integrated rather than listed: more than a single lyric sequence holds, less than an epic or a novel.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on what one play of about 3,300 lines holds. The self and its freedom; the family, a father and son, a father and an unknown daughter; the state, in succession, tyranny, rebellion and the legitimacy of a ruler who governs himself; the cosmos, in astrology and the heavens accused and called to witness; the sacred, in providence, free will and the soul’s trial; the natural order, in the man in skins measured against bird, beast, fish and stream. These are integrated, not listed: the horoscope is at once family secret, state policy and theological question. What holds it lowest of the twelve, level with The Inevitable: the social breadth of the comedia at large is absent, labour, the town and the material life of anyone below the court but the gracioso and the soldiers.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what one narrative poem holds. Consciousness, fully, in three minds. Love, in its making, its consummation and its failure. The family, in Calkas’s desertion and the uncle’s ambiguous care. War and the city: the siege, the truce, the exchange of prisoners, the parliament that overrules Hector while Troilus is silent before it; the state’s power over the private person is the hinge of Book IV. The cosmos, in Fortune, predestination and the spheres; the sacred, in a pagan world framed by a Christian close; history, in Troy and Thebes behind it; the natural order, in May, the nightingale, the days Troilus counts. All of it is held through one love, which is the strength and the limit. What holds it at 8.4: labour, commerce and every class below the Trojan nobility are absent, and the war is ground, not agent, except once.
Henry David Thoreau · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Held in one structure. Consciousness and its discipline; labour and the economy; the village, the state and slavery, in the night in jail and in the former slaves Cato Ingraham and Brister Freeman, remembered in “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors”; reading and the classics; the natural order, studied at the scale of ants and of a pond’s temperature; the sacred, across Christian, Hindu and pagan scripture; history, in the cellar holes of the dead. What it does not hold is the family, love, or any other life seen from within: the book has one consciousness, and the others are seen from its doorway. For a single-voice book of one year, what it holds is near the top of what the form allows.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what a lyric book holds, and for a lyric book it holds much, and holds it together. Consciousness and the soul, in the “Dialogue”, “Vacillation” and “Byzantium”. The body, sex and age, in Crazy Jane, “After Long Silence” and “A Woman Young and Old”. Friends and the dead, in the Gore-Booth elegy and the Coole poems with Lady Gregory. The state and the nation, with history, in Swift, Burke, Berkeley and Goldsmith in “Blood and the Moon” and “The Seven Sages”, and in the Rising and its women. The sacred, in the Bishop, “The Mother of God” and Plotinus. The natural order, in the river, the swan and the moon. These are integrated through the tower and the antinomy, not listed. What holds the axis is what barely appears: labour and the common life, and the family only as lineage. The lyric form sets the ceiling; within it, the reach is high.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Rahman I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Five orders are held in one structure: the sacred, as the direction of prayer, the mihrab as threshold and the domes as heaven, and a second faith’s choir and chapels; the community, as a capital’s congregation in equal rows, its growth recorded in the hall’s; the state, as the maqsura, the inscriptions and the dynasty’s monument; history, as the columns of Rome and the Visigoths in the first arcades, a dynasty legible in four campaigns, and conquest and conversion in the church at the centre; the natural order, as the court open to the sky and the river that stopped the hall going south. The second faith is imposed, not integrated, and adds little. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the household, labour and the individual consciousness. The worshipper is one of a row, by design.
The Clash · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Labour and its conscription are held in Clampdown; the state and the police in The Guns of Brixton; history in Spanish Bombs and in the inherited music itself; the city in the title song and the record’s sound; consumption and advertising in Lost in the Supermarket and Koka Kola; the body and drugs in Hateful; love and sex in Lover’s Rock and Train in Vain; fame in The Right Profile; the natural order as flood and ice; the sacred only as apocalypse. One city and one band’s voice join them. What holds the figure lowest is the join: most orders are single songs set beside one another, held by sequence rather than integrated, and the family, and consciousness beyond the slogan, are thin.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and they are placed, not listed. The heavens, in the celestial globe and the dials, on the upper shelf; the earth, in the terrestrial globe, on the lower. Learning: the quadrivium entire, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic and music. The state: an embassy in London in the year of the king’s break with Rome. The church: a bishop, the hymnbook, the broken string, Christ behind the curtain. Mortality, under all of it. Friendship and youth: two men, their ages written down. Several orders in one stand of objects is more than a room usually holds. What holds it from the top: the family and labour are absent, nature is present only as instruments for measuring it, and consciousness is held in two faces that give little away.
Kalidasa · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what one seven-act play holds, and it holds much. Consciousness: the king’s longing and remorse, Shakuntala’s shame and anger, Kaṇva’s grief. The family: a foster-father and a daughter, a marriage, a son, the question of an heir. The state: the king’s duty to his subjects and to the hermits, the sixth share, the court and its priest. Labour and the low: the fisherman and the police. The sacred: the sages, the curse, the gods, the benediction to Śiva. The natural order: the hermitage’s plants and animals as kin. The cosmos: the earth seen from heaven. They are integrated, not listed: one bond, lost and recovered, passes through them all. Held below the higher band because history is absent as an agent and the state is seen from the throne only.
Roman, under Vespasian and Titus · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and one structure places each. The state: the emperor in his box and the Flavian claim. The social order: every rank given its place in the section. Death and the body: combat, execution and the hunt as the building’s purpose. The natural order: animals brought from across the empire to be killed, sun and weather met by the awning. Labour: the builders, the sailors on the ropes, the gladiators trained and sold. History: Nero’s lake made public, a dynasty founded after civil war. Myth, enacted in the arena. The section stacks them round the floor. What holds the axis is the sacred, present only as rite at the edges and later as Christian memory, and consciousness, held only as the crowd’s.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The sacred: heaven itself, and the emperor’s ancestors associated with it in the Vault. The state: the Son of Heaven, the mandate, the legitimacy of the dynasty. The natural order: sky, seasons, months, hours, solar terms and stars, built into the hall. Agriculture: the prayer for the year’s grain, and with it the economy of an agrarian empire. The body: fasting and purification in the Hall of Abstinence. Music and sacrifice: the rite’s performers and victims housed in the precinct. The axis and the rite integrate them. What holds the score short: consciousness, the family as lived, labour as done and the common life lie outside the wall, present only as what is prayed for; the people enter only since it became a park.
Machado de Assis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
One consciousness holds a good deal: the family, father, mother, the sister Sabina and Cotrim, the slaver brother in law; the economy of a slave society, Prudêncio, the Valongo, inherited money; the state, a deputy’s seat and a ministry not attained; love bought and kept and refused; philosophy, in Humanitism; death and the natural order, in the delirium, the cemetery and the worm. They are integrated, not listed, because each passes through the same judging voice. But the book is short and its world is one class in one city: labour is seen from the veranda, the sacred appears only as absence, and history enters as the furniture of a life rather than its force. Nothing exceeds Brás, which is the point and also the ceiling.
Safavid, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: the sacred, as the qibla, the mihrab, the dome as heaven and the Imams named; the state, as the king’s square, the founder’s inscription and the Shi’i settlement built in brick; the city and its trade, for the mosque faces the bazaar gate across the square and the arcades of shops run up to its door; the community, as the Friday congregation in the court; teaching, in two madrasas; the natural order and the seasons, as the court open to the sky, water at its centre, summer court and winter halls; the cosmos, as the dome; and the word, as inscription at every threshold. One plan places each. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the household, labour (the square holds it; the mosque does not), and the individual self, held only as the one voice under the dome.
Mary Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
For a short novel it holds much in one structure. Consciousness: three minds from within, the creature’s the most fully. The family: the Frankensteins and the De Laceys, adoption, the dead mother, the bride, the child William. Labour and class: the cottagers’ poverty, Felix’s exile, Justine the servant. The state and the law: Justine’s trial and hanging, the Irish magistrate, the Turkish merchant’s betrayal. Science and its institutions: Ingolstadt, Krempe and Waldman, Agrippa and Paracelsus set against modern chemistry. The sacred: a creation myth told from below, with Milton as its scripture. The natural order: the Alps and the glaciers, the Arctic, the seasons the creature first learns. Each order is a version of one question, what the maker owes the made. Held a step down because history and the state are present as episode, and the world beyond the three minds is lightly furnished.
Seljuk and later builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Orders held, and integrated rather than listed. The sacred: prayer, orientation, the mihrab. The community: the city’s congregation, the Friday assembly. The state: sultans and viziers inscribing their power on the qibla axis, the rivalry of two ministers set in plan. Learning: madrasa rooms within the precinct. History: dynasty after dynasty in one building, none erasing the last. The natural order: the summer court and the winter halls, light let through stone. Trade and the city press on it from the bazaar, as context rather than as part of the work. Six orders are held by one plan, which is high for a building.
Hugo van der Goes · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held are several, and the arrangement integrates them. The sacred: the incarnation, the Mass, the saints. The natural order: winter, bare trees, wheat and flowers, the ox and the ass. Labour, in the shepherds’ hands and faces. The family: the Holy Family at the centre and the Portinari in the wings, parents and children beside a mother and her child. Commerce: a banker’s money and Medici service made into an altar for a hospital, a northern work given to a southern city. History: the road to Bethlehem, the Magi approaching, the ruined building. Consciousness, in three stages of seeing. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that commerce and the city are present only through the donors and are not argued, and that the panel holds one sacred instant rather than a world.
Claude Lanzmann · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The state, in occupation authorities, ghetto administration and the SS; the economy and labour, in a railway’s tariffs, a truck maker’s memorandum, the barbers, the Sonderkommando and the property of the deported; religion, in the church at Chełmno and the old charge repeated before it; consciousness, in the survivors’ memory and the perpetrators’ evasions; history, in the reading of documents and a whole people’s destruction; the natural order, in fields and forests grown over the sites. One subject holds them; they are not listed. What holds the axis: the film narrows itself to the machine of death and its witnesses, so the life that was destroyed, its culture, family and faith before the war, lies outside the frame by design.
Duccio di Buoninsegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and the object integrates them by where it sets them. The sacred, entire: the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection, the death and glory of the Mother. History, as sacred history, from the prophets on the predella to Pentecost. The state: a commune under its Queen, its four patrons kneeling for it, its procession in 1311. The family: the Infancy, the Mother and Child, the Mother’s death among the apostles. Consciousness, in Peter’s denial and Judas’s kiss. Labour, in fishermen called from their boat. Art, in the painter’s name and prayer on the throne. What holds the axis is what is thin: nature is barely present on gold, ordinary life appears only at the edges of sacred scenes, and consciousness is shown in gesture, not held. Far short of Anna Karenina at 9.5.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
A three-hour fresco holds many orders; the question is how firmly. The sacred: the flown Christ, the miracle, the church and its organ, the princess at Mass. The media: press, photographers, television. Class: the aristocrats at the castle, the cultivated at Steiner’s, the rich at Fregene, the prostitute in her flooded room, the waitress. The family: the father, Emma’s demand for a household, Steiner’s children. Love and sex, from Maddalena to Nadia. Art and thought, in the salon. Death, from the man in the crowd to the creature. They are integrated, not listed, but through one witness and one city, and much of what the film holds it holds as one man’s nights. Labour is held weakly, as Marcello’s trade and Paola’s service, and the state appears only as police at a door.
Alfred Tennyson · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Orders held: consciousness above all; friendship and love between men; the family, in Somersby and its leaving (C to CIII), the sister’s wedding and the father’s house; the natural order and deep time (LVI, CXXIII); the sacred, as faith, doubt and the argument between them; the nation and history at the margins, in the bells of CVI, the revolutions of CXXVII, and CXIII on what Hallam might have done in the state. A single mourning consciousness integrates them, and they do not carry equal weight: labour, the city and the social order are glimpsed, not held. For a lyric sequence the range is wide. Against the novels and epics, it is narrower, and that holds the axis at 8.4.
J. M. Coetzee · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and held in one structure: one man’s consciousness; the family, father and daughter and the daughter’s coming child; sexuality and its claimed rights; the university and the state’s new forms of accountability; land, labour and property, in Petrus’s rise from the man who keeps the dogs to a proprietor; race and history after apartheid; violence; art, in the opera; animals and death; and something near the sacred in the care of dead bodies. They are integrated, not listed: Petrus’s gaining of the land and Lucy’s pregnancy are one event seen from history and from the family. What holds the axis there is the short form and its single eye: the state, labour and the lives of the black characters are seen only through Lurie’s narrowing sight, which is the book’s point and also its bound.
David Lynch and Mark Frost · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and the town holds most of them in one structure. Consciousness: Laura’s interior in the film, Cooper’s dreams and his dissolution in The Return. The family, at the centre: the Palmers, the Haywards and the Hornes, each house with its secret. Labour and money: the Packard mill, Ben Horne’s Ghostwood scheme, the brothel across the border; in The Return, insurance, casinos and the drug trade. The state: the FBI, the military of Major Briggs, the police. History: 1945 and the bomb, and twenty-five years of a cast’s ageing. The sacred and the cosmic: the Lodges, the angel, the Fireman. The natural order: the woods, fire, owls, electricity. Held at its figure because The Return disperses the town into Las Vegas, South Dakota, New York and Philadelphia, and several orders there are present more than held.
Venetian · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and one institution places them. The state: its councils, offices and courts, each with its room. Justice and punishment: the Judgment of Solomon at the corner, the Ten, the denunciations, the cells, the bridge. The sacred: Paradise over the dais, the archangels at the corners, the Fall and Noah at the angles. History: the frieze of doges, the canvases of battles and embassies, the doge erased. The sea and empire: Neptune at the stair, the lagoon at the front. Labour and the natural order: the trades, the months and the ages of man on the capitals. The city: the arcade as the square’s walk. They are integrated, from the public at the foot to heaven at the end wall. What holds it: the family and the individual consciousness are nearly absent, and much is held on surfaces rather than in structure.
Ursula K. Le Guin · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Held in one structure: the body and its sexes; the family, in the hearths and the vowed kemmering that the tale and Estraven’s own past make central; the state, two of them, monarchy and bureaucracy; religion, two of them; labour, in the farms and the Pulefen camp; the natural order, overwhelmingly; history, in Gethen’s archive of tales; and the cosmos of eighty-odd worlds. They are integrated, not listed: each is a consequence of the cold and the doubled sex. Held here because several are held thinly. Labour and the economy of Orgoreyn appear as setting; the Ekumen is a sketch; the family is shown mostly in tales rather than in households, and no Gethenian is seen raising a child in the narrative itself. The reach is wide; the grasp of each order is narrower.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
For a single play, much is held and integrated. Consciousness: Galileo’s pleasure, curiosity, fear and self-contempt. The family: Virginia’s marriage to Ludovico Marsili sacrificed, the housekeeper and her son Andrea. Labour and economy: the Venetian arsenal, the salary he bargains for, the cloth merchants, the peasants and their oil, Vanni the ironfounder, who sees what the new astronomy means for trade. The state: Venice, Florence, the Papal States, the Inquisition. The sacred: the old heavens as the order of meaning, the little monk’s faith. History: the turn of an age, announced in the first scene and paid for in the thirteenth. The natural order: the moons of Jupiter, the sunspots, floating bodies. Held in one argument; a play’s span keeps the people mostly at the edges, in a carnival and a monk’s report.
Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Seven orders are held in one structure. The state: audience halls, insignia and inscriptions, a capital’s palace facing its town. War: the condottiere’s armour in the studiolo, the towers, the stables, the frontier site. Learning: the library, the studiolo, the Muses. The sacred: the Cappella del Perdono and the palace beside the cathedral. The household and its labour: kitchens, baths, ice houses, laundries and stores below. Nature: the hanging garden, the loggias, the valley taken into the front. The town: the piazza, the Mercatale and the ramp. They are integrated, held at their proper levels from service below to view above. Held below the highest marks because family and intimate life are present only as apartments.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The state, in the Walker campaign and its advance men; the economy, in the recording business and the management of singers in a city of studios; the family, in the Reese marriage and the deaf children, in the Greens, in Haven’s household; race, in Tommy Brown, a black star in a white industry, and in the choir; war, in Private Kelly and the Vietnam beneath the bicentennial; the sacred, in the Sunday churches; death, in Mrs. Green and Barbara Jean; history, in the bicentennial and the Kennedys; consciousness, held lightly, chiefly in Linnea and Barbara Jean. The mosaic integrates them in the city and in the final crowd. What holds the axis: consciousness is mostly surface by design, the city’s labour is seen only as performance, and the natural order is absent.
Luchino Visconti · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about three hours holds. The state, in the war, the plebiscite, the Senate and the new army. Class, in the aristocracy, the rising bourgeoisie and the peasants. The family, in a marriage of convenience, a disappointed daughter and a pious wife. The church, in the rosary, Father Pirrone and the viaticum at dawn. The body and death, in the Prince’s ageing; desire, in Angelica, Tancredi and the Prince himself; history, in the Risorgimento; the natural order, in Sicilian heat, drought and land. The plot joins them: the marriage, the vote and the ball are one transaction. What holds the figure is the people. Peasants and townsfolk are seen from the carriage and the church step, labour appears only as land, consciousness is the Prince’s alone, and the inner lives of Concetta and Maria Stella are only glimpsed.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders are held through Noodles, not listed: consciousness, since the whole is a mind’s; childhood and first love; friendship and its betrayal; the immigrant neighbourhood with its religion and families; crime as labour and business; the union and the industrialists; the state, in Max’s rise to a cabinet secretary and the investigation that ends him; and history across forty-five years of American life, from Prohibition to 1968. What keeps the figure from rising is thinness at two points. The family is slight: Noodles’s own parents barely appear, and women are seen almost wholly through male want. The sacred is present chiefly as its absence and as the cemetery.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Orders held: the state, in a prince who ruled as bishop and duke, and the Empire, through the imperial hall’s history; the sacred, in the Hofkirche and in a bishop’s house; history, in Barbarossa’s wedding and Herold’s investiture; the world, the four continents with their peoples, beasts and goods; the cosmos, Apollo and the gods of the ceiling; the arts, Europe as their seat and the makers painted beside their patron; the court and household, apartments, offices, kitchens and courts; and at the edge the garden beyond the imperial hall. One route integrates the highest of them, so they are held, not listed. What holds the axis at 8.4 lies below the prince’s view: labour appears only as the world’s tribute, the city only as a forecourt, and the common life, the family and death scarcely at all.
Gerhard of Cologne and successors; completed by Ernst Friedrich Zwirner · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure. The sacred: the cathedral, its liturgy, the relics of the Magi. The state: the archbishops, the German kings who came from Aachen, the Prussian crown that resumed the work and the empire that celebrated its end. The city: Cologne’s emblem for seven centuries, the crane on the stump the sign of an unfinished civic promise. Labour: the lodge, medieval and modern, and the cathedral works still at work on the fabric. History and the nation: the drawing lost and found, the national campaign, the war. Death: the archbishops’ tombs in the choir chapels. The long making integrates them. What holds it: the household, the body and individual consciousness are absent, and the nation is spoken of more than held.
Matthias of Arras and Peter Parler; completed by later hands · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure, not listed. The sacred: the saint’s grave, the relics, the liturgy of an archbishopric. The state: coronation, the crown jewels, the royal tombs from the Přemyslids and the Luxembourgs to the Habsburgs. The dynasty, in the busts and the mausoleum. Labour, in the masters’ own portraits in the triforium beside the emperor’s, and in a lodge whose work stands in the fabric. History, from the rotunda of about 930 to the republic of 1929. Death, in the crypt and the chapels. The nation, in the completion. What holds it short: the common life and the natural order enter little, and the national meaning is joined to the sacral one by the act of finishing more than by the form.
Anonymous; Octagon by William Hurley and Alan of Walsingham · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the liturgy of a monastic cathedral, the saint’s cult, the devotion to the Virgin. The state: a conquest church and a bishopric created in 1109, with the king’s carpenter called in for the Octagon. History: an Anglo-Saxon foundation, the Norman conquest, the crisis of 1322, the Reformation written in beheaded figures, the Commonwealth and the Victorian restoration, each legible in the fabric. The natural order: the island in the fen, the building a mark on flat and once watery land. Labour: the craftsmen whose work fills the Octagon. One body holds them, but much of the history is integrated by accretion rather than by design.
Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Orders held, and placed by one plan. The state, in both Houses; the Crown, in its entrance, robing room and throne; the social order, Lords above and Commons apart, rank stated by finish; the sacred, in the undercroft chapel, in a chamber descended from a chapel and in the bishops who sit in the Lords; history, in the medieval Hall made the door, the programme of national history on the walls and the monarchs in their niches; law, in the Hall where the courts sat until 1882; death, in the lying in state; time, in the clock whose bell marks the nation’s hours; the city and the river. They are integrated along the axes, not listed. What holds the axis is what is absent or only represented: labour, the household, the body, the natural order beyond the river, and the governed themselves, who enter as visitors to a lobby.
Japanese, under Emperor Shōmu · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders are achieved and held in one structure. The state: a temple raised by an emperor’s edict at the head of the realm’s temple network, its power later great enough to help drive the capital away. The sacred: a cosmology in which the Buddha’s body is the universe, carried in the engraved petals and the seated figure. The people: an edict that asked contribution of the whole realm, and the monk Gyōki’s mobilising of the commoners who built it. Labour and technique: copper, tin and gold from the provinces, cast at the edge of possibility. History: three foundings, under the Nara court, the Kamakura order and the Tokugawa, each recorded in the fabric that stands. The natural order: the hills behind and the season of the spring rite. The axis places each and the image gathers them. What holds it is that the inner life of persons is barely here, implied only in the visitor’s encounter.
English embroiderers (probably Canterbury) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and the one strip integrates them. The state: succession, kingship, embassy, oath, conquest. The sacred: relics, a church, a bishop, God’s hand, a portent in heaven. War, from the building of ships to the last flight. Labour: felling, shaping planks, loading casks and arms, cooking, and in the lower border ploughing, sowing and harrowing. Nature: horses, dogs, hawks, the sea, the beasts of the borders. Fable and the moral order, in the border tales; and history itself, as the subject. What holds it lower is what is thin: consciousness, since faces are formula and inner life is gesture only; the family, Edward’s household and the woman and child, little more; and women, almost wholly absent from the main field. It holds more than a room or a court, and much less than a novel of a society.
Jakob Prandtauer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Seven orders are held, and the plan places each. The sacred: the church, its liturgy and the relics of St Coloman. The monastic life: a community under the Rule, its choir, refectory and cells, prayer and work. Learning: the library and the school, taught here for centuries. The state: the imperial rooms and the Marble Hall built to receive the emperor. History: the Babenberg rock, the house as Austria’s origin. The natural order: the river and the valley, the stage the terrace commands. Death: the martyr’s shrine and the abbey’s graves. They are integrated along one axis, with learning and rule at the threshold of the church. What holds the axis below the top is absence: the family, in a celibate household; the lands and labour that paid for all of it; and individual experience.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders are real and held in one structure: the body, marriage and adultery, childhood, ageing and a failing heart, death and disappearance, sexuality including one woman’s late discovery of hers, religion in three forms, Catholic, United and Hindu, nature in a lake, a moraine and a ravine, and the uncanny held without explanation. Labour and class are on the page and in the plot: Paul’s Tuesday train out of Union, Tom’s restructuring announced from Dallas and a fourteen per cent cut, school supplies bought across two pay periods, a wood stove installed the year of a promotion, and in the blackout a family that arrives with little and is fed by people who will not mention it. The four fires make a political anthropology of the placement of backs. What caps the axis at 8.4 is the frame: history is a lighthouse legend, the state is a police visit and a bylaw misread, and politics stops at the crescent.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and the pursuit integrates them, since the hunt for one girl involves the whole town and the state. The state, in the military, immigration enforcement and detention; race, in a white supremacist fraternity, Black women revolutionaries and a Latino sanctuary community; the family, with an absent mother and a second, hidden father; history, in the radical left from the bombings of one era to the protests of the next; the community, in the town’s network, a dojo and its skaters; consciousness, in Bob’s paranoia and Willa’s discovery of who she is; the sacred, ironised, in a convent; the natural order, in the desert. What holds the axis here: labour is nearly absent, the immigrants are seen chiefly as those hidden and saved, the Adventurers are a type rather than a society, and consciousness stays mostly with Bob.
Mughal, under Akbar · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
A city holds more than a building can, and this one held much in one structure on one ridge. The state: audience halls public and private, the throne and the treasury. The sacred: the congregational mosque and a living saint’s shrine. The dynasty and the household: the heir’s birth that founded the city, the women’s palaces. Religion as argument: the debates of the 1570s, though their hall is lost. Labour and making: the workshops, the mint, the stores, the stone cut from the ridge itself. The natural order: water drawn up a dry hill to a tank of paradise, sun and shade worked by eave and screen. Death: the saint’s tomb and the graves about it. They are placed in relation, the mosque above the palace, the shrine at the mosque’s heart. Held below the top because the town that held the common life is gone.
Haruki Murakami · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Many orders, and the descent into the well joins them. History and the state: the Kwantung Army, Manchukuo, Nomonhan, the Soviet camps, and postwar politics in Noboru Wataya’s election to the Diet. The family: a marriage, Kumiko’s family and her sister’s suicide, Toru’s own want of family. Consciousness, in Toru’s stillness and May’s adolescence. Sexuality, in Creta Kano and the woman on the telephone. Labour and money: the law firm Toru has left, a wig factory, the commerce of healing. The media, in Noboru’s power on television. The sacred and the occult, in the Kano sisters, the mark and the well. The natural order, in the zoo animals and the cat. They are integrated, not listed. Thin: Japan’s present society beyond one alley and one politician, and any public life outside the family of power the book indicts.
Hans Puchsbaum and others · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and the building places them. The sacred: the liturgy, the relics, the saints on every pier. The state: the Habsburg dukes who founded it, the emperor entombed in its choir, the ducal portals, the eagle on the roof. The city: the parish of the citizens, the guild altars, the tower as watch over the roofs. Death: the catacombs, the tombs, the plague dead. Labour: the lodge that built it and keeps it still, its masters’ faces in the fabric. History and war: the siege of 1683, the fire of 1945, the resistance sign by the door, the rebuilding by the nation. Music, faintly: the choir in which Haydn sang and the church in which Mozart married. City at the door, state in the choir, the dead below, the sign above. What holds it: the family and the single consciousness enter only through devotion.
Qing builders, under the Qianlong Emperor; rebuilt under Cixi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
A garden of this size holds more orders than a building. The state: the audience hall, the court quarter, the confined emperor. The sacred: the Buddhist tower and temples, the cosmos of the back hill. The family and the dynasty: a son’s gift for his mother’s birthday, a dowager’s retreat. The natural order: water, hill, season, the borrowed hills, and the reservoir that served the city. The economy: the market street made into a scene. The empire: its provinces copied round one lake. History: the burnings of 1860 and 1900, held in the fabric. One plan places all of these round one lake and one hill, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis below the top is consciousness and the common life, which enter only as the court saw them.
Alexandre Dumas · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. History: Napoleon’s return from Elba and the Hundred Days, the Restoration and the July Monarchy. The prison. Trade: the merchant marine and the firm of Morrel. Money: the bank, the Bourse and the telegraph. The state: the Chamber of Peers and the court of assize. The world beyond France: the Greek war and the fall of Ali Pasha of Janina. The family: three households, each with its marriage and its secret, fathers and sons through three generations. The sacred: Faria’s priestly teaching and the Count’s claim to act for God. One plot holds them together. What the book holds less is consciousness: the inner life of most persons is given from outside, and the poor of Paris and the labour that makes the money stand at the edge.
Many masters, from 1386; facade completed in the nineteenth century · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure. The sacred: the Virgin’s cathedral and the Ambrosian rite. The state: a Visconti foundation, Borromean reform, a Napoleonic coronation, the city’s custom of height. Labour: the Fabbrica itself, the quarry at Candoglia, the waterways that carried the stone, six centuries of masons whose statues stand on the roof. History: a sequence of eras laid in one fabric. The city: the Madonnina over it and the piazza before it. The natural order: the sun through the apse windows, the Alps seen from the roof. They are integrated by the institution and the material more than by the plan, and consciousness enters only as the visitor’s passage from nave to roof.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
For a lyric body, much is held and integrated. Consciousness above all, in its moods, its memory, “J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans”, “I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old”, and its self-division; eros in several kinds; the city and its labour, its poor, its old women, its gamblers, its evening of thieves and workers in “Le Crépuscule du soir”; history, in the rebuilding of Paris and the exile of “Le Cygne”; the sacred, inverted but present from “Bénédiction” to “Le Reniement de saint Pierre”; nature as a temple of signs; death. What holds the axis here, the lowest of the twelve: the family is thin, the cursing mother and the servant of “La servante au grand cœur”; the state barely appears; and the natural order is present more as symbol than as world.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The orders held are integrated, and fewer than at the summit. Consciousness and memory: what happened yesterday, and whether anyone saw. Friendship, a couple who can neither part nor stay: “Don’t touch me! Don’t question me! Don’t speak to me! Stay with me!” (II). Master and servant, and the market where a man is sold: “I am bringing him to the fair, where I hope to get a good price for him.” (I). Violence, in the beatings Estragon takes at night. The body: feet, bladder, hunger, age. The sacred: Godot, the thieves, the Gospels. The natural order: tree, moon and night. One structure, the wait, holds them all. What holds the axis here is what is absent: the family, women, the state, and history, glimpsed only. The claim on all mankind is made by abstraction, not accumulation.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on what four hundred and thirty-three lines hold. The city: London as a city of the dead. Sexuality and marriage, from the lady and her nerves to the typist and to Lil. War, in Stetson and the ships at Mylae, in demobilised Albert, in the falling towers. History, from Carthage and Elizabeth on the Thames to the European capitals. The sacred, in the Grail, Christ on the road to Emmaus, the Buddha’s fire sermon, Augustine and the Upanishads. The natural order, as drought, river and thunder. Consciousness, in the hyacinth moment. Class, in the distance between the chamber and the pub. They are integrated by the drought myth, not listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the scale: labour and the family across time are only glimpsed, every order arrives in a fragment of a few lines, and the poem’s length cannot hold any of them at length.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
The orders held in one structure: the sacred, as the prayer, the direction and the call; the cosmos, as the circle on the octagon on the square; the state, as a sultan’s mosque, his loge, and the measured claim against Rome; the city, as the hill and the complex around it, the madrasas and the market that paid for it; history, as the answer to Hagia Sophia; the natural order, as light from every side and water at the centre; the body, in rows, with the voice at the centre. They are integrated by the use. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: individual consciousness, the family, story and labour. The building holds the person as a member of the rows and hides the work that made it. The figure describes the form.
Orson Welles · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Many orders are held in one structure: consciousness, in a man’s vacancy and a woman’s pain; the family, in a mother who gives up her son and two marriages that fail; the press, as the maker of a public man; capital, in a fortune from a mine; the state, in a campaign and a governor’s office not reached; history, in the American half-century from the Gilded Age to the Depression. They are integrated: the campaign is press, marriage and power in one night. What holds the axis lowest is absence and distance. The sacred is nowhere; labour appears as servants and stagehands; the natural order is a palace zoo and a snowfall. And the orders are seen from outside, as a newsreel sees them: much is held, little is entered.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Many orders are held in one structure: the family, seen from inside; business and capital, in the olive-oil front, the casinos and the drug trade refused; the state, in the judges and senators the Don keeps; the Church, in a wedding, a baptism and a funeral; immigration and the old country, in Sicily; consciousness, in Michael’s stillness. They are integrated: the baptism is family, sacrament and business in one cut. What holds the axis lowest is reach. The state is present as bribed men, not as a power in its own right, and history is a backdrop of 1945; the second film goes further into both, and this one does not. Labour and the natural order are absent, and the women are given rooms but little interior.
Imhotep, under Djoser · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Within one walled structure it holds the state, in the two lands of the Houses and the king’s claim to territory in the ritual run; the sacred, in the chapels, the ascent and the mound; death and the body, in shaft, vault and statue; the natural order, in the reed and timber of the river valley turned into stone; and, by implication, labour and administration on a scale no earlier building had organised. The rite holds them together, so they are integrated rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside a kingship: private life, the family beyond the royal shafts, and consciousness. A building’s form reaches the upper bands of this axis only with difficulty.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The form is short, and a low mark on a short form describes the form. Within it the album names more orders than most: consciousness after a fall, in “Like a Rolling Stone”; the family and labour, in the household of “Tombstone Blues”, the mother at factory work and the father scavenging; class, from the fallen heiress to the diplomat and the tramps; the state, war and the police, on the highway and the street; history and culture, from Galileo and Paul Revere to Pound and Eliot; the sacred, from Abraham to the Good Samaritan. One law holds them, the carnival, and in two songs they bear on one another: the title track sets the sacred, war and the promoter’s trade on one road, and “Desolation Row” puts police, medicine and literature on one street. What holds the axis here is that elsewhere they pass side by side.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as a novella, it holds a great deal. Consciousness, Marlow’s and, at its limit, Kurtz’s. Labour, in the chain gang, the rivets, the boiler and the dying workers. Commerce and the corporation, the ivory trade and its books. The state and empire, from Rome to Leopold. History, as the line from the Thames to the Congo. Race, as the book’s stake and its blind spot. The sacred, in Kurtz worshipped and the “unspeakable rites”. The natural order, in the forest and the river. These are joined through one journey and one telling, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the African world is held only as an exterior, the family and the city are glimpsed, love and the household enter only in the Intended and the woman on the shore, and the form is short, which the figure describes and does not punish.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
A single play, one estate, five months, a household; within that bound the orders are many, and held. Consciousness: Ranevskaya’s guilt, love and helplessness, Lopakhin’s divided self. The family: a mother, two daughters, one adopted and an unpaid housekeeper, a brother, a drowned son. Labour and class: the serfs’ grandson as buyer, the old servant who mourns his freedom, the young servant who despises his country. The economy: the debt, the auction, the dacha plots, the railway. History: the Emancipation behind, the upheaval Trofimov foretells ahead. The natural order of blossom, frost and season, and the sacred faintly, in Varya’s piety and the abandoned chapel. What holds it lowest of the twelve is the form: all of it passes through one room and its neighbourhood, and the form was chosen.
James Joyce · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held, within one consciousness. Consciousness at the highest pitch: the whole book. The family: Simon Dedalus’s slide from comfort into debt, the moves from house to house, the sisters at tea from jam jars, the father’s past in Cork. The church: the Jesuit schools, the retreat, confession, the vocation offered and refused. The nation: Parnell’s fall at the Christmas table, Davin’s nationalism, the Irish language classes, the tundish, and “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.” Sexuality and its shame; art and its theory. They are integrated, not listed, because each is a net Stephen names: “nationality, language, religion”. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve: labour, the state as an institution and the natural order enter thinly, and the world is held only through Stephen, who does not see much of it; the city’s other lives are a background.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held, though less than listed. Consciousness is the ground, given six ways. The family stands at the edge: Susan’s farm and children, Louis’s father, a banker in Brisbane. Labour, in Louis’s office and his shipping, and in Susan’s land. The state and history: the public school, the empire, India, and the passage of an era through a generation that came of age on either side of the war, felt without being named. The natural order, the sea, the sun, the birds and the seasons on Susan’s farm, is given in the interludes with an exactness that makes it an order of the book in its own right. The sacred is present as absence: no god, only the six against death. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the vantage: the social and political orders are held through six private minds and never shown as agents, and the war that divides their generation is not in the book.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one ship and one summer. The state and its law: the Articles of War, the Mutiny Act, the drumhead. History: the Revolution, Spithead and the Nore, Nelson and Trafalgar, all arriving through one deck; “the Nore Mutiny was what a strike in the fire-brigade would be to London threatened by general arson” (ch. III). The sacred: the Fall, Abraham, the Crucifixion, the chaplain. Labour: the tops, the gun-decks, the watches. The natural order: the sea, the fowl, Nature against the King. Consciousness: Claggart’s envy and Vere’s agony, held at a distance. The family as absence: a foundling, a bachelor captain. They are integrated, the ship a world with its state, church and people. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the band a short form allows: no women but a name in the ballad, no land, no ordinary life, and a canvas that is a single case.
Sophocles · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as one tragedy, it holds many orders, and joins them. The sacred is there in the grove, in the rite of purification given in detail, and in the gods below; the city in Athens and its law of suppliants, set against Thebes and its use of force; war in the coming of the Seven; the family in a father, two daughters who are also his sisters, two sons who are also his brothers, and the curse that passes down; old age and death, which are the whole action; and the land itself, horse, olive, sea and river. All of it passes through one man in one place on one day. What holds it at the foot of the twelve, level with The Inevitable, is that form: history is a ground, labour and the common life are absent, and the city appears as an ideal more than as a polity.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
More orders are held than one consciousness suggests. Consciousness in depth: memory, dream, desire, the failure of the will. The family: the dead parents, the marriage, the child he was. The sacred: the Church as school, punishment, confession and oracle. Labour: a film as an industry, its producer, writer and crew, its actors waiting on him for work, a set that costs money. Class, in the spa’s bourgeoisie at leisure; sexuality, set out whole in the harem. They are integrated, not listed: each is a face of one man, gathered into one ring. The state, history and the natural order are almost absent, politics wholly. Everything is routed through one consciousness, a narrowing as well as a law.
Rashtrakuta, under Krishna I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Seven orders are held. The sacred: Shiva’s dwelling, his household, Parvati and Nandi, and the pantheon of the galleries. The cosmos: the mountain at the centre of the world, the river goddesses at its foot. The natural order: the hill, the rock, the elephants and lions that bear the plinth. The state: a king’s temple, a dynasty’s claim on its predecessors’ type. Epic history: the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in long registers, with war, exile, love and kinship. The body: dancers, couples and gods in the full round. Labour, visible in every surface, since the work is the trace of its cutting. One structure places each. What holds the axis lowest: individual consciousness and death enter only through episodes of the epics.
Plato · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged at the dialogue’s scale: wide, and held by one question, what way of life one must live (500c). The soul: desire, pleasure, shame, order and disorder. The body: medicine, gymnastics, cookery, hunger and thirst, itching and scratching (494c). The city: the Assembly, the courts, the Council (473e), the tyrant in Archelaus of Macedon. History: the statesmen of the fifth century and the democracy that judged them, ostracised Cimon and nearly executed Miltiades (516d to e). The sacred: the myth, and the body as a tomb (493a). Nature against law. All are routed through the one question, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what it does not hold: the family, labour as labour, women, any world beyond a few Athenian rooms and one conversation. It is the scale of an argument, not of a world.
Tintoretto · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, at the centre; death and the body; the family, in the mother and the mourners; labour, in the work of execution, the ropes, the spade, the ladder; the state and its force, in the horsemen and soldiers; play and chance, in the dice; society, as a crowd of many conditions; and the natural order, in the ground, the sky and the storm of light. They are integrated, not listed: the labour is the execution, the state is its agent, the family stands at its foot, the sky answers it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: consciousness is held only in a few faces, the grieving group and John’s upturned look; history beyond the Gospel’s moment is absent; and the work is one instant, however wide. For a single image it holds an unusual amount of the world.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Several orders are held, integrated by a river that carries each past one consciousness. Consciousness: Willard’s throughout, and Kurtz’s as read and then heard. The state: a general, a colonel and a civilian at lunch, and an order not on the record. War and labour: the air cavalry, the crew’s work, the grenadier at the bridge. Entertainment, as the culture exported to the war. The family, in sharp fragments: Willard’s divorce, Colby’s letter to his wife, Clean’s mother on tape as he dies, Kurtz’s wish for his son. The sacred, from Kilgore’s mass to the rite; the natural order, river, jungle and tiger. What holds it: the Vietnamese order is barely held, and history, which the subject most demands, is present only by implication.
Byzantine, under Bishop Ecclesius and Justinian · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the eucharist, the sacrifice from Abel to Christ, the Lamb. The state: emperor, empress, officials, soldiers, the reconquest. The church as institution: bishop, clergy, the founder holding his model. History: the Old Testament carried to the present court, and the building’s own founding written into its apse. The cosmos: the globe under Christ, the dome, the octagon. The natural order: rivers, acanthus, birds and beasts. Death and the martyr: Vitalis receiving his crown, his sons on the arch. The court’s women: Theodora among hers, and the gallery. They are integrated, converging on the altar. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, the family beyond dynasty, the common life of the city, individual consciousness. The figure describes the form.
Kenji Mizoguchi · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of under a hundred minutes holds. War and history: armies, plunder, starving soldiers, a fallen noble house. Labour and the economy, at the centre: the kiln, the pots, the market, coins counted, profit made from war. The family, in two marriages and a child. Class, in a peasant who would be a samurai and a potter taken up by a lady. Gender, in women’s bodies as the war’s currency. The sacred and the dead, in the priest, the written charm and two ghosts. Art, in the potter’s work and the beauty that seduces him. The natural order, in the lake, the fields and the seasons. Two couples and one question hold them. What keeps the axis lowest: the state is armies only, and history is a ground the characters cross, not a force the film examines.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, in three men’s desires and fears; the sacred, in the Zone, the pilgrimage and the Stalker’s faith; art and science, the two vocations of the modern mind, each brought to the threshold; the family, in the wife and the crippled child at both ends; the state, in the cordon, the guards and the prisons the Stalker has known; nature, taking back the works of industry; history, as an unexplained catastrophe whose ruins are the setting. They are joined through the journey, not listed. What holds the axis lowest: labour is nearly absent, history is a ground and not an agent, society is a bar and a cordon, and the field is three men over about a day.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, in Pamina’s grief and Tamino’s silence; love and marriage, in two couples at two levels; the family, in the Queen’s claim on her daughter and the dead father’s bequest of the circle of the sun to Sarastro; the state, a priestly order against a dynastic queen, with a ruler’s justice and its punishments; labour and class, a bird-catcher who trades birds for bread and wine beside a prince; the natural order, in birds, serpent, fire, water, night and sun; the sacred, in Isis and Osiris and the chorale. They are integrated: the political quarrel is the family quarrel, and the sacred grounds both. What holds the axis at 8.3 is the fairy-tale frame, which thins every order: the state is an allegory, history is absent, and the world is a stage of symbols.
U2 · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The orders are many: the sacred; desire and marriage; addiction and the city; labour, in the miners; the state and empire; death and mourning; violence in one mind; the family under the state; the natural order as desert; history as recent event. Several songs bind two or three: Mothers of the Disappeared holds family, state and death in one, One Tree Hill sets a private death beside a political murder, and Red Hill Mining Town holds a marriage under a strike. What holds the figure here is the join. Across the album the orders are joined by a shared law and a shared sound, not by one consciousness; technology is absent, and labour lives only in the miners.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one complex. The sacred: relic and image, the Buddha’s death and paradise, in the pagoda and the Kondō. The state: a temple of the court, and of the prince who stands at the origin of the state in its own history. History: a founding, a fire, a rebuilding, and a palace become a memorial. The household: the prince’s palace under the Yumedono. Labour: the monastic life of the lecture hall and the monks’ halls, still lived, and the lineage of carpenters that keeps the fabric. The natural order: timber against earthquake and weather. They are integrated in one plan more than listed. What holds the axis is that consciousness is met mainly through the images and the legend of the prince’s hall of dreams, not through the architecture.
Inca, under Pachacuti · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held are seven: the natural order, mountain, river, cloud, spring and sun, held in the fabric and not only in the view; labour, in the terraces and the quarry, where split boulders still lie; the state and the king, the estate as a claim on a landscape; rank, in three grades of masonry, the order of the fountains and the two halves; the sacred, in the shaped rocks and the solstice; the dead, in the cave under the Torreón and the burials in the cliffs round the site; and agriculture and the calendar, the fields and the sun’s turning. One slope places each in its height. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: history as narrative, since there is no text and no relief; the family as anything but lineage; commerce; and any single consciousness. A royal estate holds more than a villa and less than a capital.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Held, not listed: the marriage; the estate and its management; the shaping of land; contemporary science; the education of girls, at the school Ottilie and Luciane attend; the cult of art and the tableau; the church and the popular sacred; death and burial, in Charlotte’s reordering of the churchyard. All of it is bound to the one law and the one household. The state and history enter only at the edges: Eduard goes to a war and returns, and the world beyond the estate arrives mainly as visitors. Labour is seen from the manor. The scale is one household and its land, held whole, and the narrowness of that scale is what holds the axis at 8.3.
Elia Kazan · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders are held in one structure, and joined. Labour: the shape-up, the token, the hold, the loading and the boss’s cut. The state: the crime commission and its investigators, and its absence everywhere else on the docks. Crime as an economy. The church, in a priest who leaves his church for the pier. The family, in the brothers and in Edie’s father, who wants her out of it. Love. Sport and its corruption, in the fixed fight, which is the brothers’ story and the racket’s method at once. Consciousness, in a man coming to know what he did. What holds the axis among the lowest: the city beyond the docks is barely present, nature is weather and birds, and the other inner lives are drawn in less than his.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of under two hours holds. Consciousness, in the narrator’s memory and its guilt; the family, across three generations, two marriages ended and a child between them; the state, in the printing house’s fear, the military instructor and the evacuation; history, in half a century of newsreel; labour, in the mother’s work at the press and the selling of the earrings; art, in Leonardo, Bruegel, Pushkin, Bach and the father’s poems; the natural order, in field, wind, rain and fire; the sacred, in the Passion, the levitation and the visitor who vanishes. They are held through one consciousness, and that holds the axis down: history comes largely as newsreel set beside the fiction, juxtaposed more than entered, and the state is felt as fear but never seen at work.
Béla Tarr · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of seven hours holds, and it holds many orders in one swindle. The community: a dozen households of a dying settlement. Labour and the economy: the end of the collective farm and the cattle money. The state: the police captain, the clerks and the informer. The sacred: a ruined church, bells, a messiah and a devil’s dance. The family: Estike, her mother, her brother Sanyi and her sisters. The natural order: rain, mud, cattle, cat and horses. Irimiás’s fraud is economic, political and religious at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: consciousness, in Futaki’s fear and the Doctor’s watching, is entered little; history is implied and never named; and the world beyond the settlement and the town is absent.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what a book of prose without narrative holds, and the orders are many: the knowing mind, the body and its drives, religion and the saint, morality and its history, science and the scholar, the state and democracy, the peoples of Europe, music, with Wagner in §256, the sexes, and the rank of souls. They are held by one perspective and not listed: each is read for the kind of life it serves. What the book does not hold is the family, labour and the natural order except as metaphor, and it holds no lives, only types. The figure describes the form.
Christopher Wren · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: the sacred, as the cathedral of the capital’s diocese; the state and the crown, in the services of thanksgiving, jubilee and state funeral; the city, rebuilt after the Fire and crowned by the dome; the nation’s dead, gathered in the crypt; history, from the Fire to the Blitz; and science, since the dome is a demonstration of statics by a mathematician. They are held in plan and section, not listed: the crypt of the dead, the floor of the gathered, the dome of heaven and the skyline of the city are one construction. What holds the axis at its level is what stays outside: consciousness, labour and the natural order are not in the building’s programme.
John Ford · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure are many: the family, in two households, marriage, adoption and inheritance; the settlement as a society, its church and its Rangers in one man, Clayton, preacher and captain; the state and history, in the war lost and unaccepted, the cavalry and its massacre, the frontier as conquest; race and blood, the central order, with the terror of mixed blood driving the plot; the sacred, in Christian burial and the Comanche belief Ethan turns against the dead; the land and the seasons. The search integrates them. What holds the axis is three limits. The Comanche world is entered only as Ethan’s enemy, so one of the film’s two societies is held in part; Ethan’s consciousness is shown, never entered; labour is sketched.
Lorenzo Ghiberti · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred and the natural order, in the Creation, the Flood and the covenant; the family at its worst and its best, in Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers; labour, in the plough and the flock, Noah’s vineyard, the building of the ark; law, in Moses; war and the state, in Joshua, David and Solomon; the city and its architecture; and the makers themselves, in the self-portrait heads on the frame. They are integrated by the line of history from garden to temple and by the threshold at which the doors stand. What holds the axis is consciousness: the figures act and gesture, but no inner life is held, and the history told is the world’s, not a person’s. For a work of visual art the reach is very wide, above Las Meninas at 8.2; the figure describes what one portal can hold.
Lu Xun · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as a book of short stories. It holds consciousness, the madman’s and that of the narrator of “My Old Home”; the family and the clan, the elder brother and the mothers of “Medicine” and “Tomorrow”; labour and poverty, Runtu, Ah Q’s day labour, the rickshaw man; the examination system and its ruin, Kong Yiji, and Chen Shicheng in “The White Light”, failing for the sixteenth time and drowning after buried silver; the state and history, 1911, the queue, the restoration of 1917 in “Storm in a Teacup”, the revolution that executes Ah Q; the sacred as folk belief and cure; the village and the city. They are held in one examination of one society, not listed. What holds it here: the natural order and love are thinly held, and each order is seen through brief episodes.
John Bunyan · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
What the book holds in one structure: the individual consciousness above all, in fear, despair, temptation and hope; the family, in the opening abandonment of a wife and children; the market and commerce at Vanity Fair, where every ware is sold, honours, places, lusts and souls; the state and the law, in the trial and its justices; the church, in its houses and its false teachers; and death and the sacred, which govern the whole. Labour and the natural order are present mainly as figure, and history is absent by design on a timeless road. The book integrates these orders under one law, but it is one man’s road through them, and its world beyond the road is thin. The figure says what this form encompasses.
Ivan Goncharov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Held round one man, which is the novel’s strength and its limit. One consciousness from childhood to death; the family twice, the household of the Dream and the household of Agafya; labour in its absence and its presence, the serfs who keep Oblomovka, Zakhar’s grudging service, Stolz’s commerce, Agafya’s ceaseless housework; class and the economy of the estate; the state in the chancellery Oblomov fled and the officials who rob him; love in two kinds; the natural order in the Dream’s seasons and the summer at the dacha; and history in the question of what Russia’s gentry is to become. The sacred enters only at the margins, the city beyond a few streets hardly at all, war and the larger public world not at all.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
In a short play a remarkable amount is held together. The state, in the election, the council and the war. The church, in the patriarch, the monastery, Pimen’s chronicle and the holy fool. The family: Boris with Fyodor and Xenia, the father who teaches his son to rule, the daughter mourning her bridegroom. The conscience of one man, and the people as a political body. Foreign powers, through Poland, the Jesuits and the mercenaries. History in two senses, the events of the Time of Troubles and the writing of history in Pimen’s cell, so that the play holds its own historiography. These are integrated, not listed: the chronicle produces the pretender, the pretender moves the Poles, and the Poles move the army, the boyars and the crowd. What holds it here is brevity: each order is touched in one or two scenes and none is built out, so the play holds less than the great novels and the longest Shakespeare.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: the state, in the police, the ministry, the press and the courts; the underworld as a mirror state, with its guild, its leader and its court; the economy of the poor, in the beggars’ association and the laundry Frau Beckmann takes in; the family, in the mothers and Elsie’s empty place; consciousness, in Beckert’s compulsion, given from inside in one speech and from outside everywhere else; the crowd and mass society, in the panic and the mob; justice, as law against lynching. They are integrated through the hunt. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the natural order beyond the streets, the sacred, love, and history except as the atmosphere a later viewer brings to it. One city, one hunt, a few weeks.
Odo of Metz, under Charlemagne · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure. The sacred: the vault, the altars, the relics. The state: the throne, the coronations, the claim to Rome. History: the spolia of Rome and Ravenna, and twelve centuries of kingship enacted in the room. Death: Charlemagne’s burial and the shrine of his bones. The social order: people below, king above, by storey. The cosmos: number and the heavenly city in plan and verse. Pilgrimage brings the common believer in. They are integrated, placed by the section from floor to vault and along the axis from throne to shrine, not listed. What holds the axis: the family, labour, the natural order and individual consciousness are absent, with no opening to the sky, only lit walls, and the body enters only as king and as relic. The figure describes the form.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The state, in three branches set apart and in relation. The nation, in a new capital for a partitioned province and in Nehru’s modernity. The natural order: the sun’s course built into the Assembly’s cap and the brise-soleil, the monsoon into the parasol, the mountains into the frame of the plain, water in the pools. The sacred, in the solar vessel and the cosmic door. Labour, in hand-made concrete that records its makers. History, in Partition and, since, in the fences of the insurgency. They are integrated: mountain, sun and state on one ground. What holds the axis: the domestic and the individual are absent, held by the city outside the work, and the citizen is present as a figure the plain imagines more than as a body it receives.
Erwin von Steinbach and others; spire by Johannes Hültz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Six orders are lodged in the building’s parts and uses. The sacred: the Judgment, the Virgins, the Passion, the church of the Virgin. The state: the emperors in the glass of the north aisle, the bishop’s see, the French king who returned it to Catholic worship. The city: the burghers’ fabric office and the front as the commune’s work. Labour: the lodge that led the masons of the Empire, whose drawings survive. Nature and time: the astronomical clock, its calendar and its planets. History: the Reformation, the Revolution, 1870 and 1944, each written on the fabric. Held where it is because the family and the private life enter only as the Bible and the parish give them, and much of the holding is by fittings and record rather than by one design.
Limbourg brothers · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held are many and joined: the heavens and their measured time, in the lunettes; nature and the seasons, in snow, field, vine and forest; labour, in ploughing, sowing, mowing, shearing, harvest and the swineherd’s month; the court and its rituals, in feast, betrothal and May ride; the state, in the castles of the duke and of the crown; the body, in the Anatomical Man; and the sacred, from creation and fall through the life of Christ to the last things. The calendar integrates them, each page setting a rank of society in a season, before a seat of power, under the stars. What holds the axis here is what is scarcely present: consciousness and the family, and history, which the book holds only as the possession of the present world.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one small structure by one family and one event. The state, in the Home Office and the Assistant Commissioner; foreign power, in the embassy; the police and its trade with informers; political ideas, in the anarchists and the Professor’s nihilism; science and time, in the target; the city, in its fog, its streets and its poor; labour and poverty, in the cabman, his horse and the almshouse; the family and the marriage, in the Verlocs and the mother’s self-sacrifice; consciousness, in Winnie’s long stillness and Verloc’s self-pity; sex, in the marriage as bargain and in Ossipon’s seductions. The sacred is present only as absence, in Stevie’s compassion and the blank of the cosmos. These are joined, not listed: the bomb joins the embassy to the parlour. The limit is the scale of a short novel and a social range that goes little above or beyond the city.
James Baldwin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
For a short novel it holds a great deal, integrated: one consciousness on one night; a family over three generations, to a Harlem boy; the church as institution and as inner life; the South, the Great Migration and the Northern city; labour, in Florence in service, Elizabeth’s work and Gabriel’s jobs; the law, in Richard’s arrest; sexuality; race; and the sacred, which here is the medium in which all the others are held. They are not listed; each prayer carries several at once. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is what the book does not hold: the larger public order, the state, politics, the white world except as violence, and the scale of a society in full. The frame of one family, which gives the book its force, keeps it from the highest bands.
John Milton · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held are more than the poem’s size suggests. Consciousness, in the Son’s discovery of himself from his memories of childhood to the pinnacle; the family, in Mary and the house at Nazareth; the state and empire, in Israel under Rome, the Parthian power, Rome itself and the question of the liberating king; history, from Adam’s fall through the kingdoms of the world; learning, in Athens and its schools; the natural order, in the wilderness, the beasts and the storm; and the sacred at the centre. Each is a temptation or the ground of one. Held in the low eights because most of these orders are offered in speech and refused, not lived in; the human world beyond two speakers is a few voices, and labour and the common life are almost absent.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: class, in three strata, each with its manners, food and speech; the nation, in French, German, British and Russian officers and a frontier; war, as a condition without a battle; race and religion, in Rosenthal and a Christmas crèche; labour, in the mechanic and on the farm, where a soldier works a widow’s land; the family, in a widow, her daughter and the photographs of a husband and brothers killed in battle; love; the ending of an aristocratic Europe; and food shared as a social order. Each order is a line men cross or are stopped by. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is rendered from outside and in talk, the women are one woman and a child, the state is felt as walls, and the sacred is touched lightly.
Gislebertus · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and the threshold integrates them. The sacred, at the centre. History, at its end. Consciousness, each soul alone with its deeds. The social order, dissolved: the dead rise alike, without rank, and the church is the door through which they pass. Death and the body, in the opening tombs. If the archivolts are counted with the tympanum, and they are reported to carry the signs of the zodiac and the labours of the months, the natural order and the year’s work frame the judgment, time around eternity. What the portal does not hold is the family, the state, or a consciousness more articulated than fear and hope: everyone in it is a soul under judgment, and that singleness of relation is the cost. For one relief it encompasses a great deal; at 8.3 the figure records it against the largest wholes.
José Saramago · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders are many, and one condition holds them. The state: ministries, the army, the quarantine, soldiers who shoot. The economy: food as power, hoarding, the storeroom. The body: excrement, hunger, wounds, sex, death. Gender: the women’s night, the women’s care, a marriage tested and held. The family, broken and remade as a company of strangers around a guide. The sacred, in the church and its blindfolded images. Ethics: the right to kill, the duty to stay. Art, in the writer who writes on in the dark. The natural order, in the rain and the dog. They are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis, second from the foot of the twelve, is what the allegory abstracts away: history, nation and class are erased by design, labour stops, and a whole city is seen through seven or eight people. Abstraction holds less than a world.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness above all, its first awakening and its powers; the family over three generations; class, in the gentry estate and its servants, governesses and tutors; the state, in the father’s liberal politics, the Duma, the Revolution and the émigré press; history, in exile across Europe and two wars approaching; the natural order, butterflies, forests, bogs and seasons given with a naturalist’s exactness; art, in the first poem, the chess problems and the émigré writer Sirin; and a hint of the sacred in a beyond the book glimpses but will not name. They are integrated by the one memory, not listed. Labour is seen from the manor, the peasantry hardly at all, the Revolution is offstage weather, and the brother and the Russia beyond the family are thin.
Chandela builders · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Orders held, and one structure places each. The sacred: the god in the cell and the pantheon on the walls. The cosmos: the mountain and the axis. The body and desire: the celestial women and the couples, set on the body of the temple. The court and the social order: musicians, dancers, warriors and processions. The natural order: elephants, lions and the composite vyalas, and the mountain itself. The state: the king’s mountain in the king’s city. They are integrated: the world on the outer body, the god at the centre, the rite the passage between. What holds the axis down is what is thin: labour, the family, history and death as subjects, and individual consciousness.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders, held through one life and one house. Consciousness, in the long reveries and the last chapter’s selves. Sex and the body, at the centre. History, from Elizabeth to 1928, as weather and costume more than as event. Literature and its institutions: patronage, the critic, the prize, the publisher. Law and property, in the lawsuits. The family: the marriage and the son. The land and the natural order: the oak, the frost, the house, the goose. They are integrated, since each passes through Orlando and changes him or her. Held a step down because much of this is sketched: history is pageant, labour and the state are absent but for an embassy, and the sacred barely appears. Three and a half centuries sketched hold less than a single day held whole.
Samuel Johnson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The book holds the literary history of England from the Civil War to the accession of George III, and through it the political history: the republic and Milton, the Restoration court, the Revolution, the quarrels of Whig and Tory in which Addison, Swift and Pope took part. It holds the economics of authorship, patronage and subscription and the booksellers’ market; religion, in the piety of Watts and the scepticism Johnson distrusts; illness, poverty and madness, in Pope’s body, Savage’s ruin and Collins’s mind; friendship and rivalry; and the nature of poetry. All of it is integrated through one judging mind. What it does not hold: the domestic and labouring worlds beyond the writer’s, the natural order except as described in verse, and English poetry before Cowley, which the selection excluded. A great breadth, held within the life of letters.
Ancient Egyptian, under Ramesses II · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Six orders are held, and one axis places each. The sacred: the gods of the state’s chief cults and the queen’s goddess. The state: kingship, the frontier, tribute and the foreign enemy. History: Kadesh, dated in years of the reign. The cosmos and the natural order: the sun’s course on the axis, the river, the mountain. The family: the queen, the queen mother and the children at the colossi’s feet and in procession on the walls. Death and rebirth: the king as Osiris. They are integrated, not listed: the gods at the end of the axis, the king between them and the river, the family at his feet, the enemies under them. What holds the axis is what is absent: labour, except as the fact of the cutting; the subject peoples, except as captives; and the individual consciousness.
Senenmut (attributed), under Hatshepsut · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The sacred: Amun, Hathor, Anubis and the sun. The state: kingship and its legitimation. Death: the mortuary cult and the royal ancestors. The family: the begetting, the queen mother Ahmose, the ancestor Thutmose I. Labour and engineering: the obelisks on their barge. Trade and the foreign world: Punt. The natural order: the cliff, the sun, the trees and animals of Punt. The axis and the climb integrate them, each programme at its station. A tenth above the Pantheon and Sainte-Chapelle, both at 8.2, because labour, trade and the foreign enter the structure; held below the higher bands because the household, ordinary life and the inner life are absent, and the individual appears only at the edge, in Senenmut’s small figures behind the doors.
Edward Yang · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure: three generations in one apartment; consciousness, in NJ’s reckoning with his past, Min-Min’s emptiness and Ting-Ting’s guilt; labour and the market, in a computer firm, honest invention against cheap imitation, and the commerce between Taiwan and Japan; childhood and school, in Yang-Yang’s teachers and the boys who bully him; love at three ages; the sacred, in a Buddhist retreat and the rites of birth and death; death itself; art, in Ota’s games and music and Yang-Yang’s camera; crime, in the killing. They are integrated through one family and one year, not listed. What holds the axis is absence: the state and Taiwan’s politics barely appear, history enters only through the grandmother’s unspoken generation, and nature is a mountain retreat and a beach.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The family: a father and three sons, two wives, a brother and sister. The state: succession, castles, oaths and alliances, and neighbouring lords who watch for weakness. War and history: the Sengoku wars and the arrival of the gun, which decides the siege and kills Saburo from a distance, ending the order of single combat. The sacred: Amida, the return of deeds, gods asked for and absent. Nature: cloud, wind, plain, storm, the cliff. Consciousness: madness, guilt and its refusal. The siege is family, state, war and karma in one sequence. What holds the axis: labour and the common life are nearly absent, peasants appearing only as the victims of past burnings and servants as bodies, and the interior is seen through masks, shown more than entered.
Richard Wright · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure and joined, not listed: a consciousness under pressure, given almost minute by minute; the family in one room, the mother’s religion, the sister and the brother; labour, and the relief system that sends Bigger to the Daltons; housing, and the rent a single landlord draws from the South Side, which binds the philanthropist to the crime; the press, the police, the mob, the courts and the state’s attorney with his election; the Communist Party and the liberal; the church and the burning cross; the cinema and the culture that teaches Bigger what white life is. The city is held in winter from kitchenette to mansion to roofs. Held less: inward life beyond fear and pride, love of any kind, the natural order beyond the snow; the women serve mainly Bigger’s story.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Held, through one man, and integrated rather than listed. Consciousness: Jesus’s torment and Judas’s, and the long interior of the vision. The family: Mary his mother and her grief that her son will not marry, Zebedee’s household, the vision’s marriage and children. Labour: the carpenter’s bench, the fishermen’s boats. The state: Rome and its centurion, the Zealots, the priests and the Sanhedrin, crucifixion as policy. History: occupation and insurrection, and the fall of Jerusalem in the vision. The sacred: the axis of the whole. The natural order: the desert, the lake, the seasons the vision passes through. The joining is the achievement: the cross is at once a trade, a state’s instrument and the centre of the sacred. What holds the axis here is that the social and political orders are figures in the spiritual drama more than agents in their own right, and much of the world beyond Jesus passes as allegory.
Sienese builders; facade by Giovanni Pisano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and largely integrated. The sacred: the Virgin’s house, the liturgy from font to altar. The state: the commune that dedicated itself to her, its colours in every course of stone, its ambition and its rivalry with Florence. History: the popes along the cornice, the life of a Sienese pope in the library, the plague’s mark in the Duomo Nuovo. Wisdom and the pagan world: Hermes, the sibyls and the philosophers of the facade, made to lead toward the faith. The natural order: the starred vault, the Wheel of Fortune, the hill itself. Death: the plague’s unfinished wall, and new life at the font beneath the altar. Held below the top: labour and the common life are present only as the works and the city’s piety, and some orders sit side by side in separate rooms.
Roman, under Diocletian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Held in one figure: the state, in an emperor’s seat and a garrison; the sacred, in a god’s temple, an emperor’s cult, a cathedral, a baptistery and a martyr’s cult; death, in the tomb at the centre of the house; the household, an emperor’s retirement and then the households of a town; labour and trade, in the substructures as market and stores and the shops on the streets; war and refuge, in walls built against invasion and a town born of a city’s fall; the sea, in the front on the water; and history, as visible layers. The plan carries them all. Held where it is because the first programme encompassed less than a cathedral or a city designed whole, and much came by occupation rather than design.
Kyivan Rus builders, under Yaroslav the Wise · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the liturgy, Christ and the apostles, the Virgin as the city’s wall. The state: the prince in his gallery, the metropolitan see, the claim to Byzantine rank. The dynasty: Yaroslav’s household painted in procession, and his tomb. The secular court: the hippodrome, the musicians and the hunt in the stair towers. History: the graffiti, the city’s record over centuries, from the prince’s death to ordinary names. The city: the church as the centre of the new Kyiv. The hierarchy of the form integrates them. What holds it lowest: labour and the common life enter only through the graffiti and the congregation, and the natural order only as light.
Michael Cimino · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of three hours holds. Labour, at the open-hearth furnace and the shift’s end; the family, in a mother’s grief, a pregnant bride and a marriage begun under a false sign; the sacred, in the Orthodox church, its crowns, its funeral and its priest; the ethnic community, in its dance, songs and food; nature, in the mountain and the deer; history and the state, in the draft, the war and the fall of Saigon; friendship and male love; consciousness, in Michael’s code and its breaking. They are integrated: the mill, the church and the mountain are one community’s places, and the war takes from all three. What holds the axis: consciousness is seen from outside, Linda’s and Angela’s inner lives are withheld, the war’s other side is absent, and the state enters as a draft and a flag.
Eastern Ganga builders, under Narasimhadeva I · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and one structure places them. The cosmos: the sun, its course and its time in the wheels. The sacred: Surya and the lesser gods in their niches. The state: the court, the war horses and elephants, the army. Daily life: the hunt and the household. The body and desire: the mithuna, the loving couples. Art itself: music and dance on the roof and in the hall before the car. The natural order: elephants, horses, beasts, and the sea on whose shore the temple stands. They are integrated because the chariot carries them all. What holds the axis is that much of this is held as catalogue, figure beside figure on a moving band, rather than ordered into relation; individual consciousness and story are absent, as the form requires.
John Crowley · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Held, mostly, not listed. Consciousness: Smoky’s life of trust, Sophie’s grief and sleep, Auberon’s loss. The family: its generations, marriages, an adultery and its child, children borne and lost, the house as inheritance and quarrel. The natural order: the seasons, the wood, the pond, the turning year as the book’s clock. The sacred: faerie, the Hermetic tradition, the cards, the passage at the end. History and the state: from the building of the house to the City’s decline and a demagogue’s rise in a near future. All are integrated through one family and one house. Held in the low eights because labour is nearly absent, the state is allegory more than agency, and the passing of history is a ground, lightly marked, rather than a force the family meets.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders in one structure: consciousness, in three interior voices; love, twice; the family, in a father who banishes a daughter and a mother who leaves a son; the state, in two polities, a chartered company and a crown; history, in the founding of a colony; the sacred, in prayer to a Mother and in baptism; and the natural order, which is the film’s ground. They are integrated: the girl’s two marriages, to the land and to an Englishman, are also the history of the land. Held lower because some orders are thin. Labour is a field planted and a fort built in passing; trade and its tobacco are glimpsed; Powhatan society is barely entered; the colony as politics is reduced to a few quarrels. Much is held, and much of it from the height of a single gaze.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders, held by one life. Consciousness, at its most exposed. The body, in sex, illness, arthritis, cancer and age. The family: a dead brother, a broken mother, two wives, one vanished and one drinking. History: the Second World War, a Jewish American childhood on the Jersey shore, the theatre of the 1950s, a college town in the 1990s, and in Drenka an immigrant’s Europe. Art, in the puppet theatre and its loss. Religion, in Jewishness and the yarmulke from the box. Death and mourning, everywhere. The natural order, in the New England hills and the sea he went to as a youth. They are integrated, not listed: each is a field of the same refusal. What holds the axis is the vantage and what is thin: the state and labour barely appear, the women’s lives are held from outside, and every order passes through one consciousness that admits no other at its own weight.
Maya · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and they are joined by the argument of legitimacy rather than listed. The family: the ruler, the royal women, the child heir. The state: nobles, allies and officials in rank. War, with its takers and its taken. Service and labour of a kind: musicians, attendants, the bearers of regalia. The sacred: bloodletting, dance, sacrifice, the sky of the vaults. History: dated events and a particular victory. The natural order enters as the cosmos the rite maintains and in the creatures of the masks. Consciousness is thinnest: the figures are types of rank and role, and the inward life of no one person is shown, unless in the captives’ bodies. For a work of image, a wide holding in one structure of three rooms.
Hoysala builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
A wide holding for a building of its size. In one structure: the sacred, in the two lingas and the gods above; the state, in the dynasty of the dedication, king and queen as shrines, and the horsemen and war elephants of the bands; the natural order, in beasts, birds, makaras and the scrolling vine; story and history, in the epics and the Puranas; labour, in the signed work of named craftsmen; and the body, in dance and music. The frieze order integrates them; they are not listed. What the building does not hold is the city or the household: it is a temple, not a palace or a town, and its interior is not a world.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The bureaucratic, the economic, labour, the domestic, the medical, the mortal and, once, the sacred, held under one mechanism. Labour is a held order rather than a backdrop: a contract that has run month to month for two years, a process its builder must explain until he is a legacy dependency, a grocer who reads lips on a produce floor with four hundred and ten dollars against nine hundred in rent. Disability, grief, addiction and depression enter as bodies, not topics. The one sacred object is a worn card a father holds in a hospital room. Outside stand the nation, public life, history and the erotic. That narrowness is what lets one law govern eighteen rooms, and it caps this axis.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are many: consciousness above all; the family across three generations, Demon and the twin sisters Marina and Aqua, and their three children; sexuality and its cruelty; time, as the book’s philosophical subject; art; science, for Van is a psychologist of Terra-madness; the natural order in its orchids and butterflies; and a whole world’s history and geography, though invented. They are integrated through one consciousness and one family, and the book is wider than Lolita or Pale Fire. Held below the upper bands because the state, labour and society are present only as comedy or furniture, the servants are figures in the lovers’ landscape, and the counter-world’s displaced history, wide as it is, is a playground rather than a history that presses on the people in it.
Milan Kundera · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Many orders, held by one theme across four lives. Consciousness: Tomas’s divided appetites, Tereza’s jealousy and her dreams. The body: sex, illness and the soul’s relation to the body, which gives two parts their title. Love and marriage, fidelity and betrayal. The state and history: the invasion of 1968, the police, the petitions, the occupation’s methods of humiliation. Labour: the surgeon, the window washer, the collective farm, Tereza’s photography and her work in a bar. Exile: Geneva, Zurich, America. Art: Sabina’s paintings. The sacred, in the essay on God and shit and in the lost Eden. The natural order, in the animals of the last part and the essay on Descartes and the animal. They are integrated, not listed. Held below the higher figures because many orders are named and argued by the essayist more than inhabited, and history is held at the level of the private life and of the idea.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as one book of twelve tales. The Coloquio alone holds more orders than most novels: the Seville slaughterhouse, shepherds whose life gives the lie to pastoral, a merchant’s household and its school, the constable’s corruption, a soldier’s company, the gypsies, a Morisco’s thrift, a poet and the theatre, witchcraft and its theology, the hospital and its projectors. Around it: the underworld of Seville and its confraternity; the university and the courts; the Indies and the fortune brought home; Italy, Flanders and the soldier’s road; the Turkish sea; England under Elizabeth; law, honour, marriage, rape and its redress; madness and its cure; the sacred, as devotion kept by thieves and as providence. Held below the top because the orders are spread across twelve pieces, integrated in one structure only in the last.
John Ford · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure: the family across three generations; labour and its price; property and the bank; the state, in deputies, a government camp and a border inspection; the land and its weather; migration as history; the sacred, in Casy’s lost faith; and the consciousness of a man who comes out of prison and goes out into politics. The family’s road holds them together rather than listing them: Grampa’s death is the land, Casy’s death is labour and the sacred together, Tom’s leaving is the family yielding to the people. What holds the axis is what stays outside: the inner life of most figures beyond Tom and Ma, and the larger economy beyond its effects. High for a film of about two hours.
Robert Altman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The family, in ten households: marriages failing, a child’s death, a parent’s old betrayal. Labour, unusually broad for American film: the waitress, the pool cleaner, the limousine driver, the phone-sex worker, the baker, the doctor, the television commentator, the policeman, the clown. The state, in the police and the spraying ordered from the air. The natural order, in the medfly, the river and the earthquake. The city as a social body. The cross-cutting integrates them more than it lists them: the car that strikes Casey connects a waitress’s household to a commentator’s. What holds it from the top: consciousness is shown from outside, history and the sacred are absent, and some households are present rather than held.
Teutonic Order builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The sacred: church, chapel and crypt, the Virgin as patron. The common life of a religious order: chapter, dormitory, refectory, cloister. The state: the Grand Master’s seat, the chancery, the guests and envoys received. War: walls, gates, moats, the arsenal, the siege of 1410. Labour and economy: the service bailey, the stores, the trade the Order ran. The natural order: the river, the delta, water carried through the plan. And the dead, the masters buried beneath the church. The plan is the hierarchy in which each stands, so they are integrated, not listed. Held below the top because the world held is one institution’s, without the cosmic reach of the great domed and temple buildings.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure: labour, in the Teamsters, the pension fund and the drivers; the state, in the Kennedys, a Senate investigation and a presidential pardon; crime as an economy; the family, in Frank’s daughters, the Bufalino marriage and the wedding the journey is for; war, in Italy and its prisoners; the sacred, in confession, the priest and burial; and age and death as an order in themselves. They are integrated: the union is the reason for the killing, and the family is where its cost lands. What holds the axis is consciousness, rendered from outside by design, since Frank’s interior is the closed room the film is about rather than a world it holds; nature is nearly absent, and the women’s lives are held mostly in glances. The structure carries more orders than Chinatown or Citizen Kane, but sees most of them from the same narrow window.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Many orders, and the law holds them all. Consciousness, in Oscar’s grievance and Christina’s exhaustion. The family, three generations of Creases and the sister’s marriage. The state and its courts, from a small town’s council to a federal bench. History, in the Civil War and the family’s place in it. Money and the corporation: the law firm, the car maker, the studio. Art: the play, the film, the sculpture and the question of what is original. Labour, as the lawyers’ and the judge’s work. They are integrated, not listed: each order arrives as a case. Held below the top because the natural order is absent but for a flooded house and a dog, the sacred is thin, the range of class is narrow, the comfortable and their counsel, and the world beyond the suits enters only as more suits.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Many orders, and the war holds them. The state, in the agency, the army and the policy above both. History, across twenty years from Kennedy’s death to the aftermath. War itself, at every level from the operation to the patrol. Religion, in Kathy’s faith and the Colonel’s mysticism of power. The family, in the uncle and nephew and in the Houston brothers and their mother. Vietnamese society, through Hao, Trung and the villages, given more room than in most American novels of the war. Love and desire, in Skip and Kathy. Labour, in relief work and soldiering. One condition, service to a fiction, joins them. Held below the top because the Vietnamese order is seen mainly as it bears on Americans, and the strands sit side by side more than in one structure.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Six orders are held, and one structure places each. The cosmos: the sphere, the vault of heaven, the sun’s course through the oculus. The natural order: light, rain, the hour and the season. The sacred: the empire’s gods housed in one room. The state: the frieze and the emperor holding court, by Dio’s account. History: Hadrian’s building under Agrippa’s name, the present as the restoration of a founder’s past. Death: the tombs of Raphael and the first two kings of Italy, set in recesses the structure provides, which carry its history into the modern state. They are integrated: the heavens above, the state at the threshold, the human at the centre. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, labour, the body as subject, individual consciousness and story. The tombs are few; the figure describes the form.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
The orders held: the sacred, in the sacrifice and the bread and wine on the table; consciousness, thirteen minds at one moment, each distinct; the community of friends and its breaking; money and betrayal, in Judas’s bag; the institution that eats beneath the painting, the friars at their tables, held by the painted room; and the state, faintly, in the duke’s arms above. They are integrated: the table places each. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, and it is large: no history and no genealogy, no natural order beyond the landscape in the windows, no labour, no women, and no time beyond one instant. A single scene in a single room cannot hold more.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.2 · Tier V
For a work without words the orders held are many, and one law holds them. Consciousness, in the self that breaks and remakes itself; history and the state, in the revolutionary hero, the withdrawn dedication and the public funeral; death and mourning, collective rather than private; the social order, in a march for the street and a contredanse for the ballroom; myth and the sacred, in Prometheus and the hymn of the Poco andante; the natural order, glimpsed in the open air of the horn trio. What holds the axis here is absence and medium: the family, love and labour do not appear, and a symphony holds its orders as forces, not as persons in a world. History and the state lie inside the structure, which sets it above Otello and Winterreise.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
The orders held are several, and the room integrates them by placement. The state: the monarchy, by which the room is ordered. The family: parents watching their daughter, or watched by her. Labour: the painter at work, the meninas serving, the dwarfs kept as entertainers, the chaperone and the guard on duty, the aposentador at the door. Rank, from the infanta to the dog, painted alike. Consciousness, every figure caught in an act of attention. Art, painting claimed as noble beneath the contests of maker and god. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no sacred order but the sacred king, no history but what the viewer brings, among it the dead prince whose rooms these were, and no natural order beyond a dog.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
The orders held, in one field: the family, in the mother and her dead child; the animal world, the bull, the horse and the bird suffering beside the human; the state and war, in the fallen soldier and an enemy not shown; technology, in the electric light and the fire from above; the home and the town, in the table, the window and the burning house; the sacred, in the Pietà; consciousness, in the lamp-bearer’s witness and the lunging woman’s lifted face. The triangle and the frieze place each, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is that this is one instant and one place in nine figures: no history before or after, no labour, no city beyond a few walls, no natural order beyond the animals.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on what a novella holds, which is more than its length suggests. Consciousness, fully, in the dying man’s argument with himself. The body, in illness, pain and its care. The family: a marriage of convenience turned to mutual hostility, a daughter, a schoolboy son. The state, in the courts, the career, the ministry, the promotion and its salary. Class, in Gerasim, on whose health and calm the master comes to depend. Medicine as an institution. Society as consumption: the apartment, the furniture, the whist. The sacred, in the question to God and the end. They are integrated, not listed: one dying holds them, and each is weighed by it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the short form leaves thin: history and the nation appear only as the career’s setting, nature barely appears, and the world beyond one apartment and one court is sketched rather than held. The figure describes the form.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on what the poem holds, as a short poem. The state and its history: Peter’s founding, the war with Sweden, an empire and its capital, the Tsar of 1824 helpless on his balcony. The natural order: the river, the sea wind, the flood. The city as a whole, palace to Kolomna. Labour and class: a poor clerk’s work, his wages and his hopes of advancement. Love and the family: the marriage he plans and the widow’s house. Consciousness, in his madness. The sacred: God’s element, the idol, the burial for God’s sake. They are held together by the single conflict, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is depth more than range: Evgeny’s consciousness is held only in outline, the girl he loves is never seen alive, and a poem of this length cannot hold the life a novel holds; the figure records the form’s limit.
William Blake · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged as a body of short lyrics. Consciousness is held in the child, the nurse, the Bard and the angry man; the family in the sold son, the groaning mother, the parents gone to church; labour in the sweeps, the charity children, the soldier and the harlot; church and state in the Priest and King, the Palace walls and the “Priests in black gowns” binding “with briars, my joys & desires”; sexuality in The Garden of Love, The Sick Rose and A Little Girl Lost; the natural order from the clod and the pebble to the tiger; the sacred in the Lamb, the Divine Image and Earth’s Answer. One law, the contraries, holds them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form: these orders are touched in short songs rather than worked through, history is a pressure rather than an agent, and a lyric book cannot hold what a novel or an epic holds.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Held in one structure: death and the body; a living lay family, in its own dress and rank; the intercessor; the sacrifice; the Godhead as three persons; the church as a building, and the liturgy of the altar that once stood before the wall; and the mathematical order of space, which the painting asserts is shared by all of these. They are integrated, not listed, each placed on one vertical in one space. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, the state, history as a process, and the natural order beyond the corruptible body. For a single wall image the range is wide; it does not hold the many orders of a cycle, and the figure describes the form.
Juan Rulfo · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve, and a short form described, not punished. It holds more than its length suggests, through one man and one town. The family: father and sons, the abandoned wife, the bastard sons, an incestuous couple. Land and labour: the Media Luna, debts, boundary stones, peasants who work and starve. The state and history: the revolutionaries bought off at the hacienda, the Cristero war. The sacred: the priest’s guilt, sin and absolution, souls in penance, the folk Catholicism of the dead. Consciousness: Susana’s madness and memory, Pedro’s love, Dolores’s longing. The natural order: drought, rain, heat, the land. Death holds them together. What holds the axis well below the novels of society is that the state and history are seen through one hacienda and one town, and the orders are concentrated rather than extended.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
A lyric cycle of ten poems holds more orders than its form usually allows. Consciousness, as its subject; love and the body, in the lovers and the Third’s inherited desire; childhood and the family, in the mother of the Third and the father of the Fourth; death, in the early dead and the dead youth of the Tenth; the sacred, in the angel and the withdrawn gods; the natural order, in the animal, the gnat, the birds and the fig tree; culture, in the Attic gravestones, the cathedral, the Sphinx and the pylons of Egypt; the city and commerce, in the Tenth’s city of pain and its fair. One task, the saying of the world into words, holds them together. What keeps the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, the state, society and history as an agent lie outside the cycle, or appear only as satire in the Tenth.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one family over about ten days. Consciousness, in fifteen minds. The family, in a marriage, five children and a paternity the husband does not know. Labour, in the carpentry and the farm, and the three dollars’ worth of lumber for which Darl and Jewel are away when Addie dies. The neighbourhood, in the Tulls, Samson and Armstid. The sacred, in Whitfield, Cora and Addie’s sin. The body, in the corpse, the pregnancy and the broken leg. Commerce, in the town, the druggists, the horse traded for mules. The natural order, in the flood and the buzzards. The state, in the asylum at Jackson. They are integrated: every order is met on the road with the coffin. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: history and the state are present only at the edges, and the book’s world is one county over ten days; the larger history of that county Faulkner set elsewhere.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
More orders than the Mass for the dead holds, and the setting integrates them: one consciousness facing its end; the community of mourners; the natural order of grass, seed, rain and harvest; labour and its rest, from the farmer’s patience to the dead whose works follow them; the family, in a mother’s comfort; wealth and its futility; the city with no lasting place; the sacred and the end of time. The figure of seed and harvest holds them; they are not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the state, history, conflict and eros do not appear. The world of mourning is wide, but not the widest.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged at its scale, a sequence of four poems. The orders held: consciousness, as the attention that makes the poem; time and eternity; the sacred, Christian above all, with the Hindu and the Greek beside it; history, from the English Civil War and the seventeenth-century emigrant to the Blitz; the nation; the family across generations, the ancestors of East Coker and “Old stones that cannot be deciphered”; the natural order of seasons, river and sea; the craft of language; age and death. They are integrated by one law, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that there are almost no persons: love between people, labour, the social life of the city and the state appear as glimpses, the dancers, the fishermen, the faces on the Tube, seen from a distance. The poem encompasses history from inside one meditating mind, and the human order thinly.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
For a short book it holds many orders, and it holds them through two minds. Consciousness, in two radically different forms. The family: Shade’s marriage to Sybil, the one stable love in the book, and the life and death of a daughter. The academy, its gossip and its cruelty. The state, in the Zemblan revolution, the Extremists and an assassin sent abroad, a Cold War kingdom in miniature. Exile, Nabokov’s own subject. The sacred, in the third canto’s institute for preparing for the hereafter, Shade’s vision and Kinbote’s religion. The natural order, in birds, butterflies and weather. They are integrated: every order passes through the question of what survives and what is reflection. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is missing: labour, class and the wider social body are nearly absent, the state is half fantasy, and the book’s world is two houses and a campus seen from a window.
Chola bronze casters · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, as the whole content; the cosmos and its time, made and unmade in one motion; the natural order, in fire, river, moon, serpent and flowers; consciousness, in ignorance trodden and release offered, the work’s deepest claim; and the body, the instrument of all of it, man and woman in the two earrings. They are integrated: one balanced figure in one ring places each, and the dance binds the cosmos to the body. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, level with the swerve, is what is absent: no family, no labour, no city or state, no history but the myth’s, no person but the god. The temple community, the procession and the festival, the human order the bronze lived in, are outside the figure, and in the museum they are gone. That is the choice of a single icon, and the mark describes the form.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: the state, in the assembly and the offices of government; the sacred, in the prayer hall joined to the ring; the community of representatives, in the hostels and the gathering; the natural order, in water, monsoon light and heat, built into the wall and the lake; and history, in a building begun under one state, carried through a war and finished for a new nation, whose form has come to stand for that nation. They are integrated, not listed: the wall that tempers the climate is the wall that makes the threshold to the assembly. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is thin or outside: the family and private life are thin, and the city lies beyond the precinct by design.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Six orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the Passion and the relics. The state: Capetian kingship, its sacral claim, its palace. History: the biblical history of the glass, carried to the reigning king. The social order: household below, king above. The dynasty: the lilies of France beside the castles of Castile in the painted finish. The natural order: the sun’s course round the windows, the hour and the season. The axis integrates them. What holds the score lowest is what lies outside the palace: labour, the body and the common life enter only as the Bible gives them, and consciousness only as the worshipper’s ascent. Almost all of it lives in the glass.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Six orders are held. The sacred, as shrine and liturgy, the plan built round a grave. The state, in the church of a prince-bishop with palatine power, paired with the castle on the border with Scotland. History, from the Northumbrian church of Cuthbert and Bede, through the Conquest, to the prisoners of 1650. Death, in the saint’s grave, Bede’s tomb and Hatfield’s throne over his own tomb. The community, the monastic life and its exclusions. The natural order, in the rock and the river. The shrine and the site integrate them. What holds the axis lowest is labour and the lay world: the town lies below and outside, and the church holds the monks, not the people. Consciousness, the family and the body enter only through tombs.
Robert Frank · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and the sequence integrates them: the state, in rallies, city fathers, a navy recruiting office and the flag; race and the colour line; labour, in the Detroit assembly line, the elevator operator, waitresses and workers; consumption and the machine, in cars, jukeboxes, televisions and gas stations; the sacred, in funerals, crosses and St. Francis before the gas station in Los Angeles; death, by the road and in the ground; youth and age; the family, held last, in the car; and consciousness, the stranger’s eye that is the book’s medium. They are held in one structure, the journey, not listed. What holds the axis, with The Inevitable the lowest of the twelve, is the form: a book of photographs holds orders by juxtaposition and surface, never by interior life, and history appears only as the present instant. The figure describes the form.
Georges Bizet · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, in José’s obsession; desire and sexual freedom; labour, rare in opera, in the tobacco factory and its women; the state and its army; an economy outside the law, in the smugglers; the family, in José’s mother, brought by Micaëla; the crowd and its spectacle, at the bullfight; the natural order, in the mountains; fate, in the cards. They are integrated: the brawl produces the arrest, the army the desertion, the smugglers the outlaw’s life, the corrida the frame of the murder. What holds the axis here is what is thin or missing: the sacred appears only as fortune-telling, history is absent, and the Roma and the smugglers are colour more than structure. A four-act opera with a domestic centre.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Many orders are held: consciousness, in the knight’s doubt, Jöns’s scorn and Jof’s visions; the sacred, in the church, the flagellants, Revelation and the holy family; death and the natural order, in the plague, the shore and the storm; the family, in Jof and Mia, Plog and Lisa, and Karin, who has waited out the crusade; art, in the players and the painter; power and violence, in the soldiers and the burning; sexuality, in Skat and Lisa. The road and the game carry each order past the knight. What holds the axis among the lowest is the social order: the state and labour appear only as a smith and some soldiers, the crusade is told rather than held, and the breadth is real but sketched.
Vittorio De Sica · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders are held in one structure: labour, in a job that needs a bicycle and the boy’s work at a filling station; the family; the state, in the employment office, the police and the carabiniere; the Church, in the mission and the seminarians; the Party, in the hall; the market; folk belief, in the Santona; class, in the trattoria; crime and its community, in the thief’s street; consciousness, in the father’s shame and the boy’s judgment. Each is reached through one search, and none is listed. What holds it lowest: history is present only as the condition of 1948, the sacred as an institution rather than a belief, nature barely appears, and one search holds two inner lives, no more.
Anonymous · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Several orders held in one structure: the sacred, in angels, relics and a conversion; the state, in the emperor in council, the barons’ counsel and the claim of public law over private feud; war; the feudal bond and the bond of companionship between Roland and Oliver; kinship, in a stepfather and his stepson; love, in one figure, Aude, who has a few lines and dies; and the land itself as “Tere Major”
“the Great Land”. They are integrated, not listed: the trial joins family, law and the sacred in one scene. What is thin or absent is weighed as it is: inner consciousness, labour, the household, the natural world beyond the mountains and the sun, and women other than Aude and Bramimonde. Against most single works of its century it holds a great deal; against the widest epics, less.
Baldassare Longhena · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: the sacred, as the Virgin’s crown and altar; the state, as a Senate’s vow and a republic’s image of itself; death, and the city’s deliverance from mass death; history, in the founding legend written into the floor; the city and its water, the church set as the hinge of the canal and the basin, its rite a crossing; the people, in the yearly procession the plan is built to receive; and commerce and the sea, beside the customs house at the sea gate. One programme integrates them: a state’s covenant with the Virgin made a building. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or thin: labour, the family, the inner life of the individual, nature beyond the water. A votive church of a state holds more than a house and less than a cathedral that houses a whole diocesan life, and the figure describes the form.
Horace · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as a lyric body of 103 odes. Consciousness, fully: one reflective mind, aging across the books. Friendship as the social ground, almost every ode addressed to someone; love in its comedy and its losses (1.5, 3.9, 3.26, 4.1); the state and history, civil war (1.2, 1.14, 2.1), Actium (1.37), the Augustan restoration (3.1 to 3.6), the Roman past (3.5, 3.6, 4.4), Troy behind Rome (3.3); the sacred, hymns to Mercury, Diana and Apollo, Faunus, Fortuna, the spring of Bandusia (3.13); the seasons, snow on Soracte (1.9), the Sabine farm; death everywhere; poetry as its own order. The voice and the law of measure join them. What holds the axis is what is thin: the family is almost absent, labour appears mainly as farmer, merchant and soldier-farmer (1.1, 3.6), and every order is seen from one vantage, a comfortable, ironic friend of the powerful.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders are held and placed by one plan. Learning, as disciplines and as a common life; the household, in the professors’ houses and families above the classrooms; the young, in the rooms along the colonnade; the state, in a public university founded by the Commonwealth and planned by a former President as an organ of self-government; history, in antiquity quoted in every order and the Pantheon at the head; labour, in the Ranges, hotels and yards; the natural order, in the terraced hill and the gardens; the sacred, present by deliberate absence, its place given to books. What holds the axis here: labour is held by concealment rather than shown, death and the individual consciousness are absent, and a campus holds less than a city.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Orders held, and the structure places each. The family, in the duplex that gives it two floors and two aspects; childhood, in the school on the roof; the body, in the track, the pool and the gymnasium, and in the Modulor that measures the whole by it; commerce, in the shopping street; the guest, in the hotel; the natural order, the sun from east to west through every flat, the sea and the hills from the roof; the city, as a quarter set in a park; and the state, which commissioned it as reconstruction after war. They are integrated, not listed: the section stacks the private, the mid-height band holds the common, the roof holds the shared ground. What holds the axis lowest: the sacred is present only as the monastery’s structure without its worship; death is absent; work enters only in the few shops; and history is what the building set out to begin anew rather than to hold.
Ivan Turgenev · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Held, in a small compass. Consciousness: Bazarov’s self-contempt in love, Nikolai’s reverie, Arkady’s slow defection. The family: two households, three generations with the infant Mitya, a father’s second family with Fenichka and the child, the parents’ adoration. Class and labour: the estate on the eve of the Emancipation, the peasants who distrust Nikolai’s reforms and take Bazarov, as he jokes with them, for a clown; Fenichka’s serf origin. Science and thought: the frog, the microscope, Büchner, the creed of negation, Pavel’s liberalism of the 1840s. The natural order: the garden and the fields, the ground of the book’s last word. The sacred: the father’s piety, the last rites Bazarov allows, the closing lines. Every order is joined through one question. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the compass: the state and history are present as ground, the reforms of the coming decade, not as agents; the city is glimpsed; and a short novel of one summer holds its orders more briefly than the long novels hold theirs.
Kurt Vonnegut · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one short book by one man’s unmoored life. Consciousness, in the mind wounded in time. War and the state: the Bulge, the prison camps, and the official history of the Army Air Forces that Professor Rumfoord is writing. History, from Dresden to 1968 and Vietnam. The family: Billy’s parents, his marriage to Valencia, his daughter Barbara and his son Robert, the Green Beret. Commerce and class, in the prosperous optometry practice in Ilium. The cosmos and the sacred, in Tralfamadore and the Christ pattern. The author’s own life. They are integrated, not listed: each is a way of looking away from Dresden or back at it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the short form, which holds these orders as glimpses: labour, the natural order and the inner lives of others are thin, and the book is built of fragments by intention. A low mark on a short form describes the form.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held are many and integrated: the land as physical country; its ecology, in the fire; the ancestral and the sacred; law and the ethics of sharing; the family, a father and his sons; kinship and the ownership of country, to which the painter’s own Dreaming belongs; and, in the act of painting it for outsiders in 1977, the encounter with the settler state and its market. They are not listed but laid on one ground. What holds the axis here: the encounter with history is in the act and the occasion more than in the image, and consciousness, the inner life, is not an order the picture holds.
Gillo Pontecorvo · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The state, in the administration, the police, the army, the press and the courts. The city, in two halves with checkpoints between. The people, as a collective body. Religion, in the purge and the wedding. Gender, in the women who carry bombs and the veil worn and removed. Labour, in the general strike. History, in the colonial order and a nation’s founding. Death and its rites, in the guillotine, the bombs, the torture and the tomb in the wall. The chronicle joins them, since strike, bombs and torture are one campaign. What holds the axis lowest with The Archetypal Deep: consciousness is absent by design, no one being given an inner life, Ali least of all; the family is glimpsed; the European city’s people are faces, not a society; and the natural order is absent.
David Lean · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure are many: consciousness, in Lawrence’s will and its breaking; the state and empire, in Cairo, the British government’s bargains and the Turkish command; war, its tactics and its massacres; the tribe and the nation, in Harith and Howeitat, the blood feud and the dream of one Arab people; the natural order, in a desert that is the film’s second protagonist; the press, in Bentley; the sacred, in prophecy and in “Nothing is written”. They are integrated: Aqaba is strategy, tribe, myth and self in one charge. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve: the family is absent, women are absent entirely, labour is unseen, and the inner life of the Arabs is held from outside.
The masons under Ismaila Traoré · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the congregation and its prayer. The town: its quarters, which compete in the replastering, and its common square. Labour, placed as on almost no other building: the town’s work is the building’s survival, done on it every year, the masons directing, the young carrying and mixing. The natural order: the river’s mud, the flood the platform answers, the rains the plaster sheds, the heat the walls hold off. Exchange: the qibla wall faces the market. History: the first mosque’s foundation, the reformers’ abandonment, the colonial rebuilding. Held where it is because the cosmos, death, the family and the individual consciousness are absent or present only by inference, and the orders are held by the practice and the site as much as by the form.
Achaemenid, under Darius I and Xerxes · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders are held in one structure: the state, an empire of many peoples figured in dress, gift and rank; the sacred, in the god’s sign over the king and the kingship by divine favour the inscriptions claim; the natural order, in the mountain and plain the terrace mediates, the cypress and the lotus, the lion and the bull; wealth and labour, in the Treasury and in the gifts, though the workers appear only in the tablets; dynasty, in the crown prince behind the throne on the audience reliefs. They are integrated by the programme, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what the programme leaves out: the individual, the family, the body other than as rank. Death enters only through the tombs above, which lie outside the work.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the book holds, as a satire of moderate length. Religion: the history of the church in parable, from the primitive coats to Rome’s accretions and the Reformation’s two ways of stripping them. Learning: criticism, the moderns’ encyclopedism, index learning, the book trade. The state: madness as the root of conquest and of the founding of systems and sects, with a scheme to staff the offices of the commonwealth from Bedlam. Consciousness: the psychology of credulity and curiosity. The body: wind, vapour, the flayed skin. What holds the axis is the family, present only as allegorical frame, labour and the natural order, hardly present at all, and the joining of the orders by a single argument rather than through lived persons. They are held, not listed; but held as a thesis holds them.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure and integrated by the vow. The sacred: the cult of the saint and the glory over the altar. The state: an imperial monument and a dynastic claim. History: Jerusalem, Rome and the domed church as one inheritance. Mortality and the city: the plague the vow answers, in a church raised outside the walls of a capital that had suffered it. The natural order, as the sky over the dome and the sun of the glory. For a single church that is a broad grasp. What holds it at 8.2: the family and labour are absent, and the holding is emblematic more than lived, so the range is wide but stated more than inhabited.
Graham Greene · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders, joined through one hunted man. Consciousness, in the priest’s self-contempt and his discovery of love. The family: Brigitta and her mother, the Fellows and their child, the household where Juan’s life is read. The state and the revolution, in the governor, the lieutenant and the hostages. The Church, in two kinds of priest and in the laity who wait for a sacrament. Class and race: the Indians of the villages, the mestizo, the English and German foreigners. Labour, in the banana station, the dentistry and the peasants. The natural order, in swamp, river, rain and mountain; death and the sacred over all. They are integrated, each a place the priest passes through or a witness to his passing. What holds the axis there: the book is short, its social world is drawn at speed, and the life of the Indian villages is largely a backdrop to the one soul.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of this length holds. The natural order, as a forest with its own gods and its own politics; the sacred, in a god of life and death and its killing; labour, in iron-making as a whole economy, from sand to furnace to gun; disease and its outcasts, in the lepers; women freed from brothels into work, and a woman governing a town; the state, in an emperor’s writ, a lord’s samurai and a monk’s commission; war, on three sides; history, in the Muromachi age and the Emishi pushed east; technology, in the gun. They are held together, not listed: the iron ball in Nago links them all. What holds the axis at its figure is consciousness, rendered from outside and chiefly in action, and the family, present only as Moro’s foster-daughter and Ashitaka’s lost village.
William Kentridge · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and one transformation integrates them. Consciousness: Soho’s coma and the divided self. Love and the family: Soho, Mrs Eckstein and Felix, the marriage, the affair and the return. Labour: the miners, the bunks, the shafts, the carrier under the load. The state and history: apartheid, the dead in the land, the transition, the years of the Commission. Capital and property: Soho’s empire, the ledger, the city. The natural order: the veld, the water, the land as witness. The body: the X-ray, the scan, the wound. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is the sacred and the cosmic, present only as the flood and the judgment of water, and the inner life of everyone but Soho and Felix, which the cycle does not enter.
Kendrick Lamar · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form beyond what the definition asks. Consciousness is held fully, its depression and its recovery. The family: the mother whose sayings give You Ain’t Gotta Lie its subtitle, and the younger sister the speaker of u accuses himself of failing. Money and labour: the record contract, the dollar refused, fame as work. The state: Uncle Sam, the institutions, the police. History: slavery in King Kunta, the lineage of Black music, Africa in Momma, Tupac and the dead. The sacred: Lucifer, the God in the beggar, the church. The community: gang violence, and colourism in Complexion. One consciousness and one poem join them, and they bear on one another. What holds the figure: every order passes through one speaker’s crisis, and the natural order is a caterpillar and a butterfly.
Daniel Defoe · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
More than its solitude suggests, and held, not listed, on the island. Consciousness: one mind alone for decades, its fear, its religion, its reckoning. Labour, as fully as any novel before the nineteenth century: tillage, pottery, carpentry, the husbandry of goats, the economics of a single producer. The sacred: conversion, providence, Friday’s catechism and his question why God does not kill the devil. The natural order: seasons learned by error, the rains, the earthquake. The state in small: a kingdom with subjects, a colony left behind, law imposed on mutineers. Trade and slavery: the Brazil plantation and the Guinea voyage. Held lower because the family is thin, a father’s advice and a marriage in a sentence; history is absent; and off the island the orders are merely present.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and the plot integrates them. The state, in a district attorney, a police force riddled with informers, a mayor and the courts; the economy of crime, mob money moved through a foreign accountant; the media, in a press conference and a televised ultimatum; technology and surveillance; and the civic body, in two ferries of citizens and convicts who decide the city’s question themselves. The mob’s money brings in the Joker, and his campaign tests every institution in turn. What holds the axis: consciousness stays on the surface, since Bruce Wayne’s inner life is thin and the Joker is opaque by design; the family appears only as Gordon’s, held at gunpoint; labour, the sacred and the natural order are absent.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of 165 minutes holds, and it holds a great deal in one structure. The family, in three marriages and the households around them; labour and class, in Olivia’s climb through school to teaching and Mason’s job in a restaurant kitchen; the state and history, in the Iraq war through a returned soldier and the 2008 campaign through yard signs; the sacred, in the grandparents’ church; consumer technology, the film’s clock; the natural order, from suburbs to desert; and consciousness, in Mason. The passing of years integrates them. The limits stand: consciousness is thin at the centre, history enters as texture, the sacred is a scene, and the world beyond the white middle class appears only at the edges.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders are a surveillance state, a criminal trade, a bush community with land and title, three generations of one family and a brother inside the system, and a country crossed twice. The revision brings two of them into scene. The state speaks in its own documents. The community works in front of the reader: a wood lot of ten men and two crosscuts, a school writing on the backs of receipt rolls, a meeting about wells and cords and paper, a meal served to the same line. What caps the axis is still the frame. For two thirds of its length the novel is two people in a car, and the city, history and labour beyond the community reach it as report. The book is deep and less narrow than it was.
Ptolemaic builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Six orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the gods, the creation and Horus’s victory over Seth. The state: the king as offerer, the foreign dynasty made native. The natural order: the Nile and its flood, the marsh plants of the columns, the sky of the ceilings, the sun of the New Year rite. Labour and economy: the temple’s lands listed on its walls, the provisions of the offering hall. The calendar: the Beautiful Meeting with Hathor of Dendera, the coronation of the sacred falcon. History: the succession of kings across the walls. They are held, not listed: each is placed where it belongs in the building. What holds the axis is the absence of the private person: consciousness, the family and the individual worshipper scarcely figure.
Aldous Huxley · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and one mechanism joins them. Reproduction and biology, in the Hatchery and Bokanovsky’s Process. Labour and class, in the five castes from Alpha to Epsilon, each conditioned to its work. The state, in the ten Controllers. Religion, in Fordism, the Solidarity Service and the Controller’s locked shelf of theology. The family, abolished, with “mother” an obscenity. Sexuality, in the rule that “everyone belongs to everyone else”. Art, in the feelies against Shakespeare. Science, held to its use; history, under Ford’s “History is bunk”; and consciousness itself, under soma. That is close to the full range the axis asks for, held in one structure. What holds the axis there is outline: the castes are seen from above and never from inside an Epsilon, the natural order is a background, and the short span gives each order a scene rather than a world.
Roberto Rossellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure are many. The family, in Pina, her son, her sister and the wedding. The parish and the sacred, in Don Pietro and his church. Politics, in the communist Manfredi and the clandestine press. The state, in an occupying army, its police and a compliant Italian official. Labour, in a typesetter and a hungry tenement storming a bakery. Childhood, in the boys’ own resistance. Sexuality and its trade, in Marina and Ingrid. History, in the city and the year. They are integrated, not listed: parish, party and family meet in one building and one Passion. What holds the figure: consciousness is rendered from outside and in clear outline, the natural order is absent, the German side is a type rather than a world, and history is the present moment, not a span.
William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch and Thomas U. Walter · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Orders held: the state, in two houses and their balance; law, in the court long housed below the Senate; history, the founding and the war built into the campaigns and the dome; death, in the empty tomb, the crypt and the rite of lying in state; the sacred, as civil religion in dome and rotunda; the city, ordered from the building’s centre; labour, in the iron industry of the dome and the enslaved men who worked on the building, though as record more than form; and the continent, in Latrobe’s maize and tobacco taken into the canon of ornament. One plan places most of them, chambers either side, rotunda between, tomb below, dome above. What holds the axis: the household and the private person are absent, nature enters only as ornament, and much of the history is held through painting and statuary the unit does not score.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The film holds many orders, and holds them through one consciousness. Consciousness itself, deeply, since the film is an inner life; the sacred, at its centre; the family, in the mother and, in the dream, a marriage, children and a household; the state, in Rome’s crosses, the Zealot cause of Judas and the scene with Pilate; history, in the burning of Jerusalem and Paul’s founding of a church; labour, in the carpenter’s trade, which is the first image of complicity; the natural order, in the desert and its animals. The dream integrates them as a whole life. What limits the axis: the society of Judaea is thin, the politics are sketched in a few speeches and one interview with Pilate, the disciples’ labour is barely seen, and the crowd is a crowd.
Diogo de Boitaca and João de Castilho · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure, and most are integrated. The sacred: the liturgy, the Nativity, the prayer for the dead. The state and the dynasty: the founder kneeling at the door, the royal tombs in the main chapel. Commerce: the trade that paid for it and its emblems. The natural order and the sea: vegetal and marine ornament, the site at the river mouth. The monastic day: cloister, chapter house, refectory. And in its later life the nation’s memory, the navigator and the epic poet entombed in the nave. The family appears only as dynasty, and the private life of consciousness barely at all. A large compass, held together by site and dedication more than by one form.
Alan Moore and David Lloyd · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
For a book of its length it holds many orders: the state and its apparatus in every organ; the media, in the Voice of Fate; religion, in Bishop Lilliman; the camp and medicine, at Larkhill; marriage and the family, in the Almonds and the Heyers; sexuality and its persecution, in Valerie; art and memory, in the Shadow Gallery; class, crime and the street; history, in the war that made the state; consciousness, in Evey’s ordeal. They are integrated by the panorama’s single question, who consents and who resists. Held here because many of the orders are shown once and in outline, the people of London are a crowd, and nature and labour are nearly absent.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Held, not listed, and integrated through the veil and the war. The state: the Carthaginian council, its factions and its finance. War, at length and in its logistics. Labour: the slaves of Hamilcar’s estates and the needs of an army. The sacred: the cults of Tanit and Moloch and the priests who serve them. The family: Hamilcar, his daughter, and his son Hannibal, hidden at the sacrifice with a slave’s child given in his place. The natural order: desert, drought, rain, lions and the serpent. History is an agent, not a ground. What is thin is consciousness: no mind in the book is held from within for long, and that order, which the novel holds best, is the one this novel declines. That holds the axis a step down.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure: the marriage and the family, three daughters, a mother-in-law and a resentful sister in one house; labour as the film’s ground, mowing, ploughing, threshing and the mill, through every season of a farm; the village as a community that turns; the church, from parish to bishop; the state, in the oath, the army, the prison, the lawyer and the military court; the sacred, central and contested; the natural order, mountains, weather and harvest, given its full weight; and consciousness, in the letters. They are integrated, not listed: the farm work is the life the state demands and the life Franz keeps by refusing it. What holds the axis: history is glimpsed, and the war is newsreel and rumour; consciousness is Fani’s more than Franz’s, whose reasons stay sealed; and the regime’s own people are faces, not orders.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The orders held, and integrated: consciousness, in the outer movements; the natural order, as the earth the first movement is in love with; the social world, in two dances and the Rondo’s street noise; art itself, in a rondo that is a contest of counterpoint with its critics; the family, in negative, through a quoted song about dead children; the sacred, in a hymn-like finale, deep bells and a funeral procession. They are held together by motif: the dances are built from the outer movements’ cells. What holds the axis here is absence: labour, the state and history do not appear, and no crowd has a voice. Everything routes through one listening consciousness, without words to widen it.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Malik · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Six orders are held, and one structure places each. The sacred: the Rock as the centre, the oneness of God in the inscription. History: the site’s earlier sacred history, the Temple and Abraham, taken into the building’s claim. The state: the caliph’s name and year, the crowns read as the regalia of conquered kingdoms. The religions: Judaism and Christianity named, answered and absorbed. The cosmos: earth, rock and cave under the dome of heaven. The natural order, transfigured in the paradisal garden of the mosaics. They are integrated, the cosmos in plan and the claims in ornament and word. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, labour, the social order, the body and individual consciousness. It is a shrine round a stone.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, in Otello’s collapse and Iago’s mind; love and marriage, from the duet to the bed; war, in the enemy fleet sunk in the storm; the state, in the embassy that recalls Otello before the court; the crowd, in choruses that pray, celebrate and acclaim; the natural order, in the storm; the sacred, in two opposed creeds. They are integrated: the embassy arrives at the hour of Otello’s collapse, so the state witnesses his fall. What holds the axis lowest is the cut of Venice, which takes the family with Brabantio, the senate’s deliberation and most of the outsider’s place in a society. Labour and history are absent. The orders are fewer than the play holds.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Seven orders are held: the sacred, the vision with the altar below and heaven above; consciousness, the mystic’s state made visible; the body and desire, the open question; the family, the dead with the living; the state and the Church as power, a doge and seven princes of the Church in marble; death, in the tomb and the skeletons; and history, a saint of the last century and the order whose church this is. The vertical places each at its height, and the viewer among them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, the natural order except as light and cloud, the poor, any world below the patron class. Teresa’s reform was a reform of poverty, and her chapel holds none of it.
Isaac Babel · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
For a short book the range held is wide and integrated. The state and its revolution enter in Lenin’s speech read aloud and in the political officer’s work; history, in the old Polish and Jewish Volhynia passing under the cavalry; the sacred, Hasidic and Catholic both, and their ruin; the family, in “A Letter”, with fathers and sons killing each other across the Civil War, and in the dead father of the first story; consciousness, in Liutov’s divided self; the natural order, in landscapes the prose makes cosmic. The narrator and the campaign hold them together. Labour is little held beyond the horse-work of the army. What keeps the axis lowest is scale: a cycle of brief stories cannot encompass what the long novels do, and the figure describes the form.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The liturgy brings several orders, and the work holds them in one structure: the single conscience, “Recordare, Jesu pie, quod sum causa tuae viae”
“Remember, kind Jesus, that I am the cause of your journey”; the church interceding for all the faithful departed; the world dissolved to ash and nature itself astonished; sacred history from Abraham’s promise to the Last Day; and the sacred as the frame of all of these. The passage from eis to me and back integrates them, so that one soul and the whole of creation stand before the same judge. What holds the axis lowest is what the form cannot hold: no family, no labour and no state enter, and the orders come with a fixed text rather than being gathered by the work.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
On the unit scored, the precinct holds the sacred, in the hall and the qibla; the state, in the sultan’s lodge, the inscription naming him caliph and lawgiver and the minarets ranking the dynasty; death and the afterlife, in the founder’s and his wife’s tombs behind the qibla; the community, in the court where the Friday congregation gathers and washes; and the city, which the mosque crowns and toward whose institutions its precinct opens. They are integrated, not listed: the tombs lie on the axis of prayer, the court is the hall’s forecourt, the massing is the city’s summit. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside or beneath it: learning, healing, feeding and trade belong to the foundation beyond the unit and are not counted, and labour, the family and the natural order are scarcely held. The figure describes the form.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
No discount for the form. Five orders are held, and one loss integrates them: consciousness, in the dream-logic of every song; the family, as father, mother and child, in the bears and in the two parts; the sacred, Christian and Buddhist, held against each other; the natural order, in sun, sea, fire, animals and the coast; and popular myth, in Elvis and in Hollywood as a place. They are held, not listed: the same loss passes through each, and the plan of the two parts makes the family the frame of the whole. What holds the axis here is what is absent: labour, the state, history and the social world do not appear, and the family is the family in grief only. The figure describes what the record chose to hold.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as the self that sees through and departs. The state and the law are held, in It’s Alright, Ma’s president and courts and in Subterranean’s police and leaders; commerce and advertising are held, labour in Maggie’s Farm, the sacred in Gates of Eden and in the indictment’s false preachers. History enters as the founding of America in the 115th Dream, love in two songs as a refuge, the natural order in Mr. Tambourine Man’s sea and sky. One voice joins them, and It’s Alright, Ma holds more of them at once than most single songs attempt. What holds the figure lowest: the family is a caricature in Maggie’s Farm, the orders are named in lists more than inhabited by persons, and no place is particular.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Many orders are joined by one creature’s passage through them: the natural order, in the beast and the flock he dies in; the sacred, in the mock baptism, the church where Gérard sings, the procession and the saint; the family, in two households and a father’s ruin; labour, at the farm, the bakery, the circus and the mill; money, in the merchant’s talk and Arnold’s inheritance; law and the state, in the lawsuit, the gendarmes and the customs men; sexuality and violence, in Gérard’s gang; death, three times. What holds the axis lowest is depth: consciousness is withheld by method, history is absent, and most of these orders are crossed in a single scene rather than entered. The form is ninety-five minutes long and does not pretend otherwise.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the church, in its clergy and its objects; the state, in the mayor and the men of the town; history, in the two old men in the dress of the 1790s beside the open grave; the family, in the mourning women; labour, in the gravedigger and the bearers; the natural order, in the cliffs and the turned earth; death; the animal; and the town as a society, all ranks of it at once. They are integrated by the frieze and by the grave they surround. What is thin: consciousness, since faces register but no one is followed into thought, and any order beyond the town. It holds more than a pastoral and less than a court seen as a structure of attention; set beside Las Meninas, at 8.2 on this axis, it holds a wider society and a narrower interior. The figure describes a single scene of very wide social reach.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what one play of about eleven hundred lines holds, and it holds a great deal. The state: the empire, its council, its tribute and its king. War: the whole campaign, by sea and by land. History: three kings and a dynasty. The family: a mother, a dead father, a son. The sacred: the jealousy of the gods, Poseidon, the dead raised by rite. The natural order: the sea, the Hellespont, the river that freezes and melts. Two continents, held in one dream. These are joined by the yoke and the harvest, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is consciousness: no figure has an inner life beyond its station, and the Queen, the fullest, is a role of dignity more than a mind. Labour and the life of the ordinary man appear only as the dead counted.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
A monastery is a small world, and this house holds more of one than a villa or a chapel. The sacred: the hours, the Mass, the private altars. The community: common life at table, in chapter and in study. The individual: the cell, each alike, for sleep, reading and solitude. Learning and the order’s vocation: library and classrooms for preachers. The Church and the lay world: the faithful in their nave across the altar. The body: food, sleep, cold, light, the Modulor’s measure of a man. The natural order: the slope, the valley, the sun through the devices. History: the monastic tradition restated. One section places each at its level, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest: labour enters faintly, the city and the state not at all, and death only as the private Mass implies it.
Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola and Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Orders held: the sacred, in sacrament, preaching and relic; the Church as institution and the new order as its instrument; the state and the great family, in the patron’s name on the front and his money in the fabric; the city, the church set on a main street of papal Rome; history and the world, in Xavier’s missions at one arm and the globe over Ignatius at the other; death and judgment, in the tombs and on the vault; and the congregation, the ordinary worshipper given a place to see and hear. The plan and the axis integrate them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the household, labour and the natural order are absent except as the world to be converted, and consciousness is addressed as a soul to be moved rather than held in its own right.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as a short novel held tight around few orders. War and the state: the Italian army, its officers, the Carabinieri executing their own at the bridge, the disaster of Caporetto as history. Love, and the family that does not form: the pregnancy and the dead son. The sacred, argued between the priest’s Abruzzi and Frederic’s unbelief, and Catherine’s saying that he is her religion. The natural order: the mountains, the rain, the lake, and birth become death. Consciousness, through one retrospective voice. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the form leaves out: labour hardly at all, class only as officers and drivers, with the socialism of Passini and Bonello, and society only at the edges of Milan. Everything is routed through one man and, at the end, one room. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Roman Polanski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: the state, in the water department, a city council with sheep driven into its chamber, the police and the courts; the economy, in land, water and the speculation that makes a city; the natural order, in drought, reservoir, tide and desert; the family, in a marriage of convenience, incest and a daughter; history, in the founding of Los Angeles; and consciousness, in Gittes. The plot integrates them: the drought, the fraud and the incest are one discovery. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is Gittes’s surface only, with no way into Evelyn or the city’s people; the sacred is absent; Chinatown, the film’s name, is held as a sign rather than a society; and labour appears only in the farmers.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure: the state and its law; labour, in the clerk’s office and the plumber’s trade; the family, in a son and a mother who becomes his lover’s face; love; the inner life of dream; consumer society; terror and the city. They are integrated through one man and one error, and the error runs through every order in turn, from the Buttles’ flat to the chamber. What is missing is named. The natural order is seen only as a fantasy of cloud and countryside; history is abolished by design, the film set somewhere in the twentieth century; the sacred appears only as Christmas, as commerce; the terrorists, who might have brought politics in as a force, stay a rumour. The form’s limit, one consciousness, is respected rather than overcome.
Margaret Atwood · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
More orders than its narrow window suggests, held through one consciousness. Consciousness itself, in memory, doubt and desire. The family: a husband, a lost daughter, a mother, and the forced household of Commander, Wife, Marthas and Handmaid. Sexuality and the body, at the book’s centre. The state, as theocracy, police, war and propaganda. The sacred, as scripture taken over. Labour and class: Marthas, Econowives, Guardians, the Colonies. The natural order, poisoned: infertility and the toxic Colonies. History, from the time before through Gilead to the symposium of 2195. Held below the upper band because the state, the economy and race are glimpsed rather than held: the narrator cannot see them, by design, and a statement about their absence is not the same as holding them.
Bernardo Bertolucci · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a feature of under two hours holds. The state, in the ministry, the secret police and its agents; history, in 1917, 1938 and 1943, the regime at its height and at its fall, and the exiles in Paris; the family, in a decayed mother, a mad father and a marriage made for normality; sexuality, in the childhood trauma, Anna’s attraction to Giulia and Marcello’s to Anna; the sacred, in a confession Marcello uses as he uses everything; thought, in Plato and the professor; and consciousness, in Marcello’s memory, which is the form. The plot integrates them: the wedding, the honeymoon and the murder are one journey. What holds the axis lowest: labour and the people appear only as a crowd in the coda and a street singer, Anna and the professor have no interior, and the politics is reduced to one man’s psychology.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Several orders are held, and integrated through the bond of two men. Consciousness, in Freddie; war and its aftermath, in the beach, the psychiatric interview and the men back from the Pacific; labour, in the studio, the field and the ship; the family, in Dodd’s household as an institution, a wife who rules it, a son who says his father makes it up as he goes, a daughter who presses herself on Freddie; the sacred, in a faith founded before the viewer’s eyes; commerce, in the second book’s launch; the state, in the arrest; class, in the patrons. What holds the axis here: the state and history appear in episodes rather than in their working, nature is the sea and the desert as figure, and the women other than Peggy are held at the edge, much as Freddie sees them.
Reginald Ely, John Wastell and others · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the liturgy, the typology of the glass, the Passion in the east. The state: two dynasties, the deposed founder and the Tudors who wrote their title on his church. History: the Wars of the Roses legible in the change of stone and the stop and start of the campaigns. Learning: a college’s chapel, its scholars in the stalls. Death and memory: a chantry for a king. Music: a room made for the sung voice. The natural order: daylight and season through the glass. The screen and the vault integrate them. What holds it here: labour, the body and common life enter only as the Bible in the glass gives them.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders, held in one night and one mind. The sacred above all, in every form the ancient world knew. Consciousness, in Anthony’s exhaustion and desire. The body, in fasting, appetite and the dream of dissolving into plants and water. History, in Alexandria, the persecutions, the councils and the empire’s cults. Knowledge and science, in Hilarion. The natural order and the cosmos, in the flight through space and the descent to the cell. They are held, not merely listed, by the ladder of temptation. What is missing is the human world below the doctrinal: the family, labour, the city as lived and the state as more than spectacle barely appear, and the orders that do appear pass as visions rather than being lived. The book is narrower in human range than its catalogue suggests.
Hou Hsiao-hsien · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 157 minutes holds. The family over three generations; the state in three forms, the departing Japanese empire, the arriving Nationalist administration, and its army and prisons; history from the surrender to the retreat of 1949; languages and the colonial order they carry; commerce and smuggling, a hospital, a school in the mountains; crime; the intellectuals and their politics; marriage, birth and death; the sacred in ancestral rites and funerals; the hills and the sea. They are integrated through one household, not listed: the state enters the house through the arrest of one son and the silence of another. What holds it lowest: the state’s mechanism and the uprising are seen only at the edge, held as consequence rather than as structure.
Willa Cather · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders, joined through one woman seen by one man. The natural order: grass, snow, seasons, snakes, wolves, the plough. Labour: breaking sod, threshing, hired work in town houses. Immigration: Bohemian, Norwegian, Russian and Danish families against the Virginian Burdens and the town. Class: the line between the hired girls and the respectable families. The family, in three households, the Burdens, the Shimerdas and the Cuzaks. Religion: the Catholic family, the Protestant grandfather at prayer, a suicide refused consecrated ground. Death, by suicide and murder; sexuality, seduction and its price; education and the classical past; law and money in Wick Cutter; history in the passing of the frontier. All are integrated through memory. What is thin: the state and the wider nation appear only at the edge, and the scale is a county and a life. A short novel holding this much is credited for it.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. Consciousness, in dozens of interior voices of every age; childhood, in the song and in the children, who alone can see the angels; love and the body; the city as one organism; history, in the war, the ruins and the division; the sacred, as the premise; storytelling and cinema, in Homer and in Falk’s film. One device integrates them, listening, and that is the achievement. Held where it is because labour and the state appear only as faces in a crowd and as a wall, the family is glimpsed in a few apartments and not entered, and the orders are sampled across the city more than worked through one another: history and the sacred run in parallel, not in collision.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form beyond what the definition asks. Consciousness is held, as memory. The family, as the daughter wished for in the title song and the houses where children were raised. Place is the record’s ground, the suburb and the sprawl, the city and the mountains. Commerce, in the businessmen who would bleed the singer of Ready to Start, and the dead shopping malls. The state, in the police of Sprawl I. Technology and time, in We Used to Wait. War, as the metaphor of Suburban War. The natural order, as the mountains beyond the sprawl. One place and one generation join them. What holds the figure: most orders appear as single images, labour and history are nearly absent, the sacred is absent, and the orders lie close together, one class in one landscape.
John Updike · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Many orders, held through one man and a small city. Consciousness, in Rabbit’s senses and, for a time, in Janice’s and Ruth’s. The family: two sets of parents, the Angstroms and the Springers, a sister, a son and a daughter. Work: the MagiPeeler, the gardening, the Springers’ car lot, Ruth’s past, the ministers’ vocation. Sex and the body, at length. Sport, as the lost form of grace. Religion, in two churches and two theologies. Class and the small city, in Brewer and Mt. Judge. The natural order, in the spring and Mrs Smith’s garden. Death. They are integrated, not listed: each is a claim on Rabbit and a place he runs from. Held in the low eights because history and the state are absent or heard only on the radio, and every order is seen at the scale of one town.
Pierre Peysson and Jean de Louvres, under Benedict XII and Clement VI · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure, and integrated rather than listed: the sacred, in the two chapels and the Grande Chapelle; the state, in consistory, audience and Rota; finance, in the treasury of the Tour des Anges; war, in the walls, towers and garrison; the household, in the Tinel, the kitchens and the pope’s chamber; the private pleasures of a lord, in the Chambre du Cerf; art, in Giovannetti’s programmes; and now the theatre. Its later history adds the barracks and the massacre of 1791. They are held because the palace was a whole government in one building. What it does not hold at the largest reach is the natural order and the inner life.
Luigi Vanvitelli · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Many orders of reality are held in one structure, and held rather than listed. The state, in the ministries and court within the block; the sacred, in the chapel on the axis, level with the throne; the theatre; the household and its labour, in the basements and service courts; the military, in barracks and guard; the landscape, agriculture and the water from the mountain; and myth along the fountain course: all are placed on, or ordered by, the one axis. That is wider than a villa or a chapel can be. What the work does not hold, or holds only as exclusion, is the town and the people outside the gate, whom the axis addresses and the work does not contain.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 135 minutes holds. A consciousness, Cleo’s, held from outside; a family and its break-up; domestic labour, its routines and its hierarchy; class and ethnicity, an Indigenous worker speaking Mixtec in a criollo house; the city, its streets, cinema and building sites; the countryside and its landholders; the state, in the paramilitaries and the massacre; Mexico in 1970 and 1971; fire, earthquake and sea; birth and death. They are integrated: the massacre, the birth and the family’s break-up meet in one week, and the beach gathers class, love, death and the sea in one shot. The sacred barely enters, the state appears in a single eruption, and the centre is held at a distance.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Many orders, held by one question, what language does. Consciousness, in James’s retrospect. The family: a separated marriage and a father’s love for his son, the book’s warmest bond. Labour: risk analysis, banking, archaeology, film-making, the work of a whole expatriate class. The state and its power: intelligence, multinational capital, the instability of the region in the late 1970s. History, in the ancient inscriptions and the Acropolis set against the present. The sacred: the cult’s ritual, Owen’s Pentecostal childhood, the temple. The natural order, in the four landscapes. They are integrated, not listed: each is a system of signs. Held below the top because the vantage is narrow, one class of Americans and Europeans seen from within and the societies they move through seen from outside, and because the history of the region is atmosphere more than agent.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Many orders, and some the novel seldom holds. Labour, as the subject: the examiner’s work given in its procedures, its tools and its hours. The state, in the Service, taxation and the civics of who owes what to whom. Consciousness, in Fogle, Lane Dean, Rand and Sylvanshine. The family, in the death of Fogle’s father, Lane Dean’s pregnant girlfriend at the picnic table, Toni Ware’s childhood in trailers with her mother. The natural order, in the Illinois fields and weather. The sacred, in the Jesuit, the ghosts, Drinion. History, as the America of 1985 and its turn from citizenship to consumption. In the achieved sections one question binds them: what attention is owed, and to whom. Held off the top because the binding is unfinished, and several orders sit in separate sections that the book never brings together.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged at the dialogue’s scale. The orders held: the body and its desire; the soul; generation and the family, the animals ready to die for their young; the city, its laws and lawgivers, Lycurgus and Solon as begetters (209d); the sacred, the daimonic as messenger between gods and men and the language of initiation; the natural order, in Eryximachus’ seasons and medicine; knowledge; and history by shadow, with Alcibiades in 416 on the eve of the Sicilian expedition and the scandals of 415, and Socrates’ death beyond the frame. Diotima’s ladder holds them in one order, not a list. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the world rendered: one evening, seven men of the Athenian elite, labour absent, women present only as Diotima and the dismissed flute-girl.
Ancient Egyptian, under Khufu · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Orders held in one structure: the sacred, in the king’s transfiguration, the mound, the horizon and the stars; the state, in a kingdom’s labour and administration, which the mass states and the gang marks sign; labour, in the names of the teams in the sealed compartments; the natural order, in the cardinal points and three regions’ stone in one body; death, in the box at the centre and its emptiness; time, forty-five centuries legible in one object. One geometry places each. What holds the axis lowest is what the pyramid alone cannot hold: the family, whose queens and mother lie outside in their own tombs; consciousness; story; any human figure. With its complex the work would hold the family and the cult, and score higher; the form’s limit is described, not compensated.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
The orders held are five. The sacred: the cover of the sanctuary and the high altar. The state: a republic’s and a guild’s monument, the sign of the commune over its territory. Labour: the dome is labour made into form, the sixteen years, the machines and the passages built for the builders visible in the fabric, and the herringbone the trace of every course laid. The natural order: gravity answered, light through the eye and the round windows, the valley gathered round it. History: the rivalry with antiquity that Alberti named. One structure holds each, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: consciousness, the family and story. A single vault holds no persons. The figure describes the form.
Euripides · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on what one play of fourteen hundred lines holds, and it holds much in one structure. Consciousness, in the monologue. The family: marriage as contract, divorce, children as the bond and the weapon, a father’s love for his daughter at her corpse. The state: a royal marriage as policy, exile, the standing of a foreign woman, Athens as refuge. The sacred: oaths, Zeus and Themis, the Sun. Gender as an order of the world; the foreigner and Greece, which is the argument of Jason’s defence; the natural order in the reversed rivers; history as the Argo’s voyage behind the action. Each is a term in the one quarrel. What holds it lowest of the twelve: labour, the wider city, war and the long course of time lie outside a single action on a single day before a single house.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged at the speech’s scale, where it holds more than its length suggests, and all of it joined by one trial: the soul and its care (29d to 30b); the city, its courts and the Council; democracy and the oligarchy of the Thirty; war, at Potidaea, Amphipolis and Delium (28e); the gods, the oracle and the charge of new divine things; politicians, poets and craftsmen, the three classes examined, and the comic stage of the Clouds; the family, three sons kept from the court and commended to the jurors at the close (41e); death and what may follow it. They are integrated, not listed: each is weighed by the question of what a life is answerable to. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that every order passes through one speaker on one day: there is one person in depth, no woman speaks or is named, nature is absent, and labour is seen only as the craftsmen’s competence.
Emily Dickinson · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged at its scale, a body of short lyrics, and the orders it holds are many. Consciousness, at depth and in its breaking: pain, despair, ecstasy, memory, madness. Death and eternity, as fully as in any poetry in English. The sacred, in belief and doubt, election and refusal. The natural order, with an exactness few poets match: the bird, the snake, the bee, the winter light, the late summer crickets of “Further in Summer than the Birds”. Love and the erotic, in “Wild Nights” and the Master poems. The household, its rites of grief and a funeral seen from a window (J389). The self against society, in “Much Madness is divinest Sense” (J435); the mind against the world it holds, in the poem of the Brain wider than the Sky (J632). One mind integrates them, and the number of poems lets them recur and deepen. What holds the axis is the human order beyond the self: history, labour, the state, the city and other persons as persons are nearly absent, and the war of the early 1860s is not held as an order.
Euripides · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
A single play of about 1,466 lines, not marked down for its length and weighed on what it holds. The orders are several and integrated through one house: the inner life, at the pitch of Phaedra’s reasoning about shame, knowledge and will; the family, in a father, a son born of an Amazon, a stepmother and her nurse, and a Cretan house with its inherited curse; the city, in Theseus as king and the law of oaths and evidence; the sacred at its fullest, two goddesses, Poseidon, oath and curse, purity and pollution, and a cult founded at the end; the natural order of meadow, hunt, horses and sea. What holds it lowest of the twelve is what the form leaves out: one house in one day at the margin of a city, with labour, a people, the economy and history absent, and the state present only as a king’s word and a son’s exile.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders are fewer than in the long novels and deliberately reduced, but more are held than the book’s austerity suggests. Consciousness is the ground; the body, in its failure, is a second order. The family: the mother in the first part, father and son in the second. The sacred, in Moran’s faith, his questions on doctrine and the parody of Youdi and Gaber. The state and its law: the policeman and the papers, the agency with its agents and messengers. Labour, in Moran’s employment as an agent. The natural order: the forest, the sea and the shore, the seasons, the bees. Love and sex, in Ruth and Lousse. All are integrated around the dissolving self. What holds the axis here is what is thin: history is absent from the page, society is seen only at its edges, and every order is held thinly by design. A small world, achieved fully.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short book holds, and it holds more than its length suggests. Consciousness, fully: a mind in crisis, most exposed in “Nuit de l’enfer”. Ancestry and race: the Gaulish blood, the “race inférieure”. History: Gaul, the crusades, the Church, the West with its science and its progress, colonial conquest. The sacred: baptism, Christ, Satan, conversion and its refusal. Love and sexuality, in a marriage of two men and the cry that love is to be reinvented. Labour, loathed in every trade and then hailed in “L’Éclair”. Art itself, in “Alchimie du verbe”; the natural order, in the songs and the seasons. One voice joins them, and they are held, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the family, the state and the social world are glimpsed rather than inhabited: the book’s world is one consciousness and what it carries, and a short form holds that much and no more.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders are held through one woman’s life, not listed. Consciousness: Violetta divided against herself in Act I, deciding in Act II, remembering in Act III. The family: a father, a son, a daughter never seen, and the marriage contract that governs them. Money and labour: the demimonde as a trade, the sold property, the purse, the winnings thrown as wages. Society: the salon, Flora’s party, the respectable provinces of “Di Provenza il mar”. The body: consumption, the doctor, the hours counted. The sacred, in the angel and the Magdalene, held in the drama’s language. Nature is glimpsed, in the country house and Provence. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the state and history do not enter, and the scale is two rooms and two parties.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: the family at the centre, three generations and five children; consciousness, in Noriko’s confession and the parents’ reckoning in Osaka; labour, since each child is placed by work, surgery, salon, railway, office and school, and the parents’ moves follow their children’s hours; time and the generations, in the watch, the clock and the trains; death and its rites, in the funeral and the temple above the harbour; history, in Shōji dead eight years and a capital filling from the provinces; town against city, two orders of life. Each is reached through the family and none is listed. What is held weakly keeps the axis lowest: history and the sacred are glimpsed, not entered; the state is absent except as the war that took Shōji; nature is a frame of boats and heat.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Held, and integrated rather than listed: consciousness, supremely; the family, in the grotesque household of Charlotte, Humbert and Dolores; childhood and adolescence; exile, and old Europe meeting postwar America; the American landscape and its commerce, motels, advertising, schools and summer camps, in one long look; the law, in the confession’s form and the foreword; art and mortality, in the last sentence. The road is both America and Humbert’s flight; the school is both a social portrait and a cage. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the book does not hold: labour, the state, the sacred except as art, and history beyond the shadow of exile and war. Its world is wide in geography and narrow in society, by the logic of a narrator who sees others only as they serve him.
Ustad Ahmad Lahauri · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Five orders are held. The sacred, in the eschatology of the inscriptions and the paradise garden. Death, as the whole purpose. The family, as marriage: a husband’s tomb for a wife. The state, as the emperor’s order made visible in symmetry, and the court’s power over material, labour and land. The natural order, in water and plants, the river and the changing light. They are integrated: one axis places each, from the gate to the grave. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: history; labour, present only as the evidence of the making; the city; any consciousness beyond a name. The forecourt and the bazaars, which would have brought household and market into the structure, lie outside the work. A tomb holds few orders, and the figure describes the form.
F. Scott Fitzgerald · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Many orders, drawn in few strokes and joined by the dream. Consciousness, in Nick and in what Gatsby is made to reveal. Love and marriage, in two marriages, the Buchanans’ and the Wilsons’. Class and money: old and new, the bond business, bootlegging and the fixed World Series of 1919. Labour, in Wilson’s garage and the ash-grey men. The city, crossed by the Queensboro Bridge. War, in the Argonne and Gatsby’s medal from Montenegro. Race and nation, in Tom’s book by “this man Goddard” (chapter 1). The sacred, in the billboard god and the son of God. The continent, in the bay, the moon and the sailors. Integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is brevity: the family is thin, Daisy’s child appearing once; labour is seen from a car window; and the women’s inner lives are withheld.
Guo Xi · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in mountain, water, trees, mist and season; time, in the turn from winter to spring; the sacred, in the temple within the mountain and in the mountain itself; labour, in the boats drawn in and the porters on the paths; and the state, by analogy, in the rank of peak over hill, which the court read as sovereign over ministers. They are integrated by placement: every human order stands at its station on the one mountain. What holds the axis at 8.0, the lowest of the twelve, is that the human orders are small and generic by design: no named person, no history, no inner life beyond the act of travelling and dwelling. That is the form’s choice, and the figure describes it.
Virgil · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as a book of some 828 lines, and high for its form. The orders held are more than a short book usually holds, and they are joined, not listed: labour, the herdsman’s work, grafting, the flocks, the farm to be lost; the natural order, season, evening, a countryside that mourns Daphnis; love in two sexes and in Gallus’s elegy; death and deification; the state and history, the confiscations, Rome, the young god, the consul, civil war; the cosmos in Silenus’s song; the sacred and the turning of the ages. The pastoral world is the structure that holds them, each order seen as it enters or threatens the shepherd’s place. What holds the axis lowest is size and vantage: each order is touched in a poem or a few lines, the city and the war stay offstage, and the family across time is barely present.
Euripides · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on what one play of about 1,330 lines holds. War, as aftermath, which is its whole ground. The state, in the council’s vote on Astyanax and the allotment of the women. The family: a mother, her daughters, Cassandra and Polyxena, whose death is reported, her son’s widow and grandson, the line of Priam ended. Women and slavery, as the condition of nearly every speaker. The sacred, in gods present, invoked, doubted and abandoned. History, in the city’s two falls and the Greeks’ return still ahead. Law, in the trial of Helen; desire, in Helen and Menelaus. What holds it lowest of the twelve: labour and the natural order are thin, and one day in one place bounds how fully these orders can be worked out.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what a single tragedy holds, and a play of this size cannot hold what an epic or a long novel holds; the figure describes the form. Within it the orders are many and integrated. The aftermath of a war and the treatment of the vanquished. The state: the Greek embassy, the reason of state that demands the death of Hector’s son, Pyrrhus’s sovereignty over Epirus. The family: a mother and an unseen child, a dead husband’s claim. Eros in four forms. The sacred: the oath at the altar, the temple where Pyrrhus dies, the Furies who take Oreste. History: Troy as memory and the Greek order as its consequence. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, the common people and the natural world are absent.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held are several, and the embrace and the gap integrate them: the family, a father and two sons, an inheritance and its waste; the sacred, the father as God in the parable’s reading, grace and judgement; the moral order, sin, repentance, mercy and resentment; consciousness, three figures each in a different inward state; the household and its labour, by implication, in the witnesses and in the son who stayed and served; poverty and the body, in the rags, the shaved head and the bare foot; age and death, in the old man’s face. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no state, no history, no natural order. One room and one instant hold it, and the figure describes the form.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what the book holds, as three tales. Consciousness: Félicité’s, given from outside and wholly. The family: Madame Aubain’s house, the children, the nephew, Julien’s parents. Labour: a servant’s fifty years of work, with the farms and the market. The state and history: Rome, the tetrarchy, the Arab war, the factions of Judaea, and the knight’s wars in Julien. The sacred: in all three, from popular devotion to legend to the Precursor. The natural order: the hunt, the animals, the sea at Trouville, the river. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that they are integrated by the triptych’s design more than by any one tale, and each tale holds few of them at depth: history in the first is ground only, the inner life in the third is thin.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as a single play of 1,420 lines, at its own scale, it holds a great deal and holds it together: the gods and their justice; the mind deranged and the mind in shame; the family, wife, son, half-brother and the absent father Telamon; the household of a captive woman; the army as a polity, with law, rank and the right of burial; war and what it leaves; the city, Salamis and Athens and the cult the burial founds; and the natural order, the sea, the seasons and the light. All of it passes through one man’s last day. What holds it at the foot of the twelve is that form: a single tragedy cannot hold labour, history or the breadth of a society as a novel can.
The Beatles · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for being an album. The orders are many: consciousness, as dream and altered perception; the family, in She’s Leaving Home and the long marriage of When I’m Sixty-Four; work and the city, in a traffic warden and the commute of the closer; the media and history, in a newspaper and a film of a war; death, in the car; the sacred, in Within You Without You; entertainment and age. A Day in the Life binds four of them in one song, and She’s Leaving Home binds the family to the generation. What holds the figure is the join: elsewhere the orders are listed, one track to an order, and nature and the state are nearly absent.
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Achieved and integrated for a short novel, through one sign. Consciousness: the minister’s vigils and self-scourging, Hester’s thought in exclusion (XIII). The family: a mother and child, a father unnamed, a husband returned in disguise; Pearl’s claim on both her parents is the book’s last question. The state: a theocratic magistracy deciding whether Hester may keep her child (VII, VIII). The sacred: sin, confession, election, the Election Sermon itself. Labour: Hester’s needlework, which clothes the town that shuns her, and the idle labour of the Custom House. History: the founding of Boston and the death of Winthrop, and in the frame the author’s ancestors and the politics of 1849. The natural order: forest, brook, sea and wild rose. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the social world, a chorus more than a field: economy, class and the wider colony are present only at the edge.
Henry James · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Several orders held, and held together. Consciousness, at full depth. The family: the Touchetts’ separated marriage, the Osmond household, Pansy’s double parentage, and Isabel’s dead child, mentioned in passing, a loss the book lets lie. Money: the bank, the bequest, the market in heiresses, the ironies of a fortune given. Nation and history: America, England and Italy set against one another, and the English aristocracy in Warburton’s radical lordship. Art: Osmond’s collecting, and Rome’s ruins as the ground of Isabel’s thinking. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is thin: labour, which is never seen; the state, beyond Warburton’s politics; the sacred, since the convent is a prison and not a faith; the natural order, present as gardens and Roman light, as setting. The book holds a class and its relations, not a society.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what a four-act play holds. Consciousness: Vanya’s late self-knowledge, Sonya’s love, Astrov’s disenchantment, Yelena’s boredom. The family: a second marriage, a first wife dead, a daughter, a mother-in-law, an uncle, all bound by money. Labour: the estate’s accounts, the rents sent to town for twenty-five years, and the doctor’s work among the peasants, the typhus and the switchman who died under his chloroform. The natural order: the forests, rivers and vanishing birds of the district, mapped over decades. Ideas: the professor’s career and the mother’s pamphlets. The sacred: Sonya’s faith and Marina’s. All of it is integrated through one household. What holds it lowest of the twelve is that the state and history stand only at the horizon, in Astrov’s thought of the people who will come after.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Orders held and placed by one structure. The sacred: the liturgy and the Heavenly City built as a volume. The Church as a social order: the graded section. The city and its labour: the trades in the ambulatory glass under the sacred narratives, and the Roman wall under the chevet, the city’s oldest boundary carried into the foundations. History and its end: the Judgment portal, through which every entry passes. The natural order: light by hour and season through three tiers. They are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or slight: the family, the individual consciousness, the state as such. The figure describes the form.
Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Several orders are held, and one structure places each. The cosmos: the sun’s course and the turn of the year, built into the passage. The natural order: the river bend, the ridge, the winter light and the farming year the solstice governs. The sacred and death: a house of the dead entered by light. Power in its first form: a lineage commanding the labour of many, and, if the ancient DNA is read rightly, kin kept close. Labour: the cairn itself, and stone carried from a distance. History in the long sense: later monuments and later myth gathered to the mound. They are one arrangement: the community outside, the lineage within, the sun on the axis between. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness, the family as lived, story and the body are absent or wholly inferred, and the state is only implied.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, above all Claudia’s, which is the film’s vantage; love and desire, at the centre; class, a moneyed Roman set and a Sicilian aristocracy; labour, in Sandro’s surrender of architecture for estimates and the young man’s drawing at Noto; the nation, north against south, Roman visitors among Sicilian men who stare; history, in Noto’s baroque and the deserted planned town; the sacred, in churches and bells, empty or rung in play; the natural order, in sea, rock, storm and volcano. Each is reached through the couple’s drift. What holds the axis lowest is what is only glimpsed: the family is Anna’s father, briefly; the state is a police station and an empty town; work belongs to others, seen from a car. It is one class seen from inside.
John Milton · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what one closet tragedy holds. Consciousness, fully: the inward drama of despair and its recovery. The family, in a father’s love bargaining with the enemy. Marriage and sexuality, in Dalila, the betrayal and its plea, and the earlier marriage at Timna. The nation and the state: Israel’s servitude, the Philistine lords, the leaders who failed to rise when Samson called them. War and violence, in Harapha and the temple. The sacred, at the centre. History, as the time of the Judges. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that all of it comes through one man in one place, which binds it and narrows it, and that the natural order is almost absent: the sun and moon of the lament, and the phoenix.
Nasrid, under Yusuf I and Muhammad V · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Seven orders are held in one structure of court and hall: the state, from the Mexuar to the throne; the sacred, as Qur’anic verse on every wall and paradise as the plan of a court; the cosmos, as the heavens of the ceiling; the natural order, as water, garden, light and the views over the Darro; history, as the dynasty’s titles and victories; the household, as the Lions and the baths; and poetry, as the building’s own voice. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour; the city, seen from the windows and never held; war, except as a title; and the individual consciousness. The palaces hold a role, the sovereign, and not a self.
Anonymous (the Gawain poet) · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Held, and held in a small space. The sacred: the liturgical year from Christmas to New Year twice, Mass, confession, the five wounds of Christ and the five joys of Mary in the pentangle. The natural order: the turning seasons, the winter wilderness, the beasts of the three hunts. The social order: the court at feast, the hospitality of a great house, the code of courtesy and the duties of guest to host. The body and death: the beheading, the year of waiting, the nick in the neck. Desire: the lady’s offer, and the bond between host and guest that the kisses pass through. History: the Troy frame, Brutus and the founding of Britain, Arthur’s court in its youth. Each is tested by the same covenant, and so they are held together, not listed. What it does not hold: labour except the huntsmen’s, the state except as a court, the family except a husband and wife who prove to be players, and the world beyond a knight’s journey.
Spike Lee · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about two hours on one block can hold, and it holds many orders in one plot. The family, in Sal and his two sons, Mookie and his sister, Mookie and Tina and their child; labour, in a delivery job and its wages, the pizzeria’s twenty-five years, the corner men’s idleness and the grocer’s work; the economy, in who owns the businesses on a Black block and who spends in them; the state, in two police officers and a chokehold; history, in the Wall of Fame, King and Malcolm, and the dedication to the dead; ethnicity, Italian-American, African-American, Puerto Rican, Korean and a white newcomer, each with a stake; age, in elders and the young. The riot is all of them at once. What holds it lowest: interiority is shallow everywhere by design, the sacred appears only as a photograph and an old man’s dignity, and the city beyond the block is offstage.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Labour is held, in the plant closing and the debts of Johnny 99 and Atlantic City; the family, in Highway Patrolman’s brothers, Used Cars’ father and My Father’s House; the state and the law, as courts, a patrolman, a trooper and the electric chair; class, in Mansion on the Hill; the sacred, in Reason to Believe; history, as 1958 and the recession of the early 1980s; the land, as plains and night roads. They are held in persons. What holds the figure: each order lives mostly in one or two songs, the songs are separate lives joined by a law, and love and the natural order are thin.
Catullus · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as a lyric body, the reach is wide and held by one voice. Consciousness: the divided lover, the self addressed in the second person. Family: the brother’s grave in the Troad (65, 68, 101), and the father’s household at Verona and Sirmio (31). Friendship and its betrayal: Fabullus, Veranius, Calvus, Alfenus (30). The state: Caesar, Pompey, Mamurra, Cicero (49), and the provincial service in Bithynia under Memmius with its disappointments (10, 28, 46). Marriage and its rites (61, 62). The sacred: the hymn to Diana (34) and the cult of Cybele (63). History and the order of the world, in the ages of mankind and the departure of the gods at the end of 64. Literature itself, in the dedication (1), Cinna’s Zmyrna (95) and the bad poets (14, 22, 36). The orders are integrated through one code, not listed; but a lyric book holds them in glimpses, and the figure says so.
Bureau of Reclamation, with Gordon Kaufmann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Orders held: the natural order, in the river, the canyon’s rock, the desert and the climate now pressing on the lake; the state, in the federal commission, the compact among seven states that apportioned the river, and the state line and two time zones that run through the crest; labour, in the camps, the strike, the deaths and the memorial to the dead; the economy, in water and power sold to cities and farms hundreds of miles away; history, in the Depression and the New Deal; and the cosmos, faintly, in the star chart. The wall integrates them, for it is literally the place where river, state, labour and city meet. What holds the axis: the household, the individual consciousness and the body beyond the worker are absent, and the sacred appears only as allegory.
Natsume Sōseki · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
A short novel of a few lives, and what it holds is held, not listed. Consciousness: Sensei’s self-examination, K’s austerity, the young man’s attachment. The family: the father’s dying, an inheritance and its theft, the widow’s management of her daughter’s marriage, a childless marriage. Money and property: the uncle’s swindle, the father’s estate, Sensei living on his capital. The state and history: the Emperor’s death, Nogi, the passing of a generation. The sacred: K, the son of a Jōdo Shin temple, who pursues an ascetic way of his own; the grave and its visits. Learning: the Imperial University and the young man’s thesis. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the natural order is little present beyond the sea and the seasons, history enters by report, and the social world is a few rooms. What is encompassed is deep; the orders are not wide.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: the family, in three households, one hidden; labour, which places every character, tutor, therapist, driver, housekeeper, an architect’s house, an executive, pizza boxes, a failed castella shop; class and the economy, at the centre; the city, vertical Seoul in rain and flood, the shelter in a gymnasium; the body, in smell and injury; consciousness, in Ki-taek’s humiliation and Ki-woo’s fantasy; nature, as the rain that cleans the Parks’ sky and floods the Kims’ street; the state and history, in a bunker dug against North Korea and debts to loan sharks; and a sacred, in one man’s worship of his host. They are held in one structure, the house. Held at its figure because history and the state are glimpsed and not entered, the Parks have no inner life, and the field is one city.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The natural order is held almost entire: light, weather, sea and land, plants, sun, moon and stars, birds, fish, beasts, insects and the worm, each in its place and its sound. The sacred holds it all, in the archangels, the Creator known from what is made, and the hymn. Humanity enters in its dignity at Mit Würd’ und Hoheit, in its reason, in marriage and the first household, and in its moral limit at Uriel’s warning. The week integrates these; it does not list them. What holds the axis at the work’s lowest figure is what the week leaves out: history, the state, labour (the pair are given a garden to tend and are not shown working), society beyond the couple, suffering and death.
Otto Dix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The work holds several orders in one structure: the body, from whole to destroyed; the collective, in the column and the sleeping row; the natural order, a landscape annihilated, a sky set on fire, the cycle of a day from dawn to night; the sacred, in the altar form and the Passion it inverts; history, the industrial war of 1914 to 1918 in its gear and its methods; and the self, the painter as witness and bearer. The form integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what the work leaves outside its frame: the order behind the war, the state, the home, the family, labour beyond the soldier’s. That is its choice, and it narrows what is encompassed. A large holding for a painted work.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders are many, and one question holds them: how a culture keeps from looking at death. Consciousness, in Jack’s dread. The family, a household assembled from several marriages. The academy. The consumer economy, in the supermarket, the mall and the brand. The media, in television, radio and the tabloids. Industrial chemistry, in Nyodene D. The state, as an emergency bureaucracy that rehearses its disasters. History, in Hitler and the crowd. The sacred, in the nuns, the tabloids and the supermarket as temple. The natural order, altered, in the sunsets and the cloud. They are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is what is thin or absent: labour, politics, class beyond the professional household, and the world outside Blacksmith except as it is seen on a screen. The field is one family in one town over a short span.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
For a feature film the orders held are many: class and its manners; the state, in the minister and the police; the army; the Church; diplomacy and postcolonial politics, in Miranda; crime and trade, in the cocaine; political violence, in the young woman and the gunmen; marriage and desire; the dead and the family, in the ghosts; and the unconscious, in the dreams. The dinner integrates them: every order arrives as an interruption of the same meal, under the same law. What holds the axis lowest is that each is touched as satire, not inhabited. The state is a telephone call, the army a visit, the Church one bishop, the political world a name, and labour appears only as servants and a gardener’s disguise.
Mamluk, under Sultan an-Nasir Hasan · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Eight orders are held, and placed by one structure. The sacred: the congregational mosque and its axis to Mecca. Law: the four schools, each given its place. Learning and its daily life: teachers, students and their cells. The state: a sultan’s foundation set below and against the Citadel. Death and the dynasty: the tomb on the line of prayer. The city: the angled portal and the face to the square. Charity: the endowment that paid for it. And, against the founder’s intent, war, when the building served as a fortress. What holds it lowest: the orders are gathered by institution rather than fused, and the family, labour, the natural world beyond light and water, and the single mind stay outside.
Sergei Prokofiev · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
A full-length ballet holds more orders than a quartet, and the drama integrates them: the self, in Juliet’s growth and Romeo’s change; the family, in the Capulet parents, the Nurse and the forced marriage to Paris; the state, in the Prince and his order; class, in the knights’ ceremony against the street’s folk dancing; the crowd, at the festival; the sacred, in the friar’s cell and the secret marriage; mortality, in three deaths and a tomb. They are held together: the Prince’s law is broken in the street where the folk dance, and the family’s ball is where love begins. What holds the axis at its figure, the lowest of the twelve, is absence and means: labour, history and the natural order barely appear, and wordless dance renders the state and the church as figures, not as structures.
R.E.M. · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for being an album. Consciousness, as depression and memory; the family in grief; age and dying; youth and friendship, in Nightswimming; the natural order, as river, sea, night water and the moon; celebrity and the media, in Kaufman, Elvis and Clift; the state, in Ignoreland and Drive; eros, in Star Me Kitten; the sacred, faintly, in the crossing of Find the River. Mortality joins most of them: family, body, nature and celebrity are held as aspects of one condition. What holds the figure is the join: the state stands apart in its own angry track, labour is absent, and history enters only as the moon landing and the Reagan years.
PJ Harvey · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The nation is held fully, as love and as guilt. History is held: the First World War and Gallipoli, with the present wars in shadow. War and the body are held, in soldiers broken on wire and fallen like meat. The natural order is held as the land, the hills, the sea and the earth that takes the dead. The sacred enters as hymn, church and the soil as grave. The orders are joined by one condition and held rather than listed. What holds this axis at the record’s lowest figure: consciousness is a witness’s, not a life; the family, labour and the state as institution are glimpsed or absent; and love is love of country and of one friend.
Stanisław Lem · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, in Kelvin’s guilt and Harey’s discovery of herself; love, and a marriage that ended in a suicide; science as an institution with a century’s history, its schools, its funding and its politics; the sacred, in the imperfect god; the natural order, an alien nature given at length and in its mechanics; death and the return of the dead. They are integrated, since each is a version of the one encounter. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: society, the family, labour outside the laboratory, the state and history are given only in report, through the history of Solaristics and the committee that will decide the station’s fate. The human world is offstage. The book holds the cosmos and four people; the closure is a choice, not a failure, but the axis scores what is held.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
For a lyric book the orders held are many, and they are held under one mask and one law, not listed: the erotic and the ageing body; religion in four forms, Islam, the Parsi faith, the Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers and Goethe’s own pantheism; history and politics, from Timur to the wars behind “Hegire”; the nature of breath, light and fire; poetics and the poet’s vocation; the meeting of two civilisations; wine and the tavern; paradise. The Notes widen the ground to history, language and scholarship. What the book does not hold is labour, the family and society in its working detail; its world is seen from a garden and a tavern, and that is what holds the axis at 8.0.
Zora Neale Hurston · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held are many for a short book: one consciousness from sixteen to about forty; marriage three times over; the town, its founding, store, mayor, street lamp and speech; labour, from the plough and the store to the bean fields of the muck and the migrant pickers, Black and Bahamian; race and colour within the community, and the white world at its edge, in the burial of the storm’s dead by colour and in the jury; the natural order in the storm; and God, named in the title and faced in the dark. They are held, not listed: the storm and the court both pass judgment on the marriage. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the book’s size and its one consciousness: the state and history enter only at the edges.
Umayyad, under al-Walid I · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the hall, the mihrab, the orientation to Mecca. The state: the caliph’s mosque, the maqsura before the mihrab, a dynasty’s claim on a conquered city. History: Roman, Christian and Muslim phases in one enclosure, the Baptist’s relic and the shrine of al-Husayn’s head carrying deep griefs and loyalties into the fabric, and death with them. The city: the courtyard as the public room of Damascus, the mosaics’ houses and pavilions. The natural order: rivers and trees on the walls, now in fragments. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, labour, individual consciousness and the body as subject, all largely missing from a building made for collective prayer.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The lowest axis, with The Inevitable. Several orders are held and integrated by one plan. The sacred: the church and its altars. Death and the cult of saints: the shrines and the tombs. The institution: the chapter in its own house, the bishop, the cloister. The city and the region: the church over the upper town, seen across the county. The natural order brought into stone: the stiff-leaf, the foliage of capitals and bosses. The heavenly hierarchy: the angels. Labour, legible in the campaigns. What holds it lowest is what is absent or thinned: the family, the individual consciousness, the state as such, and story, since the narrative glass and the shrine with its legend are mostly gone.
Luis Cernuda · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as a lyric body of forty years, held by one consciousness. The self and its desire, fully. The body, in the poems of love and in “Poemas para un cuerpo”. Love and its failure. The nation, in the elegies of the civil war, “Elegía española” and “1936”, and in the exile’s quarrel with Spain, “Díptico español”. History, in El Escorial and Felipe II, in Larra, Góngora and Ludwig of Bavaria. Art and the artist’s vocation, in Mozart, Góngora, Verlaine and Rimbaud. The sacred, in the lost gods of Greece and the Christian poems of Las nubes. Nature, the garden and the sea of the south; the city of exile. They are integrated through one lens. What holds the axis at 8.0: labour, the family and the social world beyond the poet are thin or absent, and the others are seen from one vantage.
Salian builders, under Conrad II and Henry IV · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Six orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the Virgin’s church, its relics and altar. The state: the empire’s claim to sacral kingship. The dynasty and death: four generations of Salians and four later kings in one row of graves. History: the Investiture struggle in the vaulting and in Henry IV’s delayed burial, and the later dynasties choosing the place. The city: the bishop’s seat and the town that grew round it. The natural order: the river the church stands over. The section integrates them, kings beneath, altar above, empire round about. What holds the score lowest is what is absent: labour, the family beyond the dynasty, the common life and individual consciousness enter only as a congregation does.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what one clerk’s last months are made to hold. Consciousness, in a man facing his death; the family, in a dead wife, a married son estranged in his father’s house and a pension already spent in thought; labour, in thirty years at one desk and Toyo’s work on a toy factory line; the state, in a city office of sections, a deputy mayor, and the citizens’ petition it passes round; the city, in a postwar night of pachinko, bars and dance halls; crime, in the gangsters who threaten him over the site; death and its rites, in the altar and the wake. They are integrated: the park is where the state, a poor neighbourhood and a dying man meet. What holds the axis lowest: the sacred is an altar and a portrait; history, the occupation that ended in the year of release, is felt only as atmosphere; nature is rain, snow and a ditch; and the son and Toyo are seen from outside.
Burgundian Romanesque builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Six orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the relic, the Spirit, the mission. History: the Church’s expansion, and crusades preached at its door. The natural order and labour: the zodiac and the months on the archivolt. The peoples of the earth, real and imagined. The moral life of the soul: the virtues and vices of the capitals, the deaths of the rich man and of Judas. The social order: monks in the choir, pilgrims in the narthex and nave. Most of it is held through sculpture bound into the plan’s sequence. What holds the score lowest is what stays thin: the family, consciousness as such and the state.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: labour, in the mill and the harvest gangs, paid and dismissed; class, the migrant poor against the owner of the land; the family, in a false brother and sister, a marriage and a girl with no parents; the natural order, in the season, the wheat, the locusts and the fire; the sacred, in the Genesis frame, the preacher in the field and Linda’s theology of judgment; history, lightly, in 1916 and the soldiers on the train. They are integrated: harvest, marriage and plague are one turn of the year. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is held only in Linda’s voice, and Abby, Bill and the farmer are seen from outside; the state is present only as a posse; history is a frame rather than a force. For ninety-four minutes, the reach is wide.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
For a short novel it holds many orders, joined by one question, what can be communicated. Consciousness, in Oedipa’s suspicion of her own mind. Marriage, in Mucho, and sex, in Metzger. Property and capital, in Inverarity’s estate, which is a city. The military and industrial order, in Yoyodyne. History, in Thurn and Taxis and the Pony Express. The state, as the postal monopoly. Science, in thermodynamics and information. The sacred, in the Word and the tongues. Class and the dispossessed, in the night walk. They are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the form holds these orders as signals rather than as lives: the family across time, labour and the natural order are thin, and the dispossessed are glimpsed in a night rather than held. A low mark on a short form describes the form.
Octavio Paz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a single lyric poem holds, and this one holds more orders than the form commonly can. Consciousness: the self in dissolution and return. Eros and the couple. The city: streets and rooms of memory, and Madrid. History and the state: the Spanish war and the murdered statesmen from Agamemnon to Trotsky. The sacred: the Mesoamerican calendar, Persephone, the Marian names. The natural order: river, tree, and the planet whose cycle measures the poem. They are integrated by the one sentence and the one law, not listed. What holds the axis at 8.0, level with The Inevitable at the foot of the twelve: the family is almost absent, labour and the social order beneath the statesmen are absent, and history is present as a roll of emblematic deaths more than as a society.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
More orders than the length predicts: labour and craft, the body and its failure, three generations of one family, a mother’s disappearance and the police who search for her, Québec from the aftermath of the October Crisis to the second referendum, a Michif inheritance kept on index cards, the corporation and its automation, two affairs, a marriage, animals and their deaths. They are integrated rather than listed: an election result arrives on the radio while a father and son reglaze a sash, and automation arrives as a reason-for-shrink screen in a working morning. But every order routes through one consciousness. Niobe is heard as “Niobe spoke”; Winona is never found; Zoe, Ben and Aeneas are seen exactly as far as he sees them. Nothing in the book exceeds the man, and the mark says so.
Adam Lock and others · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The lowest axis, with The Inner Law. Many orders are held in one structure and in use. The sacred: the liturgy of choir and altar, the Last Judgment of the front. The corporation: the chapter and its house, the vicars’ route by stair and bridge. The state and the church’s hierarchy: kings and bishops on the front, the bishop’s seat. The dead, rising on the screen. The everyday: the carvings of toothache and theft. The natural order: stiff-leaf foliage throughout, the tree of the chapter house. What holds it is that they are joined by the life of a working cathedral more than by one conception, and the household of the clergy lies partly outside the unit. A large holding for a building.
Katsuhiro Otomo · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 124 minutes holds, and it holds many orders. The state, in a council, a colonel, a coup, the police and the riot. Science, in the laboratory, its numbered children and the satellite weapon. The sacred, in Lady Miyako’s cult, the crowds waiting for Akira’s return and the god in the vault. History, in the war and the first explosion, and the city rebuilt over it. The natural order, in the energy that unmakes matter. Youth, in the gang, the school and the orphanage. Consciousness, Tetsuo’s, in dreams and memories, from inside. They are integrated where Tetsuo’s march joins state, science and cult in one sequence. What holds the axis at its figure: they are joined by spectacle more than by understanding; labour is absent, and the city has no work; the family is absent but for the orphanage remembered; Kaneda’s consciousness is surface; and Kei, Kaori and every woman are held as functions.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Consciousness is held at the centre: Kelvin’s memory, guilt and fever given form. The family: the father and the son, the dead mother in the home film, the wife who killed herself, the aunt and the child at the dacha. Science and the state, as one strand: the commission, decades of a discipline in decline, the institution’s wish to bombard the ocean. The sacred: the parable, the chorale, the return, the image that suffers into personhood. The natural order: the stream, the weed, the horse and the rain, against an ocean that is nature wholly other. These are held, not listed, through one man’s return. Held lower than the rest of its strengths because history is a faint ground, labour is absent, and the social world beyond the institution and the household is barely present.
Built for Bishop Bernard de Castanet · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Five orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the liturgy of a cathedral, the preaching, the enclosed choir. The state and war: the church as an instrument of conquest and of the bishop’s lordship over the town. History: the crusade, the Inquisition, the late medieval enrichment, the restorers. The city: the cathedral as its mark across the river. Labour: the clay of the plain made into a monument of the first rank. They are integrated, not listed: fortress, preaching hall and city mark are one form. What holds it at 8.0 is what lies outside: the family, the body and the common life of the town enter only as the faithful the room gathers, and the Last Things are held only in the painting, which is not scored.
Frank Capra · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 130 minutes holds. The family is held across two generations, from father to four children. Consciousness is George’s, fully, from boyhood to the bridge. Labour and money stand at the centre, in the Building and Loan, the mortgages, a run on the bank in the Depression and Potter’s rents; housing and class in Bailey Park against Potter’s slums. History enters through twenty-six years, the crash and the war; the sacred is a frame and a prayer; death is a father, a drowning averted and a suicide refused. What holds it is that all of this is held through one town and one man: the war stays at the margin, and the world beyond Bedford Falls is the place George never reaches. The narrowness is the subject, and also the limit.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Several orders are held and joined through one consciousness. Louise is held from inside; motherhood and a marriage run across a life; language and science meet in the sessions; the state and its armies stand in twelve nations and one base camp; geopolitics comes through a Chinese general and the closing of channels; the media and public panic surround it; and above all of them a cosmic order, time itself. They are integrated, not listed: the language changes her mind, her mind ends the crisis, and its end gives her the marriage and the child. What holds the axis: the nations are telegraphed through screens, the public is a montage, Ian and Hannah are seen only through Louise, and the sacred and history are present only as pattern.
James Ensor · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
For a single canvas the orders held are many, and they are joined in one procession rather than listed: the sacred in Christ, his halo and the clerics; the state in the officials and the civic occasion; politics in the socialist banner and the slogans; the crowd and the city as a mass; art and its public, the artist read as the scorned prophet; death in the skeletons of the throng. They share one street and one perspective, and each bears on the others: the state reviews the sacred, the crowd consumes the political, the artist is the sacrifice. Family, labour and the natural order are absent or nearly so, and the sky is a strip. A high figure for a painting, below Las Meninas, which holds a court, a family, the act of painting and the viewer in one room.
Aristophanes · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
For a single comedy of about 1,533 lines it holds a great deal in one structure: the sacred, in Dionysus, the Eleusinian mysteries and the house of Pluto; death and the dead; the city at war and at the edge of defeat; citizenship and its forfeit; slavery and its reward; the household of master and servant; and tragedy itself as a civic institution. They are joined through one action. The god’s journey is the city’s search for a counsellor, and the poets fight their contest on the question of how to save the city. What it does not hold is consciousness in depth or the family as an order: the persons are types, and the inward life is absent. The form allows a wide reach and the play uses it, short of the encompassing works.
Jack Kerouac · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Many orders, held loosely. Consciousness, in Sal’s restlessness and his moments of vision. Friendship, the book’s axis. The family, broken: Sal’s aunt, Dean’s wives and children, the lost father. Labour: the cotton picking with Terry and her family, the guard’s job in Mill City, Dean parking cars, the economy of the poor crossing the country by bus and borrowed car. The nation, a continent crossed again and again, its cities and its emptiness. Class and race: migrant workers, the Black jazz world of the cities, Mexico. The sacred: the Catholic “holy” and the search for God and IT. Music, as a form of knowledge. More orders than a short novel holds, joined through the road; but they are often listed rather than held, and the state and the war just over hardly appear.
Arnolfo di Cambio (attributed) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure. The state: commune, republic, principate and municipality lodged in the same walls. Faction and war: a fortress against the city’s own families, a hall built for a council and turned to celebrate a duke’s victories. The sacred: the priors’ chapel and Christ proclaimed king over the door, then King of Kings under a duke. The household: the priors’ enclosed life, the duke’s family, the duchess’s apartments. The economy: a government of the guilds. The city: palace and piazza as one civic room, the tower on the skyline. The building’s purpose integrates them. What is held least: the natural order, labour except as represented, and consciousness except as the citizen’s summons; and much of the history is told on the walls rather than in the architecture.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a silent film of some two and a half hours holds. Labour, in the shift change and the machines; capital and the state, in Fredersen’s office at the top of the tower, which governs the city as a firm; technology, as power, as god and as forger of persons; the family, in father, son and Hel, the dead wife and mother whose loss drives the plot, fully only in the restored version; the sacred, in the catacomb preaching, the cathedral, Babel and the Apocalypse; eros, in the Yoshiwara and the Sons; the crowd; childhood, in the flood. They are held in one figure, the city as body, not merely listed. What holds the axis: consciousness is thin, every person is a type, and the inner life of no one, Maria included, is given.
Zapotec builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The state and its rule, on the summit; war and dominion, in the carved slabs of Buildings L and J; the sacred, in the temples and their patios; death and the ancestors, in the tombs within the hill; the cosmos, in the axis and in Building J’s turn; rite and play, in the ball court; the natural order, in the mountain cut to a plane and the valleys seen from it; the city, in the terraces of its people on the slopes below. The plaza places them together: the dead beneath, rite and rule on the platforms, the sky above, the land below. What holds the score at the foot of the twelve: the households and their labour lie outside the centre, and their integration is inferred.
Mark Z. Danielewski · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Several orders, held by one figure. Consciousness: three minds coming apart, Navidson’s, Johnny’s and Pelafina’s. The family: a couple failing and repaired, twin brothers estranged and reconciled at the cost of one life, children, and a mother and son at the root of the book. Art and media: documentary, photojournalism and its ethics, film criticism and the institution of interpretation. The academy and its discourse. Institutions of care and confinement, in Whalestoe. The natural and the sacred, as an abyss that answers to no physics and no god. They are integrated, not listed: each is a house with a void in it. Held below the higher bands because history, labour, class and the state are thin or absent; the social world is a backdrop to the private one; and the cast is small, a family and a few friends and explorers, with Los Angeles reached mainly as Johnny’s bars and rooms.
Medang (Mataram) builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Five orders are held, and the plan integrates them rather than listing them. The cosmos: the world mountain and the four quarters. The sacred: the three great gods, the family of Shiva and the mounts, a pantheon placed by rank. The state: a king’s sanctuary whose plan is the image of his realm; that the perwara were offerings of subordinate lords is a common reading and unproven. The epic and its moral order: the whole Ramayana and the Krishna cycle, with war, exile, devotion and kingship. The natural order: the plain, its river and the volcanoes that frame it. What holds the figure: the human order enters only at second hand, in the courts, villages and animals of the reliefs, and the structure holds hierarchy more than society.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
For a short novel set in one house it holds many orders, and the house joins them. Consciousness, in Elizabeth, largely unspoken. Marriage, in the Booths, a union of debt and contempt. The family and inherited wealth, in the dead father, the company and Billy. Religion, as the ministry and its prophecy. The media, as Paul’s trade. The law, as litigation. Science against belief, in the evolution trial and McCandless’s geology. Capital and the earth, in the concession. The state and its covert power, in the intelligence men and the war. The natural order, in the river valley. History, through Vietnam and the Cold War. Each reaches the house as a voice wanting something from the woman in it. Held where it is because almost all of it is reached by report, at one remove, and labour and community are thin.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Several orders, joined by one transaction. Commerce and credit: coal stock, the transfer book, patent medicines, an intelligence office for boys, the press. Religion: Corinthians, the Methodist minister, the Episcopal clergyman, the old man’s Bible and the Apocrypha. The nation: the Mississippi as the republic in small, the frontier, the removal of the Indians and the hatred behind it, slavery in Black Guinea and the question of his colour. Philosophy, in the transcendentalists; medicine and the body, in cripples, invalids and the sick miser; literature itself, in the chapters on fiction; nature, in the herb-doctor’s creed and Pitch’s answer that nature also gives smallpox and blight. Held at 8.0 because some orders are thin or absent by design: consciousness is never entered, the family appears only in the Goneril tale and in Pitch’s boys, and labour only in its counterfeits. The book holds much of a society, seen only at its surfaces.
Mon and Burmese builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure. The sacred, at the relic and in the circuit. The cosmic order, in the planetary posts and the cardinal plan. The individual’s fate, in the post of the birth day. The state, in royal patronage and the hti. Commerce, in the stairways lined with stalls. The household and the family, who come to the platform together to make merit. The monastic order, whose presence and processions are part of the platform’s use. History, in the donor records of the shrines. The circuit and the economy of merit integrate them. What holds the axis: much of the political history belongs to events on the site rather than orders the structure holds, labour appears only as the gift of gold, and nature only as the hill and the planets.
Thomas Carlyle · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Much is held, and held under one figure. Consciousness: a whole inner life from infancy to conversion. The family: the foundling and the Futterals who take him in. Love: Blumine. Schooling and the university. Labour: the human being as a “Tool-using Animal”, and the gospel of work. Class: dandies and drudges, the Irish poor of Helotage. The church, the state and revolution, with July 1830 at the close; history as a fabric of Organic Filaments; the natural order and the sacred, in Natural Supernaturalism. What holds the axis at 8.0 is the manner of the holding: largely as thesis. Society appears in sketch and diatribe, not in lives; only one human being is rendered from within, and even he is a voice. Integrated and wide, thin in its rendering.
Mughal court painters · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held are many: war and the state, in battles, sieges and courts; the sacred, in a romance whose hero fights for the faith against unbelievers and sorcerers; the supernatural, in giants, demons and magic; labour and the city, in builders, craftsmen, the bazaar and the household; the natural order, in trees, rivers, rocks and animals; the family and the erotic, in captive princesses, marriages and households. Few cycles of images hold so much. They are integrated by the romance’s frame, every order appearing as the setting or the obstacle of the hero’s adventure. What holds the axis is that the integration is by sequence rather than by structure, one order after another across the episodes, and that consciousness, the inner life, is almost absent.
John Vanbrugh with Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: the state, a Queen’s and a Parliament’s gift recorded on the house; war and victory, in the battle on the ceiling, the trophies on the roof and the enemy king’s bust; the dynasty, a house made to be handed on; the household and its labour, in two great service courts composed into the front; the sacred and death, in the chapel with the Duke’s monument; history, the royal manor of Woodstock under the new house and Vanbrugh’s plea for its ruin; the natural order, the valley and its water made part of the approach; and the world beyond, Laguerre’s peoples of the nations looking in on the Saloon. The axis and the stepped mass place each in rank. Held at 8.0 because household, labour and the sacred are set under the monument, and individual consciousness and the common life are absent.
Built for Rao Jodha and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Orders held: war and the state, in walls, gates and cannon and in gates named for victories; kingship and the court, in the halls of audience and the throne; the household and the seclusion of women, in the zenana behind its screens; the sacred, in the Chamunda temple, the goddess of the clan, on the fort’s own point; death and honour, in the handprints at the gate; the city, laid out at the foot of the rock and ruled from it; and the natural order, the rock itself as foundation and the desert seen from the top. The section places them in one figure, rock, wall of war, court above, goddess at the end, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis: labour and the common life of the city are present only as the view below, and the orders of the inner court are accumulated across reigns more than composed.
Master Enrique and Juan Pérez · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: the sacred above all; history, from the Last Judgment at the door to the kings of the clerestory; the natural order and human work in the lower glass, as the programme is usually read; the kingdom and the episcopal city, in the adoption of the court style and the seat over the Roman camp; the liturgy and the chapter, in the plan. They are held, not listed, because the glass ranks them in one ascent from floor to vault. Held at 8.0 because most of the reach of content runs through the glass and its received programme, the common life and labour enter only as that programme gives them, and the building’s size adds the chapter’s liturgy but little else.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Many orders, and the boy’s ride joins them. The natural order: horses, weather, desert and mountain. Labour: ranch work, the breaking of horses, the vaqueros of the hacienda. Property and money: the ranch sold, the hacienda’s wealth, the bribe that buys a release. The family: a dead grandfather, a mother gone to the stage, a father broken by war, the hacienda’s owner, his daughter and his aunt. The state: Mexican police and prison, a Texas court. History: the Comanche past, the Revolution, the war just ended. The sacred: a Catholic household, fate, the old servant’s burial. Love. They are joined, not listed, by one journey. What holds the figure is the vantage: every order is seen from a sixteen-year-old’s saddle, consciousness is withheld by design, and Mexican society is drawn from its top and its prison, with little between.
Claudio de Arciniega and successors; facade by Manuel Tolsá · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and the site integrates them rather than listing them. The sacred: the Assumption, the heavenly court, the hours of the chapter. The state: the crown in the Altar of the Kings, the viceroy across the plaza, and the republic that later took the square for its own. History: the conquest built over the Mexica centre, and two and a half centuries of style in one fabric. The city: the plaza, the processions, the bells, the guilds and confraternities in their chapels. Death: archbishops and the faithful buried beneath the floor. The natural order: lake, clay and earthquake, answered with the building’s own body. What is thin: labour appears only through the confraternities, and the native world is present as what lies beneath, not as a voice in the building.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The state: the shogunate’s claim, and the daimyo’s tribute in the lanterns. The dynasty and the family: a son and a grandson building the founder’s cult. The sacred in two religions joined: a Shinto shrine form, a Buddhist theology of the avatar, a Buddhist pagoda. Death and the body: the grave on the mountain. The natural order: mountain, cedar and water, and a bestiary of carved animals. The moral life of the subject: the monkey panels read as the stages of a life, the sages as virtue. The sequence integrates them rather than listing them; what holds the axis is that the moral emblems sit lighter than the orders of state and the sacred.
Ustad Ahmad Lahori (attributed), under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: the state and its ceremony, from the walls to the throne; justice, in the hall and the carved scales; commerce, in the bazaar built into the axis; the household and the harem, on the terrace; the sacred, in the mosque and in the paradise of water and couplet; the natural order, in river, garden and breeze and in the seasons named by the Sawan and Bhadon pavilions; the city, laid out with the fort at its head. They were integrated by one plan, not listed. Since 1857 the fort has also held the end of an empire, a colonial garrison and a nation’s sovereignty, and those orders sit in its fabric. Held where it is because much of what held the household and the natural order is gone, and what remains holds them in fragments.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The book holds a good deal in one structure. Consciousness: the narrator’s self-scrutiny and his manuscript. Labour: the mine, the workmen, the cable, the economics of a venture that fails. The village: a whole community, its elders, its young men, its widow, its idiot, its feasts and its violence. The Church: the monks and the blessing of the cable. Sex and old age: Hortense. History: Zorba’s tales of the Macedonian struggle and the wars, and the name of 1821 laid on an old Frenchwoman. The sacred and the natural order: the Easter feast, the sea, death. These pass through the two men, and are integrated, not listed. Held where it is because the state and the family are thin, and history arrives as tales told rather than as forces the action holds.
Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Many orders, attempted on a cosmic scale and achieved unevenly. The sacred and the cosmological are held in full: a history of the universe in the Tarot issue, the ten spheres of the Tree, the abyss, a creation and an end. Consciousness is the work’s own subject, imagination as a world. Love and death are held in Barbara’s search for her dead husband, sex as sacrament in Faust’s lesson, history in the hosts through the century and the Alexandrian origin, the state in the agents who pursue Sophie, art in the hosts who are writers and artists. Labour, class and the family are glimpsed; the city is a science-fiction stage; Sophie’s own life is a frame. The orders are joined by one idea more than by one life, as a scheme rather than as a world.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 155 minutes holds. Many orders are present and joined by the spice: the state, an empire that sets one house against another; labour and economy, the harvesters extracting a resource from a land whose people are not consulted; the natural order, a desert ecology of worm, water and stillsuits; the sacred, a religion planted by an order for its own use; the family, each member bound by a loyalty above it; consciousness, in Paul’s prescience. The integration is real: economy, faith and war are one movement around one substance. What holds the axis is that several orders are named more than held: the Fremen appear late, the empire’s centre is offstage, the ecology is told in lines.
Claude Debussy · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The orders held, and integrated: consciousness, in the negative, people who do not know what they know; the family across three generations and a fourth born in the last scene; eros and death, unspoken; childhood and old age, each given a voice the lovers lack; the natural order as the drama’s language, forest, sea, well, light; the sacred, in Arkel’s conditional, “Si j’étais Dieu, j’aurais pitié du cœur des hommes”
“If I were God, I would have pity on the hearts of men”; the social world glimpsed, a famine, three beggars asleep in a cave, a shepherd whose sheep are not going to the fold. What holds the axis here is that the social orders are glimpsed, not carried: the state is a name, Allemonde; labour, history and the city are absent; everything routes through one house.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on what sixteen short stories hold. The cosmos and time, in the Library and the Garden. Language and the book, everywhere. The state and its power, in the Company of Babylon, in Tlön’s conquest, in the Nazi firing squad in Prague and the German spy in England in 1916. History, in Ireland, in the Great War, in the nineteenth century of Funes and of “El fin”. The sacred, in Judas, the Phoenix and the demiurge. Consciousness, in Funes. Argentina, its plain and its violence, strengthened by the stories added in 1956. They are integrated by one law, not listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is absent or only glimpsed: the family, love and sexuality, labour, the body except as Funes’s paralysis, and the natural order except as the plain. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
For a short play in one room the orders held are many and integrated: a family across three generations, parents, son and adopted son; labour and servitude, in Clov’s work, his hatred of it and his obedience; the natural order and its exhaustion; the sacred, in the prayer and the echoes of the Passion; history as catastrophe without a name; the making of art, in Hamm’s chronicle and his performance of it; and consciousness itself. Each presses on the others inside one situation. What holds the axis here is that every order is held as a skeleton, by design: the state is absent, the social world is one household reduced to its bones, and history appears only as aftermath. The figure describes what the play holds, not its length: more than most single poems or stories, less than the great novels or the history plays.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short novel holds. Consciousness, entire, and the book’s chief order. The state, as the service, the rank of collegiate assessor and the office where he snarled at petitioners. The city: Petersburg, which he calls “отвлечённом и умышленном”
(abstract and intentional), the Nevsky, the tavern, the Hôtel de Paris, the brothel, the wet snow. The history of ideas: utilitarianism, the radicals’ novel, Buckle’s civilisation, the crystal palace and the century’s faith in progress. The market in bodies: Liza, sold, and her story of a girl sold by her family. The family, as Liza’s lost one and the domestic idyll he paints to wound her. Class, in the officer and the schoolfellows. They are integrated through one voice, not listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the vantage and the count: labour is barely present, the natural order absent, the sacred unstated, and every order is seen through one man in his corner. A low mark on a short form describes the form.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on what a book of short fictions holds. The sacred and the metaphysical, fully: the god’s writing, heresy, eternity, the cabbala. History, widely: Rome and the barbarians, the Arab and Christian middle ages, the Aztec conquest, the British in India, Nazism, the Argentine civil wars. Consciousness, in the confessions of Zur Linde and Tzinacán and the jealousy of the narrator of “El Aleph”. The state and violence, in war, the knife-fight and the camp. Literature itself, as an order of reality. They are integrated by the one law, not listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the count and the vantage: the family and love appear only as Beatriz’s absence and Emma’s father; labour only in Emma’s factory and the gaucho’s trade; the natural order as emblem rather than world; and no story holds a society across time. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Hafez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on what a lyric body of some five hundred ghazals holds, and weighed as it is. It holds consciousness fully: the lover’s states, doubt, despair, defiance and grace. It holds the sacred, in the covenant, the trust, the Qur’an, the cloister and its critique; the state and its power, in princes, their fall and favour, and the muhtasib enforcing public piety in a Shiraz under successive dynasties; society, in the preacher, the mufti, the ascetic, the Sufi, the tavern-keeper and the rend as a social type; and the natural order, the garden, spring and autumn, the rose, the nightingale and the night sky with its sickle moon. They are integrated by one voice and one law, not listed. What holds the axis at 7.9, the lowest of the twelve: labour, the family and the body at work are nearly absent, and history is a weather, not an agent.
Rogier van der Weyden · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held are several, and the composition integrates them. The sacred, at the centre: the death of God and the theology of redemption. Sacred history, from Adam’s skull to the cross. The family: a mother and her son, and the friends and kin of the dead. Labour: the work of lowering and carrying a body, done by three men with strained hands. The civic: a guild’s altar for a Leuven chapel. Consciousness, in ten distinct griefs. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no state, no natural order, since the landscape is refused, no history but the sacred, and no world beyond the box. The form chooses this narrowness, and the figure describes the form.
The Beatles · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form beyond what the definition asks. Seven orders are achieved, each given a whole song rather than an image: consciousness in “I’m Only Sleeping” and the closer, the state in “Taxman”, church and parish in “Eleanor Rigby”, erotic love made and lost, childhood and the commune, medicine and drugs, and the sacred, Hindu and Buddhist. Three lie beyond the self and the couple, and one tension frames all seven: the world’s demand at the opening against the self let go at the close. What holds the axis lowest is integration. The orders sit one to a song, and the taxman, the priest and the void never bear on one another. Labour appears only as the working world the sleeper refuses, and the family and history are absent.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as a book of short prose. Consciousness, in the doctor’s racing guilt. The family: the father and Odradek, the eleven sons, the dedication, the boy’s parents. Labour and profession: the doctor, the lawyer, the mine engineers, the ape’s training. The state and empire, in the imperial message and the old manuscript. The law, in the doorkeeper. History, in Alexander and the end of the heroic age. The sacred, in the wound and the lost faith. Race and colony, in the jackals and the Arabs and the ape taken captive and made European. Sex and sacrifice, in Rosa. Death, before the Law and in the dream. They are joined by one law rather than listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is that each order is held in a shard, and no piece holds more than two or three of them at once. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as a novella, and not punished for its length beyond what it holds. Consciousness, fully, with the artist’s vocation and its ethic. Eros, age and the body, down to the cosmetics and the dyed hair. Death, as a guide and as a disease. The city, as commerce, tourism and official concealment, and Europe in a year of threat. The sacred, in the god’s return. Class and nation, lightly, in the Polish family, the hotel society and the English clerk. The natural order, in the sea, the sun and the swamp of the east. All of it is integrated through one consciousness. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, below 8, is vantage and count: labour, the family across time and history as lived are present only as background, and one man’s mind in one summer holds the rest.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held: labour, in women’s handwork shown as work; class and the court, in the ladies who look and the women who spin; myth and the sacred, in a goddess and her punishment; art itself, in its whole chain from fibre to Titian to this canvas; music, in the viol; the natural order of light and air; and, by implication, the painter’s claim to rank. The chain of making binds them, and the two rooms are their two levels. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no state, no war, no history beyond the history of art, no family, and consciousness only as attention and work, in a single room in one afternoon. For one canvas it holds much, more than The Large Bathers, less than any picture of a state.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what a novella holds. Slavery, as economy and as theatre. Empire: Spain in decline and the young United States in confident ascent, met at sea. Race, as a way of seeing. The law, in the court at Lima and its document. The sacred, in the friars, the monastery and Mount Agonia. Consciousness, Delano’s fully and Cereno’s in ruin. The sea and the trade of ships, navigation and the calm. Violence and death, in the massacre the deposition tells. They are held in one structure, one day and one document, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the form leaves out: the family, but for a mention of Delano’s home; labour, except as it is staged; the inner life of the enslaved, closed by design; and any society beyond the ship and the court. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Hector Berlioz · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
More orders than a wordless symphony usually holds, and held by the idée fixe and the programme, not listed: consciousness, in reverie, drug and dream; love, as obsession; society, in the ball; the natural order and rural labour, in shepherds’ calls, the field and the storm; the state and the crowd, at a public execution; the sacred, as parody, in the Dies irae and the bells; death and damnation. The same theme passes through them all. What holds the axis, the lowest of the twelve, is depth of hold: the social orders are scenery seen by the dreamer, the family is absent, and history appears only as the furniture of the decade. One mind’s dream of the world, more than the world.
Sergei Eisenstein · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held are many: the state, in the navy, the Cossacks, the squadron and the guns; labour and class, in the sailors as workers, the food and the city’s trades; the city as a social body, the people of Odessa on the mole and the steps; the Church, in the priest, held as an arm of the state; the family, in the mother and child and the pram; history, as 1905 seen from 1925; death and mourning, in the vigil on the pier; and a collective consciousness, built as the film’s subject. One event integrates them. What holds the axis lowest: individual consciousness is excluded by design, so no person is held from within; the sacred appears only as an enemy; and nature is a backdrop of sea and fog. The breadth is real, and the depth is single.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, as justice and prison, carried out by its functionaries; labour, the executioner at his job and the jailer at his; the sacred, the forerunner’s martyrdom and the patron of the Order whose hall it hangs in; the household, in the servant with the dish and the old woman; consciousness, in the old woman’s horror and the prisoners’ watching; and the maker, signed into the event. Placement and one light integrate them. What holds the axis lowest is absence: no natural order beyond bodies and stone, no family, no history but the viewer’s knowledge of the story behind the scene, with the feast, the king and the dance left out, and one place at one instant.
Radiohead · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form beyond what the definition asks. Consciousness is held fully, since nearly every song is a nervous system under load, and technology and the body are bound into it: the regime, the sleep, the antibiotics, the car. Labour, the market and the state are present and joined; politics enters through the riot shields and the IMF of the eighth track and returns in the tenth and eleventh, so the state is held rather than glimpsed. The sacred is evoked through rebirth and karma. The natural order appears only industrialised, the family as a house to escape, history in a single line.
Théodore Géricault · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, present by its absence, the abandonment that made the raft; the natural order, in sea, wind and sky and the indifference of the elements; the body at its extreme of hunger, death and effort; consciousness, in the father’s stare and the climbers’ hope; the family, in father and son; race and the world beyond France, in the Black figures and the man at the apex; death and the sacred, in the echoes of the deposition and the judgment. One composition integrates them, the climb from the dead to the sign. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only implied: labour, history beyond the instant, the domestic, women, the nation as anything but an implication. It is a single instant with a single company of men.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
More orders than its size suggests, all bound through the dying man. Consciousness first: memory, invention, the failing mind. The body: age, immobility, appetite, excretion, and sexuality in the grotesque love of Macmann and Moll. The family: the Saposcats, petty bourgeois with hopes for their son, and the Lamberts, a peasant household. Labour: the farm’s work and Big Lambert’s trade of killing pigs. Class: the distance between the two families, each seen with the same flat eye. The institution: the asylum, its keepers, and its charity in Lady Pedal. The sacred: Moll’s crucifixes, and the death as birth that frames everything. What holds the axis here is what is not held: history and the state are absent, the world beyond the room and the asylum is sketched, and the short form gives each order in outline. The figure describes the form.
Georges Seurat · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the city’s classes together, a bourgeois in a top hat, a man in a cap at rest, soldiers, a nursemaid, rowers; the family, mothers and children; labour and its absence, Sunday as the release of workers and clerks; the state, in the soldiers’ uniforms; the natural order, in river, trees, grass and animals; the modern, in the steamboat and the fashions; and science, in the method itself. The frieze and the shadow integrate them, each order placed on the same ground. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no sacred order but the rite of rest, no history, and little consciousness, since the faces are hidden in profile or shadow and no figure can be said to think. The crowd is wide, and every person in it is a type.
Albrecht Altdorfer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held are many for one panel, and the upright integrates them, earth below heaven. War and the state: empires in collision. History: the passage of one world power to another, and the present of 1529 seen in the past. Geography: the known world laid out from above. The cosmos: sun, moon and the curve of the earth. The sacred, as the frame of history’s ending, if the reading after Daniel holds. What holds the axis at 7.9 is what is absent or barely present. There is no consciousness, since no figure has an inner life the picture attends to; there is no labour but killing, no ordinary life, and no family the picture attends to. Within the rubric’s scale the panel falls short of the works that hold persons as well as worlds.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
One structure holds the family, in two marriages, two sons and a mother’s ambition; class and the patent of nobility; money and property; war and the state, in the British and Prussian armies and the police of a monarchy; the relation of Ireland to England, in an Irish adventurer trying to enter English rank; and the art of a period as the frame through which the period is seen. They are integrated, not listed: the marriage is a property transaction and the duel a class instrument. What holds the axis lowest is consciousness, kept at a distance by design, and the sacred, present only as the Reverend Runt’s household office and the formal church. Beside the novels that hold a society and its inner lives together, three hours of one life hold less.
Daniel Libeskind · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Seven orders are held: history, two millennia of Jews in Germany with the Holocaust at its centre; the city, its addresses in the slashes, its court house, its sound in the Tower; the state, the Prussian building through which the Jewish history must pass, and a nation’s public account of itself; death, in the Tower and its axis; exile, in the Garden; the sacred, as Jewish tradition and as the absence of a community; and memory, in the body’s disorientation at the voids. One plan places each: death and exile below, the city and the state at the threshold, continuity above. What holds the axis is what is absent or left to the exhibitions: the family, labour, daily life, the natural order except as the Garden’s emblem. The lives the void stands for are present only as absence: the point of the form, and its limit.
Paul Gauguin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: a life from birth to death; the family, in the women with the infant and the child; consciousness, in the turning figure, the seated woman, the old woman’s despair and the questions overhead; the sacred, in the idol; the natural order, in the animals, the trees, the stream and the sea; labour of a kind, in the gathering of fruit; and history, unspoken, in European questions painted over a colonised island. The frieze integrates them, making them a sequence rather than a list. What holds the axis lowest: the state, work beyond gathering and any social world in detail are absent, and history is present only as a reading, not as anything shown. It holds more than a landscape or a pastoral, and less than a court or a ceiling. The figure describes the form.
Walker Evans · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Orders held: labour, in the tenant farmer’s wife, the steelworks and the workers on the street; the family, in that portrait and in the homes of the second part; commerce, in the signs, shops, studios and roadside stands; the state, in the Legion, the monuments and, by implication, the agency that paid for many plates; history, in the Greek Revival and Victorian houses, the Civil War memorials and the ruin of the auto graveyard; race, in the minstrel bill and the Black citizens of Southern towns; the sacred, in the churches and the graveyard; and the image itself. One gaze and one sequence integrate them; they are not listed. What holds the axis is what the plain style keeps out: interior consciousness, the natural order beyond the made, and story. For a book of photographs the figure is high.
Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Orders held and placed by one structure. Death, the subject throughout. The sacred, in the chapels, the cross and the rite, held open to more than one faith. The natural order: forest, sky, season, the growth and renewal of trees, the body returned to the ground. The family, in the separate funeral of each household. The city and its civic community: a municipal cemetery for a modern capital, the dead held level, the living gathered in a common loggia. History, as antiquity and the Nordic past called up in temple, hut and mound. They are integrated; the path places each at its stage. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour enters only as the work of burial, the state only as provider and not as power, consciousness only as the mourner’s walk, story only as the funeral’s passage. The figure describes the form.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. Consciousness: memory as the self, in Rachael’s photographs and Batty’s last speech. Labour: slaves made for the off-world colonies, an engineer who makes toys, the workshops of Chew and the snake-maker. Capital: the Tyrell Corporation and its pyramid, a man owning the life he makes. The state: a police that hunts runaways. The city and migration: the street crowd, its languages, the blimp calling people off-world. The natural order as absence: animals extinct and copied, a sky never seen. The sacred: maker and creature, the fallen angel, a dove. The family: a father killed, a false mother in a photograph. The hunt integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the state and the colonies are named rather than shown, the family is figurative, history is not there, and consciousness is the replicants’ more than any human’s.
The Smiths · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form beyond what the definition asks. The orders are many: state and monarchy in the title track; the church there and in “Vicar in a Tutu”; labour in “Frankly, Mr. Shankly”; the family, in the mother of “I Know It’s Over” and the home that cannot be returned to; erotic love, unconsummated; city and class in “Never Had No One Ever”; literature and its dead in “Cemetry Gates”; death throughout. In the title track palace, church, pub and self bear on one another, and one voice carries every order through both sides. What holds the axis lowest is how they are held: every order is seen through one speaker’s grievance, and the sacred and history appear only as institutions mocked.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The family is held, as parents failing, a brother lost and grandparents dead, and the passage from child to adult is the subject. The community is held, as a neighbourhood and as the crowd the sound makes. The natural order enters as winter, snow, darkness and the power cut; history and the state enter in Haïti, a country of the dead and of exile; love and marriage in Tunnels and Crown of Love; the sacred as summons and lament. One condition joins them, grief answered by gathering. What holds it lowest of the twelve: labour is absent, the state appears in one song, the sacred is evoked rather than held, and most orders enter as images in a fable whose figures have no names.
Alejo Carpentier · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
For a short novel the book holds many orders, and one cycle holds them. History, across seventy years and three regimes. The state, as colony, kingdom and republic, each with its labour. Labour itself: the cane mill, the plantation, the forced work on the Citadel, the surveyor’s field. The sacred, Vodou and the Church, both in power and in fear. Nature, in plague, storm and the wind of the end. The body, in mutilation, burning, sickness and Pauline’s cult of her own. Europe and Africa held in one island. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, and below 8.0, is consciousness and the family: Ti Noël’s inner life is given in glimpses, his wife and children in a sentence or two, and no character is held from inside.
Jules Hardouin-Mansart · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure. The sacred: the dome as heaven, the saint-king’s glory, the altar shared by two congregations. The state: absolute monarchy and then the nation, each claiming the same dome. War and its cost: the army’s honour, and the hospital for the maimed that the church crowns, held in plan by the joining of the two churches. History: Louis XIV, the Revolution’s Temple of Mars, Napoleon, Foch, 1940, each written into the building as a tomb or a change of use. The social order: king and soldier, separated and joined. The cosmos: heaven over the centre and the grave below. The axis integrates them. What holds the score lowest: the family, labour and private consciousness enter only through the soldiers, who are context rather than form, and the natural order only as the city’s skyline.
Seamus Heaney · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as a book of short lyrics. It holds much in one structure: deep time, the Iron Age, the Norse settlement and the Plantation; the political present, internment, the constable, the British Army and “neighbourly murder”; the sacred in its pagan and Catholic forms; sexuality and the body; the family and its labour, the aunt at the griddle and the seed cutters; language and its roots; and the vocation of the poet. These are held together, not listed: the bog is at once the natural order, the burial place, the archive and the national ground. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form: no social world beyond the speaker’s tribe and its victims is rendered at length, and no other consciousness is inhabited beyond the brief voice of “Bog Queen”.
Reed and Stem, and Warren and Wetmore · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Orders held: the machine and transport, in the buried yard; commerce and the corporation, in the railroad's fortune, the sale of air and Mercury over the door; labour and the daily life of a city's workers, in the commuter's passage; the city and its plan, in the avenue and district the yard made possible; the heavens, in the painted sky over the crowd; the family as dynasty, in the Vanderbilt acorn. The section integrates them: the machine below, the public in the middle, private building above, the sky on the vault. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only emblematic: the sacred, death, the household and the single consciousness; the state enters only through the law that saved the building, which is its history rather than its structure. The figure describes the form.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The figure describes the form. The orders held are many, and the current integrates them: the state and history, in Europe, the war and the temple of public life; the family, in the mother and child; labour and the city, in the architect and his instruments; art and learning, in the lute, the books and the drawing; love and the erotic, in Venus and the Cupids; the natural order, as plague and famine. That is unusually wide for one canvas, and it is the point of the programme. What holds the axis below the top band is that most of these orders are present as emblems, not as worlds: the architect is a sign for building, not a man at work, there is no consciousness but grief and fury, and the inventory is closer to listed than lived.
Euripides · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
A single play, weighed at its own scale and not marked down for it, holds a good deal in one structure: the family, a marriage founded on murder, a father, a mother, a daughter and the infant son who will be the avenger; the state and the army, with command, ambition, the assembly and the crowd; war and its ideology, Greek against barbarian and the honour of Hellas; the sacred, in the seer, the goddess’s demand and the altar; and a young consciousness making itself at the edge of death. Love and marriage as institutions run through all of it. These are integrated, not listed: each order acts on the girl. What it does not hold is the natural order and labour, or history beyond the one moment at Aulis.
Octavia E. Butler · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve. The book holds a good deal in one structure: consciousness, in Dana’s divided self; the family, in descent, marriage, and Alice’s daughter and sons; labour, in field and kitchen and the economics of the plantation; the state, in law, patrol, sale and free papers; history, the early nineteenth century set against 1976; and memory, in the archive of the Epilogue. These orders are integrated, each bearing on the others through Dana’s body. What holds the axis lowest is what the book does not hold. The sacred is absent; the natural order is setting, the land no more than ground; and the polity beyond one plantation and one county is not entered. It is a novel of one household and one marriage, deeply worked, not a panorama.
Lars von Trier · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred: faith, church and miracle. The community as state, its elders governing, judging and burying. The family: the mother who obeys, the dead brother, Dodo his widow, the grandfather. Labour: the rig and the men who leave for it. The body: sex, paralysis and violence. Medicine and reason, in the doctor. The natural order: the sea, the weather, the bare coast. The plot integrates them, for Jan’s accident, the doctor’s reason and the church’s judgment are one crisis. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the routing: everything passes through Bess’s consciousness and her marriage; history and the wider society are barely present beyond the village; and the rig is a setting more than an order the film thinks through.
Raymond Hood and the Associated Architects · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Orders held, many for a commercial work: commerce and labour, in the offices; the media and the public, in broadcast and theatre; the nations, in the international pavilions on Fifth Avenue; the natural order, in the gardens and the gardens on the roofs; the city, in the plaza and the concourse; and, by allusion, myth and knowledge in the art programme. They are integrated, not listed: the gardens lead to the plaza, the plaza is the tower's forecourt, the concourse joins them all to the subway. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, level with The Archetypal Deep, is what is absent or thin: the household, for no one dwells in the complex; the sacred, which stands across Fifth Avenue as context only; death; and the state. The figure describes the form.
Pearl Jam · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The family is held, and is the record’s ground: mothers, absent and false fathers, a son. Consciousness is held as rage and grief. The school and its violence enter in Jeremy, the institution in Why Go, poverty and the street in Even Flow; love lost in Black; the natural order in Oceans; death throughout, and the sacred as prayer in Release. One wounded consciousness joins them, and the family binds them. What holds the figure: the state, labour and history are absent, and most orders appear as one song’s subject rather than as a structure held together.
Stevie Wonder · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form, and it holds many orders, each by a whole song. Consciousness and love throughout; the family in the newborn of “Isn’t She Lovely”, the childhood of “I Wish” and the mother of “Easy Goin’ Evening (My Mama’s Call)”; the city and its poor in “Village Ghetto Land”; history and the nation in “Black Man”; the sacred in “Have a Talk with God” and “Pastime Paradise”; the music’s own history in “Sir Duke”; the natural order in “Summer Soft” and the impossibilities of “As”; the world beyond English in “Ngiculela”; the cosmos in “Saturn” and “Another Star”. What holds it: labour is absent, the state glimpsed, and the orders arrive song by song, joined by statement more often than by structure.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: the state, in Homeland Security, the camps and the managed news; the natural order, in a species that can no longer bear children; the family, in Theo’s dead son, his marriage to Julian and Kee’s child; history and culture, in the art kept against a future with no viewers; the sacred, in the Nativity the plot builds and in the penitents and cults in the streets; war, in the uprising. The plot joins them: the birth is a political object, a natural fact and a sacred sign at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: consciousness is Theo’s alone and is held from outside; Kee, around whom everything turns, has little inner life; labour and economy are nearly absent; and the world beyond Britain is a set of news images.
Elias of Dereham and Nicholas of Ely (attributed); spire by Richard of Farleigh · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The lowest axis, with The Swerve. Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the church, its liturgy and its processions. The institution and its law: the chapter house, the close as a liberty, a corporation with its own jurisdiction and its own walls. Society: clergy separated from town, the canons’ houses within, the market without. History: the move from Old Sarum, visible in a close wall built partly of the old cathedral’s stone. The natural order: the meadow, the rivers, the low land the spire governs. What holds it lowest is what the wall keeps out: labour, the household, the body and the common life enter only as excluded, consciousness only as the worshipper’s procession, and the town, the work’s own counterpart, lies outside it.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Several orders are held and joined through one image, the wall. The family: a marriage, children, the mother-in-law, the household as a project of status. Labour: the maids and gardeners, the prisoners heard and never seen, and a career of transfers and efficiency. Industry: a firm’s engineers selling a crematorium as a product. The state: the SS hierarchy and the deportation from Hungary. History: the genocide, and its memory in the museum. The natural order: the river, the garden, the dog, the horse, the seasons. The sacred is present only as a fairy tale and as absence. Consciousness is withheld by design, from perpetrators and victims alike, and the figure describes that choice.
Voltaire · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Many orders in thirty short chapters, held in one structure, the argument about evil: war and the law of nations; the Church and the Inquisition; the Jesuit state; colonial slavery and the sugar trade; commerce and fraud, in Vanderdendur; the nobility and its quarterings; sex, disease and the body; the literary world; the monarchies of Europe; the natural order of earthquake, storm and shipwreck; the sacred, in theodicy itself; and labour. They are integrated, not listed: each is a case for the same verdict. What the book does not hold is consciousness. No person has an inner life, the family is a joke about quarterings, and each order is held in outline, in a page. Short forms cannot reach the upper bands, and the figure describes the form and its outlines.
Bernardo Rossellino, for Pius II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The square holds an unusual number of orders in a small compass, integrated and not listed: the sacred, in the cathedral and the see; the dynasty and the household, in the palace, its court and its garden; the commune and civil law, in the town hall and its loggia; the market and daily passage, in the square and the well; the natural order, in the valley, the mountain and the sun on the loggias; and history, as the birthplace of a pope. Each is given its building or its view, and the plan relates them: a town in miniature. What holds the axis at its figure, with The Sublime the lowest on the page, is size: labour and the many lie outside it, the houses of the town beyond the unit, and the poor are present only as those who cross the square. It is a wide figure for a small work.
Jacob Lawrence · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and one structure, the journey, integrates most of them: labour, in the fields, the steel mills, the railroads and the labour agents; the state and the law, in the courts, the vote and the police; violence, in the lynching and the riots; the natural order, in the floods, the boll weevil and the failed crops; the family, in the households that left and those that stayed; the sacred, in the churches and in Exodus as the shape of the whole; the city; and history, at the scale of a people. That is far more than a single canvas holds, and the series form is what lets it. What holds the axis lower is consciousness: the migrants are a people and rarely persons, and no single inner life is entered.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 87 minutes holds, and it holds labour fully, which few films do: the line, the shipyard, the store, the café, the strike and the lockout, unemployment as a condition. The state enters as police, prison, the juvenile authorities and demonstrations broken up with gunfire. Class and property come in the store, the dreamed house and the burglars who are hungry men; hunger and the city run throughout; technology is power. What holds it: consciousness is rendered from outside, as pantomime requires; the sacred is absent; history is the present only; the family is the girl’s lost one and the dreamed one, never lived. Many orders, held in one structure through one body.
Lina Bo Bardi · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Orders held: labour, in the factory shell kept as such and in an institution that serves workers of commerce; the body, in courts, pool, gymnasiums and the sun deck; culture, in the theatre, library, exhibitions and workshops; the community and the family, all ages together at the weekend; the city, in the street opened to the district and the towers on the skyline; the natural order, in water, fire, the drainage that shaped the plan and the sun; history and memory, in the factory kept. The gathering hall stands at the centre, so these are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest: the sacred is absent but for the hearth’s echo, the state appears only as the institution, and consciousness and death lie outside its range. The figure describes the form.
Michael Mann · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The city, in its freeways, towers, harbour, refinery and airport; the state, in the police and its surveillance, and the parole that binds Breedan; labour, in the ex-convict’s job, the crew’s trades and the work ethic of both sides; the economy, in bearer bonds, laundered money and Van Zant’s business; the family, in three marriages and a daughter; consciousness, in the solitude of the two leads. The plot joins them: robbery, marriage and pursuit are one course. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the inner life of the women is barely entered, history is absent beyond the men’s prison pasts, the sacred is a song title, and the city’s people beyond the two crews are scenery. It is a crime epic’s scope, carried as far as the genre carries.
Ancient Egyptian, under Amenhotep III and Ramesses II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the god’s journey and his resting place. The state: kingship renewed, its legitimacy shown by birth and by war. The city: the festival procession of a whole population, shown on the colonnade walls and lived on the road outside. The natural order: the papyrus marsh, the primordial mound, the river that carried the boats. History: Kadesh on the pylon, and the long layering of Roman, Christian and Islamic use on the site. They are integrated in the procession, not listed. What holds the axis is what is absent: the domestic, labour, and the individual consciousness except as it is subsumed in the king. For a single temple the range is wide.
Chaulukya, under Queen Udayamati · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure. The natural order: water, the seasonal table, heat and cool, light and dark. The sacred: Vishnu, his avatars, the cosmic ocean. Labour: the daily drawing of water and the climb with a load. The social order: a public place where the town met, much of it women. The dynasty: a queen’s gift in a king’s memory, the patronage of the Chaulukya court. The body and desire: the apsaras at their toilette. Death and memory: a memorial made as a source of life. The section integrates them, labour and worship one descent, memory given as water. What holds it: the orders are many, but the structure is a single act repeated, and history and the person are thinly held beyond the patronage itself.
Basil Spence · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one structure: the war and the city’s destruction; the medieval town whose church it was; the nation rebuilding; the sacred, in worship continued in both churches; death and memory; reconciliation between former enemies; the arts of the decade; labour and industry, given a chapel; and the crown, which laid its stone. They are held together by the plan more than listed, the ruin and the new church making history and the present one place. What holds the axis below eight: a building’s range is narrower than a book’s, the industrial and civic orders are attached as chapels rather than integrated, and much of what the place holds is carried by its art and its ministry rather than its architecture.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. History is held fully, from the bombing to the founding of the Federal Republic’s myth of itself. The economy is held in the black market, a textile firm, exports and unions; the family in Maria’s mother, her grandfather and the friends’ marriage; marriage and sexuality as contract; the occupation and race in Bill; the law in a court and a prison; the state in the radio and the chancellors. They are integrated: the recovery, the marriage and the house are one plot. What holds the axis below the rest: consciousness is held only at the surface, by design, and Maria’s interior is kept from the viewer; the sacred is absent; labour is seen from the director’s office; the war itself is offstage.
Mudéjar builders, under Peter of Castile, and later hands · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Orders held: kingship and the state, from Pedro’s title on the gate to the crown’s rooms upstairs; the household, in the private core; two faiths and two languages, in the epigraphy; the natural order of water, shade, garden and season; empire and commerce, in the rooms of the Casa de Contratación and the altarpiece of the navigators; history, nine centuries legible as a walk; violence, in a king killed by his half-brother. The sequence of courts places them, and garden and water run through every layer, so they are integrated more than listed. What holds the axis is what is absent: labour, except as anonymous workmanship; the common life of the city outside the walls; the sacred, which enters as inscription and chapel, not as the governing order.
John Barth · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Many orders, and the theme of innocence and fraud joins them. Consciousness, in the hero’s self-regard and its undoing. The family, in the twins and their father and in Burlingame’s lineage. Labour and money, in tobacco, factors, debt, indenture and the estate. The state, in the Calverts, Coode’s rising and the governor. Law, in the courts of the province. History as a discipline, in the journals and the apology. Race and conquest, in the Indians and the enslaved. Sex everywhere; poetry and its social office in the laureateship; the sea and the voyage. They are integrated, not listed. Held below the top because most orders are held at the depth of caricature: the enslaved and the Indians are comic types, women are seen through male appetite, the natural order is scenery, and the sacred is absent except as cant.
William Hogarth · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
For a cycle of eight cabinet pictures, many orders are held, and the current of money integrates them. The family: the father’s hoard, the seduced and abandoned woman, the child, the mercenary marriage. Labour and the professions: tailors, tutors, a gardener, a jockey, bailiffs, gamblers, prisoners at their schemes. The state and the law: the court day, the arrest, the debtors’ prison. The sacred: the church and its marriage of convenience, and the figure of the pietà in Bedlam. Consciousness: madness itself, in the last scene and in the cell beside him. The city: its taverns, streets and institutions. They are held, not listed, because one man’s ruin passes through each. What the form cannot hold is the inner life: Tom is a type, seen from outside. High for a visual work; the form’s ceiling is recorded, not compensated.
Sufjan Stevens · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The orders are many, held by one frame, the state, and one voice: history and the state in the Black Hawk War, the Exposition, Lincoln and Mary Todd and the Sears Tower; labour in the Pullman and the workers of the Rock River Valley; crime and conscience in Gacy; the sacred in Casimir Pulaski Day, The Seer’s Tower and the exodus of the close; the family in a stepmother; friendship and desire in the Wasp and Casimir; the natural order in a prairie fire, a wasp and a sighting in the sky; the mass culture of Superman. What holds the figure: several orders arrive in a title or a single interlude rather than being held, labour is named more than sung, and the integration is by frame and sequence more than by any one song that holds several orders at once.
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held: the household, in two thousand flats of many sizes; the city, its financial district at the door and its streets beneath; history, in the Roman and medieval wall, the church of St Giles and the bombed ground the estate was built to heal; the sacred, in that church at the centre of a court; learning and the arts, in the schools, the music school, the theatre, the concert hall, the gallery and the library; the natural order, in the lakes, gardens and conservatory; and the machine, in the roads, railway and car parks put underneath. One section integrates them: machine below, people on the deck, dwellings above. What holds it: the sacred and history are kept rather than made, the labour of the City lies outside, and arts and dwellings sit side by side.
Hadhrami builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
For a work of architecture the range is wide, because the unit is a city. It holds the family, in the house as its vertical order; labour and the economy, in the storage floors, the fields outside the wall and the trades of the town; the state and its violence, in wall, gate and fort; the sacred, in the mosques and the round of prayer inside the wall; and the natural order, in the flood that set the site, the sun that set the streets and the earth that is the fabric. They are integrated, not listed: one tower answers flood, raid, family and sun at once. Held under eight because consciousness and history are held only implicitly, and the sacred is a part of the city rather than its governing order.
Harappan builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
A whole city holds more orders in one structure than a single building can. The household, in the courtyard house, the bathing floor and the stair to the roof. Labour, in the wells and the making of a city’s brick. The civic order, in the street, the drain, the public tank and the halls of the western mound. The natural order, in the river, the flood and the groundwater, all answered by platform and drain. And in all likelihood the sacred, in the Bath. They are integrated, not listed: water ties them together. Held at 7.9 because two of the orders that would carry it higher, the state and the sacred, are inferred from form rather than shown, and because the encompassing is of a city’s daily life more than of history or of a cosmology the city states.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
For a collection of essays, a wide reach. Consciousness and identity, in the name and the mask. The family, in memories of his mother in Oklahoma. Labour and poverty, in Harlem. The state and history, in the review of Myrdal and the account of segregation. Art, across fiction, film, jazz and gospel. The sacred, in Mahalia Jackson and the church. The nation, everywhere. They are integrated by one argument about American identity and by one consciousness, not merely listed. Held below eight because the essay form holds these orders as subjects of argument more than as lived orders, and the natural order and the inner lives of others are glimpsed rather than held. A short form is not punished for its form; what it holds is weighed as it is.
Tibetan, under Songtsen Gampo · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure are many, and the plan integrates them. The sacred: the Jowo, the chapels, the rite. The state: the founding as the act of a king and his alliances, and before the door the pillar of the treaty of 821 to 823 between Tibet and the Tang. The city: the Barkhor, the market on the circuit, Lhasa grown round the temple. The land: the demoness pinned at her heart, the lake filled in. History: thirteen centuries of campaigns legible in the fabric. And the body in labour, prostrating and walking. They are held together by the circuit, not listed. What holds the axis: consciousness and the family are scarcely present, and the encompassing is done as much by use and city as by the building’s own form.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
With the plantation core in the unit, the work holds many orders in one structure. The household: the white family and the enslaved Hemings family, who were also the maker’s family, in the same house and wings. Labour: the nailery, the joinery, the kitchen, the garden. Slavery as an institution, built into the section. Learning and science: the library, the specimens in the hall, the experiments of the garden. The natural order: the mountain, the views, the seasons in the garden. The state, as the house of a founder and president, and history, as Rome rebuilt for a republic. One plan, the house over the work, places most of these, so they are integrated rather than listed. The sacred appears only as borrowed form, and death lies outside the unit, in the cemetery.
Tiwa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The village holds many orders in one structure, and holds them together rather than listing them. The household, in rooms owned by families. The community, in one mass, one plaza and common labour on the walls. The sacred, in the kivas, the dances in the plaza and the stream from Blue Lake. The natural order, in the valley’s earth, the mountain and the seasons that demand the plastering. Labour and defence. History, in the church, its ruin and the cemetery of 1847, and the Revolt in the village’s past. That is close to the full list. What holds the axis: the state and a cosmos made explicit are not held as a great temple holds them, and the inner life is not open enough to credit more.
Chimú builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders held in one structure. The state: kingship as enclosure. The economy and labour: storerooms and their guarded routes, goods drawn in from the irrigated fields of a valley and from the sea, built by the labour of those kept outside. Death and the sacred: the burial platform, the ruler’s dead and those sacrificed with them, inside the palace. The natural order: the sea in the friezes, water drawn from the wells. History: a dynasty laid out compound by compound, the city as its record. Social class: by exclusion, the commoners’ barrios defined by the walls that shut them out. The compound integrates these; it does not list them. What is absent or held only by inference: the family, individual consciousness, story, and the gods themselves, whose figures are lost. The figure describes the form.
John Barth · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
The attempt is cosmic, and much of it is achieved. History: the Campus Riots and the Quiet Riot stand for the world wars and the cold war, with a college for each nation. The sacred: the Founder, Enos Enoch and Moishe, and a new scripture in the making. Science and the state: WESCAC as the automated deterrent, the émigré scientists, Tower Hall and the Power House. Knowledge and the institution: the university as the order that contains the others. The natural order: the goat barn and the animal in the man. Sex and the body, in George’s education in both; the family, in his search for his parents. They are joined, not listed, by the one conceit. Held below the eights because the joining is a code more than an integration: consciousness is held mostly in George’s alone, and labour, class and the daily life of persons are thin.
Martin Scorsese · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Many orders are held in one structure: the economy, in the casino, the skim, the pension fund and, at the close, corporate finance; the state, in the gaming commission, the county commissioner, a senator, the FBI and the courts; organised crime, in the bosses, the crew and the chain of couriers; the family, in a marriage, a daughter and a father’s custody; consciousness, in two narrators and Ginger’s dissolution; labour, in dealers, slot managers and cooks, hired and fired; the city and its history, Las Vegas from the 1970s to the 1990s; the natural order, in the desert and its holes. They are integrated: the marriage, the licence and the skim fail in one sequence. What holds the axis: the sacred is present only as frame, in Bach and the falling body; consciousness is mostly self-report, the two men’s inner lives surfaces by design; and labour is seen from the pit boss’s chair.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Through its titles and its structure the work holds the natural order, the earth and the season, across Part I and into Part II; the community, in games, rounds, rival tribes and the circle of girls; the sacred, in the elder’s adoration, the ancestors and the sacrifice; the body, driven by rhythm to its end; death, and the dead as the community’s ground; and time as cycle. One rite holds them, and they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence. Individual consciousness is excluded on purpose, and the family, labour, the state and history do not appear. A wordless rite holds more orders than a quartet can and fewer than an epic.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
The orders held: the state, as an army turned into a mechanism; the Church, in the friar at the point of death and the dark tower over the city; the people and the city, in the file from Madrid and the labourer at the centre; consciousness, in defiance, prayer, refusal to look, despair; history, a dated event in a national war; mortality, in three tenses at once. The light places each, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family; the natural order beyond a dark hill and sky; labour, except as the man’s clothes; the sacred as an active presence, which the picture withholds. It is one place, one night, one act, and the figure describes the form.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged as a novella. Consciousness, in Gregor’s mind, estranged from its body and still keeping a salesman’s hours. The body, in the transformation, the wound and the slow starvation. The family, fully, as an economy of debt, care and resentment. Labour, in Gregor’s job and its debt, and in the father’s, mother’s and sister’s new work. Money and class, in the father’s failed business, the secret savings, the servants and the lodgers. Art, in the violin and the picture of the lady in furs. The animal, in what Gregor becomes. They are integrated, not listed: the family economy joins them all, and each order is one more account the household keeps. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the count: the state, history, the city and the sacred are absent, and every order is seen in one flat. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Several orders are held in one structure: consciousness, in obsession, guilt and vertigo; love and sexuality, at the centre; gender and power, in Elster’s use of Judy, Scottie’s remaking of her and Carlotta’s story; class and money, in a shipbuilding fortune married into and a shopgirl from Kansas made over into a lady; the city’s Spanish past; death and the dead; the police, the inquest and the sanatorium; the sacred, setting until it intervenes. They are integrated: Elster’s scheme turns on money, class and the city’s legend at once. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the family, with no parents, children or marriage seen from inside; labour, glimpsed in Midge’s work and Judy’s counter; the state and history beyond the city’s legend. It is a chamber film of three people.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.0 · Tier V
The orders held: consciousness, in the drinker’s despair and the farewell; the natural order, as the earth and its seasons, which is the work’s ground, not its setting; friendship, in the last song and the pavilion; youth and desire, in the lotus girls and the horsemen; mortality, built as the departure; and cosmic time, the firmament and the earth set against the span of one life. They are held together by one law, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the state, labour, history, the family and the sacred as such do not appear, and society is seen as pictures from outside. The figure says that two voices and six songs hold one life, its friends and the earth.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The book holds consciousness at full depth: one mind’s inability to coincide with itself, given more completely than almost anywhere in fiction. It holds language as an order of reality in its own right. It holds the sacred, in the masters, the penance and the talk of God; the family, grotesquely, in Mahood’s household; the city and its trade, in the chophouse, the shambles and the menu on the jar; the body, reduced to a trunk; time and death. What holds the axis here is what is absent: labour, the state, history and the natural order, and the absence is the method. The book claims to hold everything by holding the one who would say it, and the claim is earned for consciousness and thin for the world, which is present as debris, not as an order held.
Jacques-Louis David · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, in the deputy, the assembly the picture was made for and the date of the Year Two; labour, in the writer at work to the last, with his board, inkwell and quill; poverty, in the crate for a table, the patched sheet and the money set out to be given away; the sacred, displaced into the political; death and the body, in disease and murder; history, in the date on the letter. They are held together, not listed: each passes through the body in the bath. What holds the axis lowest is the form: one figure, one room, no landscape, no crowd, the family barely present, and the murderer and the city present only as words. The figure describes the form.
Carl Theodor Dreyer · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held: individual consciousness, at the centre and held to the bottom; the sacred, as faith, sacrament and the claim of revelation against the claim of an institution; the Church, its law, its procedure and its politics; the state and war, in the English occupation and Warwick’s interest in a verdict; the body, in hunger, bleeding, the shorn head and the fire; and at the end the people, a city that sees what has been done. One trial and one face integrate them. What keeps the axis lowest: family, labour and nature are absent, history is present only as the occupation behind the trial, and Joan’s own past, her voices, her campaign and her king, is held only in what is said of it. The narrowness of the form is the source of its depth and the limit of its scope.
Luigi Pirandello · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as a single play of under two hours, and not charged for that. It holds consciousness and the self, in the Father’s and the Stepdaughter’s divided accounts; the family across two households and a generation, with the Mother’s second family and the abandoned son; sexuality and its commerce, in Madama Pace’s shop, where dresses cover a brothel; poverty, and a mother taking in sewing; art and its institution, in the company, the director and the audience; and a metaphysics of being and form. These are integrated through one family and one stage. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the state, history, labour beyond the needle and the theatre, the sacred and the natural order are absent or only glimpsed.
Li Bai · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as a lyric body, not charged for being lyric, and what it holds weighed as it is. The natural order, held at its deepest: mountains, rivers, the moon, gibbons, the waterfall. Consciousness, in its transports and its melancholy. The sacred, in the Daoist heavens and the immortals. History, in the Old Airs and the poems on old sites, where the kingdoms of Wu and Yue are partridges and grass. The state: the court, the frontier, the soldier and his wife, and in the nineteenth of the Old Airs the rebellion seen from the sky, blood on the wild grass and wolves in officials’ caps. Love and the family, in the song of Changgan and the letter-poem to his children left in Shandong. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that one persona joins them: the orders are present more often than integrated, and the family, labour and society are thin beside Du Fu’s.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Consciousness is held fully, one night mind across seventy-three minutes, and it is that one mind that joins everything else. Desire and the couple are held in nearly every song. Art and history enter as Mona Lisa, the museums, Shakespeare and Achilles, set against the present. The sacred is reached in the devotion of the closing song. Society is a carnival and the law a thing to live outside, in Mobile and in Absolutely Sweet Marie. The family enters only as a grandfather and a marriage implied. What holds the figure is that the orders beyond desire are held as images, not as subjects; labour, the state as institution and the natural order are absent.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short novel holds. Consciousness, fully: the book is a mind. Love and desire. The family, in Lotte’s motherless household of brothers and sisters and her father the bailiff. Nature, as the field of the whole argument. Class and the state, in the embassy, the envoy and the nobility’s closed rooms. Law and crime, in the peasant lad’s killing and Albert’s office. Labour, glimpsed in the peasants and in the work Werther will not do. Religion, in the Passion language and the burial without a clergyman. Literature, in Homer, Ossian, Klopstock and Lessing, as forces in the action. Each passes through the heart and is changed by it. What holds the axis in the high sevens is the vantage: every order is seen through one young man, history is absent, and the others are present as what he feels them to be.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as a short novel. The orders are held by one structure: consciousness; the family, in the mother, absent and decisive; love and the body, in Marie; work, in the office and the post in Paris refused; the state and its law, in the examination, trial and sentence; the sacred, in the magistrate’s crucifix and the chaplain; death; and the natural order of sun, sea and night sky. The trial binds them: every order the first part held loosely is called to account in the second. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is present and not held. Colonial society is everywhere in the setting, the Arabs on the beach, the nameless dead man, the pied-noir quarter, and the book never takes it up as an order; history is absent, though this is the Algiers of the late 1930s; labour and class are glimpsed. The form rightly keeps to one life, and a low mark on a small form describes the form.
Anna Akhmatova · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what some two hundred lines hold, as a lyric cycle. A single consciousness and its breaking; the family, a husband shot and a son imprisoned; the state and its terror; Russian history, from the streltsy and Peter to Tsarskoye Selo and Leningrad; the sacred, in the Passion and the liturgy; the people, as a chorus of women; and a city and its rivers, the Neva, the Don and the Yenisei, under the polar star of VIII. They are held in one structure, not listed. What holds the axis at 7.8, the lowest of the twelve, is what is absent: labour, the social order beyond the prison line, the men, the long time of a life. The Road holds two people and a road at the same figure; this cycle holds a nation’s terror at it, and holds no more than a lyric cycle can.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what an 88-minute film of eight speaking parts holds. Consciousness, as the self that rewrites its own acts. The law, in the court and its unseen questioner. The sacred, in the priest’s failing faith and the medium through whom the dead speak, held more fully than in most films. Class, in the bandit, the samurai, the woodcutter and the commoner. Marriage and honour, in what husband and wife require of each other. History, as a ground, and the natural order, as forest, sun and rain. One event and one question integrate them. What holds the axis lowest: the family is glimpsed only in the woodcutter’s six children at the close, labour is an axe, the state is a court and a police agent, and history is told at the gate, not entered. The orders are argued more than lived.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as a book of prose poems, and as a short form. What it holds: consciousness, fully, as subject and as instrument; childhood, in “Enfance”; love and the erotic, in “Being Beauteous”, “H”, “Royauté” and “Génie”; the modern city and its industry, in “Villes”, “Ponts” and “Métropolitain”; labour, in “Ouvriers”; the state, empire and the army, in “Démocratie”; commerce, in “Solde”; the sacred, in “Après le Déluge”, “Mystique” and “Génie”; the natural order, in “Aube” and “Marine”. One visionary consciousness integrates them; they are not listed, and for a short form that is a real achievement. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the family and history as lived are thin, and that the orders are held in flashes rather than in a structure.
Anonymous (Neolithic and Bronze Age) · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure: the cosmos, in the sun’s year and its turning points; the natural order of chalk, plain, river and season; the dead, placed in the enclosure; the sacred, whatever its names; labour and society, the gathering of many communities made visible in stone brought from Wales, Wiltshire and Scotland; and time, in a monument rebuilt across fifteen centuries. The axis integrates them: the dead, the year and the gathering lie on one line through one circle. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or only inferred: the household, the body except in death, individual consciousness, any state or power whose name is known. Much else read into it, the feasts and the lives of the people who came, belongs to its landscape and not to the monument.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what a single play of three men on an island can hold, and not charged for being one play. Consciousness is there, in Philoctetes’ ten years alone with himself and Neoptolemus’ divided mind; the body, in the wound and the stench, more than in any other Greek tragedy; the state and the army, in the sons of Atreus, the war and the uses of a man by his community; father and son, in Achilles’ absence from every choice his son makes; the sacred, in the oracle of Helenus, Heracles and the bow as a divine gift; the natural order, in the island, the birds and beasts he lives by, the sea. What holds it lowest of the twelve is what it does not hold: women, the household, labour beyond survival, the city as a place.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred and the divine, in Apollo and in the inverted body’s martyr shape; the animal, in the satyr’s goat legs and the two dogs; art, in the contest itself, the bowed instrument and the pipes; justice and the state, in a punishment done for an order and a king sitting in judgement; labour, in the flayers at their craft; consciousness, in Midas’s meditation; the natural order, in the tree and the dusk. The hanging body at the centre of attention integrates them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no history but the myth’s and what the viewer brings, no social world beyond the scene. It is one event in a clearing, though it holds more than one scene usually does.
Nirvana · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Eight orders are present: consciousness, as numbness and rage, throughout; youth addressed as a market, in “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and on the sleeve; sexual violence in “Polly”; erotic love as body and illness in “Drain You”; religion as consolation in “Lithium”; the audience and fame in “In Bloom”; poverty and the outcast in “Something in the Way”; conformity in “Stay Away”. Each is achieved in its song, and one voice carries them all: a wide spread for forty-two minutes. What holds the axis lowest is integration. The orders sit one to a song, and the market, the predator and the believer never bear on one another. The family, labour and history are absent.
Sultan Muhammad · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Several orders are held, and held by where they are set. The state: kingship at its origin and the court as its body. Dynasty: king, son and grandson at the summit. The natural order: beasts at peace with men, trees, water, a living earth. The sacred: the first king as bearer of divine glory, creation in its first age. History: the beginning of Iranian kingship, set in the dress and faces of the Safavid present. What holds the axis lowest is what is thin or absent: labour, since these are courtiers and not workers, and the arts Ferdowsi gives to Hushang and his successors have not yet come; consciousness beyond attention; and death, which waits outside the frame. A single page holds this much by compression, and the figure records that it is a single page.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what so short a book holds. The sacred stands at the centre: the Bible, Milton, Swedenborg, the prophets, the genealogy of religion. The body and desire: “The nakedness of woman is the work of God”. Perception and mind. The state and history, in A Song of Liberty, with France, Spain, Rome and London in the light of the Revolution. Art and labour, in the printing house in Hell, where the book shows its own making. The natural order, in the beasts and birds of the Proverbs. They are integrated by one dialectic, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the vantage: consciousness is held as doctrine rather than as a life; the family, ordinary social life and the work of most people are absent; history comes as apocalypse rather than as an order. A low mark on a short form describes the form.
Søren Kierkegaard · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve. A short book, and not charged for its length beyond what it encompasses. What it holds, and holds together: consciousness at its extreme, in the decision that cannot be shared; the family, in father and son, Sarah, the marriage of Tobias and Sarah, the lovers of the princess and of Agnes; the state and its ethics, in Agamemnon, Jephthah and Brutus, who sacrifice children for nation, vow and law; the sacred; the age, its commerce and its philosophy, in the Preface; the body and its deformity, in Gloucester. Each order enters as a test of the one relation. What holds the axis lowest is what the book does not hold: labour, history in any extent, society beyond the figures named, and the natural order. A wide intellectual compass in a narrow human world.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what a comedy of about ninety-five minutes holds, and it holds more than its length suggests. The state, in the presidency, the joint chiefs, the hotline and diplomacy; war, in a bomber crew, a base and its assault; technology and science, in codes, radar, a discriminator and a Doomsday Machine; history, in the Nazi past alive in the War Room and the songs of the Second World War over the end; sexuality as a political force; the natural order, in the planet itself and the fallout that will cover it for ninety-three years. The plot integrates them: one order from one man runs through all. What holds the axis lowest is what is missing: consciousness is caricature by design, the family is absent, labour is military procedure, the sacred appears only as parody, and the people of the world the film destroys are never seen.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
A single play, judged as a play, and the orders it holds are many. The family across generations: the father’s death, the children’s lives, Natasha’s children. The house as property, mortgaged by Andrei. Labour, at the school, the telegraph office and the council. The army as an institution in a town. Marriage, adultery and love. Class, in the displacement of the gentry by a new provincial bourgeoisie; culture and education as a burden; history and the future, in Vershinin’s centuries and Tuzenbach’s coming storm of work; the natural order, in the fir avenue, the birds and the seasons; death, in the father, the fire and the duel. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the state, the sacred and labour itself are glimpsed rather than held, and all of it is seen from one household’s rooms.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
For a book of lyric the reach of orders is large. The natural order, in the animals and the flowers; art, in the torso, the cathedral and the Buddha; the sacred, in the Old Testament poems and the same cathedral and Buddha; myth; the city; death and the body, in the morgue and the washing of a corpse. Consciousness is present chiefly as the act of seeing. What holds the axis lowest is what is thin or absent: the family, labour, the state, and history as lived. The social world appears only as things seen. The orders are held in one method, but they are often listed poem by poem rather than integrated. The figure describes the form; it does not punish it.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Several orders are held: consciousness, in joy, grief and doubt; love and marriage, in the wedding and the loss; the community, in the shepherds and nymphs who celebrate and mourn; the natural order, in the woods and fields of Thrace and their echo; the underworld and the gods, with a second marriage in Plutone and Proserpina, whose love moves the release; father and son, in Apollo and Orfeo; and art itself, in La Musica and in the song that moves the dead. They are joined: Proserpina’s memory of her own love is the hinge on which Orfeo’s song works. What holds the axis here is absence: the state, labour and history have no place in the pastoral world, and a court favola of about two hours holds a cosmos in emblem more than a society.
Built for Fujiwara no Yorimichi · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The sacred: Amida, his land and his welcome, under the doctrine of the Latter Days. Death: the hall rehearses the deathbed and the crossing. The state: the regency at its height, its wealth and its private claim on salvation. The natural order: water, sun, west and evening, and landscapes with seasons on the doors. The household: a villa become a temple. They are integrated: the regent’s estate is the paradise, the sunset is the descent. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what lies outside the court: labour and the people beyond it are absent, history is held only as an age of decline, and the form is small and single-minded.
Richard Strauss · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, in Salome’s desire and Herodes’s fear; the family, rotten at its centre, a tetrarch who killed his brother, married his wife and now wants her daughter; the state, in the tetrarch, a Roman envoy named and absent, and the soldiers who carry out the sentence; the sacred as revelation, rumour and institution at once, in the prophet, the Nazarenes’ report of a Messiah and the Jews’ dispute; the natural order, as the moon and the wind; and history, at the turn of an age, a new faith announced to a court that cannot hear it. They are integrated: the family’s corruption lets the state’s oath deliver the sacred’s head. What holds the axis here is scale: one terrace, one night, a hundred minutes. Labour and the crowd are absent, and the world beyond the court is reported, not held.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as a short récit. Consciousness, fully, in a mind that observes itself observing. The law and the profession, in the advocate’s practice and the idea of judgment. The sacred, in Christ, the Last Judgment and the absent God. History, in the war, the camps and the Amsterdam quarter emptied of its Jews, which Clamence names as the site of a great crime. Eros, in the seductions and the women he used; friendship, the city, the sea. They are integrated, not listed: each is a field on which the same hunger for innocence is played. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the count and the vantage: the family, labour beyond the courtroom, the state as a working thing and the natural order are absent or glimpsed, and every order present is seen through one speaker’s argument rather than given its own life. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
For one panel the orders are many, and one view integrates them rather than listing them. The natural order: the season, the weather, the animals, the mountains. Labour: the hunt, the fire and the pig, the mill stopped by the ice. The social world: the inn, the village, the play on the ponds, a community of every age. The sacred: the church, and the saint on the sign. Economy: one fox for three men and a pack, the provisions of winter. What holds the axis here is what one panel cannot hold. Consciousness is thin, with no face seen and the hunters’ minds given only through posture; the family as such, the state and history are absent; and the year belongs to the series.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held are integrated through the voice. The sacred: judgement, majesty, praise and absolution. Death and the individual soul, in the soprano’s final pages. The community of the living, in the chorus, which prays for its dead as a people. The cosmic order, in the trumpet over the graves and the world dissolved in ashes. Consciousness under fear, in the Quid sum miser and the Ingemisco. What holds the axis lowest is that the orders are the liturgy’s, not built: the family, labour, the state and history are absent from the work. Its occasion, the death of Manzoni, the national poet of a new nation, gives it a civic frame, but that frame stands outside the text and is not scored.
Anton Bruckner · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness facing death; the sacred, in the chorales and the Adagio’s prayer, which are the centre of the work; the natural order, in the horn calls and open fifths, by long reading more than by the notes; the state, in the dedication and the ceremonial brass of the Finale; the common people, in the Scherzo’s peasant dance. What the score holds it holds integrated, as one ascent from death to glory. What holds the axis here is twofold. Several of these orders are held only through Bruckner’s words outside the score: without the programme, the state and the everyman are a march and a dance. And the family, labour and history are absent.
David Bowie · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form beyond what the definition asks. Consciousness is held fully, and its last state is the subject; death and the sacred are held, as rite, as heaven, as resurrection. Fame and the self as a made thing are held in the star that dies and is replaced. Place enters as exile, New York and England; crime and violence in Sue and ’Tis a Pity; money in a title; language itself in the slang of Girl Loves Me. One condition joins them, the dying artist’s. What holds this lowest of the twelve: the family, labour, the state and history are absent, the natural order is a bluebird and an evergreen, and every order passes through one man facing one end.
Prince Hachijō Toshihito and Prince Toshitada · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held are five. The natural order — water, moon, season, planting — is held most fully. The social order: rank built into gates, paths and rooms, from the imperial gate to the waiting benches. History and letters: Heian Katsura, Genji and the famous places, carried in plan and name. The sacred, held lightly: the Onrindō, and the moon’s place in poetry and devotion. The dynasty: two generations of one house, and the reception of a retired emperor. The circuit passes through each in turn, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, which the princely villa hides; the state, present only as the absence of power the villa answers; the family as anything but lineage. An estate with a garden holds more than one room, and much less than a city.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Several orders are held: the sacred, in the axis to the apostle’s tomb and the forecourt of the church; the state, in the pope as sovereign, the palace on the north and the window of the apartments; the city and the world, Urbi et Orbi, the arms reaching toward Rome and, in Bernini’s account, toward heretic and unbeliever; history, in an obelisk that passed from Egypt to Caligula, to Nero’s circus and to Sixtus V; the crowd, the people as a body; and faintly the natural order, in the obelisk as gnomon and the meridian in the paving. One plan integrates them: the people in the arms, the pope above, the tomb at the end of the axis. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, labour, the individual consciousness, the body as subject. A square holds a gathering, not a life.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
For a single sculpture the Gates hold an unusual number of orders: consciousness, in The Thinker; desire and the couple; the family, in Ugolino’s children; age and decay; death; the sacred in its absence, the empty seat of the Judge; the first man, as the Shades are read; and the maker contemplating his own creation. They are integrated by one field and one gaze from above, not listed. What holds the axis where it stands is what Rodin’s hell, narrowed to the body and the mind, lets go: the state, labour, history and the natural order, all of which Dante’s cosmos holds. Against the literary summit the figure describes the form; for a sculpture it is high.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short book holds. War, at the front and in the evacuations. The state and its violence: the ministers shot, the police, the hanging, the young revolutionary in Italy, the deposed king. The family: the doctor and his wife, Krebs with his mother and sister, the couples. Birth and death together in “Indian Camp”. Love and its end. Sport as ritual, in the bullring and at the racetrack. The natural order, fully, in “Big Two-Hearted River”. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the method: the orders are held side by side and joined in the reader, not worked through one another; the sacred appears only at the edge; and labour, history as process and the wider society are glimpsed. A low mark on a small form describes the form, and this one holds more than its length promises.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as a short novel. Consciousness, in Jake’s guarded mind. The body, in the wound, in desire and its impossibility, in drink and the bull’s horn. War, as the past that made everyone, never shown. Religion, in Jake’s prayers in the cathedral at Pamplona and his sense that he is a rotten Catholic, and in the Ecclesiastes frame. Money and exchange, a governing order, kept in Jake’s accounts. Nation and class: Americans, English, a Greek count, Basques and a Jewish Princeton man, set against one another. Art, in the ring, in Cohn’s novel and in Jake’s journalism. The natural order, in the river and the abiding earth. They are integrated, joined by the code. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what the form leaves out: there are no families, labour appears only at the edge, and the state and history are present only as the war behind the book. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as a book of short prose poems, it holds much and integrates it. Consciousness, fully and in many states. The city as a whole: boulevard, café, fair, public gardens, crowds, garret. The poor, at length and from many sides, in “Les Veuves”, “Le Joujou du pauvre”, “Les Yeux des pauvres” and “Assommons les pauvres!”. Labour and trade: the glazier, the saltimbanque, the prostitute’s living in “Mademoiselle Bistouri”. Money and the gift; art and the artist’s condition; love and its cruelty; childhood, in “Le Gâteau”, “Les Vocations” and “La Corde”; death and suicide; the sacred, as Satan, as the infinite, as the lost halo; the state, as a prince who kills his jester. One consciousness and one city hold these together. What holds the axis here, the lowest of the twelve: the family across time, history and the natural order are thin, and the form keeps each order to a page or two.
Eugène Delacroix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state and history, in the overthrow of a king on a named day; class, in the bourgeois, the worker, the street boy and the labourer side by side; death, in the foreground dead of both sides; the body, living, wounded and stripped; the city, in the barricade, the paving and the towers of Notre-Dame; the sacred, in the cathedral and in an allegory raised to the place of a goddess; and the idea, Liberty herself, made flesh. The pyramid and the tricolour that runs through all of them integrate them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, labour as work rather than as a mark of class, the natural order, and consciousness, since no figure is shown thinking, only acting and seeing. One instant, one street: more of the public world than a sky or a pond, less than a court or a ceiling. The figure describes the form.
Pablo Neruda · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as a book of lyric poems, and not punished for the form. What it holds: consciousness and its dissolution; eros and its aftermath, in the Josie Bliss poems, “Agua sexual” and “Material nupcial”; death; the family, in “Melancolía en las familias”, “Maternidad” and “Enfermedades en mi casa”; the city of commerce and labour, in “Walking Around”; the natural order, sea, wood, vegetable and wine; friendship and the deaths of friends. These are integrated, not listed: the city, the sea and the bed are the same rotting matter. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent by design: history and the state, which enter only in Neruda’s later books, and the sacred, present only as its absence.
Marvin Gaye · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, in a voice that witnesses, despairs and prays. The family is held, in the address to mother, father, brother and in the children of Save the Children. The state and history are held: the war, the veteran, the police, taxes, the space programme set against the poor. Labour is present as its absence, the soldier without work. The natural order is held in Mercy Mercy Me, the sacred in God Is Love and Wholy Holy, the city in Flyin’ High and Inner City Blues. That is more than Remain in Light holds at 7.6. What sets the figure, the lowest on the sheet: the orders arrive one per song, not integrated in any one place, and the ecology and the sacred are stated more than held.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what a chamber horror film of about 144 minutes holds. Consciousness, in Jack’s breakdown, Danny’s second sight and his other self, Tony, and Wendy’s fear and denial; the family, a marriage and a child already hurt; labour, a caretaking job, a writer’s block and the hotel’s order of service; history, a burial ground, the Donner Party talked of on the drive, a ball of 1921, the slur the waiter uses for Hallorann; the natural order, mountains and a storm that seal the house; the sacred, inverted as a haunting. All are integrated through the house. What holds the axis lowest is depth: history, race and the Native ground are signs at the edge, glimpsed rather than entered; the world outside is a ranger’s radio and a television report; Wendy is seen from outside. Many orders, held at the depth of suggestion.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held are many for a panel of 66 centimetres, and placement integrates them. The sacred: the Incarnation, the Queen of Heaven, the typology of Fall and redemption. The state: the chancellor of Burgundy, his office in his robe and his bearing. The city: churches, houses, a bridge, streets with people, traffic on the river. Labour and ordinary life, at the scale of a few millimetres. Nature: the garden, the river, the hills and mountains. Consciousness: Rolin’s attention, inward and fixed, and the parapet figures’ looking out. History: the Old Testament in stone. What holds the axis lowest: the human orders beyond the two principals are present at miniature scale rather than given weight, the family is absent, and the integration is by setting rather than by drama. The figure describes the form.
Dziga Vertov · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Many orders are present and joined by the cutting: labour, in mine, mill and switchboard; the city, as transport, streets and crowds; the family, at birth, marriage, divorce and death; the body, in sport and the beauty parlour; technology, in every machine and above all the camera; leisure and its institutions, the workers’ club and the beer hall; and cinema itself as an order of reality. They are integrated in a single day and a single rhythm, which is more than a list. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is depth and absence. No consciousness is entered, and no person is known from within. The state is everywhere implied and nowhere seen. History is a present tense without a past. Much is held at the speed of a shot, and little is held long.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed as a novella, at its own scale. It holds consciousness, two minds in depth, one coming apart by fear and one by inertia; the institution, in hospital, board, ward and watchman; the state, felt in the convicts under escort, the police and the fear of arrest; the town and its society; money and its loss; friendship as a form of oppression; medicine as a vocation and its betrayal; philosophy, in the Stoics, Christian immortality and Ragin’s question whether consciousness survives death; and, in the deer, the natural order glimpsed at the end. All are joined by the one reversal. What holds it lowest of the twelve is the vantage: no family across time, no labour but Ragin’s neglect of his own, history only as a pressure off the page; a society held in one building, not a world.
John Soane · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The house holds more orders than its size suggests, in one structure. The private life: the bedrooms, Mrs Soane’s room, the dining room. Labour: the office where the pupils drew. Learning: the library, the casts as a teaching collection, the academy the Act settled. Antiquity: Rome in fragments, Egypt in the sarcophagus, the Gothic in the monk. Death: the crypt, the tomb, the memorials. A nation’s art, in the Hogarths it shelters. The family is present as grief. The plan integrates these; it does not list them. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside the house: the state, the sacred as a public rite, the natural order. A house cannot hold a city, and the figure describes the form.
Maya · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Six orders are held in one structure. The cosmos: the four quarters, the centre and the sky. Time: the solar year and its months. The natural order: the sun’s course and the seasons, which governed planting and rain. The sacred: the feathered serpent and his temple. The state: the power of Chichen Itza and of those who commanded the calendar and the labour to build it. Death and ancestry: the older pyramid and its throne kept inside, the new built over the old. They are integrated: the god descends from the sky through the year to the ground of the city. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the household, labour as subject rather than means, the body and individual consciousness. A temple mountain holds the order of the world, not a life.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Several orders are held: consciousness, at the centre and held completely; the city as a social order, its trade in sex and its classes in the back seat; labour, in the long shifts, the drivers’ talk and the job as identity; the state, in a presidential campaign, the Secret Service and an assassination planned; the press, in the clippings that make a hero. They are integrated through one man, and that is what holds the axis lowest: every order is seen as Travis sees it, and so held in part. War is implied only, in the Marine discharge and the jacket. The family is an absence, a lying letter home. Women are two ideas of a woman, and the sacred only a longing for purity.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what about 290 minutes and two leads hold. Two consciousnesses, each changing across eighteen years; romance, then marriage and family, in twin daughters and in Jesse’s son by his first marriage; work, in Jesse’s novels about the night in Vienna and Celine’s work for environmental groups and the job she is offered; the city, in Vienna and Paris walked; history, in a European ground of churches, ruins and a chapel in the Peloponnese; the generations, at the lunch table. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that all of it is held through two people’s talk: the state, labour and history are discussed, not dramatised, and the work encompasses a couple’s world more than the world. The figure describes the form.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Seven orders are held: the sacred, in the Redeemer and the way to the sanctuary; the state, in the Senate’s vow and the procession; death, in the plague the vow answered; the city, as the people in the nave and as the Venice across the water where the walk begins; the religious life, in the friars and their poverty; the natural order, in the water, the light and the July day of the feast; and history, as antiquity claimed. One axis places each in its space, people, state and friars in that order toward the altar. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the household and the family, labour except as the friars’ poverty, and the individual consciousness except as the worshipper’s progress. A votive church holds a city’s gratitude and its hierarchy, and the figure describes the form.
Assyrian court sculptors · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, in the king and his claim; the sacred, in the hunt as rite and the libation; the natural order, in lions, horses, dogs and the wooded hill; war and the army, in the cordon and the weapons; the people, as spectators on the hill; labour, in grooms, beaters and the boy at the cage; and death, given more fully than any of the others. They are integrated by the rite, each with its place in one staged event. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or present only as type: no family, no consciousness in any human figure, no history beyond the king’s present, no city, no individual life among the people. Wider than most single images, as a cycle should be; narrower than a cycle that holds a world.
David Fincher · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Several orders are held and joined by one line, the case. The law, in four jurisdictions that cannot pool their evidence; the press, which carries the killer and makes him; labour, in the careers the case consumes; the family, in Graysmith’s marriage and Armstrong’s choice of his family over the case; the city across two decades, its look and its fears; popular culture, which turns the case into Dirty Harry while it is still open. What holds it lowest is what lies outside. Interiority is withheld by design: the killer has none on screen and the investigators little. The sacred and the natural order are absent. The victims are seen only at the moment they become victims. The film encompasses a society’s apparatus of knowing more fully than its people.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Through the Credo the work holds several orders: the sacred above all; the natural order, in caeli et terrae, heaven and earth, and visibilium omnium et invisibilium, of all things seen and unseen; history, in sub Pontio Pilato, under Pontius Pilate; mortality and the last things; and the community of the church, built into the texture itself. What holds the axis here is how they are held: as the Creed holds them, in a list the setting articulates, not integrated by the music into one structure that knows them apart. Consciousness, the family, labour and the state do not appear, and there is no individual voice in the work at all, by design. The figure credits the scope the text brings, sung as one communal act, and charges that the music holds it as one order seen from many angles.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. Labour: the shaft, the drilling, the deaths of workers. Capital: leases, the pipeline, the Standard Oil offer. The family: a false son, a false brother, the Sunday household, a marriage. Religion: the church, healing, baptism, public confession. The land, the scrub and the oil under it; and the town, promised schools and bread and given a derrick. They are integrated, since each order is shown as one more thing Plainview leases. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what a film of one man leaves out. The state is nearly absent. Women, love and sexuality are close to absent. The town and the workers appear mostly as a crowd. The film holds fewer orders than its period would allow, and the absences are weighed.
Werner Herzog · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 93 minutes holds, and many orders are present. The state, in a king deposed by notarised document and an emperor proclaimed; the church, in a friar who serves the strong; the family, in Aguirre’s daughter and his wish to found a dynasty with her, and in Inés’s widowhood; conquest and slavery, in the litter-bearers and the chained Indians of the opening; nature, in a forest, a river and rain that decide everything; the sacred, in the Bible, the cross and a blasphemy. What holds it lowest is the view from outside: consciousness, Aguirre’s included, is rendered through gesture and two speeches; the conquered are a man in a canoe, a slave with a pipe and arrows from the bank; labour is portage. All of it is held through one expedition and one will.
The Beatles · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The orders are many. Consciousness, as exhaustion and despair in “I’m So Tired” and “Yer Blues”. The family: the dead mother of “Julia”, the mother who rides along with Bungalow Bill, the birthday, the lullaby. The state and politics: “Revolution 1”, the collage, the class satire of “Piggies”. The natural order: “Blackbird”, “Mother Nature’s Son”. The sacred, in the false guru of “Sexy Sadie” and the hymn of “Long, Long, Long”. Violence, in “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”, the tiger hunt and the duel of “Rocky Raccoon”. History as noise. What holds the figure is the join: the orders sit in separate songs, placed side by side, more listed than held, and no consciousness or structure integrates them.
John Milton · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as an oration, at its own scale. What it holds is wide for its form: the individual conscience and the making of virtue; the Fall and the theology of free choice; the Church, its councils and its history; the state and its power over speech; learning and the life of scholars; the nation, in the vision of London as “the mansion house of liberty”; and the European present, in Milton’s visit to Galileo, “grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition”. These are joined by the one argument about trial, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is vantage and count: everything passes through a single case, the family and labour are glimpsed only, the natural order is absent, and the orders are held as instances of a thesis rather than as worlds.
Public Enemy · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The state is held, as surveillance, the draft and the prison; the press and television as an order of power; the drug trade and the community it harms; history, in the Panthers, Hoover and the line from Malcolm X; the law of property, in Caught; the sacred, as prophecy and the Nation of Islam; the crowd and the public, in the live frame. One voice and one condition join them, and the sound holds them in one structure, a wider span than most albums attempt, integrated more than listed. What holds it lowest: the family is absent; women appear chiefly as a figure of contempt; labour and the natural order are absent; and the speaker’s inner life is kept almost wholly behind the stance, so consciousness is held as will rather than as depth.
Pirro Ligorio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve, and what holds it is what the work leaves outside. It holds more orders than most buildings: the natural order of a river, a hill and the view of the plain; antiquity and its recovery; the Church and the state in a cardinal’s power and his lost election; myth, in Hercules and the Hesperides; the history and geography of Tivoli and Rome, built as a model; music and mechanism; the household and its pleasure. These are integrated in the plan rather than listed, above all along the cross-walk. But labour, the poor of the town whose water the work took, and the family beyond the patron’s lineage are absent or present only as cost.
Robert Frost · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as a short book of poems. Labour, fully: haying, apple-picking, wall-mending, wood-cutting, housework, the mill. The family and marriage: the child’s grave, the couple who cannot speak, the housekeeper’s daughter who leaves a man after years unmarried. Death, in Silas and in the child. Madness and the mind under strain. Community and its law: neighbours, the code of the hired hand in “The Code”, charity and its limits. The economy of a failing region: a crippled man’s claim settled with a company lawyer in “The Self-Seeker”, abandoned farms, the cellar holes of “The Generations of Men”. History, faintly, in the Civil War widow of “The Black Cottage” and her belief in equality. The natural order, as the hills and the swamp. The state and the sacred are only glimpsed. One ground and one voice integrate them. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the form: seventeen poems of one county cannot hold a society’s whole structure. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure: capital and labour, in the mine, the company and the brothel as a business; sex and money, inseparable in Mrs. Miller’s house; the church, built first and used last; the town as a polity; death, unwitnessed; the natural order, in rain, mud and the snow that closes the film; the state, present only as a company and a lawyer in another town. They are integrated: the ledger and the duel are one economy. What holds the axis lowest is absence and glimpse: the family is one widow and no children; the Chinese labourers who work the mine are seen and not entered; the Native woman at Mrs. Miller’s is a face; law exists as a speech in Bear Paw. It is one town in one winter.
Louis Le Vau and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Orders held: the state, in minister, king and a finance whose source was in question; the household and the court; nature, earth, water and sky worked into one order; the arts, painting, sculpture, theatre and poetry gathered under one patron; myth, in the solar and Herculean programme; and, unstated but plain, labour and the land taken, villages cleared and a river moved. The axis places each on one line, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the score lowest: the sacred is absent but for allegory, labour is present only as what the place conceals, and the house holds the life of a single class. Wide for a building, narrower than a work that holds a society.
Pagan builders, under King Kyansittha · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred: four Buddhas, the path to them, the Dhamma told in stone. Cosmic time: the four Buddhas of this aeon, the series in which the present one stands. The cosmos in space: the four quarters and the world-mountain. The natural and animal orders, the household, labour and trade: the Jatakas on the plaques, the Buddha’s former lives as hare, elephant, prince and merchant. The state: the temple as a king’s foundation. They are integrated, life on the skin, the path in the corridors, presence at the core, the cosmos above. What holds the axis lowest: the world appears as story at small scale on the surface, and consciousness and death only as doctrine.
Guru Arjan; rebuilt and gilded under Maharaja Ranjit Singh · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: the sacred, as the word at the centre; the natural order, as water, sky and the hours marked by the book’s going out and its return; the social order, as the door open to all, the shared water and the common circuit; the state, as the misls’ rebuilding and a maharaja’s gilding, sovereignty given to the shrine; history, as destruction and return written in the fabric; and the city, founded round the pool and named from it. The setting integrates them rather than listing them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, the household and the body enter only through bathing and through the langar, which lies outside the work; consciousness only as the worshipper’s approach; and the shrine is small. A compact form holding much.
Prince · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness and the self divided are held fully in the songs of the pitched voice. The couple is held from flirtation to settling and jealousy, across several songs, not in one image. The body is held as dance and sex. Society and the state enter in the title track, as epidemic, drugs, poverty, the bomb and the shuttle, and labour in “Dorothy was a waitress”; the sacred is held in The Cross and in Adore’s devotion, the crowd in the live track, and the family as the wish to settle. That is a wider span than most albums attempt, and the double album gives it room. What holds the figure lowest on the page: the social order is a list in one song, history and the natural order are absent, and the orders are joined by one appetite more than integrated in one structure.
Kate Bush · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, at its limit, in the suite. The couple is held in Running Up That Hill and the title track; the family in mother, father, son and brothers across both sides; the state in the arrest of the father in Cloudbusting; history in the witch trial; the sacred in the deal with God and the chant; the natural order in sky, rain, sea and ice; the earth seen whole in Hello Earth. The suite integrates several of these in one night and one woman. What holds the figure lowest: labour is absent, the state and history are glimpsed through single figures, and side one lists its orders song by song rather than holding them together.
Carol Reed · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: friendship and its betrayal; love, unrequited and unchanged; the state, in four occupying powers, a military police and the threat of repatriation to the Soviet sector; crime and its market; medicine, in the penicillin and the children’s ward; history, in a defeated city’s ruins and Harry’s talk of the Borgias and the Renaissance; art, in Holly’s westerns against literary culture; death and its rites, in two funerals at one grave. What holds it lowest: consciousness is rendered from outside, chiefly through Holly’s actions; Anna’s inner life is withheld by design; labour, the family and nature are nearly absent; the sacred is a cemetery, not a belief. It is a thriller’s scope, carried to the edge of what a thriller can hold.
Built for Taira no Kiyomori · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the goddesses, the island, the mountain behind. The natural order: sea, tide, moon and season, made part of the building’s daily life rather than its view. The state and its history: Kiyomori’s ascent, the Taira’s dedication of their sutras and their fall, then the Mōri and the later rulers who rebuilt. Court culture: bugaku on the stage over the water, the residential manner of the capital carried to the province. Seafaring and pilgrimage: the approach by boat. The tide carries all of them, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, the household and the common life enter only as worshippers and visitors, and the closed honden admits no interior world.
Maya, under K'inich Janaab' Pakal and his son · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Six orders are held in one structure and tied by the section: the king’s body and death; the family, as father and son and as ancestors become trees; the state, as dynastic history and the rites of succession; history, as the long count of the panels; the sacred and the gods; and the natural order, as mountain, earth and tree. They are achieved and integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside the court. The life of the city beyond its rulers is not held, and labour appears only as the fact of the pyramid. The building’s world is the court’s, and it is held in a single funerary temple of moderate size.
Max Beckmann · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, as torture and confinement; the body, bound, maimed and inverted; the couple and the family, in the bound pairs and in the king, queen and child; labour, faintly, in the fisher’s net and the torturers’ work; the sacred, in the altarpiece form and the holy family; the natural order, in the sea and sky; history, the German 1930s, foreseen; art and spectacle, in the cabaret props. They are joined by one movement, from confinement to departure, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is the means of holding: much is carried by emblem, one figure standing for an order rather than the order being shown, and three painted panels cannot unfold the state or labour as a novel or a cycle can. A high figure for a single painted work.
David Fincher · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
One consciousness holds many orders, and it is a consciousness made by a whole economy. Consumption: the catalogue, the condominium, the self as a set of purchases. Labour and the corporation: the office, the recall formula that prices death, the waiters, mechanics and projectionists who become Tyler’s army. The body: cancer, fat made into soap, burns and bruises. Masculinity and the absent father: the groups, the fights, the speech about fathers. Finance and the state: the credit records, and police who are already members. What keeps the axis lowest is what is held weakly or not at all. The family is named, never shown; history and the natural order are absent; the sacred is parodied; and love lives only in Marla, thinly.
George Bähr · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the Lutheran liturgy given a room. The civic: the burgher city’s church set against the court. Music: Silbermann’s organ on the axis, a room built as much for song as for speech. The city’s form: the dome as the centre of the skyline and of the Neumarkt. The dome integrates them: roof, the city’s sign and the sounding vault at once. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside them: the natural order and the state are not held on the scale of a cathedral and its city. The history of destruction and reconciliation belongs to its survival and is not counted.
Nirvana · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held as exhaustion, illness and self-contempt, Milk It’s “my own parasite”. The body is held fully, and it is the record’s ground: birth, pregnancy, illness, sex, violation. The family is present: a father in Serve the Servants, a womb and a child implied on the sleeve. Fame, the press and the market are held in Serve the Servants and Radio Friendly Unit Shifter. History enters once, in Frances Farmer and the Seattle that broke her. The sacred is glimpsed, in an angel on the sleeve and a “Leonard Cohen afterworld”. Labour, the state and the natural order beyond the body are absent. One consciousness joins the orders, and several are images more than held: that holds the figure lowest.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Fewer orders than a novel of society, held tightly. Consciousness, in the man’s memory and dread. The family: a father, a son, and a mother present only in her absence and her choice to die. The natural order, dead, ash on everything, and in the coda the living world the book mourns. The sacred, argued between the man’s faith in the boy, Ely’s denial and the fire. History, as the ruins of a civilisation: roads, houses, shops. Society, reduced to bands, captives and the question of who the good guys are. Labour, as scavenging and the making of camps. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the premise removes: the state, class and institutions are absent, and that absence is the book’s statement about them, not their being held. The orders present are bound through the road, in a short form chosen on purpose, and the figure describes the form.
Wang Ximeng · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and the landscape places each while the journey binds them. The natural order at its fullest, in mountain, water, tree, cascade and sky; labour, in fishers, boatmen, millers and porters; dwelling and the family, in villages and courtyard houses; travel and the road; the life of the scholar, in pavilions and retreats; the sacred, in temples set among the hills; and the state, held by implication as the realm itself. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the human orders are present as signs at a tiny scale, not held as conditions: there is no consciousness, no individual, no conflict and no history, and the state is present only as an ideal. For a single landscape image the encompassing is wide; the figure describes the form.
Gérard de Nerval · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are present: consciousness and its disorder, love, the family and childhood, a regional people with its songs and festivals, labour in Sylvie’s glove making, the Revolution and the wars in “Émilie” and in the memory of the Valois, the American frontier in “Jemmy”, antiquity, and the sacred of many religions at once. Achieved and integrated, they are fewer. In “Sylvie” the Valois, memory, love and a social order passing into another are held in one structure; in the sonnets, the sacred and the self. The rest are present, not integrated, and each stands in its own piece. Short forms are not charged for being short; the figure describes what the book holds as one.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are many: commerce and capital; the police and the law, with the court and the gallows; poverty and the charity trade; marriage and sexuality, in Polly’s wedding and Macheath’s dependence on the brothel; religion, in Peachum’s Bible texts and the parody chorale; the crown, in the coronation and the pardon; war, in the Cannon Song’s colonial army. They are joined by the one law of the transaction. What is not held is consciousness: no person in the play has an inner life the play attends to, and the family is a joke at the family’s expense. A single evening of three acts is not charged for its length. The figure records the choice of the form: what the play encompasses it holds as a diagram of a society, broad and without interior.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a book of twelve essays holds, and it reaches widely: consciousness and its intuitions; history, read as the one mind’s biography; the natural order, as law and as figure; the sacred, without a church; love, friendship and the household; prudence and money; heroism and the state of society; intellect and art. One law joins them, which is the integration the axis asks for. What holds the axis there is that the orders are held as ideas, not as lived conditions. Labour appears as a moral emblem; the family as a tie to be shaken off; the state, slavery, a live question in 1841, and the poor as objections to be answered in a sentence. The book encompasses a great deal of thought and very little of the world as it is suffered.
Barma and Postnik Yakovlev (attributed) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The state: the tsar’s victory over Kazan. History: a campaign turned into a calendar. The sacred: nine feasts and saints, and the Heavenly Jerusalem. The city: the building stands in the market square, not inside the fortress, and the Palm Sunday rite made the square part of it. Popular piety: the holy fool’s grave and his name. They are integrated, not listed; the fool in the tsar’s monument is a true meeting of orders. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what stays outside: dwelling, labour, the natural order and the inner life of the worshipper, which the small dark sanctuaries leave unstated. A building of one purpose cannot hold what a cathedral city holds, and the figure says so.
W. H. Auden · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as a book of lyric and occasional poems. It holds much: consciousness and the unconscious, in the Freud elegy; love and its faithlessness, in the lullaby and the cabaret songs; the state and the citizen, in “The Unknown Citizen” and “Epitaph on a Tyrant”; history and war, in “Spain 1937” and “September 1, 1939”; the refugee; the city, Brussels, New York and Oxford; art and the artist, from Brueghel and Yeats to Housman, Lear, Rimbaud and Arnold; law, in “Law Like Love”; and the sacred at the edges. The best poems hold several orders at once: “September 1, 1939” holds a bar, Europe’s history, the psychology of nations and a personal faith in one argument. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: a gathering of short poems lists more than it integrates, and the family, labour and the natural order are thin.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
It holds more than its scale suggests: a child’s consciousness; the family, in parents who eat and are transformed and know nothing of it; labour, in a whole economy of shifts, wages, bosses and a boiler room; money and appetite, in No-Face; the sacred, in the gods who come to bathe; the natural order, in a polluted river and a buried one; modern Japan, in the ruined theme park. They are integrated through one girl and one building, not listed. What holds the axis lowest: history and the state are nearly absent, and every order passes through a ten-year-old’s perception, which is the film’s genius and its limit. Nothing exceeds her, and the world outside the bathhouse is a train and a cottage.
Middle Byzantine builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure: the sacred cosmos of the dome; the liturgy and its divisions of space; the monastic community; the cult of a local saint, with the pilgrims and the healing it drew; the dead in the crypt; and, through the patronage, the provincial order of the Byzantine state on the mainland after the wars of the tenth century. They are integrated, not listed: the tomb and the dome are joined on one axis, and the community and the pilgrims are sorted by the plan. What holds the axis lowest is what a church of this size does not hold: the city or the empire as a whole, as the great imperial churches do. The natural order of its valley is context, not structure. For a monastic church the figure is high.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred, built as light and height round the altar. Lordship and the state: the bishop of Beauvais was a count and a peer of France, and the height makes his claim. The town and its labour, which paid and quarried for three centuries and could not finish. The natural order, in the light the building is shaped to receive and the wind it has to stand against. History, in the older church standing to the west, in the scars of its falls, and in a fabric that carries three centuries of building in two manners. They are integrated, not listed: the height is at once worship, power and the limit of means. What holds the score lowest is the building’s kind and its truncation: a choir and transept without a nave hold less of a city’s life than a whole cathedral with its west front and portals, and the family and the individual mind are present only as the worshipper’s body in the space.
Clint Eastwood · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, in Little Bill’s law, his ban on guns, his jail and his whip; labour, in the brothel’s trade, Skinny’s ownership of the women, the pig farm and the bounty; the family, in Munny’s dead wife and the children he leaves to fend; history, in the frontier of 1880 and the press making its legends; consciousness, in Munny’s fever and his talk of the dead; the sacred, in his fear of damnation and his wife’s reform of him. One cut face moves the law, the money, the press and the family at once. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is Munny’s and Ned’s, the women are kept at the edges, the town is a few buildings and a dozen people, and the natural order is weather and landscape rather than a world.
Henryk Górecki · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are more than the single affect suggests: the family, as mother and child in all three texts; the sacred, as Mary and as a prayer on a cell wall; history and the state, in the Gestapo, and in Polish history across five centuries in the choice of texts; the people, in a nameless mother’s folk song; death throughout; the natural order, in the flowers asked to bloom over a grave. The archetype holds them in one structure; they are not listed. What holds the axis at 7.8, the lowest of the twelve, is integration and depth: labour, the social and consciousness beyond grief are absent, and history is present as the cause of the wound, not as a world the music holds. It stands above Op. 131 at 7.3 and Winterreise at 7.7 for the history its texts bring.
Kazuo Ishiguro · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
For a short novel told by one narrator it holds many orders, and one condition holds them. Consciousness, in Kathy’s memory and its evasions. Friendship and love, in the triangle of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy across fifteen years. The institution, in Hailsham, its guardians and its curriculum. The body and medicine, in donation, recovery and completion. Class, since the students are an underclass bred for use and know it in their manners. Art, in the Gallery and the question of what art proves. History, in an alternative post-war Britain glimpsed through a scandal and a breakthrough. They are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what the design leaves out: the state that runs the programme and the public that benefits from it are offstage, labour is only caring, the natural order is a flat Norfolk landscape, and the sacred is a question about souls asked once.
Edith Wharton · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
What is held, and held together: consciousness, in Archer’s long inward argument with himself; the family, as the clan that governs marriage, divorce and inheritance; money and the state where they meet, in Beaufort’s crash and the law firm of Letterblair; the condition of women under that law; and history, in the last chapter’s leap into a changed New York of telephones, public life and Theodore Roosevelt. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or thin: labour, except as a servant’s tray; the sacred, except as the church at a wedding; the natural order, except as the sea at Newport and the snow at Skuytercliff; the city beyond its few avenues. This is the scale of the novel of manners, deep and narrow, and the figure records the form rather than charging it.
Mexica · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the cosmos and the sacred, in the central face and the fire serpents; history, in the four ended ages and the present one; time at every scale, the day, the year, the age; the natural order, in jaguar, wind, rain and water as the agents of the ages’ ends and in the animals and plants of the day signs; the state, in a monument made for the imperial centre; and the body, in the hearts. One geometry places each. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, level with The Swerve, is what is absent or present only by implication: consciousness, the family, labour, the person. For a single disc the range is wide, wider than most paintings, but it is held as a scheme rather than lived.
Unknown court painters (Heian period) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are several, integrated by the room: the state, in emperors and retired emperors and rank in every seating; the family, in paternity, marriage and jealousy, as when in Yūgiri Kumoi no Kari creeps up to snatch her husband’s letter; the sacred, in Onna Sannomiya taking the tonsure in Kashiwagi I and the Buddhist rite of Minori; death; art, in music, letters and the reading of pictures; nature, in garden, season and the insects that name Suzumushi; and consciousness, carried through every arrangement. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour except service, no world beyond the court and its retreats, no history but the novel’s. And the fragments now hold a part of the novel’s world, where the whole once held all of it.
Leos Carax · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 115 minutes holds. Consciousness, in one man who may have none of his own left; the family, twice, in the father and Angèle and in the chimpanzee home; labour, the whole film being a working day for an unseen employer, with a dossier, a driver and a fear of retirement; money and power, in the bankers and their bodyguards; death, in Vogan and the cemetery; love, in Jean; the city, from bridge to cemetery to department store; technology, from Marey to motion capture. They are held together through one day. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the state and the social order appear only as an employer without a face, history only as cinema’s history, and the sacred only as a church used for an accordion march.
Alberto Burri · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the earth, as geology and as catastrophe, by the crack; the town as a community, by its plan; the dead, by burial; the household, since each block was houses; the sacred, by shroud and tomb; memory and history, by the act of sealing; the landscape of the Belice, by the field’s lying in it. They are integrated, because one act, casting over the ruins on their plan, touches all of them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that most of these are present as one gesture’s implications rather than held in articulation: no persons, no labour beyond the work’s own, the state and its failures only as context, the life of the town only as its streets. For a single field, a wide reach.
George Miller · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and one road carries them all out and back. The state, in the Citadel’s tyranny and its trade with Gas Town and the Bullet Farm; the economy, in water, gasoline, bullets, milk and blood; religion, in the war boys’ Valhalla and Joe as god-king; the family and reproduction, in the wives, the pregnancy, the mothers; the natural order, in desert, storm, bog and seed; history, in a world remembered only as loss. What holds the axis at the bottom of the twelve: consciousness is kept at the surface, with Max’s flashes of the dead and Nux’s conversion the only interiors; the Citadel’s people are a crowd under the pipes; labour is servitude seen from outside; and the world is drawn as a sign, at a parable’s scale, rather than as a society.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The work holds more orders than most single buildings: the dead and their names; the city, levelled and rebuilt around its line; the state, in a nation’s postwar turn to peace as public creed; history, from the Kofun house form to the atomic age; the sacred, in the cenotaph as tomb and in the annual rite; the natural order, in the rivers and the grown trees that frame the axis; and the world, since the dome addresses the nuclear age as a whole. One line integrates them rather than listing them. What holds the axis lowest is what a building and a park cannot hold: labour, the household and the inner life are thin, and the museum’s interior carries little of the encompassing itself. It is a line through a city, not a city or a cosmos.
Aghlabid builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Six orders are held in one structure. The sacred, in the orientation of the whole toward Mecca and the mihrab. The state, in the emir’s building, the maqsura and the minbar from which the ruler was named. The community, in the rows and the Friday gathering. The natural order, in the court that takes the rain into its cisterns and the sky into the plan. History, in the columns of Roman and Byzantine Africa built into the centre of an Islamic city. Frontier war, in the fortress walls. The plan integrates them, from the court and its water to the qibla. What holds the score lowest: the family, labour and individual consciousness are absent, and the human figure is excluded from the ornament by its law.
John Huston · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure: consciousness, in Dobbs’s reasoning into murder, given from inside; labour, from the unpaid wages of the camp to the digging, the sluice and the year on the mountain; money and value, from a beggar’s peso to gold taken for sand; the state, in the federales and their summary justice; the outlaw band as a rival order; the village, with its own law of obligation and its claim on Howard; the family, present only as Cody’s widow and her orchard in Texas; and the natural order in the mountain itself, wounded and closed up again. They are joined, not listed. What keeps the axis lowest is the frame: three men, a mountain and a road, with the larger orders seen from the trail.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 114 minutes holds. A dying consciousness, with its memory and guilt; the family, living and dead, in one household; labour, in the tamarind farm, the bees and the Lao worker, a migrant in a borderland; the nation and its violence, in the communists killed and the soldiers of the dream; history, in Nabua and the 1960s; the sacred, in rebirth, ghosts, the cave and the monk; the natural order, in buffalo, forest, insects and catfish, held as kin of the human. These are held through Boonmee, not listed. What holds the axis lowest: the state and history enter in a sentence and a set of stills, the city only at the close, and the farm’s labour is a setting more than a subject. The reach is wide in kind and slight in each register.
Evelyn Waugh · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
One of the three lowest of the twelve. The orders held are several, and integrated rather than listed, for each bears on Tony’s ruin. The marriage and the family, in the child’s life and death. Property and inheritance, in Hetton, its upkeep and its passing to cousins. Class and society, in the London set, its money and its idleness. Law, in divorce as procedure. Religion, present as its absence: the vicar, Tony’s churchgoing as habit, the Gothic as a faith in architecture. Empire and the world beyond England, in the forest, the expedition and the sermons for India. What holds the axis there is that consciousness is held from outside, labour hardly enters, and the state and history are present only through their manners: a short novel holding much, not a book of the largest scope.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Held in one structure: the war as history and as an industry of death; three economies of greed; a family, two brothers, their parents’ death and the claim of blood; the Church as the poor man’s other exit; the land as desert and grave; the body under torture and in hunger. They are integrated through the road and the treasure, not listed, and the war is no backdrop, since its armies decide every station. What holds the axis lowest is consciousness, thin by design: the three men are surfaces, and the film’s knowledge of minds stops at faces, which is its method and its limit. The state is seen only as two uniforms and a commandant’s gangrene. Wide for a western, and well held.
Christopher Wren, with Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: the state and the crown, in a royal foundation of palace form and its painted programme of succession; the common man and his labour, the seaman in his old age and his charity; war and sea power, the navy and Nelson lying in state; the sacred, in the Chapel; communal life, in the hall and the dormitories; history, from Webb’s Restoration block to Jones’s house kept in view; and the natural order, the river and the hill held in one prospect. They are integrated by the axis and the twin plan, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: a building’s encompassing is bounded by its form, and the private life of the pensioners is housed rather than held in the structure’s meaning.
Built for King Kashyapa I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Six orders are held. The state: a capital and a fortress. Kingship and its legitimacy. The natural order: rock, water, forest and the rains that fill the cisterns. Labour: the hydraulic works and a palace built on a cliff. The sacred: the mountain as seat, and the monastic life before and after the king. History: a parricide and a lost war, written into the site by its rise and fall. They are integrated rather than listed, since water, defence, pleasure and rule are functions of the same axis and the same rock. What holds the axis lowest on the page is what the building does not carry: consciousness and the family enter only through the chronicle, and the sacred stands as a frame round the royal work more than within its programme.
Robert Smythson (attributed), for Bess of Hardwick · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Orders held: the household in its ranks, from scullery to presence; the family and the dynasty, four marriages and their heirs, a granddaughter near the throne; the state, in rooms fitted for royal reception and the compliment to the Queen in plaster; labour and the economy of an estate, the house raised from its owner’s own stone; the natural order, in the hill, the prospect and the forest of the frieze; and the sacred, in the chapel. One section places them by height, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest: the sacred is a station, not the house’s law; the city is absent; the natural order is a view; and death, the founder’s tomb, is elsewhere, at Derby. A house of a single owner holds one estate, and the figure describes the form.
Alice Munro · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what one book of nine stories holds. Consciousness, in every story, often across the decades of one life. Marriage and family, in nearly every story: courtship by forgery, a long marriage and its betrayals, a sister’s or a cousin’s life seen from beside it. Class, in the housekeeper and the merchant’s family, the well digger’s son and the doctor’s daughter, the newspaper writer and the university. The body, in cancer, ALS and dementia. Sexuality, in adulteries remembered and desired. Art, in the writer’s appropriation. A regional history, the small towns of Ontario from the middle of the century onward. They are integrated, not listed: one law of chance and revision joins them. What holds the axis is what is thin: the state and public life are absent, labour is glimpsed, the sacred is not pursued, and every story is a private life.
Joseph Paxton · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Many orders are held: industry and labour, in the means of making as in the goods shown; commerce and the market; the nations of the world and the empire, set out in their courts and bays; the state, in the Royal Commission and Prince Albert’s project; the natural order, in the trees, the gardens and fountains, and at Sydenham the prehistoric displays in the park; history, in the Fine Arts Courts; class and the crowd, in the shilling days and the excursion trains; leisure as a public order. The frame holds them together in one place, more than most buildings hold. Held below the upper figures because much is contained rather than built into the form: the household, the body, the sacred and death are absent, and the world appears as display.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the abandoned child and the broken family, at the centre of the purpose; the nurses and wet-nurses, the labour of care; the guild, its wealth and its civic standing; the commune, which made charity public; the sacred, in the dedication, the church and the Christian duty to the foundling; the city, in a front given to a square that was built round it; and death, present as the condition the hospital fought, though not on its face. The loggia is the hinge where city and institution meet, so these are integrated through use, not listed. What holds the axis: the natural order is absent, history appears only as antiquity quoted, and much of what is held is held by the institution rather than by built form.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, in the kivas and great kivas; the sky, in the solar and cardinal alignment; the dead, in the burial rooms with the house’s richest goods; labour and economy, in storage, timber, quarrying and the roads that converge on the canyon; the polity, a centre for a region and perhaps a ruling lineage; the land, in cliff, canyon and winter sun. The D holds them together rather than listing them. What holds the axis is that much of the integration is inferred, not shown, and the domestic order, the household and the family, is the uncertain one: the house holds the world of a region, but the record lets that world be seen only in part.
George Orwell · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Many orders, held through one man’s six months. War and the body: the front, the wound, the hospital. The state and the party: the coalition, the police, the prisons, the press. Class: the revolutionary city in which class seemed abolished, and its return. Comradeship and the stranger, in the militia and in the Italian. History, as a war in progress and as a record falsified. Marriage, slightly, in Eileen in Barcelona and in the escape. England at the close. They are integrated through the witness. Absent or thin: the sacred, for the burnt churches are noted and not entered; the family; the inner life beyond the narrator’s honesty; and the Spanish themselves as more than a ground. A record of one corner holds what one corner holds.
Indian builders (Gupta and later) · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Several orders are held, and the plan places them. The sacred: the seat and the image. The individual consciousness: the building exists to mark one mind’s awakening, rare in architecture as a subject. The natural order: a living tree at the heart of the work, and the sun the image faces. History: from Ashoka through the Gupta builders, the Burmese repairs, monastic custody, colonial survey and modern law, legible in the fabric. The state and the nations: many kingdoms’ repairs and the present joint committee. What holds the axis level with the temple’s lowest is the integration, which is partial: these orders are joined by the site more than by the structure, and labour, the family and the body are absent.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
For a two-hour film it holds much in one structure: a single consciousness dying; capital and industry in Dickinson, his metal works and the accountant’s job itself; the state’s violence in bounty and marshal; the destruction of Native nations; Native cultures from the plains to the Pacific coast; poetry and its misreading; the sacred passage of the dead; and the natural order of forest, animal and sea. These are joined through the journey rather than listed. What holds the axis here is what is absent: the family, labour in its daily shape and any social life beyond the encounter. The world is seen in stations, not in duration, and the figure describes that reach.
Miloš Forman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held are several: consciousness, Salieri’s above all, and through him the experience of hearing; the family, with the father’s rule and his death; money and patronage, court appointment and debt; the theatre, from the imperial opera to Schikaneder’s suburban stage; the state, in the Emperor and his censors and the ballet in Figaro; the sacred, in Salieri’s God, the confessor and the mass for the dead. They are integrated through the rivalry rather than listed. What holds the axis among the lowest: the world beyond court and theatre, the city’s people, labour, the politics of the Empire, is decor, and Constanze’s life and the poverty of the household are touched rather than held.
Guillermo del Toro · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 118 minutes holds. A child’s consciousness and its imagination; the family, in the dead father, the remarried mother, the pregnancy and the stepfather who wants only the son; the state and the army of a dictatorship in its first years; the war’s afterlife in the hills; the Church at the captain’s table; the sacred and the underworld; the natural order of tree, root and toad; the history of Spain. These are integrated, routed through the girl and the house. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the scale is one house, one valley and a few days; the village and the ration lines beyond the mill are glimpsed; and the history is carried by one captain more than by a society.
Lee Chang-dong · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of 148 minutes holds. Consciousness, in Jong-su, held close and unreadable; the family, in a father on trial, a mother who left and returns, Hae-mi’s estranged mother and sister; labour, in delivery work, street promotion, a dying farm and a calf; class, in Gangnam and Paju; the state and the nation, in a courtroom and in the loudspeakers of the North across the border fields; gender, in a woman passed between two men’s stories; the natural order, in fields, greenhouses, sunsets and snow; the sacred, as the Great Hunger. Rage, class and desire are one movement. What holds it at its figure: almost everything routes through one consciousness, Hae-mi’s interior is withheld by design, a cost the film knows and still pays, and history and the state are heard as noise rather than entered.
Wilkie Collins · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. Marriage and its law; money and inheritance; class in the country house, from the master and the solicitor to the drawing master and the servants; the madhouse and the medical certificate; a woman’s mind under constraint; illegitimacy and the parish register; and a thread of foreign politics in Fosco and Pesca. They are joined by one plot: the law of property drives the marriage, the marriage drives the asylum, the asylum drives the erasure. What holds the axis where it is: the book does not hold history, the sacred, labour, or the natural order beyond its settings. Its world is the propertied household and the processes that guard it.
Juan O'Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martínez de Velasco · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
For a building, the reach is wide. It holds cosmology, the Mexica heavens and the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems; the sacred, in the gods and the church; the state and its arms; conquest, labour and industry; science; the university as an institution; and the land itself, since the stones are the country’s own material gathered from its regions. It holds them in one structure, the four faces of one tower, ordered by time, and the working library inside, the knowledge it encloses answering the history on its face, adds an order most murals lack. Consciousness and the family are scarcely present, and the orders are held as programme more than as lived experience: the integration is iconographic.
Raymond Chandler · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. The very rich and their control of press and police; the police and the jail; organised crime from Las Vegas; the publishing trade and the writer’s work; medicine as a racket; marriage, divorce and adultery; alcoholism in two forms; the war remembered, in the commando, the foxhole and a face rebuilt by surgeons; class between Idle Valley and a one-room office; and Mexico as the place where Americans go to vanish. They are joined through two households and one friendship. What holds the axis where it is: no consciousness beyond Marlowe’s, since every other person is seen from outside; no sacred order; no labour beyond the professions; and no history of the city beneath its moneyed surface.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held: the state, in its parliament and its working building; the people, on the route above the chamber and named on the portico; history, from empire through Weimar, the fire, the war and the division to reunification, kept in the fabric; the city, opened in panorama from the dome with the line of the Wall at its back; the natural order, in daylight brought down to the chamber, air drawn up and the sun tracked; and the citizen, climbing alone among others. The section places the people over the state and history in the walls, so these are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the sacred, except as the shadow of a dome; the family; labour, except the labour of government; and the body beyond the climb.
John Ruskin · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held are several and are integrated in one consciousness, not listed. The family, in the parents, drawn as one of the great double portraits of Victorian prose. Religion, in the evangelical childhood, the Bible as education and the loss of faith. Art and the formation of taste. The natural order of Alps, rivers, stones and plants. Class and commerce, in a wine merchant’s son at Christ Church. Europe as the English middle class travelled it. What holds the axis there is what is not held: marriage and sexuality are withheld, the labouring world and the state that occupied Ruskin’s later life are barely entered, and the madness that frames the writing is unspoken. A wide book about one man’s seeing, not a world.
Timurid and Ashtarkhanid builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held: learning, in the colleges; the sacred, in the mosques, the qibla and the script; the state, in the ruler’s emblem on Sher-Dor, the patrons’ names and the square as the place of proclamation; commerce, for the square began as a market and the bazaar is beside it; the city as a civic body, gathered in the open space; and the heavens, in the star geometry and the solar emblem. The plan places these in one figure, school and mosque round the public room, so they are integrated, not listed. Absent or slight: the household and the family, labour except as the craft of the surfaces, the natural order beyond the solar figure, and death, since no tomb belongs to the work. The figure describes a civic and religious form.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Many orders are held. The sacred: a church and its chapels. The state: the lordship of Rimini, its arms, its name on the frieze, its war. Death and fame: the tombs of the lord, of Isotta and of the court’s learned men, laid in public. Learning: the liberal arts in the chapels, the poets and philosophers in the flank. The cosmos: the planets and the zodiac over the city. Love: a mistress, later a wife, honoured in her own chapel by inscription. History: Rome recalled from the arch in the same town, Greece in Plethon’s bones. They are integrated in part, by one programme of glory that sets each order round the patron. What holds the axis is that the integration is a programme, not a structure; labour, the common life of the town and the friars are present only as what the shell covers.
Byzantine, under Justinian · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the theophany, the Transfiguration, the liturgy. The state: Justinian’s frontier, the garrison, imperial patronage written on the roof. History: the biblical past of the mountain carried into Byzantine, then Islamic and Ottoman times, all present in the fabric. The religious other: the mosque within the walls. Labour and the community: a monastery that had to feed and defend itself in the desert, with its cells, storerooms and hoist. The natural order: the valley, the granite, the mountain above. They are joined in the enclosure’s single purpose. What holds the figure is that the building gathers more than it composes: much is present by accretion, and the founding work holds the sacred and the imperial in one form more securely than it holds the rest.
Mughal, under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: the sacred, in the qibla and the Friday prayer; the state, in the emperor’s gate and the axis to the palace; the city, in a capital’s congregation and its gathering ground; the market, on the stairs and in the streets at their foot; and, by the building’s afterlife, history, in 1857, the office of the Shahi Imam and the mosque’s place in the politics of independent India. The platform and the axis integrate them; they are not listed. The natural order and the single consciousness are less present than in the greatest religious buildings: no programme of light or built cosmology governs the hall, and the person is held chiefly as one of the congregation.
Roman, under Caracalla · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and one plan places them. The body, washed, heated and exercised. The state, as giver of the gift and in the emperor’s name. The city, gathered into one precinct. Labour, in the slaves and the furnaces, placed by the section beneath the leisure they served. The natural order, in water brought from the hills and the sun turned into heat. Learning, in the libraries; worship, in the Mithraeum in the galleries; and in the ruin, history, the empire’s fall. They are integrated in the section as well as the plan, leisure above and labour below. What holds the axis: the household and death are absent, the sacred is at the margin, and the libraries and the Mithraeum stand beside what the building is rather than within it.
Bram Stoker · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Many orders, joined by one invasion. Consciousness, in Harker’s terror and in Mina’s divided self under the Count’s hold on her mind. Marriage and the family: two engagements, a wedding at a hospital bedside, and a child named for the band in the Note. Sexuality and its policing, in Lucy’s three suitors and her death. Medicine, in the transfusions, the asylum and Renfield’s eating of living things, with Charcot and hypnotism named. Law and property, in the conveyancing that brings the Count to Carfax. Technology and the press. Religion, in the Host and the crucifix. Empire, history and the East, in the Count’s account of his race and the Szekely wars. The sea, in the Demeter. They are integrated: each is a front of the invasion. Held below eight because labour and the state appear only as servants, carriers and a passing police, the poor are comic, and the inner life of most characters is thin.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a comedy of about 125 minutes holds, and it holds many orders, most of them integrated. The state and its machine (the palace, the propaganda ministry, the army, the invasion), international politics (two dictators bargaining over a small neighbour), the persecution of a people, the life of a street and its shops, the war past and the war coming, a love story, and at the end an address to humankind and its future, all hang on the one structure of the double. Labour is present in the barber’s trade; faith only in passing, for the ghetto is Jewish in name and scarcely in practice; consciousness hardly at all, since the film knows its people from outside. The outline drawing of the ghetto and the speech’s turn to the general, which enlarges the claim more than it integrates it, hold the axis where it is.
Elena Ferrante · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Many orders are held, and integrated rather than listed. Consciousness, in Elena’s envy and self-doubt. The family, in the Grecos, the Cerullos and the rest, set out in the cast list. Labour, in the cobbler’s shop, the grocery and the pastry shop, and in the black market and moneylending behind Don Achille’s money. Schooling, sex and marriage. The postwar history of the quarter: fascism and the Camorra in the money of the Carraccis and the Solaras, the communism of Peluso and Pasquale. Held in the high sevens because the state and the sacred are faint, and the city beyond the quarter is seen only in glimpses: the road toward the sea, Ischia, the centre of Naples. This is one volume of four.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders are many, and the year integrates them: the family at Titta’s table, with the father’s rages and the mother’s death; the Church in the confessional; the state in the rally, the federale, the police interrogation and the castor oil; the school; sexuality as the town’s continuous preoccupation; the natural order in the seasons, the sea, the fog and the snow; history in the 1930s, the Rex as national pride and Fascism as civic theatre; and madness in Teo. Each passes through the same square. What holds the axis down is the depth of the holding: consciousness stays at the surface of caricature, Titta’s included; labour appears only at the edges; the sacred is institution and rite, the calendar apart; and the world beyond the town arrives only as spectacle passing through.
Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The state, in the housing policy that made the estate and the police who tax it. The economy, in the drug trade as a business with suppliers, territories, payroll and succession. The family, in brothers, a father and a son, a boy’s revenge. Childhood, as the trade’s labour force. History, in twenty years of one place. The press, in the newspaper that prints Zé’s picture and gives Rocket a way out. Consciousness, in Rocket’s narration. The plot joins them: Otto’s revenge and the Runts’ rise are the economy and the family in one act. What holds the axis: the sacred is present only in the name, women stand at the edge, consciousness is Rocket’s alone and only its surface, and the city beyond the estate, which made it and buys from it, is barely seen.
Hannah Höch · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
How many orders of reality are held in one structure? For a single sheet, many. The state, in rulers, generals and the Republic’s leaders. War, in the soldiers of 1914 to 1918. Revolution, in its leaders and its crowds. Science, among the faces of the day; industry and technology, in the wheels and machine parts. The body and performance, in the dancers. The sexes and the vote. The press and mass culture, as the very material. Art and its movement, in the Dadaists. And the self, in the maker’s small face. One act, the cut, integrates them on one plane where they act on each other. What holds the axis below the eight is what lies outside: no nature, no sacred order, little of the family or of labour as lived.
U2 · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for being an album. Consciousness, a middle-aged interior counting what it keeps, is held throughout. The family is held in Kite, parent and child at both ends of a life; friendship and death in Stuck in a Moment. The political order enters twice in particulars: a Burmese prisoner of conscience in Walk On, and in Peace on Earth the Omagh bombing, by its dead. The sacred is the frame, from the opener’s flood to Grace. The city appears in New York. One idea, what survives loss, makes the joins, and they are real. What holds the figure: labour, history beyond the two political songs and the body beyond love are absent or glimpsed, and several orders appear in one song each.
Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Six orders, held. The state and the sovereign: the throne rooms, the ceremonial way, the facade as public face. The sacred: the Great Church, the cupola on the roof, the blessing of the waters for which the river entrance is named. The dynasty and the household: the private apartments of successive rulers. Labour and service: a whole court housed in the service storey and the courts. History and war: the Military Gallery of 1812 and the Field Marshals’ Hall. The city and the river: fronts made to answer square and Neva. One structure, the closed quadrangle and its ceremonial way, places each, so they are integrated more than listed. Absent or weak: the natural order beyond the river, death, and the individual consciousness.
Franz Schubert · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The orders the work holds are held together by its one law, not listed: consciousness; the natural order, as the whole surface, snow, ice, river, crow, leaf and storm; the social, at the edge and sharp, in the rich bride, the sleeping village, the beggar no one hears; the sacred, as absence, in a God who made love to wander and may not be; labour, in glimpses, the charcoal-burner and the hurdy-gurdy as a trade; mortality, built as the inverted quest. What holds the axis here is absence: the state, history and the family, a mother who spoke of marriage in one line, do not appear. One voice holds one mind, the weather and people seen from outside; the figure says how many orders that is.
Jean Racine · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on what a single tragedy holds, and it holds more than its size suggests. Consciousness, at the highest pitch. The family: a father, a son, a stepmother, a nurse who is a second mother, the dead mother and sister present in speech. The state: the succession of Athens is a live question in the first two acts, with Phèdre’s son, Hippolyte and Aricie, heir of the Pallantides, as claimants, and Thésée returns as a king. The sacred: Venus, Neptune, the Sun and Minos, the oath and the curse. The natural order: the forests Phèdre longs for, the horses, the sea. They are integrated through one house and one day. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, the people, history and the world beyond the palace are absent, and the state is a question of inheritance, not of governing.
Caravaggio · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
For one canvas, many orders are held: the sacred, entering; money and labour, in the counting table and Matthew’s trade as a collector of tax; the state behind the trade, since the tax is the occupier’s; the street and its social world, armed young men, a boy and an old man in a room of the Roman present; consciousness, in recognition dawning, attention turning and inattention persisting; youth and age at one bench. The light passes over each in turn, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is absence: no family, no natural order, no history beyond the instant, no city outside the window. A single canvas of one moment cannot hold what a vault or a poem holds.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body and sexuality; commerce, in the price implied by flowers, jewellery and name; class, in a courtesan’s room furnished for clients; race and labour, a Black woman in service to a white one, both working; consciousness, in the look that appraises; the animal, in the cat; and art, the museum nude and its history set on the bed to be undone. The composition and the transaction integrate them, binding each element to the client who is not shown. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no nature beyond cut flowers, no sacred but a goddess emptied, no state, no history, no family. One room, one instant, three creatures, and a world of exchange implied beyond the frame. It holds more than a field with no figure and less than a court. The figure describes the form.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders the film holds are integrated through one life. The body, trained, damaged and swollen, is the calendar of the second half. The family, two marriages and the brothers, is the centre. Labour is boxing as a trade; institutions enter through the mob’s hold on the sport, in Tommy Como and the Fox fight; the neighbourhood through its code of honour and possession; celebrity through the nightclub act; the law through the cell; the sacred through the imagery, named only in the epigraph. What keeps the axis lowest is what is absent or withheld: history, since the war passes off screen; the state; the natural order; and consciousness, which the film declines to open. One life, held with great density and small reach.
Chantal Akerman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and they are fused: labour, domestic and sexual, as one economy; the family, in a widow, a son, a sister abroad and a dead husband spoken of; money, in the tureen and the counting; sexuality, as the order’s excluded term; the body, in its daily care. They are held in one figure and one routine, and none is merely listed. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is reached by exclusion, never entered; history is present only in what Akerman said behind the film, not in it; the state, the sacred and the natural order are absent, and the city is a few shop counters. The form chose its narrowness, and it holds three or four orders completely, not seven; that completeness lifts the figure, and no further.
Flannery O'Connor · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what the book holds, as a book of stories, and not marked down for being short beyond what it holds. Consciousness: the self-deceiving mind, rendered from inside. The family: a grandmother, her son and his children, mothers and daughters, and fathers absent. Labour and land: the farm as an economy in “The Displaced Person” and “A Circle in the Fire”, its hired hands and tenants, the white widow who owns it and those who depend on her. Race and class, as the order of the South, seen from the white side. History: the war in Europe and its refugees, and the Confederacy as a museum piece. The sacred, everywhere and load-bearing; the natural order, in woods, rivers, fire and sun. One law integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is missing: the state is absent, the city appears once, and the world beyond the rural South enters only as Mr. Guizac.
David Lynch · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
A two-hour film holds four orders in one structure, each built in rather than merely present. Consciousness and sexuality, the adolescent’s discovery of desire and violence, at the centre. The family: two households, a father struck down and restored, a mother and child held hostage. The town and its order: the police, who are the plot’s hinge and the seat of its corruption. The natural order, insects under the lawn and robins above it, as the frame. The father’s stroke opens the descent. What holds the axis lowest is what is only touched: the lumber trade is a radio jingle and a truck, the sacred an organ and a dream, and history is not lived in, the time deliberately unstated.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, one young man’s. Desire and the couple are held in Thunder Road, She’s the One and Jungleland; friendship and its betrayal in Backstreets. Labour is present as the trap, the working week Night runs from. The city is held, with the shore towns and the highway; the machine is the car, salvation and suicide at once; crime is held in Meeting and Jungleland, and death at Jungleland’s close. The sacred appears as image. One consciousness and one law join these orders, each a form of the trap or the way out. What holds the figure: the family is nearly absent, the state appears only as police and a dead end, and history and the natural order are missing.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure: crime as a trade, with its tribute, its fences and its bookkeeping; the family, in Karen’s marriage and the dinner at Tommy’s mother’s with a body in the trunk outside; class, in a boy from East New York who wants never to wait in line; consumption, the suits, the furs, the Copa table; the neighbourhood as a state within the state; the prison as a continuation of the life. They are integrated, since every acquisition is paid for by a crime. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the state proper appears only as detectives and a courtroom, never as the city the mob lives off; the sacred is a wedding and a Christmas; history outside the neighbourhood is a soundtrack. It is a chronicle of one crew.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Several orders are held, and integrated by the pyramid and the axis rather than listed. The sacred, at the centre. The natural order, in the turning seasons and the dawn. The state, in the soldiers set to guard the tomb and in the painting’s own place, the council hall of a town named for the Sepulchre. The body, a wounded god and four sleeping men. Death, in the tomb. Consciousness, as its opposed pair, waking and sleep; and art, if a tradition that cannot be verified is right that the painter sleeps among the guards. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: no labour, no family, no history beyond the one event, no society beyond guards and god. The figure describes the form.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Much of a state is held in one structure. The administration in its departments: the courts, the charities and the hospital, the schools, the post, the police. Commerce, in the merchants who bring sugar loaves and complaints. The poor, in the locksmith’s wife whose husband was taken for a soldier and the sergeant’s widow who was flogged. The family, in the Mayor’s wife and daughter and their rivalry. The capital, imagined and longed for as a place of generals and balls. The orders present are integrated, each a branch of one machine that the false inspector works in turn. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the play leaves out: religion is present only as hypocrisy and the Judge’s borrowed atheism; consciousness is shown from outside, as fear and vanity; history and the natural order hardly enter. It is the provincial state in cross section, not a world.
Mikhail Lermontov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short novel holds, and it holds more than its length suggests, integrated rather than listed. Consciousness: a single one, at full depth. The state and history: the empire’s war in the Caucasus and the peoples it subjects, Circassians, Chechens, Cossacks, the Ossetes on the road, seen from the officer’s saddle. Society, at the spas. Love in three forms, in Bela, Vera and Mary. The metaphysics of fate and will. And the generation the preface names. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the book does not hold: the family as a living order, labour, the state as anything but posting and rank, and the sacred except as a question. It is not punished for being short; what it encompasses is weighed as it is, and it is less than the great Russian novels it opened the way for.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one field: the natural order and the cosmos, in sun, storm and sea; commerce and the state, in a trade and an insurance law that the poem’s “market” names; the body, in chains and fragments; history, in a case of 1781 shown in 1840, a year of abolition; the sacred, as judgment by storm; and the watcher’s consciousness, made the subject by the order in which the image is seen. One light integrates them. What holds the axis lowest is what is present only by implication: no family, no labour seen except as cargo, no persons with faces, no community; the trade’s whole apparatus is a ship at a distance. It is a single scene, and the figure describes the form.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Five or six orders are held and placed by one structure. The sacred: the sacrament on the axis, the vision at the centre. The body: fourteen helpers invoked against illness, childbirth and death, so that the shrine holds human need in its bodily forms. The common life: a shepherd’s vision, the pilgrims, the people of the region coming in need. The natural order: the slope, the valley of the Main, the light, the answer to Banz across the water. The institution, an abbey’s commission and a prince-bishop’s choice, is present only in the history, and history only as legend. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the state, labour beyond the shepherd, the family except through childbirth, consciousness except as devotion.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: the law, in a sheriff’s office, a courthouse and newspaper stories read aloud; history, in the border and the drugs crossing it, and in Ellis’s uncle shot in 1909; marriage, in Ed Tom and Loretta at their table and Moss and Carla Jean in the trailer, shown from inside; the natural order, in the antelope, the desert and the dog; and the sacred, once, in the fire carried in a horn. Integrated: Ellis’s story and Ed Tom’s dreams are one argument. What holds the axis here is absence: labour is thin, a welder who never welds; the family beyond marriage is a mother who dies between scenes; the state is a county sheriff and men in suits; consciousness is given from outside, in faces. A wide country in a few hands.
Christopher Marlowe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short play holds. Consciousness, fully and in time: a mind’s desire, doubt, despair and terror. The sacred, as its centre: God, Christ’s blood, mercy, the devil, heaven’s loss. Learning: the university and its disciplines, the scholars, the books, the astronomy of the spheres. Antiquity: Helen, Troy, Alexander, Ovid. The cosmos itself, in the dispute on the spheres and the Chorus’s flight to view the heavens. Power: the Pope, the Emperor, a duke’s court. Class and service: Wagner, the clowns, the horse-courser, the vintner. One transaction integrates them, since everything in the play is something the bond can buy. What holds the axis down: the family is absent, labour slight, and power and class are held as farce more than as worlds, so that the state is a stage for tricks.
George Orwell · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short fable holds. The state is present in nearly all its apparatus: police, propaganda, law, foreign policy, war, planning and the cult of the leader. Labour is in the harvest, the quarry and the windmill; class appears as species; religion in Moses and Sugarcandy Mountain; literacy as the root of power; history and its falsification; the natural order in the seasons and the animals’ bodies, Boxer’s split hoof and failing lungs. They are integrated, not listed: the windmill alone binds labour, technology, propaganda and war. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is scale and vantage: the orders are held as a model rather than lived, consciousness is drawn from outside, the family appears only as the puppies taken from their mothers, and no single life is given its full inward weight. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
J. D. Salinger · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as a short novel told by one boy. Consciousness, fully, a mind in breakdown. The family, in the dead brother, the sister, the brother in Hollywood and the parents just offstage. School and class, in the prep school and the money behind it. Sexuality, in his fears, Sunny and the pimp, and Jane. Death, in Allie, James Castle and the mummies. Art and its corruption, in D.B. and the films Holden hates and watches. The sacred, glancingly, in the nuns and his talk of Jesus and the disciples. War, in D.B.’s service and Holden’s remark that he is glad the atomic bomb was invented. They are integrated, not listed: each is a field of the same refusal to fall. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the vantage and the count: labour, the state, history and the natural order are absent or glimpsed, and every order is seen through one sixteen-year-old’s eyes over three days. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Held in one structure: consciousness, Gillis’s from inside and Norma’s from without; the industry as labour, the writer as hired hand, the repossession men, the electrician, the producer’s office; money and the sale of a man; age and gender in a trade that uses women’s faces; the history of a medium from silence to sound, embodied by its survivors. They are integrated: the kept man’s debt, the studio’s indifference and the star’s delusion are one economy. What holds the axis lowest is the narrowness of the world: one town, one trade, one house. The family is absent but for Max’s marriage; the state appears only as police; the sacred as Salome and a pet’s coffin; the natural order as a swimming pool. A wide trade held whole, inside a small world.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 107 minutes holds. Labour and commerce are held fully, in the insurance company, its salesmen, its claims department and its tables; marriage, in a loveless one and the affair that destroys it; the family, in a stepdaughter and a dead first wife; the law, in the claims process more than the police; friendship between men, the film’s real centre; death, counted by actuaries. Consciousness is Neff’s, through his voice, and Phyllis’s is withheld by design. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that every order runs through one man’s crime and one office: the city is a set of locations, the war that was being fought as the film was made is absent, history and the sacred do not enter, and the social world is held as a mechanism rather than as a society.
Marilynne Robinson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short novel holds. Consciousness, fully, in Ruth’s voice. The family across three generations of women and the men who died or left them. The town as society: the school, the church women, the sheriff and the court that moves for custody. The natural order, held at length: the lake, the flood, the cold, the mountains and the forests. The sacred, in Ruth’s meditations and the book’s scriptural frame. These are integrated, through the house and the water. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the narrow social field: history is thin, the railroad and the town glimpsed and the country beyond Fingerbone almost absent; labour is barely present, no one in the present working except at keeping house; and the state appears only as the sheriff and the court. The figure describes the form.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as a novella, which the form bounds. For its size it holds many orders, and the town holds them together. The family, in the Vicarios, the Nasars and the narrator’s kin. Class and money, in Bayardo’s wealth, the Vicarios’ poverty and Santiago’s inheritance. Ethnicity, in the Arab community. Sexuality and the body, in virginity, the brothel of María Alejandrina Cervantes and the autopsy. The sacred, in the bishop and the parish priest. The state and the law, in the mayor, the trial and the brief of the case. Memory and time, in the narrator’s return; labour, in the twins’ trade. They are integrated, not listed: each is a channel through which the killing passes. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the vantage: one town over one day, history and the nation only glimpsed, the natural order present only as weather, and no consciousness entered at length.
Giacomo Puccini · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, in love, jealousy and the fear under it; the couple, twice over and in contrast; friendship, the society of four men; labour and money, in the artists’ work (a manuscript burnt, Schaunard’s paid engagement), rent, debt and things sold for medicine; the city, in the Latin Quarter crowd and the customs post; the natural order, in the seasons and the cold; illness and death. They are integrated: money decides the love story and the death. What holds the axis at its figure, the lowest of the twelve, is what the work leaves out. The family is absent, the state appears only as a customs barrier, history only as a period setting, and the sacred only in Musetta’s prayer. It is a work of one quarter, one winter and one circle.
Ovid · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a book of exile elegies holds. The state and its sovereign, as absolute power over one man. Law, in the distinction the book draws between relegation and exile (2.137). Marriage, in the poems to the wife. Friendship and its failure. Literature, its history and its licence, in Book 2. Language itself, its loss and its replacement. A people at the edge of the empire, their dress, weapons and speech; a natural order of frozen rivers and treeless plain. One man’s life, in 4.10. These are held together by the single situation, which is the book’s strength and its limit: everything is seen from one window, the family is one wife and an absent daughter (4.10.75), and the sacred is Caesar as god. Much for an elegiac collection; one order of experience, seen widely.
Giulio Romano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Orders held: the household and its pleasures, love and the body in Psyche’s room and its banquet; the economy of the court, in the stud farm the house began as and the horses portrayed by name; the state and its allegiances, in the emperor’s reception and the homage of the giants; the cosmos, Olympus and the fall of the rebels; the natural order of island, water, garden and grotto; antiquity and its language. One patron’s life and one idea of leisure as power integrate them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, except as horses; the sacred, except as the gods of a game; the city, except as what the island stands apart from; death, except the giants’. More than a house of retirement holds, less than a palace of state; the figure describes the form.
Buscheto and Rainaldo · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Several orders are held together. The sacred: a cathedral and its rite. The state: a commune’s statement of its power and independence. War and trade: the Palermo spoils and the Mediterranean sources of the forms. History: the inscriptions of victory, and the classical spoils carrying Rome into the church. Death and memory: the founder’s tomb in the façade. Nature and labour enter only through the material, the stone of distant quarries and islands. What holds the axis lowest is how the orders are carried: some of them, the city’s victories and its dead, are carried by inscriptions and a tomb rather than by the architecture, and the church holds no whole cosmology in sculpture and glass as the greatest cathedrals do.
Jean-François Millet · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held in one field: labour, as the whole content of foreground and distance; the social order, in the gap between those who harvest and those who glean, and in the rider who keeps it; the economy of the land, plenty and its leavings; the natural order, earth, season and light; the body, three times; and the sacred, recessive, in Ruth’s field behind the stubble. One structure of near and far integrates them. What holds the axis lowest is what is withheld: no family, no history beyond the season, the state only as a man on a horse, and no consciousness, since the faces are turned away and no woman can be said to think. That withholding is the meaning, and the figure describes the form.
Workshops of Qin Shi Huang · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are several, and the formation integrates them. The state: the army is the state’s instrument and its picture. Labour: the workshops and the conscript labour of the mausoleum are present in the made thing, in its standard parts and its finishing hands. War: the order of battle of the army that unified the country. Death and the sacred: the host serves a dead king in an afterlife that requires an army. The person: the face in the standard body. Rank, from general to infantryman, and the animal, in the horses. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no women, no labour of the field, no natural order beyond the horse, nothing of the peoples the army conquered. A form that holds one institution entire holds less of the world than one that holds a household or a cosmos.
Claire Denis · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a ninety-minute film holds. The military institution, its hierarchy and rites; one consciousness, Galoup’s, held in depth with its desire, envy and shame; the colonial order after independence, in a French force on Djiboutian ground and in the women, herders and traders who live around it; labour, in drill and in work done for no purpose; the natural order, in a landscape that dominates and nearly kills; the body, which is the film’s medium as well as its subject. They are held in one structure through Galoup’s memory. What holds the axis lowest is what is thin or absent: the family is an absence, unless the Legion stands for it; the state is a distant authority that discharges a man; the sacred is a borrowed pattern only; and the Djiboutians are seen, not entered.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
How many orders are held in one structure. The sacred: several cults, Athena of the city with her ancient image, Poseidon, Erechtheus, the altars Pausanias names. The state: the city’s oldest house of its patron, rebuilt in wartime as an act of the assembly. Lineage: the earth-born kings, Kekrops and Erechtheus, the city’s descent from its soil. Death: the tomb of Kekrops. The natural order: the rock, the olive, the marks of the sea god. The plan integrates them, placing each where the ground gives it. What holds the axis lowest: the family enters only in myth, labour is in the accounts and not in the building, consciousness and the common life are absent, the festival lies outside the unit, and the interior where these orders met is lost. The figure describes the form.
The Flaming Lips · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, in its frailty and its dying. Friendship and the household are held: friends nearly lost, groceries put away. The body is held as illness and injury. Science is present as labour against death in Race for the Prize, and the natural order and the cosmos as the record’s horizon, the light and the origin of the universe; the sacred is raised by the question of the light. One tender law and one voice join them. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve: the state, history and labour beyond the laboratory are absent, and most orders appear as a single image rather than as a structure held together.
Orson Welles · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a crime film of about 111 minutes holds. The orders are many and held in one structure: the state, in two jurisdictions, a district attorney, police on both sides and the politics of a narcotics case; the law and its corruption; race and the border, in contempt, in a marriage across it and in a town living off crossing; the family, in a marriage tested by a husband’s crusade and a crime family’s revenge; crime and its trade; consciousness, in Quinlan’s grief, drink and pride; history, in a dead wife, an unpunished murder and Tana’s memory of the man he was; industry, in the derricks of the last scene. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the town’s people are glimpsed, labour and the sacred are absent, Susan’s consciousness is a victim’s, and the Mexican side of the border is drawn from the American.
Michael Haneke · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 117 minutes holds. Georges’s consciousness, in denial, seen from outside; the marriage and its trust; Pierrot, at an age to judge his parents; the aged mother and the farm, a rural France of the past; labour, in television and publishing; class and space, the book-lined house against the suburban flat; the state, in the police of 1961 and of the arrest; history, the Algerian war in Paris; the wider world, in the news on the television. They are integrated: the national past and the family secret are one lie, and the arrest is the state used again by the same man. What holds the axis: the world news runs as a frame, not a held order; the sacred and the natural order are absent; Majid’s life and his son’s are seen only at their thresholds.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Labour is held fully: the road gang, the lost job and the carwash of Downbound Train, the closing mill. The state and history are present in Vietnam and the veterans’ hospital of the title track, and in the racial violence of 1965 and the economy of My Hometown. The family is held in its father and son and in the failed marriages of Downbound Train and Glory Days; friendship in Bobby Jean and No Surrender; desire in I’m on Fire and Dancing in the Dark. One condition joins them: work is the hinge on which family, town and country turn. What holds the figure: most orders arrive song by song, and the sacred and the natural order are hardly present.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Several orders are held, some integrated and some only present. The soldier’s body and consciousness under fire; the squad as a small society, with its law, its mutiny and its forms of command; the state, which counts its dead by typewriter and decides at the top to save one; the family, a mother and four sons, and in the frame the generations who stand behind the old man; history and its memory, the war made into what is owed. The mission joins them, running from a general’s desk to a farmhouse to a bridge. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve: the enemy is seen as one man and otherwise as uniforms and tanks; the French are a family on a wall and a gramophone; and the sacred is invoked through prayer and the cemetery without being held.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of 132 minutes holds. The state, in the police, the riot squads, the civil defence drill and the demonstrations; the rural community, in its fields, bars and gossip; labour, in the factory, the farm and the town’s work; the natural order, in field, rain and quarry; history, in 1986 and 1987 and in the coda of 2003; and consciousness, in Park and Seo. The plot integrates them: the drill, the protests and the murders are one night’s failure. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the family is thin, Park’s girlfriend a side and Seo with none; the victims are given almost no lives; the sacred appears only as a shaman’s charm played for comedy; and consciousness belongs to the two detectives alone, with the town around them a chorus.
Henry Bacon · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The state: the Union as a sum of states, built into the colonnade. History: the war and its end, in the two carved speeches. Death and memory: a shrine to a murdered man. The sacred, as a civil sacred. And, through the carved Second Inaugural, slavery and judgement, held in words on the wall rather than in the form. The state, history and memory are integrated, held by one figure. The household, labour and the natural order are absent, apart from the water before it. Much of what the building holds it holds in its inscriptions and its later use rather than in its architecture.
Lauryn Hill · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as a self being educated. The couple is held from many sides: desire, betrayal, the lover who stays and the one who leaves. The family is held: a mother and her child in To Zion, a girlhood in Every Ghetto, Every City. The city, Newark and the ghetto in general, is held in that song and glimpsed in Everything Is Everything. Commerce enters as the music industry in Lost Ones and Superstar. The sacred is held, in Final Hour, Forgive Them Father and the coda’s prayer. Education and Black history are named, through the title’s echo of Carter G. Woodson, but held by the title and the frame, not by the songs. One voice joins them all. The state and the natural order are absent, history is glimpsed more than held, and several of these orders are touched in a single song rather than sustained: a wide reach for one voice, and a narrower world than the largest records hold.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what a novella can hold, and it holds more than its length. History, compressed: the railroad and its labour gangs, the violence against the Chinese, the logging of the old forests, the fire, and the twentieth century arriving. Labour, at the centre: railroad work, logging, hauling, a body’s life spent working. The family, in its making and its loss. The natural order: forest, fire, wolves, seasons. The sacred, as the uncanny: ghosts, the curse, the wolf-girl and Grainier’s half-belief. The native peoples and the Chinese, at the edges of the white West. They are integrated, not listed: each passes through one life. What holds the axis is the form and the vantage: consciousness is held thin by design, the state and society are glimpsed, and a century is given in outline. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders are several, and the crowd and the self join them: the writer’s consciousness and vocation; religion as cult; the household, Bill, Scott and Karen as a strange family, with Karen’s parents in the stands; the city and its homeless; international politics as terror and hostage-taking; the image economy and its art, Warhol and the photograph; history in the face of Mao. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is that several are present as reference more than as held reality: Beirut is seen briefly and late, politics appears as theory spoken by Haddad, and labour, class and the state as an institution are absent. The scale is a short novel’s: four persons and a few cities.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 166 minutes holds. Consciousness, in Paul’s prescience and its terror; the family, in a mother’s ambition, a dead father, an unborn sister and a grandfather revealed as the enemy; a colonised people, the Fremen, with their water discipline and their factions; empire and the state, in the Emperor and the Great Houses; religion as faith, institution and instrument; the economy of the spice; the natural order of desert and worm; history as a long breeding plan and a coming war. They are integrated: the prophecy binds the family, the religion and the war. What holds the axis: the Fremen are shown mostly in crowds rather than from within, the novel’s ecology is reduced nearly to setting, the spice economy is stated rather than shown, and the Empire’s politics stay largely offscreen.
Hakka builders (Jiang clan) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: the family, in the household’s column of rooms; the lineage, as the ring of households; the dead and the sacred, in the hall at the centre; labour, in the stores and in the fields the wall turns from; defence and the absence of the state, in the blind wall and single gate of a country where the clan kept its own peace; the natural order, faintly, in the soil of the wall, the climate and the siting. The plan places them at measured distances from one centre, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis is what lies beyond the lineage: the state, trade, the individual consciousness, the outsider, and history beyond the clan’s own generations.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 130 minutes holds. Consciousness: Ellis’s, fully, and Mud’s through his stories. The family: two parents parting, a mother’s wish for town, a father’s bitterness, Neckbone’s uncle as a second home. Love and sex: three or four couples, from May Pearl to Juniper, all failing. Labour and class: a living drawn from the river, scavenged engine parts, a way of life on the water ending. The state and the law: the police, bounty hunters, a killing the courts have not punished. The natural order: the river, the flood that placed the boat, the snakes. These move together, since the parents’ parting, the river’s decline and Mud’s romance are one summer for Ellis. What holds the axis: history and the sacred are thin, the women’s inner lives absent, and the town barely entered.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 115 minutes holds, and it holds much. The family: father, mother, son, the father’s infidelity. The community as a polity, with its sentries, its rite of manhood, its feast and its law. The nation and its story of itself, in Kipling, Agincourt and the longbow. The international order, in a quarantine kept by others and a soldier from a world that recovered. Medicine and dying, in Kelson’s diagnosis and his morphine. Birth. The natural order, England gone back to wild ground and deer. The sacred, in the vicar’s prayer and the ossuary. They are integrated more than listed, since the boy’s two crossings pass through all of them. What holds the figure: consciousness is held only through Spike, the mother’s mind is a symptom more than a life, and the international order is a single figure.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Three orders meet in one body and are held as one: the civic, the biblical and the heroic. The state is the emblem of a republic set at its door, in the marble wherever it stands: a citizen with a sling, not a knight in armour. The sacred is David, the anointed one, chosen against the giant. The heroic is the antique nude at colossal size, the shepherd fused with the classical hero. Around them, the body as the whole subject and consciousness as the decision in the face. No attribute lists them. What holds the axis lowest is what one figure in one moment cannot hold: the family, labour, history as a sequence, the natural order and other persons.
John Milton · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged as a single poem of 193 lines, it holds more than its length should allow. Consciousness: the poet’s own vocation, ambition and fear of early death. The sacred: the apocalypse, the communion of saints, the keys. The Church as an institution, and the state of the nation in 1637. The natural order: the sea, the flowers, the day-star, “the shores and sounding seas”. The classical inheritance as a whole system of meaning, held against the Christian. Death, and the body lost. They are integrated, not listed: the shepherd’s care joins them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the count and the vantage: the family, labour except as a figure, love and the common life are absent, the dead man has no life the poem shows, and every order passes through one singer on one day.
Fan Kuan · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Four orders are held in one structure: the natural order fully, rock, water, vegetation, weather and mist as one system; labour and commerce, in the drovers and their loads; the sacred, in the temple and the mountain as the centre of a world; and the relation of the human to the cosmos, the painting’s whole subject. One ascent places each, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis at 7.6 is absence: the family, the state, history and consciousness appear only by analogy, and the host mountain as a ruler among ministers is Guo Xi’s figure, not the silk’s. Labour and the sacred rest on one small motif each.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
A short form, and the low mark describes the form. Held: consciousness, minutely, from the three spirits of II to the self split into heart and soul, “L’anima dice al cor” (the soul says to the heart, XXXVIII); the sacred and the nine moving heavens (XXIX, XLII); the family at the edges, Beatrice’s father’s death (XXII), her brother (XXXII), a kinswoman weeping at Dante’s bed (XXIII); the city, widowed (XXX) and crossed by pilgrims bound for Rome (XL); the history of the vernacular (XXV). What holds the axis here is what the form leaves out: labour, the state, war and the political Florence of the 1290s are absent. What is held is integrated, each order a place where her effect is felt; what is not held is a great deal.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Six orders are held: the household, one man’s retirement, his guests and his servants below; class and standing, a gentleman’s dignity, later bound by inscription to one line of heirs; the natural order, the hill, the river, the hills as a theatre and the sun’s course; the cosmos, in circle, square, dome and the four quarters; the sacred, as form only, the temple and the dome lent to a house; and perception, dwelling as seeing. One geometry places each, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, except as what is hidden below; the state and the city, only as a view; history, except as antiquity quoted; the family as more than a line of inheritance; and death. A house of retirement for one man holds less than a palace or a cathedral, and the figure describes the form.
Michelangelo · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
What the group holds is integrated, not listed. The sacred: the doctrine of incarnation and sacrifice, the Virgin as mother and as church. The family: mother and son, birth and death in one lap. The body and death. And the commission, the funeral of a cardinal, which gives the work a place in the ordering of the Church. The theological and the familial are the same image, and that fusion lifts the axis above what a single image usually holds. What holds it lowest is the form: two figures in one moment cannot take in the state, labour, history, the social world or the natural order beyond a stump of rock. The figure describes the form, not a failure.
Andrei Rublev · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
One panel with three figures, a small form. The orders it holds are real and integrated: the sacred, as its subject; the natural order, in the tree and the mountain; the built world, in the house; the meal and the sacrifice, in the table and the cup; the human, in the viewer given the fourth side; and history by implication, the covenant at Mamre and, through the monastery, the Rus’ of Sergius. They are held by their places in one circle, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is most of the human world: the family, since the hosts were removed; labour; the state, except as context; consciousness as particular persons. Higher than a single mood or object, lower than a room of a court. The figure describes the form.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body, five times, at life size; sex and its economy, since this is a brothel and the viewer its client, which brings commerce and labour into the room; death, as the threat the removed skull left behind; the gaze and consciousness, every figure attending to one place; culture and its borders, three traditions of the face side by side, Iberian, African and European; and art, the history of the nude turned on itself. The encounter integrates them, since everything converges on the viewer. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no state, no history, no natural order beyond the fruit, and the city outside the curtain not present at all. It holds more than a pastoral, because transaction and threat are in it, and less than a court or a ceiling. The figure describes the form.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
For a single sheet the print holds an unusual number of orders: the mind; the body and its humours; the liberal and the mechanical arts; number and geometry; the heavens and their influence, in the comet, the rainbow and Jupiter’s square against Saturn; time, in the hourglass and the bell; worldly power and wealth, in the keys and the purse. They are integrated through the one seated figure, not listed. What holds it lowest is what the form cannot reach: the family, the state, history and labour as social life are absent, and the sacred is present only obliquely. A small print cannot encompass what an altarpiece does; the figure describes the form.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed as a story, which is not punished for being short beyond what it holds. It holds a good deal for thirty pages, in one structure. The state and its law, in a colony with two commandants and a judicial system of one judge. The sacred, as a cult and its passing. History, as the change from an old order to a new. The body, as the page of the law. Technology, as an apparatus that acts on its own. And Europe’s observer of all of it. They are joined, not listed, by the single apparatus. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the count and the vantage: no family, no labour beyond the soldier’s guard, no love, no natural order beyond the heat of a sandy valley, and every order given as diagram rather than as a world. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what one story holds. Consciousness, fully, in the narrator’s mind observed by itself. Labour, as copying, and as an office divided into tempers that produce. Capital and the city, as Wall Street, its rents and its walls. The law and the state, as Chancery, the landlord, the police and the Tombs, where a man who does nothing becomes a vagrant. The sacred and the moral, as charity, the commandment, Job and the question of will and necessity. Death. They are integrated: one office joins them, and Bartleby passes through each in turn. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the count and the vantage. The family is absent; the natural order is absent but for the walls that shut it out; history appears only as an extinct office; and every order is seen from one room and one conscience. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Sappho · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
A lyric body is not punished for brevity, and what it encompasses is weighed as it is. Consciousness is held at the highest level, in the hymn, in fragment 31 and in fragment 94. The family: the brothers of the Brothers poem and the poems on Charaxos, the daughter Kleis, the mother. The community: the circle of young women, their partings and marriages. The sacred: Aphrodite, Hera, the rites of marriage. The natural order: moon and stars, the orchard, the hyacinth and the apple. History: Troy, in fragments 16 and 44. Some single poems hold several orders at once, as fragment 96 holds absence, memory, a foreign city and the night. What holds it lowest of the twelve: labour is all but absent, the city’s strife barely shown, and the body does not hold its orders in one structure; much is now listed rather than integrated.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
A small chapel on a hill holds more orders than its size suggests, and holds them integrated. The sacred: a Marian shrine and its liturgy, inside and out. The natural order: the hill, the horizons, sun and rain, the spout and basin making weather part of the building. History: the war, in the rubble built into the walls and in the memorial pyramid, and a pilgrimage older than the building. The community: the crowd at the outdoor altar and the single worshipper in a side chapel. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside a programme narrow by design: the state, labour, the city, and the centuries of use and change that the great cathedrals carry. The form sets the limit.
Giovanni Bellini · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, in the event and its light; the natural order, in rock, plant and animal; the self, one man’s consciousness in ecstasy; labour, in the shepherd, the cultivated land and the made things of the cell; the city and its walls, a social order at a distance; and death, in the skull. They are integrated, not listed: each is placed in the same light as part of one claim about creation. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or thin: no family, no state as power, no history as event. A single figure in a landscape holds more than its form leads one to expect, but its world is order without conflict: above The Large Bathers (7.5), below Las Meninas (8.2).
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no adjustment for the form. About six orders are present: consciousness, drugged and paranoid, in “Heroin” and “Sunday Morning”; the city and its economy in “I’m Waiting for the Man”, with race and class implicit in the trip uptown; eros and power in “Venus in Furs” and “Femme Fatale”; love without power in “I’ll Be Your Mirror”; death in “Heroin” and “The Black Angel’s Death Song”. They are integrated, not listed: faces of one New York whose addict, buyer, party girl and lover share the streets, so that the buy, the round of parties and the lover’s mirror bear on one another. What holds the axis here is absence: the state, the family, labour, the sacred and the natural order are missing.
Michelangelo · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Four orders are held in one structure. Learning and the book. The reader’s body, in its posture of study, given its place by the building. The dynasty: a Medici library in the Medici church, built by a Medici pope and opened by a Medici duke, its emblems running through the fittings. And the language of architecture itself, held up for inspection. The sacred is present only through the setting in a church complex, not in the work’s own programme; the city, the state and the natural order are context. What holds the axis lowest is the form: two rooms for one purpose cannot hold what a cathedral or a city holds, and the figure describes the form.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short pamphlet holds. The economy of a nation: population, harvests, rents, trade, the market for meat. The state and the colonial relation, in the English policy behind the arithmetic and in the absentee landlords. Class: landlords, squires, tenants, cottiers, beggars. Religion, in the Papists whose numbers the scheme will thin and the Dissenters who leave the country. The family: maternity, nursing, marriage made tender by profit. The body, as meat, skin and breeding stock. They are integrated, not listed: one conceit joins every order to every other. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the vantage and the scale: consciousness is only the projector’s, the poor have no interior, history is a single season of famine, and the natural order is livestock. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Six orders are held. The sacred: the worship, and the Wisdom the building is dedicated to. Learning: the university closed by its church. The state: the papacy as ruler of Rome and of its university, three pontificates in one fabric. Law, through the lawyers’ saint. The cosmos: the starred dome and the ascent to light. Biblical history, as far as the readings of Solomon and Wisdom hold. One section places them, so they are integrated, not listed: the court of study below, the church at its end, heaven above. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the household, labour, the body, the natural order beyond the light, death, consciousness and story. A small chapel cannot hold these, and the figure describes the form.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held: the soul and its constancy; death; evil; the sacred, in the destination on the height and the armour of faith; the natural order, in the gorge, the trees, the horse, the dog and the lizard; a social order, the knightly class in the armour of its day; and time, in the hourglass. They are integrated by the journey, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent and what the form cannot carry: no family, no labour, no state beyond the knight’s class, no history beyond an allegory of the single soul, on a sheet held in the hand. Large for one sheet; the figure describes the form.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held are several, and one geometry integrates them. The sacred, the Passion at its most physical point. The state, in Pilate and his authority, and by costume the politics of the present. History, the ancient trial and men of the painter’s own day set in one space. Consciousness, in the three men’s inward, unattending presence. Art and number, in a perspective that is itself a claim about how the world is measured. The city, in its street and buildings. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form: a small panel of a few figures, with no family made legible, no labour beyond the scourgers’, and nature only as one tree and the sky. The figure describes the form.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The figure describes the form, an altarpiece of one event. Held: the sacred, as the whole subject; the human community, as the apostles; the natural order, as sky, cloud and light; the family, faintly, as a mother received; and, through the setting, the institution: the Franciscan order whose choir it closes, the liturgy at its foot, the church whose name it paints, a city whose great families compete for altars in the same nave. Those last are held by placement, not painted, and count for less. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: history, labour, the state, death as a fact, and any consciousness beyond the single state of wonder. Everything is one moment and one feeling.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
A wordless symphony holds more than its medium suggests, through its forms: the inner life of a single consciousness, in the first movement’s argument and the flute’s lament; the old church, in the church mode and the trombone chorale; history itself as material, the Baroque ground made the law of a Romantic movement and the past held inside the present; the festival and the dance, in the Allegro giocoso; fate or the natural order, in the ground that turns. They are held in one structure, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, labour, the state and any community are not in it, and the sacred is present as a sound, not as more.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The figure describes the form, a cityscape with no story. Held in one structure: the natural order, sky, light, water and the hour; the made order, walls, gates, bridge, roofs and towers; the civic order, in the gates and the clock; the sacred, as two church towers seen from outside and not entered; labour and commerce, in the moored boats; and the human, as a handful of people on the bank, at rest. One light places them all. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no consciousness beyond a conversation, no history except what the viewer brings, no state beyond a gate, no inner life. A city holds more orders than a mountain, so the figure is level with Fan Kuan’s and the Night Watch’s, and not higher because the human orders are present as tokens.
Edgar Allan Poe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as a body of tales. Consciousness, deeply: the divided self, the perverse, the obsessed and the dying mind. Death and the body, in burial, plague, decomposition and mesmerism. Crime and the law, in the murderers’ confessions and in Dupin’s dealings with the police. The city, in “The Man of the Crowd” and in Dupin’s Paris. The natural order, in the vortex and the sea; science and its pretensions, in the hoaxes and “Valdemar”; art and its cost, in “The Oval Portrait”; power, in Prospero’s walled abbey and the king of “Hop-Frog”. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the family appears only as a dying line or a dead wife; labour, history, the state, the sacred as faith and the wider social world are absent or glimpsed; no tale holds more than a few orders at once. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body, made in six figures the instrument of feeling; consciousness, each man’s interior turned outward; the city and its citizens, since the act is civic; the state and war, in the king, the siege and the surrender of keys; history, the fourteenth century as remembered in the nineteenth; the sacred, in the penitential dress and the rite of offering; and death. They are integrated, since one act touches all. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only implied: the town, the families and the labour the six leave behind are not shown, the king is offstage, nature has no place, and the whole is held in a single moment of six men. A group holds more than a single figure, as The Thinker at 6.6 shows, and less than a painted world.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held are fewer than the depth with which they are held. Consciousness, at its highest: self-analysis as a way of life, and the inward collapse of a devout woman. Sexuality and the body, frankly. The family: a mother’s arranged match for her daughter, an aunt’s house. Class: the aristocracy and its servants, with the valet Azolan a strategist in his own right. The sacred: the convent, the confessor Father Anselme used as a go-between, Tourvel’s faith. Law and reputation as social power, ending in a lawsuit. What holds the axis lowest is the absence of the rest of the world: labour beyond service, the state, war, history, since the book is set in an unnamed present and the coming revolution is only implicit, and the natural order. The confinement is deliberate; it is a form’s limit, and the figure records it.
Hans Scharoun · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve. The orders held: music and the musicians who make it, at the centre; the public as a community of small groups and as a whole, built into the blocks; the city, as the hall stood on waste ground by the Wall and was made the crown of a cultural forum for a divided and then reunified Berlin; the political order, a democratic assembly made in space within twenty years of the war; and the natural order, as image, in the valley, the vineyard slopes and the tent under the sky. The section integrates them, music at the core and the public round it. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or faint: labour, except in the orchestra; the family; the sacred, unless the gathering itself is read so; and history before 1945, which the hall puts behind it rather than holds. The figure describes the form of one room for one purpose.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about ninety-eight minutes holds. Two consciousnesses, each in restraint; marriage, an absent order the whole film obeys; the émigré community, Shanghainese in Cantonese Hong Kong, with its landladies, mahjong and food; labour, in a shipping office and a newspaper, and the writing of martial-arts serials as a second life; the city, in crowded tenements and streets in rain; history, in Hong Kong in 1962, in Singapore, and in Cambodia during de Gaulle’s visit; the sacred, in a temple and a monk. They are held through the two, and that holds the axis lowest: history and the sacred are set at the edge as frame and coda, labour is a set of desks, and the state appears only in a newsreel.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
A lyric sequence of 770 lines holds more than its size. The natural order, in trees, fruit, flowers and animals; the dead and their realm; the sacred, in a god who is not a creed; technology and the machine; childhood; dance, breath and the body; and art itself as an order of being. These are integrated under one law, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside it: society; the family, except as absence; labour, except as the machine’s threat; history, except as a backdrop of change. The short form is not charged beyond what it encompasses, and what it encompasses is wide for a lyric and narrow for a book.
Sylvia Plath · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what a slim book of lyrics holds. Consciousness at its extreme. The family entire: father, mother, husband, children. Marriage as an economy, in “The Applicant”. The body and the hospital, in “Tulips”, “Cut” and “Fever 103°”. The natural order: bees, elm, yew, poppies, the moon. The sacred, Christian and pagan, in “The Moon and the Yew Tree” and “Lady Lazarus”. History, in the figures of the camps and the war. All of it is held through one private self, which is the book’s strength and its bound. What holds the axis at 7.6, the lowest of the twelve, is what is absent or only figured: labour, the state and the social world beyond the household are not held, and history appears as a figure for the self rather than as itself.
Simone Martini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, as the descent of the spirit and the word; the person, in the Virgin’s alarm and her reading; history, as the moment on which Christian time turns; the prophetic past, in the four roundels; the city, in Siena’s patron saint, the olive of peace and the cathedral altar for which the panel was made; the natural order, in the lilies and the olive. They are integrated by the descent from dove to word to woman, and the civic frame is real. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or merely present: no labour, no family beyond the implied, no state except as patronage, nature as emblem rather than world, the prophets as furniture. A two-figure scene in a polyptych holds several orders; it does not encompass a world.
U2 · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Two orders are fully integrated: erotic love and marriage, made and failing, and the sacred, in Judas and Christ, in Cowper’s hymn turned, in the doubter of “Acrobat”, bear on each other in nearly every song. Others are present more than held: the self and its masks in “The Fly”, a culture of copies in “Even Better Than the Real Thing”, drink and the night city in “Tryin’”. What holds the figure here is absence: history, the state and labour are not in the songs. The fall of the Wall is in the making and on the sleeve, and the family is glimpsed only in readings of “One”.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held on one wall: the sacred, in Christ and the miracle; the community, in the twelve as a body that assents; the state and the fiscal order, in the collector and the coin; labour, in the fisherman’s catch from which the tax is paid; the natural order, in the lake, the trees and the bare hills under a real sky; the city, in the building at the right. They are integrated, not listed: the pointing of Christ and Peter binds the centre to both ends, and one light binds all of it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no women, no history beyond the gospel’s moment, and consciousness given as collective gravity rather than as minds. One frieze holds more orders than most single pictures and fewer than a cycle.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the made world and architecture, at the scale of a city; the state and its law, explicit after 1761; history, Rome as the ancestor of power; the body under punishment, in II and in the racks and chains; labour, in the ropes, pulleys, wheels and timber of a vast works; consciousness, in no figure but in the viewer, made to search and fail; and something like the cosmic, in the space’s infinite extension. They are integrated, not listed: law, history and machinery are one building. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the natural order, with no sky that is not framed; the family; the sacred, except as Babel; and any inner life in the people. Sixteen plates hold more than most single images, and less than the large forms.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, as incarnation, forerunner and angel; the natural order, unusually wide, rock, water, plants and the far landscape; the family, a mother, a child and a cousin, with the mother’s care made the axis of the picture; consciousness, in the Virgin’s inward look and the children’s recognition; and time, the baptism and passion to come carried by water and gesture. They are integrated by the cave and the light, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no state, no labour, no history beyond the doctrine its patrons brought, no society beyond four figures. An altarpiece of one meeting in a cave cannot hold a court or a city. The figure describes the form: above the cabinet picture, below the room and the ceiling, and above The Starry Night at 7.4, which gives its field to the sky.
Henrik Ibsen · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The play holds a good deal inside one room, and holds it rather than listing it. Consciousness: Hedda’s, never stated and always present. The family: the Tesman aunts and their care, the dead father, a marriage, a pregnancy. Money and class: Tesman’s debts for the villa, the expected professorship, the general’s daughter married down to a middle-class scholar, the distance between Brack’s world and the aunts’. Work and thought: two kinds of scholarship, the antiquarian and the visionary, in competition for one post. Sexuality and its policing: Løvborg’s past, Mademoiselle Diana, Brack’s triangle. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the state, history as an agent, the sacred and the natural order are absent or faint, and what it encompasses is the life of one household.
Pontormo · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, as sacrifice and as the Mass completed below the panel; the family, in the mother and her son; death and the body; a community of mourners, young and old, men and women; consciousness, in faces of shock, absence and grief that do not meet; and art and the artist, in the painter who stands at the edge as witness. The ring and its empty centre integrate them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the natural order, nearly erased by design, and the state, labour and history, except as the patron’s chapel implies them. A panel holds more than a cabinet picture and less than a programme, and the figure describes the form.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: labour, in a woman at work; commerce, in the goods and the counter; class, in the man in the hat and the girl who serves him; sexuality and its sale, implied; the crowd and the city’s leisure; spectacle, in the trapeze; and consciousness, in a face that withholds what it thinks. The counter and the glass integrate them, binding each to the transaction across the bar. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the sacred, nature (the oranges and the flowers are goods), the family, the state and history are not in it. It holds more than a pond or a night sky, since a society is present, and less than a court, since that society is a bar. The figure describes the form.
Mexica · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, in the deity; the natural order, in the earth and its serpents; the body, in breasts, claws and the cut neck; the family, in the mother of the god and the nursing breasts; death and sacrifice, in the necklace; and, by implication, the state, since this is the imperial cult of Tenochtitlan made stone, though the state is not shown. They are integrated, not listed: the body is the cosmos. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what a single standing figure cannot hold: labour, history as events, consciousness (there is no face and no thought), society beyond the cult. It holds more than a pastoral and less than a ceiling or a codex; the form sets the limit.
Federico García Lorca · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what an eighteen-poem lyric body holds, and not charged for its size. The sacred, in the archangels, the martyr and the Christ-like Antoñito; the state, in the civil guard; eros, in nearly every poem; death, everywhere; the family and its honour, in Thamar y Amnón and the Camborios; the natural order, made animate in moon, wind, river and horses; history, in the three historical romances, which reach from Rome through the Old Testament to Andalusia’s Christian and Moorish layers; and a people and its marginality. One myth integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, the city as an economy, consciousness as an inner life and the family across time are absent or glimpsed, and every order is seen through a mythic lens that simplifies it.
The Cure · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no adjustment for the form. Two orders are held fully: consciousness, in its dissolving, and the couple, through devotion, marriage and parting. Time is held as youth ending, and held in the form itself, in tracks that lengthen as the self goes under. Other orders are glimpsed: the natural world as weather and water, childhood in “Lullaby”, the sacred only as the figure of a prayer. They are integrated, since rain, drowning and love form one image system, and what is held is held completely. What holds the axis here is absence. Every public order is missing: no labour, state, crowd, media or history, and no family beyond the couple. It is the world of one person in one room at one age.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short book of argument holds. Consciousness, fully, in the narrator’s mind at work. The family, in Mrs Seton’s thirteen children, in the mothers who could not leave money, in the sister. Money and labour as the book’s ground: endowments, legacies, wages, the cost of a room. Institutions and the state: the university, the law of property, the vote, the church in the bishop. History, from the Elizabethans through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the war; and literature itself as an order. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the sacred and the natural order are thin, the chapel a building and the river a backdrop, and the orders are held by one argument, not by a world. The form sets the ceiling, and the figure describes the form.
August Strindberg · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
A small form, weighed for what it holds and not for being small. Consciousness: Julie’s divided self, Jean’s double nature. The family: the mother’s feminism and revenge, the father’s authority, a broken engagement. Labour and class: the kitchen, the livery, the cook’s economy, the servant’s ambition, the estate and its people. The sacred: Kristin’s church and the Lutheran morning. The natural order: Midsummer, lilac and birch, the animals. History is present as the hour of a class, the decline of the old estates and the rise of the new man with money, though only in talk. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the state is absent, history is spoken of rather than enacted, and every order the play holds passes through two people in one room, narrow by design.
Guarino Guarini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Five orders are held, and one structure places most of them. The sacred: the rite, the altar, the saint. The cosmos: the heavens as geometry and light, the eight-pointed star. Knowledge: mathematics and astronomy as a road to the divine, built by a man who wrote on both. The state: a duke’s vow, a royal chapel on the court’s square, folded into its palace front. History: a battle of 1557 remembered in a building of 1680. They are integrated: the state at the threshold and the street, the sacred at the floor, the cosmos and knowledge overhead. What holds the score lowest is what is absent: the family, labour, the body, death except as liturgy, individual consciousness, and the natural order beyond light.
Wallace Stevens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the body holds, as a book of lyrics, and not marked down for being short beyond what it holds. Consciousness, fully: perception, imagination, the self as “the world in which I walked”. The sacred and its ending, in “Sunday Morning” and “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”. The natural order, in Florida, Tennessee and the Carolinas, the seasons and the winter. Death, at the emperor’s wake and on the Sunday morning. Sexuality and the body, in “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and the middle-aged eros of “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”. Art itself. They are integrated by one argument, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the book leaves out: the family barely appears, labour and the state not at all, and history only as the voyage of Crispin.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as memory, rage and longing; the couple is held from every side; time and memory are the record’s medium. The road and labour appear in Tangled Up in Blue, a fishing boat, a strip club, jobs taken and left, and a generation’s history is glimpsed there, the cafés and “revolution in the air”, and its scattering. The sacred enters Shelter from the Storm as a passion borrowed for a love; fate is named. What holds the figure lowest is what is absent or only glimpsed: the state, the family beyond the couple, the city as a society, the natural order beyond weather. The world passes through one man’s memory of one love, and little in it exceeds him.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in rain, river, cloud and the hare; labour on the land, in the ploughman; leisure and the old life of the river, in the boat and the figures on the bank; industry and engineering, in the engine and Brunel’s bridge; history, in the old road bridge beside the new and in two speeds of life in one valley; and the perceiving mind, in a viewpoint set on the line. The one diagonal integrates them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or only implied: no family, no state and no sacred, and the human world a few small marks in a field of weather. More orders than a landscape of sky alone, fewer than a figure painting of a society. The figure describes the form.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what a single tragedy holds, and what it holds it holds integrated. The family: a mother, two sons, one of them adopted, and a marriage of state. The state: the imperial succession, the Senate and the people invoked, the army present through Burrhus. Consciousness: the interior turn of Néron and the self-knowledge of Agrippine. Love, and the sacred at the edge: the Vestals, the statue of the deified Augustus, the mother’s prophecy. History is present as the weight of Augustus and Claudius on the living. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, the natural order and any life outside the palace are absent. The form excludes them by design, and the figure records the form.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: marriage and the family at the centre, with a child glimpsed and a household; consciousness, in the Man’s guilt rendered in images; country and city as two orders of life, the farm and a metropolis of traffic, cafés and fairground; nature, the lake, the marsh and the storm, as an active power; the sacred, in the church and the vows that turn the Man; the village, in the search with lanterns. Money stands at the edge, in the plan to sell the farm. What holds the axis lowest: the state and history are absent by design, since the song is of no place; the city is one day’s pleasures; the village is a frame. Few orders are entered, and those are held with grace through one couple.
Jacques Tati · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: the city and its architecture, at the centre; work, in the office, the cubicle and the appointment that never happens; commerce, in the exhibition and the tourist trade; the private life, in the glass flats and their televisions; class, in the restaurant’s guests and its waiters, cooks and doorman; the international order, American and German visitors in a city that could be anywhere; technology, in every door, lamp and chair. One day and one law hold them in one structure. What holds the axis lowest is what the form refuses. Consciousness is not entered, by design: no one has an inner life the camera visits. The family appears only behind glass, history as the old city reflected; the sacred is absent, and the natural order is a flower seller’s stall and a potted plant.
Josquin des Prez · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held are those of the Ordinary, and they are held, not listed: the sacred first and throughout; the cosmos, in the creator of all things “visibilium omnium et invisibilium”
“visible and invisible”; history, in a dated suffering “sub Pontio Pilato”
“under Pontius Pilate”, and the state that inflicted it; mortality, judgement and the life to come; the community, in a liturgy sung by a body of voices for a body of people, and the Body itself as the feast’s subject. The breadth is the text’s; its integration through one hymn is the work’s. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness, the family, labour and the natural order do not appear, and history and the state are clauses sung at speed. The setting holds the frame of a world more than its particulars.
Pink Floyd · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, and its breaking is the subject; time and mortality are held fully, in Time and the Great Gig. Money and labour are present in Money and the working day of Breathe; war and the state in Us and Them; the natural order as sun, moon and breath; the sacred as the question of death, raised by the speaking voices. One life-course joins them, and Eclipse names them in one inventory. What holds the figure is the join: the orders are named more than held, the inventory is a list, and the family, history and place are absent. No one in the record lives in a particular year or city.
Radiohead · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Six orders are present: erotic love and desire, in four songs; the body and its mortality, throughout; the sacred, as heaven’s gate and the devil in Videotape; the natural order, in the sea floor of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi; the suburb and the social night, in House of Cards and Jigsaw Falling into Place; and the recording medium itself, in Videotape. They are held closely, since love and death bear on each other in nearly every song. What holds the figure here is absence: the state, labour, history and the family do not enter, and the social world is glimpsed only at a party and a pub.
The Doors · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, the self at the threshold, wanting out. Eros is held in Light My Fire and The Crystal Ship, death in The End and End of the Night. The family enters once and with force, in the father’s and mother’s rooms of The End, as the thing to be destroyed. The sacred is held as rite and evoked as drug; society enters as the Fox and as Brecht’s whisky bar and its money, both glimpsed; the West is landscape, and the natural order a snake more than a world. One consciousness joins what is held, which integrates it and narrows it: the orders arrive song by song, but The End holds several at once, consciousness, eros, death, the family and the sacred in one rite, and that integration is achieved, not attempted. Labour, history and the state are absent, and that is what holds the figure lowest.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in the many species of the Ice Age fauna, predator and prey, in behaviour and in season; death and violence, in the lions’ hunt and the rhinoceroses’ combat; the human presence, in hands, palm marks and the woman’s body; the sacred, in the composite at the back and the passage into the dark; motion and time, in the many legs and repeated outlines. The cave integrates them, holding them in one passage. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, the family, the community, the state and history are not shown, and no human figure is whole. The figure describes the form.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The figure describes the form, a sacred cycle at altar scale. Held: the sacred, in incarnation, death and sacrament; the family, in the mother and the son, and in Elizabeth and Mary each carrying a child; labour, in the workmen at the cross and the guild that paid for the altar; the body, as weight and as corpse; ritual and law, in the Temple and Simeon’s offering. The civic order, a guild of armed citizens in a city at the edge of a religious war, is present in the commission rather than in the image, and counts for less. The bearing programme integrates them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: history as event, with the truce of 1609 and the divided Netherlands outside the frame; the natural order beyond a sky and a river; and the state.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what one book of fourteen stories holds, and it holds more than its size suggests. War and the wounded, in three stories. Sport as labour and money: the bullfighter’s trade, the boxer’s fixed fight in “Fifty Grand”. Crime and its economy. Marriage and its end. Childhood and a first betrayal in “Ten Indians”. The state, in the fascist Italy of “Che Ti Dice La Patria?”. Death and the body in “An Alpine Idyll”. The sacred, in the Passion and the child’s prayer. Addiction in “A Pursuit Race”. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is that the orders are held through one stance rather than joined in one structure, and the family and society are seen only at their breaking. A low mark on a book of stories describes what it joins, not its length.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Several orders are held by one law. Vocation and art, at the centre; love and marriage; the company as a small society, with its hierarchy, its routines and its patrons; money and class, at Lady Neston’s party and among the students in the gallery; authorship and theft, in Julian’s stolen score; the sacred, in the church door barred against the dancer and in Lermontov’s religion of art; and death. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is everything outside the theatre. Labour is the labour of art only; the state, history and the natural order are absent, three years after the war; consciousness is rendered from outside except in the ballet, where it is rendered once. A backstage drama’s scope, raised by its myth, not widened by it.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. Consciousness, in Vittoria above all, between two lovers and two kinds of possession; the family, in her mother and in the flat of Piero’s absent parents; labour and money, in the Borsa as a whole social organ with its clerks, runners and ruined; the city, in EUR and the centre of Rome; the colonial order, in Marta’s Kenya; the age, in the eclipse of the title; the natural order, in wind, trees, water and light. One law joins them, and the joining is real. What holds the axis lowest is how some are reached: the state appears only through money, the colonial order through a scene the film does not master, and history only at the edges, as setting rather than as a field the film enters.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Six orders are held: the sacred, in the altar and the liturgy; the monastic community and its hours, in the choir; the state, in the doge’s annual crossing and the place made for it; the city, in the church’s address across the water to the palace and the Piazzetta; antiquity, in the temple and the bath brought into the church; and the natural order, in the light of the lagoon and the setting on the water. The plan places them in one sequence, so that they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what enters only as a congregation does: the household, labour and the body. A church holds what its liturgy and its city give it, and no more, and the figure describes the form.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, in a king’s foundation set opposite his palace; the public and the city, in the stoa on the square and the view from the stair; education and the formation of citizens; history and antiquity, the matter of the collection the plan was made for; and the sacred, displaced into art and housed in the rotunda. One sequence integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or outside: the household, labour except as the piles hidden below, the natural order beyond the light from the oculus, death, and the life of anyone who is not a visitor. A single institution in a single figure holds more than a villa and less than a city or a cathedral, and the figure describes the form.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
A film of 159 minutes centred on one man holds more orders than a chamber drama, and holds them in scenes: marriage and sexuality at the centre; consciousness and dream; money, class and power, from the doctor’s licence to Ziegler’s billiard room; the body, sickness and death, from the bedside to the morgue; the family, in Helena and the Christmas shopping. Commerce runs through all of them. What holds the axis lowest is absence and routing. The state, labour beyond Bill’s practice, history and the natural order do not enter; the sacred appears only as a liturgy played backwards; and every order reaches the film through one man’s consciousness.
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders present are many: science and its thinker, in Einstein and relativity’s trains and clocks; technology and transport, in train, building and spaceship; the law, in the trials and the prison; history, in the bomb and the century’s machines; consciousness and time, the work’s real subject; love, in the lovers on the bench; popular culture, in radio, a song and a supermarket; sleep and death, in the Bed. The scale is large and the range real. What holds the axis here is integration. The orders are set in one structure of images but do not act on one another: the law does not judge the scientist, and the lovers meet the bomb only by sequence. The family, labour, the state as institution and the sacred are absent or only glanced at.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Six orders are held in one structure: the sacred, in vocation, liturgy and the instruments of the Passion; the family, in uncle and niece, a dead wife, a natural son, a servant and her child; sexuality, repressed and predatory; property and labour, in the inheritance and its modernisation; class, in the beggars kept and then loose in the house; and the state, in the regime the film addresses. The inheritance integrates them, the hinge between the uncle’s desire and the beggars’ feast. What holds the axis lowest is what stays out or slight: history in its open form, and any inner consciousness beyond Viridiana’s opaque piety. A single feature holds a society in small, and the figure describes the form.
Andrea Palladio; scene by Vincenzo Scamozzi · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure: the city, in the streets of Thebes and the frons as civic façade; the civic body, the Academy seated and commemorated; antiquity and its recovery; the sky over the cavea; and, through the play it was made for, fate and the knowledge of the self. They are held together, not listed: the plan places the audience, the polity, the city and the heavens in one order. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or only gestured at: labour, the family, the sacred except as classical allegory, nature, death, and the people of Vicenza who were not members. It is a single room for a single art, and the figure describes the form.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held are few: the city, in a civic company with its ranks and flag, a republic’s citizens as its defenders; arms and the drill, the musket handled in its stages, pikes and partisans; the individual, in named sitters with faces, the captain’s authority and the lieutenant’s attention; emblem, in the girl and the claw; the child and the animal. The action places each, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no sacred order, no family as an institution, no labour beyond the drill, no natural order, and no history beyond one afternoon in one city. A group portrait cannot hold what a ceiling holds.
Polykleitos the Younger (attributed) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one bowl. The sacred: the altar base at the centre, the sanctuary of healing round the theatre. The civic: the gathered body of the audience, and rank in the seats of honour. The natural order: the hills drawn into the view, the air and stone that carry the voice. The art the theatre was built to serve: tragedy and contest. They are held together, not listed: the crowd sits round the altar, and the play is given before the hills. What holds the axis lowest: the orders are few, and the work holds them as a vessel holds what it is used for. Labour, the household, history and the self are not in it.
Dominikus Zimmermann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The building holds more orders than its size suggests. The sacred and the last things: judgment, mercy, the Passion. The social: a peasant devotion housed by a monastic lordship, and the pilgrim crowd. The natural: the meadow, the mountains, the light of the season in the windows. The personal: one wooden figure and one pilgrim before it. These are integrated in the plan, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is the size of the form: the state, labour, history and the family are present only as the setting of a pilgrimage, and the work is one room for one devotion. The figure describes the form.
Henry Purcell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are held in one hour: consciousness, in Dido; love; the state, in a queen whose marriage is policy, “When monarchs unite”, and a Rome that waits offstage; history and myth, in Troy behind and Rome ahead; the supernatural, in the witches and a counterfeit god; the natural order, in the grove, the hunt and the storm; the common people, in the sailors; death and memory. What holds the axis at its figure, the lowest of the twelve, is that most of these are held in passing: the state is a line, Rome a destination, the sailors a song. The family, the household beyond the court and the sacred as faith do not appear, and the orders are joined by mirror rather than by depth.
H. G. Wells · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a novella holds, and charged only for what it does not. Held together, not listed: labour and class, as the cause of the divide between the species; the natural order, as evolution; the cosmos, as entropy and the end of the earth; history, as the deep time of man’s rise and fall; the scientific mind, in the Traveller’s inference and the guests’ doubt; the body, in hunger, fear and the eating of flesh; tenderness, in Weena and the Epilogue. One argument joins the orders. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the human range: consciousness beyond the Traveller’s practical mind is thin, the family is absent, and the state and the sacred appear only as their absence in 802,701. A short book holding the earth’s whole future in one structure is a real achievement here, and its people are few.
Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, under Bega Begum and Akbar · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Six orders are held. The sacred, as paradise, the direction of prayer and the saint’s ground nearby. Death and the body, the grave below and its image above. The state, a dynasty’s claim to rule. The family and lineage, wives, a mother, descendants and later emperors laid in one house. History, the Timurid descent and the Delhi tradition in one building. The natural order, the garden, its water and the river it once faced. The garden and the plinth place them in one structure, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, the city and its common life, which enter only as a view beyond the walls; consciousness, except as the visitor’s passage; and the cost of the dynasty to those it ruled. A royal tomb holds the dead and their order, and the figure describes the form.
Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Orders held: the state, in a republic’s account of itself against its past; history, in Berlin 1936 answered and in the war’s rubble beneath; the natural order, in the landscape, the lake, the sky through the cover and the forces that give the form; the body, in sport, the swimmer, the runner and the crowd; the festival public, entering from the grass; and technology, in the computation and the net. The section joins them: the ground of rubble below, the people in the bowl and the park, the light roof over them, open to the sky, so they are integrated rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the family, labour, the sacred and individual consciousness are absent, and the history the roof answers is held as a gesture, not worked through. The figure describes a roof over a festival.
Agnès Varda · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about ninety minutes holds, through one consciousness: the body and illness, death, vanity and the self, love as a kept woman’s arrangement, labour in the song trade, the model, the projectionist and the taxi driver, friendship, the city, and through Antoine the state at war. The sacred enters only through the tarot and superstition. The orders are present and joined, not listed. What holds the axis lowest: the state and history are kept at the edge, in a radio bulletin and a soldier’s leave, and the scale of the film is the afternoon of one woman. A small form, well filled; the figure describes the form.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Six orders are held. The household and class: owners on the principal floor, tenants above, the concierge, service in the attic. The city: a corner of Cerdà’s grid turned, the great avenue answered, a building made the image of a quarter. The machine: the car, taken into the plan in 1906. The natural order: geology, water and plant built into the whole surface, light and air let down through the courtyards. Labour and craft: the masons’ stone, Jujol’s iron, the broken tile of the roof. The sacred, faintly and as absence: the Marian words at the cornice and the summit left empty. One section from cellar to roof integrates them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the state, history save the mark of the empty summit, death, and consciousness beyond wonder. A house of flats holds more than a single house and less than a cathedral or a palace, and the figure describes the form.
Anthony Burgess · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders are present and some are held. A consciousness, rendered from within. The family: parents cowed by their son, who replace him with a lodger while he is away. The state: its prisons, its science, its ministers and its politics. Religion, in the chaplain. Art, in the music. The city at night. Youth as a social order. They pass through one narrator in a short book, and most are sketched rather than inhabited: the state is a minister and two doctors, the family a few scenes, the city a set. Nothing exceeds Alex. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form itself, a short novel told by one voice, which holds more of the state than most books of its length and less of any one order than a long novel; the figure records the form.
Christina Rossetti · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a book of lyrics and one long narrative poem can hold, much is held. The title poem integrates the market and its exchange, the household and sisterhood, the body’s appetite and its wasting, the sacred economy of sacrifice and redemption, the natural order of brook, bee, cow and season, and the passage of generations in the coda’s children. The lyrics add death, the grave and what may follow it, and love possessed and lost; “In the Round Tower at Jhansi” glances at empire and war. In “Goblin Market” these are held, not listed; across the volume they sit side by side in separate poems more than in one structure. What holds the axis at 7.6, the lowest of the twelve, is that the state, history and labour enter only by the market’s figure and a single topical piece.
Utagawa Hiroshige · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in season, weather, river, bay, birds, plum, cherry, iris, maple and snow; the city as a built and peopled place, its bridges, wharves, timber yards and shops; labour, in boatmen, porters, raftsmen and farmers; the sacred, in shrines, temples, Inari and its foxes, and Fuji; festival and pleasure, in the fireworks, Torinomachi and the Yoshiwara; and time, the year and the hour. The season order and the standpoint integrate them. What holds the axis is what the form cannot hold: no consciousness beyond the viewer’s, no family, no state, no history beyond the city’s rebuilding, which is implied rather than shown, and figures that are types. A print series cannot encompass what a novel does, and the figure says so.
Talking Heads · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, and its dissolving is the subject; the body is held, as dance. The household is present in Once in a Lifetime, a house, a car and a wife seen as strangers; the media and their images in Seen and Not Seen and Crosseyed and Painless; the state and empire in Listening Wind, seen from the colonised side. The sacred is sermon and possession; the natural order is water, wind and heat. One condition joins them, and the groove holds them in one sound. What holds the figure: most orders appear as single images, labour and history are glimpsed, and only Listening Wind gives an order a place and a person.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure: consciousness, in Harry, rendered as closure; labour, in a trade with its craft, its rivals, its convention and its market; the corporation, in the Director’s building, its elevators and its assistant; the sacred, in confession and the Virgin; sex and love, in Amy and Meredith; technology, as the medium of every relation; the city, in San Francisco’s square, warehouse and hotel. They are integrated: the job, the confession and the apartment obey one law of exposure. What holds the axis lowest: the state is absent except by implication; the family appears only in a childhood recalled in a dream; history is the release date’s, not the film’s; the couple and the Director are ciphers by design; and the whole is held through one consciousness that refuses to open.
Paul Auster · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the work holds, as three short novels. Consciousness, fully: solitude, identity and its dissolution. Writing and authorship, as a vocation and a danger. The city, New York, as the field in which a man can vanish, with its homeless and its streets mapped on foot. The family: Quinn’s dead wife and son, the Stillmans, father and son, the narrator’s marriage and adopted child. Language and theology, in Stillman’s Eden and Babel. American history, through Stillman’s reading of the New World as a second Eden, and the literature of Thoreau, Hawthorne and Whitman. They are integrated rather than listed: each is an order in which a self is made or lost. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the field: labour, the state, class beyond Quinn’s vagrancy and the natural order are absent or glimpsed, and every order passes through one solitary man’s consciousness, three times.
Joseph Wright of Derby · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are many for one canvas: the new natural science and its instruments; the family, in the father and daughters; childhood and age; erotic love, in the couple; death, in the bird; the natural order, in the moon and the animal; and the sacred, displaced, in the scene’s likeness to a sacrament with a philosopher at the altar. The single light and the single question integrate them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is absence and form: no labour, no state, no history beyond the room, though the culture of the provincial Enlightenment is present in the company; consciousness is shown in faces, not entered. It is one instant in one room, and the figure describes the form while crediting its range.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Held in one structure: the body and its illness; the daily life of the patient, timed and regulated; the labour of the staff, kitchen, laundry, nurses and doctors; the natural order, forest, sun and the northern seasons, admitted as therapy; the municipal state and its public health, which commissioned the building; and death, which the building faced in a disease that killed many of its patients. They are integrated, not listed, through the plan’s separation of sick and well and the orientation of every room. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or thin: the sacred, history, the city, and the family, from which the patient was separated. A hospital holds more than a house, and less than the great encompassing buildings.
Zhang Yimou · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Several orders are held, and the household’s ritual binds them. The family, as a hierarchy of wives, children and servants; gender, as an economy of favour; class, in Yan’er, who wants to be a mistress and dies for burnt lanterns; the economy, in Songlian’s sale into concubinage after her father’s death and in the household’s wealth; ritual and something like the sacred, in the ancestral rules and the locked room; consciousness, in Songlian, whose interior the film reaches mostly by her face. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: history is absent by design, the 1920s, the warlords and the republic kept outside the walls; the natural order appears only as seasons and snow; the master and the men have no interior; and the state is present by allegory only, available rather than achieved.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: consciousness, in Jeff’s restless watching; marriage and the couple in many forms, from the newlyweds to the murdered wife; the city as a society of strangers sharing a wall and an alley; work, in a photographer, a fashion editor, a nurse, a dancer, a songwriter, a salesman and a sculptor; desire, loneliness and age. They are integrated: the windows are the city, and the city is the argument about marriage. What holds the axis lowest is the form’s chosen narrowness. The state is one police lieutenant; history is absent but for an echo of a decade of surveillance the film never names; the sacred is nowhere; the natural order is the heat and the rain. Every life is seen from one window and at a distance, so that much is held and little entered. A small form, and the figure describes it.
Liao builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Orders held by one structure. The sacred: the Buddhist cosmos from the historical Buddha to the cosmic, storey by storey. The state: the Liao court and its claim on the Buddhist and Chinese order, on a frontier. The natural order: the plain the tower commands, the weather, and the earth that moves under it, which the frame is built to answer. The word: the printed canon once held inside it, known from the finds of 1974. History: some 970 years of war and earthquake. They are integrated, each placed by the frame. What holds the score lowest is what a single tower cannot hold: no dwelling, no family, no labour as subject, no single consciousness; the human is the climber, and the climb is closed.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, the whole of it, heaven, earth and the pit in one frame; history, by inscription, the troubles of Italy set inside the time of the Apocalypse; the cosmos as a vertical order; the family at the centre, a mother, a child and a bowed father; the human estate in shepherds and travellers, with labour present in the shepherds; and the reconciliation of the human and the divine. The vertical and the olive branch integrate them. What holds the axis at 7.6: the state is present only as troubles named in words, not in the image; there is no consciousness beyond devotion and one bowed head; and nature is a sign, rock and a few trees. A small canvas holding more orders than its size suggests; the figure describes the form.
Kongo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Orders held in the one body: law and the settlement of disputes; the social bond, contracts, oaths and debts between persons and villages; the sacred, the force of the dead and the world beneath the water; medicine and healing; violence, the threat of death against the guilty and the witch; the hunt; and, through the iron and the trade goods often tied on, the Atlantic trade itself, a history the figure absorbed. They are integrated, not listed: one act, driving a nail, at once makes a contract, rouses the force and wounds the figure. What holds the axis lowest with The Swerve is what the body leaves out: the family and labour are present only through their disputes, the state is absent or replaced by the nkisi, and consciousness, an inner life, is not a dimension of the type at all.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the family and marriage, at the centre; labour, in the harvest stacked in the wall and in the service of the feast; the community and its ranks, from the carriers to the bench to the crowd at the door; class, in the gentleman at the edge; the church, in the friar; childhood, in the child on the floor; the animal, in the dog under the table; and hunger and its satisfaction, the condition that binds them. They are integrated by the table and the food, not listed. What holds the axis at 7.6 is what is absent: the state, history and consciousness, since no figure can be said to think beyond the moment, and the sacred appears only as a guest. More than a cabinet picture holds, and less than a world.
Hermann Hesse · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders are held in one structure, not listed: consciousness above all, in depth; eros and the body, in the dance lessons and Maria; art and the high tradition against popular music; the bourgeois economy and its outsider; politics, in the war article and the nationalist professor; and a kind of sacred order in the Immortals and their laughter. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is range. The book is short and centred on a single mind: one man, his few acquaintances, a city of bars and rented rooms. The family, labour, the state and history appear only as Haller’s views of them, and it does not hold the world the large novels hold.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Many orders, held through one mind. Consciousness, fully and comically. The family, in three generations of a Newark household. The body and sexuality, at the centre. Ethnicity and assimilation, the Jewish neighbourhood against the Gentile country. Class and labour, in the father’s work for an insurance company that keeps him below its Protestant managers. Civic life, in the Commission of Human Opportunity and its official’s liberal pieties. Religion, as law and food and taboo, and Israel as the nation the diaspora imagines. They are integrated, not listed: each is a stage for the same bind. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the vantage. Every order is seen from inside one speaker’s appetite and grievance; history is a backdrop, the state a job title, and the other people, the women most of all, are present as his weather. A low mark here describes the form of a monologue.
Walter Gropius · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: work and industry, in the workshops; education at two levels, the art school and the city’s trade school; the governing institution, in the bridge; the community at table and at festival, in the canteen and the hall; dwelling, in the studio block; the city, which commissioned the building, runs its road through it and placed its own school in it; and art, built into the fabric by the workshops. One plan places each and joins them by bridge and corridor, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the sacred, death, history, deliberately set aside, and the natural order beyond light, air and flat ground. More orders than a house holds, fewer than a cathedral or a city; the figure describes the form.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed at the play’s own scale, it holds more than its length suggests: the sacred; the state, in the struggle of Church and Crown; the poor and their labour and seasons, in the women’s world of harvest, weather and hearth; history and its afterlife, in the Knights’ modern apology; and one consciousness under trial. These are integrated, not listed: the women’s lives are the ground the martyrdom is for. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the form: a single action, Priests and Knights who are types, the family absent, and every order held at the scale of a rite. The figure describes the form; it is not a charge against the play’s size.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held in one canvas: the state, as an army and as two empires, the French by uniform and the Habsburg in the condemned; history, as an event of a named day reported in the press; death, at the instant of its making; the sacred, in the martyr’s grouping and its denial; labour, in the soldiers’ duty and the sergeant’s routine; and the public, in the onlookers who watch as the viewer does. The wall and the line of rifles integrate them, setting each in its place. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is kept out: no consciousness inside the scene, no family, no natural order beyond a slope and a sky, and the victims, the persons the history happened to, kept from view. For a single painted moment the range is wide; the figure describes the form.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The building holds more orders than most single rooms. The nation and its history: the Renaixença, Clavé and popular song, the corner group. Civic society and labour: a choir of ordinary people as patron, and the crafts of tile, glass, iron and stone joined in one work. The natural order: the garden and the sun of the ceiling. The European tradition of music, set beside the local one. And the experience of listening itself. They are held in one structure, not listed: the frame lets the light in, and the light gives the garden and the sun. What holds the score lowest: the sacred is only figured, in the muses rather than the divine, and the family and the individual consciousness lie outside what a concert hall can hold.
Joseon builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The state: the shrine is one of the two pillars of the capital’s plan and the seat of the dynasty’s legitimacy. The family: kings and their queens side by side, and the line edited into a second hall. The dead and the sacred. History: the building’s length is the dynasty’s span. Ritual rank: the three-strip path and the gates by status. These are integrated, not listed; one row of doors carries all of them. What holds this axis lowest of the twelve is what stays outside: labour and the common life, met only in the officials and musicians who serve the rite; the natural order beyond the grove that encloses the courts; and the individual consciousness, which a hall of identical doors deliberately suppresses.
Kanye West · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as grandiosity, paranoia and shame. The couple is held in Blame Game and Runaway; the family is glimpsed, a father and a daughter in All of the Lights. Fame and the media are the record’s medium. Race and the state are held in Gorgeous and glimpsed in the coda’s question about America. The sacred is evoked as devil and choir, and money and appetite as their own order. That is a wider span than most records attempt, and one persona holds it. What holds it lowest: labour and the natural order are absent, history enters only through a quoted voice, and several orders appear as images within the boast rather than as subjects held.
Roman · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the household and the family, in child, bride, matron and the house’s own room; women’s life stages and their society; ritual and the sacred, with the god present; the natural order and the wild, in satyrs, the young Pan and the suckled kid; the body under ordeal and in ecstasy; and art itself, in the mask, the mirror and the reading boy. The walk round the room integrates them, and the god at its centre. What holds the axis is what is absent: labour, the state, history and any public world. The frieze is a private room’s account of a private passage, a household and its gods: more than a pastoral or a single figure holds, less than a court, a ceiling or a city.
The Smile · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as anxiety. Power and the media are present in one song, sharply. A public crisis, climatic or civil or both, is implied everywhere, in floods and flags and in The Same’s appeal, and gives the record its ground. Consolation is held in Free in the Knowledge. One sensibility joins what is present. What holds the axis is what is absent and how the rest appears: love, the family, labour, history, the sacred and the natural order beyond the image are absent or glimpsed, and the oblique words hold the orders at arm’s length, so that they appear as weather more than as structure.
Pre-Pottery Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The human body, made monumental. The animal world, in its dangerous powers. Death, in the vulture and the headless man. The community and its labour, in the quarrying and raising that the stones themselves record. The sacred, in whatever form the rings served. The landscape, in the ridge above the Harran plain and the quarry on the same plateau. They are integrated in one figure: the human pillar carrying the animals on its body, within the ring of the gathering. What holds the axis at its low mark is what is absent or cannot be read: the household and the family, beyond sexual signs; the state; history; the sky, which is claimed and unproven. The mark describes a form that holds a world that can only partly be named.
Philip K. Dick · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Among the lowest of the twelve, level with The Made and The Inner Law, and judged on what one short novel holds. Consciousness, in Joe’s dread and his failing body. Death and what may lie past it, in the half-life and the Moratorium. Labour and money, in Runciter’s firm, Joe’s debts and a world of metered things. Marriage, in Runciter’s hours with his dead wife. Commerce as the medium of life, in the epigraphs. The sacred, in Ubik and in Ella’s intercession. Time and history, in the regression to 1939. One figure joins them, the commodity that is also grace. What holds the axis there is the field: the state, the family beyond the Runciters, love beyond a sketch, the natural world and any society larger than a firm are thin, and the persons are few and lightly drawn.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Held within its scale, one play of about a thousand lines. The city at war: walls, gates, citizens, the women’s terror, the ruler’s management of fear. The family over three generations: Laius’ disobedience, Oedipus’ curse, the sons. The gods: the oracle, the Erinys, Zeus, Dike, the city’s gods addressed by name. The earth, as mother and as the grave allotted by the iron. These are held in one action. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, the household’s daily life and history beyond the myth are absent, and consciousness is given in one turn, not explored. The figure describes the form and the narrowness of the action; a short play is not marked down for being short.
Michelozzo · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Orders held: family and household, bank and commerce, the faction and the state, a party’s seat dressed as a public palace, the city street at the door, the sacred in the chapel at the house’s heart, antiquity revived as authority, and collecting as a mark of standing. The plan places them: clients on the bench, business and reception in the court, devotion in the chapel above, the family on the piano nobile, integrated by the passage inward and upward. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the natural order is present only in the garden behind, labour only as masonry, the wider polity only as a claim, and much of what the palace held survives in record.
Muhammad ibn Mahmud Isfahani (attributed), under Timur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, in the dynasty’s seat of the dead and the conqueror’s claim; history and genealogy, from the ancestress Alan Qo’a to Ulugh Beg in one room; the family, a grandfather, sons and grandsons laid together; the sacred, in the guide at the head of the graves, the dome of heaven and the Quranic inscription; death, the building’s whole subject; the city, under the dome raised over Samarkand. The plan places them: the holy man at the head, the founder at the centre, the line round him, the city outside. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour enters only as the evidence of the making, and the natural order, the common life and individual consciousness are not there. The tomb holds a dynasty, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held are several, and one consciousness holds them. Money and the economy, at every level from the street to the financing of a film. Work, in the making of commercials and of the film. The family, in a father’s bill, a dead mother and a question of paternity. Sexuality and pornography. Class, in Self’s London origins and his New York money. The city, two of them. The culture of television and fast food. Fiction itself, in the author who enters the book. They are integrated: every order arrives priced. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is thin or absent: the state and history appear only as the backdrop of a royal wedding and of riots, the sacred and the natural order not at all, and every consciousness but Self’s is seen from outside.
Roman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, in the ruler and his gesture; war and diplomacy, in the recovered standard and the mourning peoples; empire, in the Parthian and the subject peoples at the flanks; history, in a dated event of 20 BC; the sacred, in the gods of the breastplate and the bare feet; the natural order, in sky, sun, dawn, the earth’s fertility and the dolphin of the sea; the family, in the descent from Venus, the earth’s children and the statue’s place in Livia’s villa. They are integrated by the body that bears them, a wide reach for one figure. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, with The Unconcealment, is what is absent or only emblematic: consciousness, for the face shows no interior; labour; the ordinary life of the people the order is for. The orders are emblems on one surface, not lived.
Charles Garnier · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Orders held: the arts, music, dance, painting and sculpture in one building; society and class, in the boxes, the subscribers, the upper galleries and the separate entrances; the state, in the sovereign’s pavilion and the regime’s monument at the meeting of its avenues, finished by the Republic; the city, an axis of Haussmann’s plan answered by the front and the loggia; labour, in the stage, the workshops, the machinery and the rehearsal rooms under one roof with the salons; the body, in the dance; myth as allegory. Front and back of house stand on one axis, so the orders are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the sacred except as borrowed figure, the natural order, which the building shuts out, the household, death, and history except as quotation of styles. A house of spectacle holds a society at its pleasure, and the figure describes the form.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Five orders are held. A people’s culture and memory, built into the plan as settlement and into the grounds as myth. The natural order, wind, light, vegetation and lagoon, built into the skin. History and the state, in a commission that answers a war and names a dead leader. The sacred, in the case as the house of the ancestors and of speech. Labour and craft, in the visible making. They are integrated by the village plan and the shell, not merely listed. What holds the axis lowest: the household and the individual life are absent, for the centre is a public institution only; the sacred is translated, not inhabited; and the political order is present more as condition than as form. At this size, holding a culture, its climate and its history in one structure is a real achievement.
Knights Hospitaller builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Orders held: war, as the whole design; the sacred, in the chapel and the order’s rule; the community, a garrison and convent living together with its stores, ovens and water; the state and the frontier, the pass and the county of Tripoli it guarded; the natural order, the rock, the water and the earthquake the building is shaped to withstand; and history, Frankish then Mamluk, the chapel a mosque, built into the fabric. The walls place them in one structure, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the household and the family, labour except as the building’s own making, consciousness except as the soldier’s watch. A fortress holds a besieged world, and the figure describes the form.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the suffering body and the family, in the naked couple with their child; the heroic and the social, a champion petitioned, armed and accompanied by compassion and ambition; the monstrous order, Typhoeus and the Gorgons; sickness, madness and death; desire in its forms, lust and unchastity against the closing embrace; art itself, poetry and the arts leading on; and the sacred, in the choir of Paradise and the divine spark of Schiller’s ode. They are joined by the walk and the one line. What holds the axis at the frieze’s lowest figure, with The Unconcealment: labour, the state, history and nature as nature are absent, the orders are named by emblem more than inhabited, and consciousness appears only as longing. It holds more than a single panel could, and it is still an allegory of states, not a world.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
This is the lowest axis, and what holds it is named. A film of about 129 minutes holds Cole’s consciousness fully and Railly’s in her conversion; psychiatry and its hearings, the police, the government of the survivors, science and the laboratory; history, in the species near its end, a First World War trench glimpsed, a city decaying. The natural order is present as a theme, not decoration: the animals inherit the earth. Love is held in the couple, and the cinema itself through Vertigo. What is missing: family appears only in Jeffrey and his father, sketched, and in a boy whose parents are not seen; labour and religion are absent; the social order is seen through an asylum and an airport crowd; and a plague with one madman for its cause narrows what the apocalypse can hold.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
For a short novel it holds many orders, and one life holds them. Consciousness, divided between the narrator and the man. The body, in medicine, illness and age, with the doctor’s trade at the centre of each part of the life. History, from the camps through the flight of war criminals by way of Rome and the Church to postwar America. The state, in the Nazi apparatus and its medicine. Sexuality and marriage, in Tod’s women and Odilo’s wife. The sacred, in the reversed Genesis and in the narrator’s sense of himself as a soul. They are integrated, not listed: each is the field of one man’s offence and evasion. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is what the form cannot hold: the victims are seen only as the backward world shows them, in crowds and not as persons; labour, class and the family across time are thin; and the short span of the telling holds a life in outline.
Bob Rafelson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of 98 minutes holds. Consciousness, Bobby’s, held from outside and through behaviour, from within only in the field; the family as an institution of art, a father, three children, a fiancée and a nurse; class from both sides, the axis on which the film turns; labour on the rigs, glimpsed and real; art as practice, inheritance and burden; the couple in Rayette, Catherine and the double date; the country from Kern County to Puget Sound; the counterculture at the edges, in the hitchhikers. They are integrated, since class, family and art are one problem in Bobby. What holds it: Rayette’s and Catherine’s inner lives are withheld, and the state, history, the sacred and the politics of 1970 are absent by choice.
Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Orders held: the family, rebuilt in the K and F types as a smaller unit; labour, above all domestic labour, taken out of the flat into kitchen, laundry and dining room, and with it the place of women in the household; the state, as patron and as the commissariat whose staff it housed, with the commissar on the roof; class and hierarchy, in the gap between the K flat, the F cell and the penthouse; the body, in gymnasium and roof; the natural order, in the garden slope, light and air; the city, in the internal street. The section places each at its level, so they are integrated more than listed. What holds the axis: history appears only as the moment’s programme, the sacred and death are absent, and a single block holds a household’s world and its politics, not a city’s.
Johnny Cash · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The state is held, as prison, guards, walls, stripes and the gallows, and not as abstraction: it is the room. Labour is held in the mine of “Dark as the Dungeon” and the work gang of “I Got Stripes”. The family is held: a mother’s picture, a wife and son in “Give My Love to Rose”, home and parents in “Green, Green Grass of Home”. Love and its loss, addiction and violence, death throughout, and the sacred in “Greystone Chapel”, all integrated by one place and one audience. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: history and the natural order are absent or glimpsed, and consciousness is held in song types more than in an interior.
William Gibson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Held, not listed. Consciousness, in Case’s addiction, grief and self-disgust and in the minds of the two intelligences; the body, modified, sold, rented and wired; labour as the hustle and the hired job; the economy as the corporation and the black market; the state, present as the Turing Police and as the military betrayal of Screaming Fist and otherwise outgrown; the family, as a dynasty in decay; the sacred, in Zion’s faith and the god born in the matrix; and the made world, the city and the orbital habitat. One law joins them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, level with The Inevitable: ordinary life, household, children, love that lasts, any work outside the criminal, is all but absent; history is a backdrop of wars named and not shown; and the natural order is the one thing the book does not hold at all.
Geoffrey Bawa · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Five orders are held in one structure: the state and its hierarchy, built in plan; history, in the move to Kotte and the roof taken from the Kandyan kingdom; the natural order, the lake, the monsoon, shade and air, answered in section; ceremony and assembly; and the city, held at a distance across the water, present as its absence. They are integrated, not listed: the water is at once landscape, history and political separation. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or thin: labour, the household, the sacred (the building borrows a temple’s setting but is not a temple) and individual consciousness. A parliament is a large programme, and the building holds more than a house or a hall, but less than a city or a cathedral.
Frank Ocean · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, in a voice that observes and wants. Love and sexuality are held, and the record’s centre is one love withheld. Class is held at both ends, the rich kids and the addict, with money in Sweet Life and Not Just Money. Drugs as the common escape run through four songs. The state appears as the police of Crack Rock; religion as Bad Religion’s faith and the cab driver’s prayer; myth as Egypt; the city as Los Angeles and its suburbs. What holds this axis lowest of the twelve: most orders are present as one sketch each, joined by attitude more than by structure, and labour, the natural order and history beyond myth are thin. Many orders, lightly held.
Thai builders, under Rama II and Rama III · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: the sacred, Buddhist and Brahmanic in one cosmos; the natural order, as the mountain of the world with its quarters and its winds, and as the river the tower faces; the state, as Chakri kingship placed on the axis opposite the palace; commerce, as the China trade built into the skin; and the city, as the emblem of Bangkok on the water. These are integrated, not listed: the trade is the surface of the mountain, the king’s temple the summit of the city. What holds the axis, level with the page’s lowest, is what is absent: the household; labour, except as the anonymous craft of the surface; the individual consciousness, except as the climber’s ascent; and death. A solid monument holds a cosmology more than a world.
Iris Murdoch · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One of the two lowest of the twelve. The book holds consciousness, at length and in depth; love and marriage; the life of art, the theatre as a world and as a metaphor; religion, in Buddhism, the spiritual life and the uses of power; and the natural order, the sea as a force and not a backdrop. It integrates them through the one narrator. What holds the axis there is what it leaves out, which is large: labour, the state, history and class appear only as a tint of Charles’s snobbery and Ben’s soldiering. Its world is a house, a village and a set of former lovers. That is a choice, and the integration of what it holds is good, but the orders of reality held in one structure are fewer than in the social novels at the top of the axis.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, in three agencies, the Mexican police, the rules of jurisdiction and the paper that legalises; the economy, in the drug trade’s cash, its banks and its routes; the family, in Silvio’s household, Alarcón’s dinner table and Alejandro’s destroyed family, held as one chain of consequence; consciousness, in Kate, whose conscience is the film’s thread; and the border as a political and physical place, with the desert as its ground. The plot integrates them: the cash, the tunnel, the policeman and the family are one operation, and for a two-hour thriller the range is real. What holds it among the lowest: consciousness is Kate’s surface and Alejandro’s mask and no further, Mexico is seen from outside, and labour and the sacred are absent.
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger; Michelangelo; Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held: the family, as lineage and as household, in the arms, the rooms and the service ranges; the state, a papal dynasty acting as a sovereign house; the Church, whose head built it; the city, in the piazza opened before it and the axis through it to the river; antiquity, in spolia, quoted orders and the collection it held; and labour, in the scale of the making. One axis and one block place each, so they are integrated rather than listed. What holds it is what is absent or thin: the sacred appears as power, not as worship; the natural order only at the garden end, now cut; death only in a dynasty’s need for a seat. A palace holds more than a villa and less than a city.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what a lyric collection holds. Consciousness, in the analysis of love’s effects that the new style practised and the stony poems darken. The body and desire, in the stony poems. The natural order and the cosmos, in the winter of Io son venuto, where the sun’s position and the stars frame a frozen earth. Friendship and the poets’ guild, in the sonnet to Cavalcanti and the exchanges. The household, poverty and appetite, in the tenzone with Forese. Society and ethics, in Le dolci rime on nobility and Doglia mi reca on avarice. The state and history, in the exile of Tre donne. The sacred only at the edge. Several are joined in single poems, love, justice and exile in Tre donne, cosmos and desire in Io son venuto; across the body they are listed more than integrated.
Bob Marley and the Wailers · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The sacred is held, Jah and Zion, in the frame of the whole. The state and its powerful are held as Babylon, in Guiltiness and the title track. History is held: slavery and Garvey in So Much Things to Say, the diaspora in the title. The couple is held across side two, desire, waiting and rest; the natural order appears in Natural Mystic and in the birds at the doorstep; the people as a gathered body is the close. That is a wide span for thirty-seven minutes. What holds the figure lowest is integration: the orders are joined by the theology, but laid out side by side, judgement here and love there, and only One Love and the title track hold more than one order in one song. Labour and the family are absent.
Judy Chicago · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Many orders are present, and the triangle holds several in one structure. History, across some four millennia of named women. The sacred: goddesses, abbesses, mystics, heretics. The body, made the sign of every guest. Labour: the domestic work of the table and the needle, and the collective labour of the making itself. The state and the law: queens, reformers, suffragists. Learning and art: Herschel, Dickinson, Woolf, O’Keeffe. The table integrates them, at once altar, household and historical record. What holds the axis is that the orders are present more than held. Each life is reduced to an emblem, so that consciousness and the family are almost absent; the natural order appears only as the fertility of the first wing; and the world encompassed is overwhelmingly European and Euro-American, the rest of the world almost unseated. Wide and thin.
Sidney Lumet · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. The medium and its audience; the corporation and the market, in the CCA deal and Jensen’s speech of currencies and dollars; the state, as a fiction under money; revolution, in the Ecumenical Liberation Army and the Communist Party, bought as content; the family, in the Schumachers’ marriage; work, in the news division and its dismantling; consciousness, in Beale’s breakdown and Diana’s emptiness; and something like the sacred, in Beale’s voice and Jensen’s cosmology, held as parody. They are integrated through one law. What holds the axis lowest: the public is a crowd at windows and never people, labour beyond the office is absent, history is a line in a speech, and the sacred is a joke the film will not commit to.
Kara Walker · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held are many, and one figure in one place integrates them. Labour, enslaved and industrial, in the sugar and the refinery; the body and sex, in the figure and its exposure; childhood, in the boys; commerce and the Atlantic trade, in the commodity; history, from the medieval subtlety to the plantation to the closing plant; the city and its capital, in the demolition and what was to follow; the sacred and the monumental, in the sphinx; and the public, made part of the material. What holds the axis is the form: one figure and her attendants, with no narrative, and much held by implication through the title rather than in the sculpture. Wide for a single sculptural work, and the figure describes the form.
David Mackenzie · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
A film of about 102 minutes holds many orders and joins them in one act. The family: two brothers, a dead mother, a dead father whose violence lies behind both, an ex-wife and two sons. The economy and labour: the bank, the reverse mortgage, oil, cattle, a waitress’s tips, closed shops. The state and the law: two Rangers, the FBI at the margins, armed citizens. History: the Comanche, the frontier, the land taken twice. The land itself, with fire and drought, and race, in the Rangers’ ribbing and the casino. The robbery, the debt and the dispossession are one act, and that is the figure’s ground. What limits it: consciousness is shown from outside, women are present as functions, the sacred hardly enters, and the whole is carried by four men on two roads.
Jules Verne · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The book holds the natural order on a planetary scale, the ocean and its life from the surface to the floor and from pole to pole; science and its technology; history, in Atlantis, the galleons of Vigo, the drowned ships and the Vengeur of 1794; politics, in the Cretan rising, the colonial seas and Nemo’s war on the nations; and, in Nemo’s appeals to God at the end, the sacred. What it does not hold: the family is a portrait on a wall; labour is a silent crew; the state is an absent enemy; consciousness is Aronnax’s wonder and Nemo’s sealed grief. The orders are present and in part held together through Nemo, whose history, a family lost and a nation oppressed, would join them; but the book withholds that history, and the orders stand largely side by side.
Taddeo Gaddi or Neri di Fioravanti (attributed) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders held: commerce and the guilds, in the shops and their trade; the state, in the commune that built and let the bridge and the duchy that laid its corridor over it; the natural order, in the river and its floods, which shaped the arches and twice nearly took them; war and history, in the night of August 1944; the sacred, faintly, in the corridor’s window into Santa Felicita; the household, in that the shopkeepers once lived over and behind their shops; and the city as a whole, joined across its river. The two-level section integrates commerce and the state, and the arches integrate the river. What holds the axis at 7.6: consciousness and death are absent except in the site’s legend, the sacred is touched rather than held, and the household is a memory. For a bridge it holds much.
Harper Lee · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Many orders, held in one structure: a child’s consciousness and its growth; a family without a mother, with its servant, its aunt and its neighbours; the town’s class and caste; law as procedure and as ritual; two churches; the memory of the Civil War and of the Finches’ slave-holding forebear; the Depression’s economy of payment in kind; the natural order of seasons, snow, fire and mockingbirds. They are integrated through Maycomb and the trial, not listed. The bounds are the town’s and the child’s: the state is present only as the courthouse; labour, the sacred and history are glimpsed rather than held; and black Maycomb’s own world lies outside the structure. A small compass, well filled.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: the household, in suites of living and storage rooms with hearths; labour, in the courts where corn was ground and in the stores above; the community and its divisions, in the many kivas and the halves one reading proposes; the sacred and the cosmos, in the kiva and the way of emergence; the natural order, in the alcove, the seep and the canyon; and by the end history itself, a community at the edge of leaving. One section places them: the sacred below, dwelling in the middle, stores above, the rock over all, so they are integrated more than listed. What holds the axis: the state is absent or unknowable, individual consciousness is not built, and the record is too thin to say what more the village held.
Lev Rudnev · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held in one structure: the state, in the emblem, the star, the axis and the decree that made it; learning and science, in the faculties, the library and the earth sciences museum at the summit; domestic life, in the residences for students and staff lived inside the monument; labour, in the building’s own making by prisoners, held in its fabric if not in its programme, and in the workers and students of its sculpture; the city, in the skyline, the plan and the axis to the river; and the natural order, in the hill, the river and the instruments of weather and time on the tower. They are integrated, not listed: the residence is in the wing because the wing is in the ensemble because the ensemble is the state’s university. Absent or displaced: the sacred, which the building usurps rather than holds, and death, history and the household beyond the dormitory. Held below 8.0 because the integration is by rank rather than by meaning.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for being an album. Consciousness is held, as the self in a hall of images. Erotic love and marriage are held in the dialogue songs and in Porno, the most exact of them. The family enters in We Exist, a son asking his father for recognition. Death and grief are held in Afterlife and the Orpheus songs; the sacred in the missionaries and the locked heaven of Night Time and in Joan of Arc; history and the state glimpsed through Haiti’s carnival and its missionaries. The media age frames them all, and the reflection theme joins several orders under one condition. That is a wider span than most albums hold. What holds it: most orders arrive song by song, Haiti is a sound more than a place, and labour and the natural order are absent.
Ptolemaic and Roman builders · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Orders of reality held in one structure. The sacred is the frame: the goddess, the myth of Osiris, the birth of Horus. The state is held within it, foreign kings and emperors cut as pharaohs and the temple an instrument of rule at a frontier. The natural order is held in the siting at the cataract and in the myth of the Nile’s source and the flood. The frontier between Egypt, Nubia and Rome is held in its pilgrims and its inscriptions, and history in the fabric of the last temple of a religion converted in place, though that order is the building’s fate rather than its design. Consciousness and the family enter only through the divine family of the myth. A large holding for a temple of its size, joined in the siting more than in the plan.
Takashi Yamazaki · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. One consciousness, Shikishima’s, from inside; the found family of a man, a woman and an orphan; the neighbourhood, in Sumiko; labour, in the minesweeping; the state, present as an absence and an accusation; history, from the kamikaze order to Bikini Atoll and the occupation; the natural order, as an irradiated creature from the sea. These are integrated, not listed: the guilt, the family and the operation are one movement, and the holding is wide for a film of its size and kind. What holds it: Noriko’s consciousness is barely given, the occupation is mentioned and not shown, the sacred is present only in a name, and it remains the film of one man.
Paul Abadie · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The orders held in one structure: the sacred, in the Heart and the Sacrament adored without end; the nation, in the vow of France after the defeat of 1870 and the statues of the porch; history, in the Commune on the same hill, the Republic that funded and fought it, and the wars it outlasted; the city, which the building exists to be seen by and to see; the natural order, in the hill, the quarries beneath and the stone that whitens with rain; and martyrdom, in the mount of Saint Denis. The site integrates them. What it lacks: labour, the family, the body and the common life enter only as the crowd on the steps, and consciousness only as penance prescribed. Many orders present, a fair number integrated.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 137 minutes holds. The family drives the plot: father, mother, uncle, half-brothers, the unborn twins. Kingship and succession, with Harald’s conquest of Norway making Fjölnir an exile. Labour and slavery, at length, on the slave ship and the farm. War, as the raid. The sacred, in seeress, rite, sacrifice and afterlife, presented as fact. The natural order, in sea, ice, birch forest and volcano. Consciousness is thinnest: Amleth is held from outside by design, and Olga and Gudrún get less inwardness than their parts require. The orders are joined, the sacred governing the family and the family the politics, at the scale of a few households.
Robertson Davies · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Many orders, joined through one life. Consciousness, in the narrator’s guilt and its displacement. The family, in Dunstan’s hard mother and the Dempster household. The village and its morality. Religion in three forms, Baptist, Presbyterian and Catholic, with the hagiographer’s learning. War, at Passchendaele. Money and power, in Boy’s sugar fortune and his political ambition. Education, in Colborne College. The theatre and the carnival, as the world of illusion. Sexuality, in the gravel pit, in Leola and in Liesl. Canadian history from 1908 to 1968, as the ground. They are integrated, not listed: each is a stage on which the stone does its work. Held in the middle sevens because every order passes through one narrator’s reticent and ironic vantage, labour and class are drawn from above, and history is a ground rather than an agent.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
A wordless symphony holds more than its medium suggests, and less than a song cycle or an opera with a world. The orders it holds: consciousness, as a will under trial; the collective, in the finale’s public, open-air music; the individual against the collective, in the oboe’s single bar; the military and the festive, in the fanfares of the Andante and the finale; mortality and terror, in the scherzo. They are held by one law, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the natural order, which belongs to the Sixth, written beside it, the family, labour, the sacred and history do not appear, and the state appears only as public celebration. The figure describes the form.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
A small form carries scope by section and geometry rather than by extent. The orders held: the sacred, the Trinity in plan, dome and lantern; the cosmos, circle, triangle and cross made one body; the body, enclosed by a moving wall; the community, a conventual life of church, cloister and crypt on one lot; the city, the crossroads and its fountain taken into the façade; death, in the crypt; poverty, in the brick and whitewash of a mendicant order. One geometry places each, from the crypt to the dove. What holds the axis here is what is absent: the state, the family, labour as such, history except through a saint, nature except as light, consciousness except as perception. A small conventual church holds a community’s faith, not a world. The figure describes the form.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier IV
A wordless piano work holds more orders than its medium suggests, through its registers. Consciousness, in a subject passing from assertion through grief to labour; the learned tradition, in a fugue that carries Bach and Handel into the sonata; the public and ceremonial, in the fanfare and the first movement’s grandeur; the comic, in the Scherzo; the sacred, unnamed, in the chorale-like stillness of the D major episode and the prayer of the Adagio’s close. They are held on one law, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the state, history, labour, the family and the natural order do not appear, and nothing outside one mind and its art is held. Above the Goldberg’s 7.4 for its range of states; below Winterreise’s 7.7, whose words bring in a town and the weather.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held are few and integrated: the sacred, as the work’s whole matter; mortality and the soul, in the stranger who will soon be gone; the community of worship, in a chorus that sings as a body and never as a person; the institution, lightly, in a work made for an orchestra’s jubilee and to the glory of God; and the cosmos, in the last psalm’s every instrument and every spirit. The order of the three psalms holds them together; they are not listed. What holds the axis here is the form and its absences: the family, labour, the state and history as lived do not appear. A short sacred work holds the creature and its praise, more than a wordless quartet can and far fewer orders than an epic.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held in one small room are several, and placement integrates them. The family, in a couple whose union or loss is the occasion. Commerce and rank, in a merchant’s furs, imported fruit, a brass chandelier and glass. The sacred, in the Passion round the mirror, the carved figure on the chair, the prayer beads, the lit candle. The law, in the witnessed gesture and the inscription. Consciousness, in two people side by side who look past each other. The natural order is a terrier and a few oranges, and the world outside a fruiting tree seen through the window. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no state, no labour seen, no history but what the viewer brings. The figure describes the form.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in earth, trees, river and sky; the body, fourteen times; a company, women together without rank, address or story, a society of a kind; the animal, in the dog; the sacred, in the nave of trees and the steeple across the water; the made, in the fruit on its cloth, a still life inside a landscape; and art, the museum tradition rebuilt in the open air. They are integrated by the triangle and the river. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, the state, history, the family, and consciousness, since the faces are blank and no figure can be said to think. That absence is the form’s: a pastoral is a world without work or time. It holds more than the pond, since there are people and a town across the water, and less than a court or a ceiling. The figure describes the form.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Four orders are integrated through the couple: desire, at the centre; crime and the state, in the killing, the police and the informer; cinema and the image, in the Bogart cult, the Monogram dedication and the films within the film; and the traffic between France and America, in the newspaper, the language, the cars and the novelist at Orly. What keeps the axis lowest is what is touched or absent. Art beyond cinema appears as posters and a quoted line, journalism as Patricia’s ambition, and death arrives only at the end. There is no family to speak of, no labour beyond petty crime and selling papers, and nothing of the sacred; the Algerian war, then being fought, is outside the frame.
Olivier Messiaen · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The work holds, and integrates under one eschatological frame: the sacred, as a developed theology, the Angel, the end of Time, Christ as Word and as risen man, eternity and immortality distinguished; the natural order, in birds at dawn, the abyss and the rainbow; consciousness, in the solitary voice of the Abîme and the dream of the Fouillis; time itself, as the subject; and the cosmos, in the heaven and stars of two movements. What holds the axis here is absence. The family, labour, the state, history and society do not appear, and the four in unison are a single will, not a community. The figure says how many orders a fifty-minute chamber work with a printed theology holds.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged at the play’s own scale. Consciousness, fully, across three ages. The body, in appetite, constipation, drink and decay. Love: the girl in the punt, the others on the tape, Fanny. Death: the mother’s, behind the blind on the canal. Vocation and its failure: the work, the vision, seventeen copies. The sacred, in the vespers and the vision. Time itself, the subject. They are integrated, not listed: one man’s renunciation joins them. What holds the axis at 7.5 is what is absent: labour, the family beyond the mother, the state and history appear not at all, and the natural order only as backdrop, the canal, the water, the wind on the jetty. Everything is seen from one chair. The play holds more than its size would suggest, and no more than one life.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Five orders are held in one structure: the labour of science, in the laboratory, its equipment and its change over time; consciousness in solitude, in the study; a community of scholars, in the court and on the bridges; the natural order, in the ocean, the horizon, the light and the water’s course; and, by the axis and the empty precinct, a gesture toward the sacred without a god. They are integrated, not listed: the section joins labour to thought, and the court joins both to the horizon. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, the city, the state and history. The residences and meeting house, where common life would have entered, were never built. The figure describes a focused building.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as altered perception and as disorder in Manic Depression and the title track. Desire and the body are held in Foxy Lady, Fire and May This Be Love. The blues tradition is carried in Red House, and with it, unstated, the history of the music it comes from. The cosmos is evoked in Third Stone, Earth seen from outside, and displacement is set in I Don’t Live Today. What holds the figure lowest: the family, labour, the state, the city, the sacred and history as event are absent or glimpsed, and the orders that are present are carried by one sound more than held together by any person or argument. A forty-minute record of sensation holds what it holds.
John Donne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what a body of love lyrics holds. Consciousness, fully: the mind of the lover in argument with itself. The body, in sex, in sickness (“A Fever”), in death and the grave. The sacred, in relics and canonization, the soul’s descent in “The Ecstasy” and the theology of angels. The cosmos, in the spheres, the hemispheres and alchemy. The state and the court, in kings, favourites and princes (“The Sun Rising”, “The Anniversary”); money and law, in “Love’s Usury” and “The Will”. These are integrated into one argument, love’s, and that is the limit as well as the achievement: the orders enter as figures for love more than as orders held for themselves. The family, labour, history and the natural order as lived are absent or glimpsed. That holds the axis at 7.5, the lowest of the twelve; the figure describes the form, and the body holds more of the world than most lyric bodies because its figures reach so far.
Sophocles · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged at a single play’s scale. Consciousness is held fully, in Electra’s long endurance. The family: a mother, two sisters, a dead father, an absent brother, and a murdered daughter, Iphigenia, argued over in the agon. The state: Aegisthus’ rule as usurpation, the house as the city. The sacred: Apollo’s oracle, which sends Orestes and is prayed to by mother and daughter both; the dead below; the rites at the tomb. The body and labour, in Electra’s servitude; games and spectacle, in the Pythian race. All of it is held, not listed, through one house and one day. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that form: history and the natural order are absent, and the city as an agent barely appears.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The natural order is present as storm, flood, mountain and land; the sacred as Stairway’s question of ascent and a sermon on what can be bought; desire as the blues boast; the road and the wish for a new life in Going to California. History enters once, through sound: the 1927 flood and the people it displaced, carried by Memphis Minnie’s song. War is present as fantasy. What holds the figure lowest: consciousness is thinly held, the figures are emblems, the family, labour, the state and the city are absent, and the orders are named in separate songs and joined by sound rather than held in one structure.
Radiohead · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for being an album. Six orders are present: consciousness, as dissociation; the family, in the ninth track’s divided children; the state and the crowd, in the anthem and the fear that everyone has; the natural order, in an ice age and dinosaurs; technology and the media, in radio, mobiles and strobe lights; death and the sacred, in limbo and the next life. One condition, the self withdrawing under pressure, integrates them, more through sound than statement. But most orders appear as single images, glimpsed rather than held, and labour and history are absent. That, not the album form, sets the figure.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
A few orders are held in one structure: consciousness, in a mind given to the audience from inside; the state, in prison, police, a Minister and a treatment; art, in Beethoven as love and as weapon; medicine, as an arm of government. They are integrated: the Ninth is the hinge on which consciousness, art and the state turn together. What holds the axis lowest is the rest. The family is glanced at: parents who are furniture, a lodger, no children. Labour does not exist; nobody in the film works except doctors and police. The sacred is a chaplain’s speech. History is a near future with no past. Women are victims and furniture. It is a film about one young man and the state, and the world between them is a set.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of 108 minutes holds. The family, which is the whole subject; two consciousnesses, held mostly in reserve; marriage as an institution, and the divorced woman as its alternative; work, briefly, in the father’s scholarship, Hattori’s assistance and Aya’s living; the nation under occupation, through a few signs and roads; tradition and the sacred, in the tea ceremony, the Noh, the temples and the garden of stones; the natural order, in the sea and in the season the title names. They are integrated rather than listed: every order is shown as it bears on the one decision. What holds the axis lowest is that they all enter at the edge of a household. History and the state are glimpsed and never held, and the world beyond the house is seen only as it touches the house.
Charles Mingus · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record achieves. Consciousness is held, as a divided interior made audible and named in the title. Eros is held, in the duet and the farewell. The social and the political are held, in the freedom and revolution of the titles and in the band as a society of shouting equals, and they are integrated with the interior rather than listed beside it, which is the record’s achievement. The sacred is named in the saint and carried in the church inflections of the ensemble. The history of Black music, from the blues and the church through Ellington, is carried in the sound. What holds the axis lowest is absence: labour, the family, the state as an institution and the natural order do not appear. A wordless record of thirty-nine minutes holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
What the cave holds in one structure: the natural order, horse, aurochs, bison, stag, ibex, feline, bear, rhinoceros and bird, by species and perhaps by season; the sacred, by inference from the place, a cave not lived in, worked in the dark at great labour, with its one human at the bottom in a mask; death and the hunt, in the Shaft, where the spear, the wound and the fallen man are drawn, not inferred; and the human as such, once. The descent places them, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the family, labour as a subject, the state, history, the city, the plant world and the landscape. The form is immense and the orders few.
Lewis Carroll · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Many orders are present, held as satire, through one child’s dream, at the scale of a short book. The self, in identity under growth, said outright. Education, in lessons recited wrong and the Mock Turtle’s curriculum of Reeling and Writhing. The household, in the Duchess’s kitchen, the cook throwing pans and the baby that becomes a pig. Class and service, in the Rabbit’s servants, the gardeners and the footmen. The state and the law, in the Queen’s executions and the King’s court. Language and logic throughout. One law governs them all, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve is depth: none of these orders is held for long, and the state is a deck of cards. The natural order appears only as talking animals, history only as a dry lecture on William the Conqueror, and the sacred not at all. A small form describes itself here.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Six orders are placed by one unit and one axis, and so are integrated rather than listed. The sacred: the blood of the Passion and its veneration, with the pilgrims and the parish in one room. The state: the Gonzaga marquisate’s claim on its city’s chief church and on the relic’s prestige. History: Roman antiquity revived and an Etruscan origin claimed, the past of Italy built into a Christian present. Death, in the chapels and tombs, Mantegna’s among them. The city, the front addressing the piazza at the centre of Mantua. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the household and the family, labour except the building’s own making, the natural order, and consciousness except the pilgrim’s approach. A town church holds more than a house and less than a cathedral; the figure describes the form.
Paul Celan · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a book of lyrics holds, not punished for its form. Consciousness, fully, in a self addressing a “you”. The family, in the mother killed in Transnistria, present in “Espenbaum”, “Der Reisekamerad” and elsewhere. Love and the erotic, through the later sections. History and the state, in “Todesfuge”, where the machinery of murder, its commander, its labour of digging, its music and its letters home, is held in thirty-odd lines. The sacred, in Sulamith, Ruth and Mirjam, and a God addressed obliquely. Nature as emblem: aspen, dandelion, almond, poppy. What holds the axis at 7.5, the lowest of the twelve, is what is absent: labour, society and the ordinary world, and outside the strongest poems the orders are held one at a time.
Jane Austen · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the novel holds, and it holds a few orders thoroughly and integrates them. Consciousness, in Elizabeth’s judgment and its reversal. The family, in the Bennets: a mismatched marriage, five daughters, a negligent father, the consequences borne by the children. Property and law, in the entail and the stated incomes. Class, from Lady Catherine through the landed gentry and the clergy to the Gardiners in trade, with its mobility and resentments. Sexuality, in Lydia, and its social price. The land, in Pemberley as a moral landscape. They are held together, not listed: the entail drives the marriages, and the marriages expose the classes. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the book leaves out: labour and the servants barely appear, Mrs Reynolds the housekeeper the exception; the war is present only as officers at Meryton and a camp at Brighton; the state, the sacred and death are absent.
Käthe Kollwitz · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
For two figures the orders held are many and integrated: the family, a marriage and a lost son; the state and the war, a German memorial in Belgian ground among the dead of the invasion; history, a generation’s consent and its cost; the sacred, kneeling as prayer and penance before a holy field; consciousness, two minds in grief that cannot meet. They are held in one structure rather than listed, because the siting carries the war and the nation while the figures carry the family and the mind. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form: no landscape of labour or society, no natural order beyond the field, no second scene. The mark records the ceiling of two figures. Level with The Large Bathers at 7.5, a tenth above The Starry Night.
Charles Laughton · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 93 minutes holds. The family is held fully, twice: the Harper house broken and refounded, and Rachel’s house of gathered children. Consciousness is John’s, fully: his oath, his silence, his breaking. The sacred is a real order here, in its counterfeit and in its practice, a revival tent and a hymn sung in two meanings. The Depression enters through a robbery done for the children’s bread and through the river’s drifting poor; the natural order through the river and its animals; the law through the gallows, the police and a court; sexuality through Powell’s revulsion and Ruby’s hunger. What holds the axis lowest: labour and the state stay at the edges, the town is a parlour and a congregation more than a society, and history is a setting, not an order held.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held are several, and the cycle places them in one structure. The state, as police, prison and the burial it permitted. History: the Federal Republic’s war with the children of the generation that made the Third Reich, though that war is nowhere stated. Death, in nine of fifteen canvases. Ideology, present as books on shelves and as its absence from every image. The image itself, the media through which a nation saw the Red Army Faction. Consciousness, in Ensslin’s turn of the head and in the viewer’s attempt to see. The sacred enters only through mourning and burial. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, though Ensslin’s father was a pastor and Meinhof had children; no labour; no natural order; and no victim of the Red Army Faction.
Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
How many orders does one structure hold? The family and its rooms; the profession and the body, a gynaecologist’s practice inside the home; labour, in the servants’ routes and quarters; the machine and industry, in the frame, the lens and the mechanism; the city and history, in the insertion into a hôtel of the ancien régime and the old storey kept above; and the natural order, in the daylight and the garden. They are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the sacred, the state and death are not here, and the world of the house is one household in one court. A domestic form holds this much and no more, and the figure describes the form.
Dmitri Shostakovich · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
A wordless symphony holds orders through sound alone, and this one holds several: consciousness, in the first movement’s lyric line and in the Largo; the state and the crowd, as the public voice of the march and the coda; mourning and the community of mourners, in the Largo as it was heard in 1937; the popular and the grotesque, in the scherzo’s dance; history, as the occasion the work answers. They are integrated by the law of public and private voice, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the state and history are present by inference from the occasion, not in the score, and that the family, labour, the natural order and the sacred named as such do not appear.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, the self divided and its own companion; the body, its anatomy, wound and blood; love and marriage, in the miniature of the absent husband; the nation and its history, European and indigenous Mexico worn on one face, a colonial inheritance made a personal fact; the sacred, in the devotional heart given to a secular self; and the natural order, as weather. They are integrated: the one vessel passes through the husband, the two hearts and the clamp, and the dress carries the history on the same bodies. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no labour, no state as institution, no community beyond the one person doubled, no family beyond the husband as a child’s image. The figure describes the form.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a novella holds. Consciousness, fully, in an obsessed mind. The body, in sex, pregnancy, nursing, illness and the knife. The family, in the marriage and the five children. Medicine, as an institution Pozdnyshev blames. Art, in the music and its power. Society, in the upbringing of girls, the marriage market, the brothel and the court that acquits him. The sacred, in the epigraph and the doctrine of chastity. One obsession joins them, and they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that they are seen from inside one consciousness and largely as charges in its argument, while the state, labour, history and the natural order are absent or glimpsed. For a novella the count is generous, and the figure describes the form.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The set holds more orders than most wordless chamber music. The state is present: the hymn written for a monarchy at war stands at the centre of No. 3. The sacred is there in the hymn’s character and in the Adagio sostenuto of No. 1; society in miniature in four voices in conversation, and the court and the country dance in the minuets and the stamping canon; consciousness in the mesto Largo and the searching Fantasia. The orders are held together by the conversation, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, labour, history as such and death do not appear. The figure stands above Op. 131, at 7.3, for the state, and below Winterreise, at 7.7.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Seven orders are held, more than most houses hold: the household, family and guests; art, in the collection the house was built to show and the studio of a woman who painted; class and labour, in the service arm and the industrial fortune that built the house; the body, in sauna, pool and the hand on the fittings; the natural order, the forest brought into the columns and the courtyard opened to it; the history of the place, the farmstead and the sauna, a nation’s memory; and, faintly, the new state’s ambition to be modern and its own. The courtyard places them round one yard, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the city, the sacred, death, and the state except faintly. A country house holds a family’s world and its land, and the figure describes the form.
Attributed to Domenico da Cortona, under Francis I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Six orders are held. Kingship, in the emblems and the central lantern; the court and its ranks, in the lodgings, halls and stair; the natural order, through the forest and the hunt the building exists to serve and to watch; history, in the feudal keep kept as the frame of a new plan; the meeting of Italy and France; and spectacle as a mode of power. The geometry places most of them, so they are integrated. What holds the score lowest is what is absent: labour and the life of the household appear only as service spaces; the sacred is in the chapel wing, finished late and at the edge, not in the governing idea; the family is reduced to lodgings; death does not enter. A seat of pleasure holds less than a palace of government or a cathedral.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
More orders are held than two figures suggest. Consciousness, in Gelsomina’s sense of herself and Zampanò’s late knowledge; the family, in a mother who sells her daughter out of poverty and a pair that is almost a marriage; labour, in performance as a trade, money counted after each show, the strongman’s body as his tool; the sacred, in the procession, the convent and the nun’s word that they both travel; the natural order, in the sea that opens and closes the film and the winter that takes Gelsomina; the social order, in poverty, the police and the circus as a society of outcasts. What holds it lowest: the state is a cell, history is felt only in the poverty, and the towns are glimpsed from the road. It is a parable’s scope, held through two people.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of under two hours in one register holds. The state, as a feudal order of loyalty and murder; war; the marriage, and the family through the lost child and the promised succession; the sacred, in the spirit and a Buddhist frame of vanity sung over the ruin; nature, as forest, fog, horses and birds, each an agent of the plot; history, the age of warring states in which lords rise by killing lords. They are integrated, not listed: the forest is at once nature, prophecy and the army that kills him. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness, the order the play holds above all others, is withdrawn and shown only as behaviour; labour and common life are absent but for soldiers and servants; and the society beyond the castle and its garrisons is not seen.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 100 minutes holds. Consciousness, in a woman’s fantasy life, rendered from outside but at the film’s centre; marriage and sexuality, the main order; class, in the bourgeois flat, the clients of the house across rank from a sweet manufacturer to a duke, and the underworld of Marcel and Hippolyte; the Church, in the communion flashback and the profaned rite; medicine, in Pierre’s surgery and a professor’s game; labour, in prostitution kept to hours and paid. Séverine integrates them. What holds the axis lowest: the state appears only as the police; history is absent, with no war and no politics in a Paris of 1967; nature is a park and a snowfield; and every consciousness but hers is surface, Pierre’s above all.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
For a short form it holds more than it seems to: a family under the strain of illness; a farming village and its labour, in rice planting, Granny’s vegetables and the journey to and from the city; the sacred, in the shrine tree and the stone jizo by the road where Mei waits; the natural order of season and growth; and, implicit, Japan’s rural edge before it was paved, which the period setting makes a quiet elegy. These are integrated, not listed: the seeds tie the sacred to the garden, and the ear of corn ties the field to the sickbed. What holds the axis lowest: history and the state are absent, and consciousness is a child’s. The form reaches no further, and the figure says so.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 110 minutes holds. The family across three generations, with marriage, divorce, remarriage, adoption, widowhood and grandchildren; consciousness, at a deliberate distance but present in several characters; vocation and its failure, in finance, playwriting, sport, fiction and neurology; money and class, Royal broke and evicted from his hotel, the house as a family estate; race, lightly and pointedly, in Royal’s taunts of Henry Sherman; addiction in Eli; death and burial. One house and one story of a father’s return hold them together. What keeps the axis lowest: the state, history and the natural order do not enter, the city is an invented New York without a public world, the sacred is absent but for the funeral, and the outsiders’ worlds are sketched rather than held.
Wang Xianchen; Wen Zhengming (attributed design) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held are several. The natural order, made into a world of mountain, water and seasons. The self, as the scholar’s withdrawal and cultivation. Culture, in the poems, couplets and names that bind text to view. The state, as what is renounced and present by that renunciation, for the name is political. The household, once in the residence at the garden’s front, now only context. History, in a Taiping prince’s occupation and the long change of owners, carried in the fabric rather than designed. The walk and the view integrate them. What holds the axis lowest is what the wall keeps out: labour, the gardeners and the tenants whose rents paid for it, is hidden; the sacred is present only as Daoist pattern and a borrowed pagoda; the city and the common life stay outside.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in the forest and the winter; history, from the battle of AD 9 to the uses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the state and the nation, the Roman empire defeated and the German nation founded on the defeat; literature, in the writers through whom the battle became a nation’s story; violence and death, in the blood; the family, in the family tree the names make; the sacred, in the grove, evoked more than held. They are integrated by placement: names above, blood below, the path through. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or thin: labour, any consciousness beyond the viewer at the mouth of the path, and any human figure. History and the nation lift it above a landscape that holds none; the absence of persons keeps it well below a peopled interior.
Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure, and the premise integrates them: individual consciousness, in the question of what can be known; labour, in the cubicle and the boss; the species, in a war lost and a humanity farmed; technology as a power over life; the sacred, in prophecy, salvation and the One; and a small community, the crew of the ship with its loyalties and its betrayal. The office and the pod are one fact. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the family is absent; history is told in a speech rather than held; the natural order appears only as a scorched sky; and no inner life but Neo’s and Cypher’s is entered. The film encompasses the ideas of these orders more than it holds lives within them.
Neutral Milk Hotel · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, in a voice that is almost all the record is. The family is held, in the broken house of the opening, a father and a mother, and in Oh Comely’s fathers. Sexuality and the body are held throughout, as desire, as rot and as seed. History enters through the Second World War and a girl killed in it, held through one person. The sacred is present, Christ and the rising of the dead; the natural order enters as seed, soil, flower and sea. Labour, the state and the city are absent, and politics is glimpsed in a title. That absence is what holds the figure lowest; the orders present are joined by one voice’s love and grief, integrated rather than listed, and the history held through one girl keeps it from lower.
George Gilbert Scott and William Henry Barlow · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Six orders are placed in one section. The machine and its engineering, in the shed; commerce and the company, in the hotel’s display and the beer under the floor; labour and industry, in the Butterley iron and the Burton trade the undercroft served; the city and its rivalries, in the front on the New Road beside King’s Cross; history and memory, in the Gothic’s claim on a national past and in the rescue that made the building a monument to its own survival; and since 2007 the nation’s relation to Europe, at the frontier the station became. The city and its past stand at the front, the machine behind, trade beneath, the continent beyond. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the household except as a hotel guest, the sacred except as borrowed form, and the natural order.
Thomas Cole · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in storm, forest and river; labour, in the fields, the farms and the smoke of clearing; the nation and its history, in a land turning from one condition to another; the sacred, in the storm as deluge and, if they are granted, in the letters on the hill; and art, in the painter set into his own view. The diagonal integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the people are absent but for the painter: no family, no consciousness but his, no state except by implication, and no one who lived on this land before it was cleared. A landscape of large reach held at the scale of one view. The figure describes the form.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Violence and war are held, as weather, in Gimme Shelter. Desire and the body are held throughout, as appetite and as use. The couple appears in the title song and in You Got the Silver; the city and its society in You Can’t Always Get What You Want’s reception, demonstration and drugstore, and politics only in that demonstration. Drugs and dependency run through several songs. History enters as the blues tradition carried in Love in Vain; the sacred is evoked in a choir and a mock devil, without weight; one stance joins them. What holds the figure lowest: the family, labour, the state and the natural order beyond the storm are absent or glimpsed, and most orders appear as single images inside a pose rather than held together in one structure.
George Saunders · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a book of stories holds. Consciousness, in many persons. The family, in nearly every story: the father of “Sticks”, the diarist and his daughters, the mother of the chained boy. Class, sharply, the precarious measured against the comfortable. Labour and the corporation, in the memo, the theme park and the laboratory. The state, at the edges: the returned soldier of “Home”, the prison. Medicine, in the trials and the terminal illness; immigration and global poverty, in the Semplica Girls; death, and the natural order in winter. They are integrated, not listed: each order presses on a mind’s language. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form and the vantage: history is thin, the state and the sacred are glimpsed, and every order is seen from inside one American present and one class band. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders are present: the couple, and the marriage left behind; consumer society and advertising; war, in Vietnam; art and literature as a second world; the natural order in the sea, the sun and the animals of the coast; consciousness, in Ferdinand’s journal and the two voices. They are partly integrated through Ferdinand, who holds the art, the language and the love in one disposition. What holds the axis low is that the social and political orders are listed by collage more than held. Vietnam is a playlet and a report on the car radio; labour is absent once Ferdinand has lost his job in television; the state appears only as police by the road; the sacred is Rimbaud’s eternity and nothing more. It is a film of one man’s disposition, widened by quotation rather than by structure.
The Kinks · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held as memory, in Do You Remember Walter? and Picture Book. The family is held in the picture book of parents and childhood, friendship and its loss in Walter and All of My Friends Were There. The community, the village and its characters, is the frame, and the nation is held through the title song’s list of an England worth saving. Modernity enters as the steam train, superseded; the natural order as the riverside, the farm and the open sky; the sacred is glimpsed in Big Sky. The village joins these more fully than most albums attempt. What holds the figure lowest: labour and the state are absent or glimpsed, history is nostalgia rather than event, and each order is a two-minute sketch.
Nina Simone · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness, in grief, resolve and defiance. Marriage and its terms, in “Be My Husband”. Poverty and the fickleness of friends, in “Nobody Knows You”. History and the state, in the lynching of “Strange Fruit”, the racial order of the American South named in one image. The sacred, in the judgment of “Sinnerman”. Community, in the handclaps and the call. One voice and the sequence hold them together, carrying the self out into history and judgment. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour is present only in a work song’s cadence, and the family beyond the couple and the natural order beyond its images are absent.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the law and its office; two marriages, Bell and Loretta, Moss and Carla Jean, with Carla Jean’s mother beside them; two wars, Bell’s in Europe and Moss’s in Vietnam, as the measure of the generations; the border economy of drugs and money; a regional history in Bell’s memory of his elders; and the sacred, faintly, in Bell’s want of God and in his father’s fire. They are integrated, not listed: each enters through Bell’s reckoning. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the drawing of the world, tight around a single pursuit, with labour and community only sketched and the sacred a want more than a presence.
Mastodon · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as a self leaving its body and returning; the body is held, paralysed and then released. The family enters through the dead sister in the title, the record’s truest order. History and the state enter as Tsarist Russia, the conspirators and the falling Czar. The sacred is the spirit realm and the martyred holy man; the natural order is the sun, the sky and the wormhole. Six orders, and one frame joins them. What holds this lowest is integration: most orders arrive as images and settings, the history is a backdrop, and the record holds them in an outline it does not make audible. It stands below Remain in Light at 7.6.
Frederick William Stevens · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Several orders are held at once, and integrated better than in most single buildings. The state and the company, in the offices of a power; labour, in the carvers whose hands made it, the railway’s workers and the commuters who use it; commerce and the city, the port and its hinterland; the sacred translated into the secular, the cathedral made a station and Progress set where a saint would stand; and history, empire, independence, the renamings and the attack of 2008. They are held together in use as much as in form. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: consciousness, the family and the natural order, present only at the edges.
Donna Tartt · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve. Several orders are joined through one circle. Consciousness, in Richard’s longing and concealment. Class and money, the book’s most exact order: Richard’s lie about his family, Bunny’s genteel poverty and borrowed money, the old wealth of Henry and Francis. Education and its authority, in Julian and the college. The family, in Richard’s cold parents, the Corcorans and the twins. Sexuality and taboo, in Francis and in the twins. The sacred, in the Dionysian rite. The law, in the police and the press. They are integrated, not listed: each is a stage on which the circle’s separation from the world is tested. What holds the axis in the middle sevens is a narrowness chosen by design: one college, one year, a few houses; history and the state are absent, labour is barely present, and the book holds its orders inside a closed room.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about two and a half hours holds. Consciousness, in Alexander’s despair and his vow; the family, in a failed marriage, a stepdaughter, a mute son and a friend of the house; the sacred, in prayer, the legend, the painting and the miracle; history and the state, in the war announced on television and Otto’s old map of Europe; art, in Alexander’s past on the stage and his criticism; the natural order, in the sea, the wind, the tree and the fire. One structure holds them, the vow, which binds the family to the sacred and the private act to the fate of the world. What holds the axis lowest: the state and history are a broadcast and a map, labour is two servants and a postman, and the world beyond the house is never entered.
Built for Vimal Shah and Vastupala and Tejapala · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Orders held: the sacred, in the Tirthankaras, their lives and the Jain cosmos of heavens and assemblies; the state, in ministers of the Chaulukya and Vaghela courts whose power paid for the building and whose inscriptions record it; the family, built in, the donors’ kin on their elephants; the arts of the court, dance and music, carved in the ceilings as the life of heaven; and the Hindu world beside the Jain, its gods and stories in the same stone. The plan integrates them: the donors at the threshold, the court of heaven above, the jina at the centre. What holds the axis is what is absent: labour and the common life appear only as the carving itself, the natural order of the mountain is shut out by the wall, and death and the body enter only as renunciation.
Byzantine, under Archbishop Ursicinus · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the Transfiguration, and the cross as the salvation of the world. The natural order: the garden of paradise with its trees, flowers and birds, and the stars of the disc. The local church: its founding martyr and four later bishops in its apse, and the archbishops’ sarcophagi along the aisles. The state: the imperial grant of the seventh century. Death and the grave: a church built over a burial ground. The axis integrates them, the earthly church below, the cosmic Christ above, the walk between. What holds the score is what lies outside: labour, the city and port that built the church, the family and the body enter not at all, and consciousness only as the worshipper’s approach. A basilica on this scale holds the sacred and civic order of a see; it does not hold a world.
Michael Curtiz · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 102 minutes holds, and it holds more orders than its length suggests, through one room: a love affair; a friendship between two men; the economy of a refugee port; the police state and its collaborators; the war in Europe; the American decision to enter it; and, at the edge, the question of what one person owes the many. They are held, not listed: the private choice at the airport is the political one. What holds the figure is that the orders are sketched rather than inhabited. The refugees are a chorus, Morocco itself is decor, and the war is known only through one café’s door. A small form, and the figure describes it.
Jane Campion · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. Consciousness, three of them deeply, Phil’s, Peter’s and Rose’s; the family, two brothers bound since boyhood, a widow and her son, the old parents and their money; labour, the ranch’s work of cattle, castration, hides and the men’s bunkhouse; class, the Burbanks as gentry in a land of hands, a Yale classics man among cowboys, the Governor at table; sexuality, kept and hidden; the body, illness and medicine; the West of 1925 with the motor car at its edge; the land and its disease. Held well through the four principals. What holds the axis at 7.5: history and the sacred enter at the edges, the sacred in the psalm only, the Native trader and his son have a single scene, and the state is a dinner guest.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The state at war, in Intervention and Windowsill; the church and its commerce, in Intervention and the title track; the media and celebrity, in (Antichrist Television Blues) and Black Mirror; the family, as a father and a daughter; the body and the soul, in My Body Is a Cage; the natural order as threat, the sea of Ocean of Noise and Black Wave. That is a wide span for an album, and the frame of an apparatus of fear joins several orders: the church is the state’s partner, the screen the church’s pulpit. What holds the figure is integration. The orders arrive song by song, labour enters only as the father’s job, history only as the present war, and much is held by naming an institution rather than showing it at work.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Many orders are present: consciousness in the dying, the addicted and the ashamed; the family across three generations; television and the culture of performance; commerce in Earl’s production company, Frank’s seminar and the quiz show as an industry; labour in the nurse, the policeman and the electronics store; the law in Kurring and the lawyer; the natural order in the weather and the plague; the sacred in the Exodus frame and the question of forgiveness. What holds the axis is how they are held. Every order passes through the one lens of father and child, each seen as a version of the family wound rather than in its own right. History is absent, the city is a set of interiors joined by roads, the state is a single patrolman, and the sacred is invoked more than examined.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Nikolaus Pacassi and Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Several orders are held. The state and the dynasty, in the court rooms, the cour d’honneur and the eagle on the Gloriette. The family, in the scale of Maria Theresa’s apartments and the household’s use of the house. War and victory, in the trophies of the Gloriette. The natural order, in the garden, the hill and the views; myth, in the gods of the parterre and in Neptune at the hill’s foot; the city, as the prospect from the crest. The axis integrates them, carrying a walker from household to state monument in one ascent. Labour is out of sight in servants’ rooms and kitchens; the sacred has a chapel in the fabric but no place in the plan’s idea; the events the house witnessed are history, not orders its form holds.
Don DeLillo · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The book reaches for many orders and holds most of them in sketch. Money, the master subject. Technology and the network. The state, in a presidential motorcade that stalls the city. The body, in the daily examination of Eric’s asymmetrical prostate and in his appetites. Marriage, in Elise. Art, in Didi Fancher and in Eric’s wish to buy the Rothko Chapel whole. Religion, in the Sufi funeral. Protest and politics, in the riot. Death, at the end. The city, crossed street by street. They are integrated, in that each is a station on one route and each is turned into data; and they are thin, in that each is visited once and held for a scene. Achieved, mostly, and integrated by abstraction more than by life.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held in one small field: the cosmos, in moon, planet, stars and the current between them, given most of the canvas; the natural order, in the hills, the tree and the coming day; the human settlement, a village with lit windows and people implied asleep; the sacred, in a dark church and the sky that has taken its place; death, in the cemetery tree that reaches the stars; and consciousness, in the one who watches, outside the frame, against the town that does not. They are integrated: the two verticals and the one stroke place each. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is nearly everything the rubric lists: no person, no family, no labour, no state, no history. The human world is a strip along the bottom edge of less than a square metre. The figure describes the form.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
A wordless keyboard cycle holds more orders than its medium suggests, through its genres: the court in the French overture; the church and the learned tradition in the canons and the alla breve; the dance floor in the gigue and the sarabande; the street and the household in the Quodlibet, which Forkel connects with the Bach family’s sung quodlibets; private grief in the minor variations; time and memory in the return. They are held on one bass, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the state, labour, history, the natural order and the sacred named as such do not appear, and the family enters only through a joke.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Several orders are held: the sacred, as light; consciousness, as an event inside one man with his eyes closed; the natural order, in the animal, the largest presence in the field; labour, in the old groom at his work; history, in the founding of an apostle’s mission and a soldier of empire laid down; death and birth in one posture. The light and the arrangement integrate them. What holds the axis lowest is absence: no family, no state beyond a soldier’s dress, no society, no landscape, no time beyond the instant. Three figures and a dark. The figure stands level with The Starry Night at 7.4, and describes the form.
Arnold Schoenberg · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders the work holds are held together through the moon and the mask, not listed: consciousness, in intoxication, obsession, guilt and homesickness; the sacred, inverted but present as structure, in Madonna, the Red Mass and the crosses; art and the artist, the governing subject; eros and cruelty, in Colombine, Gemeinheit and the violence of Part II; history as a style looked back on, in Chopin’s waltz, the commedia’s Bergamo and the last number’s fairy-tale time. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, labour and the state do not appear, and the natural order is no more than a lunar emblem. A chamber work holds one masked consciousness and its stage; the figure says how many orders that is.
John Keats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what 320 lines hold, as a lyric body. Consciousness, fully, in its trance and its waking. The body and mortality: “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”, the line of the sick room. The natural order, as fully as anywhere in English verse: Autumn’s fruit, gleaning and swallows, and Nightingale’s dark garden of “verdurous glooms”. Art, as the Urn’s subject. History glimpsed in emperor and clown and in Ruth’s exile; the sacred in Psyche’s fane and the urn’s sacrifice; labour as figure, in the reaper, the gleaner and the cyder-press; love in Psyche and in Melancholy’s mistress. Each passes through one mind’s encounter with beauty and its passing. What holds the axis at 7.4, the lowest of the twelve, is what is absent: the state, the city, society, class and the family across time.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
A book of keyboard pieces holds few orders, and the figure says so. Consciousness, in a range of states from wit to lament. The sacred, in the old church style of the great minor fugues and the chorale-like gravity of several preludes. The social, in dance types, the gigue, the courante, the siciliano rhythm, and in the voices of fugue as equal speakers. Learning and labour, in a book made to teach hands and minds. The natural order, in the claim that one tuning makes a world of twenty-four regions, which the book makes structural rather than illustrates. They are held together by the plan, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, the state, history and mortality as a built theme do not appear.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure are consciousness, in the first movement’s storms; the social world as dance, in the waltz; the public world of victory and arms, in the march; mortality; and the sacred, in the chant and the chorale. They are held by the order of movements, not listed, and each is answered by the next. What holds the axis, the lowest of the twelve, is the plain absence of the rest: the family, labour, the state and history are not present, and the sacred appears as rite, not as belief. A wordless symphony holds fewer orders than a work with a text, and the figure sits with the Goldberg Variations (7.4) and below Winterreise (7.7).
Titian · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body and desire; the household, as chests and their contents, which are wealth; labour, in the two servants at work; rank, in the prince’s chamber; the natural order, at the window, in the plant and the evening sky; the animal, in the dog; and the sacred at its edge, as the goddess the figure was and is no longer. They are integrated, not listed: the divide makes body and house one structure, and the window draws the outside in. What holds the axis here is the form, one woman in one room, where the orders are present as signs more than as worlds. History, the state and the social world beyond the house are absent, and consciousness is one look.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held in one block: the sacred, as god, body and sacrament; death and burial; the family, in a mother and her son’s companions; labour, in the carrying of a body by men of the people; grief as a range of human response; and the church, in the altar the slab becomes and the congregation it addresses. The descent integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what the form excludes: no world beyond the group, no landscape, city, state or history. The dark that gives the picture its force removes every order outside it. Six figures hold less than the court of Las Meninas at 8.2, stand level with The Starry Night at 7.4, and above The Swing at 6.4.
Raphael · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, as the centre; the family, a mother and her child, and the child’s fate; the Church, in a pope and a martyr, the tiara set down and the tower of Barbara’s imprisonment; death and sacrifice, in what the two faces know; and the congregation, the human order before the altar, drawn in by the pointing hand. The structure integrates them by placement on one axis of approach. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no state except the papacy, no history beyond the saints’ legends, no natural order but cloud, and no ordinary world. It is a single devotional image of six figures, and the figure describes the form. Below The Transfiguration at 8.4 and level with Primavera at 7.4.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in grove, meadow, flowers and season; the sacred, in pagan form, a goddess set where the Madonna is set; love and desire, from violence through marriage to the dance; and consciousness, faintly, in Mercury’s turn toward something above. If the panel was made for a wedding chamber, as is often proposed and not documented, marriage and the household would be a further order; it is not counted here. The frieze integrates them in one sequence. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, the city, the state, death, and any history but the classical past the picture revives. A small cast in one grove is a narrow world held well, a little more than The Birth of Venus at 7.2.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The figure describes a small form. The orders held in one studio are several, and the room integrates them: art and its labour, a man at work among the tools and models of his trade; history and fame, in Clio, her book and her trumpet; the state and its history, in the map of the provinces with its seam and its towns and in the eagle of a former sovereign; the past of the art, in the cast mask and the old costume; and consciousness, in the model’s lowered eyes and the painter’s absorbed back. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no sacred, no natural order beyond daylight, and no labour but the painter’s own. It clears its floor of 6.0 by a point and four tenths.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Six orders are held: the natural order, the harbour with water on three sides and the light and weather on the roof; the city, approached from its grid and quay and answering its bridge; the arts, music, opera, theatre and dance in several halls; the civic public, on the stair and forecourt; the state, a public commission and a national image with the record of its power in the fabric; and, faintly, the cosmos, for the roof is pieces of one sphere. The platform holds the city and the public, the roof answers the sky and the water, and the arts are housed between. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, labour, the body, individual consciousness, and the history of the point before 1959. The figure describes the form.
Donato Bramante · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Five orders are held, and one axis places each. The sacred: the martyr’s death and the Church that rose from it. History: pagan Rome and Christian Rome, the temple and the martyrium joined. Church and state as power: the keys of the papacy in the frieze and the commission of a Spanish crown. Death: the crypt and the place of the cross. The cosmos: the circle, the dome, the vertical from earth to sky. They are integrated by the axis from crypt to lantern. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the household, labour, the natural order (the building is closed in a court), the body as subject and individual consciousness. A small martyrium holds a doctrine and a city’s history, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus of Rhodes (attributed) · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held are the family, a father and two sons and his failure to protect them; the sacred, the priest at the altar, the god’s serpents, a divine punishment; the natural, the serpents as animals and the body as an organism under force; and the body and consciousness in extremity. They are held in one structure, by one coil. History and the state, the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome, are present only for a viewer who knows the story. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form itself: one event, one instant, three bodies, with history, labour and the city absent or carried only by the story. For a single sculptural group the reach is real, and the mark describes the form.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Six orders are held. The natural order, stream, falls, rock and forest, is held most fully, in the fabric and not only in the view. The household: parents and son, with their rooms and terraces, and guests in a house of their own. Class and labour: the servants, and the fortune of a Pittsburgh store behind the whole. The machine: the car on the drive, the steel sash, the concrete. The body: the plunge into the stream, sun on the terraces. Art: the family’s collection, kept in the rooms. The house places each in the site, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the city, present only as what is escaped; the state; history; the sacred; and death. A weekend house holds a family and a stream, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
Titian · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: the divine and the mortal in one encounter; the natural order, sea, sky, trees and animals, as the god’s domain; the cosmic, in the constellation tied to the human event; the erotic; and the wild order of drink, music, sacrifice and dismemberment. They are integrated, not listed, since each is an attribute of the god and all converge on the leap. What holds the axis at 7.4 is what the poesia excludes by design: the social and historical world, the state, labour, the family and history are absent. It is a single scene on a single canvas, and the figure describes the form. On this axis it is level with The Starry Night, which stands at 8.9.
John Fowler and Benjamin Baker · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Five orders are held, and the structure integrates them. The natural order: tide, deep water, wind and the width of the estuary, answered member by member. Industry and a new material. Labour, in the scale of the workforce and in the dead. The state, as the Admiralty’s clearance, the Board of Trade’s rules and the inquiry into the Tay. Commerce and the nation, as the railway joining the east coast of Scotland to the south. Wind, shipping and trains are all present in the form. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the household and dwelling, the sacred, consciousness, and death except as cost. A railway bridge holds a crossing and an age’s power, and the figure describes the form.
Mohammad Reza Isfahani, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: the sacred, in the orientation to Mecca, the dome as heaven and the inscriptions; the state, in the mosque’s place on the king’s square opposite his palace, and in the Shi’i learning the shah brought into his capital; the city, in the turning away from its axis; the natural order, in the light of the day carried through the grilles and the dome’s change of colour with the hour. The passage and the plan integrate them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: it is one room, for prayer, with no court, no school and no market; labour, the family and the common life of the city lie outside it, and consciousness enters only as the worshipper’s turned attention. A small form, honestly placed.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held are several, and the hall places them. History: the Reich and the destruction of the Jews, joined in one building. The state: the memorial hall as the state’s own instrument of meaning. Death, as crypt and as ash. The sacred, in the sanctuary light at the end of the axis and in the Song of Songs. Art, in Celan’s poem, present as one word. Love enters only through the title, the Shulamite as the beloved, and it is named, not held. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no body, no family, no labour, no natural order but fire, no consciousness but the viewer’s. One empty hall holds much by allusion and little by integration.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Orders held: the sacred, as worship of God under light from above; the congregation as a community, gathered in tiers and in view of itself; the service of others and the parish’s social life, in Unity House; education, in the Sunday school; the city, as the street the building turns from and the suburb it serves; and the natural order, as daylight and the hours. The cross axis and the shared hall integrate them, so that they are held and not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, labour, the state, history except as the congregation’s own, death, with no burial and no memorial in the fabric, and individual consciousness. A parish church holds a congregation’s week, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Six orders are placed in one structure: the city, since the building is an argument about the street and the block; capital and the corporation; labour, as the uniform order of the office floors; the public, given ground; the natural order, faintly, in light, in sky reflected in the glass and water in the pools; and history, as the classical temple transposed. They are integrated rather than listed: plaza, face and floors make one statement about the city and work. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, the body except as a passer-by on the plaza, the sacred, death and individual consciousness. A tower of offices and its forecourt is a small form by this measure, and the figure describes the form.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
What the building holds in one structure: clerical labour and the office day; the family firm and its paternal care; the industrial company and its research; the natural order as figure, grove, tree and light; the car and modern transport at the threshold; and the single worker within a congregation of work. These are integrated, not listed: the room is at once the labour and the firm’s care for it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or refused: the city, which the building turns from; the household, the state, history, the sacred and death. It is a building of one institution’s working day, held whole, and the figure describes that compass.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Orders held: the body in sport, in swimming, diving and play; the crowd as an assembly; the nation and the state, the Olympic return and the public commission; the city, the halls set at the edge of Shibuya and Harajuku; the sacred, faintly, in the restated shrine structure and the Meiji forest beside it; and technology as an order of its own, the steel and engineering of a modern state. The section holds crowd, body and state in one bowl under one roof. What holds the axis lowest: the family, labour, the individual consciousness and the natural order beyond the tent are absent or faint, and a sports hall’s programme is narrow. The figure describes the form.
Carlo Scarpa · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
For a private tomb the precinct holds more than its form would seem to allow: the marriage and the family, in the two sarcophagi and the other graves; death and the sacred, in the chapel and the rite; the village and its public, entering from the communal cemetery; the natural order, in water, grass, cypress and the seasons written in the weathering concrete; the countryside of the Veneto, over the walls; and, through the maker’s grave, the artist and his craft. They are held in one structure, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is the size of the world: it is one family’s precinct, and the state, labour and history in their larger orders stand at the edge. The industrial fortune that paid for it goes unspoken.
Yasunari Kawabata · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
A short novel of three persons, and what it holds is integrated, not listed. One consciousness and its failure of feeling. The erotic and the economic: the geisha’s contracts and debts, the inn trade. Labour: the chijimi woven through the winter and bleached on the snow, the cocoon warehouse. The natural order of seasons and snow, which governs the town’s life and the book’s form. A faint sacred register in the Milky Way. The chijimi passage ties labour, season and beauty into the book’s single subject. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the state and history are absent, though the book was written through the war; the family hardly appears beyond Komako’s dependants; and there is no society beyond the town and its visitors. The figure describes the form.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held as desire, craving and fatigue; the body as sex, addiction and the hospital bed of Sister Morphine; love in Wild Horses; death as the addict’s and as a gospel summons. Money appears in the rich girl of Dead Flowers, the road and the working musician’s life in Moonlight Mile. History enters once and largely, in the slave trade of Brown Sugar. What holds the figure lowest is the join: the orders sit side by side under one mood, the largest of them, history, is a riff’s occasion rather than a held order, and the family, labour, the state and the natural order are absent.
Egyptian (Early Dynastic) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state and kingship; war and its dead; the sacred, as falcon, bovine heads and the king made divine; the natural order, as beasts wild and bound and the bull; writing, newly joined to image; the land, as the papyrus country and the walled town; ritual use, since the object is a palette. For an object of its size the range is wide, and it is integrated by the one figure of the king. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no consciousness but the king’s role, no family, no labour beyond the attendants’ service, no inward life in any figure. The dead are counted, not mourned. The mark describes the form: a small slab that holds a polity, and holds it from above.
Sly and the Family Stone · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Five orders are held: the self, in addiction, withdrawal and fame; the family, in Family Affair and in a band of siblings; the nation, in the flag, the riot and the year; race and the African diaspora, in the two Africa titles and a movement’s aftermath; and the dance floor as a public space now emptied. They are integrated in one sound, and that is the achievement. What holds the axis lowest is that many of these orders are emblems on the sleeve and in the titles rather than worlds held in the music, and the state and history are present by implication only. Forty-seven minutes of record cannot hold what a novel holds. It stands level with Zooropa, above Low and Kind of Blue, and below Remain in Light.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a book of short essays holds. Literature and its history across six or seven languages; metaphysics; theology, in Pascal, Bloy, the Kabbalah and the Book; the history of ideas; the state and politics, briefly, in the pieces of wartime and of the years under Perón; and the self, in the confession under the refutation of time. They are integrated by one mind and one method. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what the book does not hold: the life of the body, the family, labour, and the natural order except as metaphor. It encompasses the library and what the library thinks of the world. A short form is not punished for being short, and this is a wide short form; but what it holds is weighed as it is.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short novel holds. Consciousness, in a narrator rewired by the crash. The body, wounded, braced, scarred and reconstructed. Sexuality, in every configuration the book can find. Technology, as landscape and as object of desire. The media and celebrity, in the photographs, the commercials and the film star. Medicine, in the hospital and the language of injury. Marriage, cool and open. The city, as a system of roads. They are integrated, not listed: one law joins them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent by design: labour beyond a glimpse of the narrator’s studio, the state, history except as the Kennedy assassination made into spectacle, the family across time, the natural order, and the sacred except as its inversion. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure: the city, whose grid and streets it meets; the river and the industrial port whose land it occupies; the bridge, taken into the building’s own body; the art of the collection; the economy and politics of a regional government’s wager on culture; and the post-industrial history of the Basque Country. They are integrated through the plan and the site, not listed. Absent are the sacred, the domestic, labour as lived and the natural order beyond the water’s edge, and the consciousness the building shapes is that of the visitor who looks. For one museum on a riverbank the reach is wide; beside the cathedrals, temple cities and palaces it is modest. The figure describes the form.
Thomas Eakins · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held, and held in one room: the body, the patient’s, opened; labour, as a profession and its hands; the institution, the college and its amphitheatre; knowledge and its transmission, in the students and the clerk; the family, in the woman at the edge; the self, in the painter among the tiers; and, by occasion, the nation at its Centennial and the age’s confidence in science. The light integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only implied: no sacred order except as the structure of the altar, no natural order, no history beyond the instant, no state but by occasion. It is a group portrait of a profession at work, and for that form the figure is high.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of 98 minutes holds. The family, held twice: Jerry’s household of wife, son and the father-in-law who owns him, against Marge and Norm’s marriage and coming child; money and commerce, in a dealership, a fraudulent loan, a parking-lot development and a ransom; the law, in a small-town police department and the state police; crime as trade, in a hired kidnapping; a region and its manners, in speech, food and weather; the natural order, in winter and the plain; and art, small and earnest, in Norm’s duck paintings. They are integrated: debt, kidnapping and inquiry are one movement. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is rendered from outside by design, the sacred is absent, history and the state appear only as procedure, and the social world is one region’s surface rather than a society examined.
Gunnar Asplund · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure. The civic: a city’s library on its main street, with shops let along the front. Knowledge entire, in the collection round the reader. The individual reader at the centre. Childhood, in the children’s library and its story room. The city and its ground: the hill, the park, the pool, the street. And, through the archetypes, a quiet sense of the sacred inside a secular institution. They are integrated in one plan rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest is what the building does not hold: labour, the family, the state in its harder aspects, history, and the natural order beyond the hill behind it. It is one institution of moderate size, and the form sets the ceiling.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, and its destruction is the subject. The body is held as sex and as damage; the sacred as its rejection in Heresy; technology as the machine the self becomes in The Becoming; violence and the social order, the herd, in the pig songs and Big Man with a Gun; addiction and its cost to others in Hurt. One consciousness joins them all. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve: the family, labour, history and the state are absent or present only as contempt; the natural order is absent; and every order passes through one self that sees nothing outside itself, held as an aspect of one mind rather than as a world.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the book holds, as a book of short stories. Consciousness, fully: a mind damaged and visionary. The body, in addiction, overdose, wounds and sex. Labour, in “Work”, in the hospital and in the nursing home. Love and its failure, in the women the narrator loses and the abortion in “Dirty Wedding”. Death, in nearly every story. Crime and violence, in the shooting in “Dundun”. The sacred, in the narrator’s visions and the book’s title. The institution, as the hospital and the home. They are integrated, not listed: one consciousness and one appetite join them. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the count and the vantage: the state, history, the family across time and the natural order are absent or glimpsed, and every order present is seen from inside one marginal life and one milieu. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Cistercian builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: the sacred, in the church; the community, in the chapter house and the dormitory; labour, in the storeroom and the lay brothers’ range, and in the order’s economy, present by trace and by plan; the social order, in the separation of choir monk and lay brother; the body, in the dormitory, the lavabo and the lost refectory; the natural order, in the slope the cloister follows and the sun that marks the hours. The plan integrates them round the cloister. What holds the score lowest: the state, history and the city are absent by design, since the abbey was founded to withdraw from them, and the lost ranges take part of the body and of labour.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as depression, longing and withdrawal, and it is the record’s ground. The family is present, a childhood’s violence in Disarm and a child set apart in Spaceboy, glimpsed more than held. The couple is present in Soma, Mayonaise and Luna, as love and its loss. The scene the band came from is mocked in Cherub Rock. The body appears as hurt and as the narcotic of Soma’s title. Labour, the state, history, the sacred beyond a cherub’s name and the natural order beyond the moon are absent. One consciousness joins what is held, and what is held is few orders, mostly inward. That is what holds the figure lowest.
Dorothea Lange · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held, in one figure. The family is the whole subject. Labour is present in the crop and the migrant’s work, by the evidence of the clothes and the hands. The economy and the state are present by implication: the collapse that made the camp, and the government that made the photograph and first used it. Consciousness is in the mother’s thought, which the hand and the gaze make visible; the sacred is built in the Madonna composition. One face carries them all, and they are integrated. What holds the axis, with The Swerve the lowest of the twelve, is what is absent, which in a single close frame is most of the world: no landscape, no nature but the fabric of a tent, no history but the moment, no person beyond the family. The figure describes the form.
Patti Smith · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, the self making itself in the act of speech. The family enters in three places: a sister born in a storm in Kimberly, a mother and a dream of money in Free Money, a dead father and his son in Birdland. The body and sexuality are held in Gloria and Land, violence in Land, death in Redondo Beach, Birdland and Elegie, the sacred in Gloria’s refused redemption and Birdland’s light, and art and its dead as a lineage. What holds it lowest: labour, the state, history and the natural order beyond weather and sea are absent or glimpsed, and the orders are joined by one witnessing voice more than by a structure.
Abbas Kiarostami · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 95 minutes holds. One consciousness, withheld; labour, in the day workers, the gravel works, the building site and the museum; the state, in the army, the soldier on leave, Badii’s memories of service and the soldiers of the coda; peoples, Kurd, Afghan, Azeri and Tehrani, with the war in Afghanistan behind the seminarian; the sacred, in religious law; the family, in Bagheri’s sick child and his wife; the natural order, in earth, tree, fruit, sunset and rain. One drive joins them, and none is merely listed. What holds the axis lowest: Badii’s own family and history are absent by design, the city appears only as its edges, and each order is touched through one figure in one scene. The figure describes a small form held with discipline.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
For a feature of about an hour and a half on one set, the film holds more orders than its frame suggests: class, in masters and servants, the host’s authority and the proposal to kill him; the body, in thirst, illness, the doctor’s failing authority and death; sexuality, in the lovers and the Valkyrie’s chastity; the sacred, in sacrament, sacrifice and the occult; and in the coda the Church and the state together, with the police firing on the people. One mechanism, the spell, integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what the form cannot hold: history, labour as lived, the family across time, and the inner life of any single guest. The characters are types by design, and the film takes a society in section, not in depth.
Giuseppe Terragni · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state and its party; the crowd and the square; the city, set against the cathedral and so placed in tension with the sacred; history, in the palazzo and the regime’s claim to Rome; labour and administration, in the offices round the hall; perception, in light and the frame. They are integrated: the siting, the hall and the doors hold the state, the crowd and the city in one move. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, the body’s daily life, the natural order (the lake and the mountains of Como are not drawn in), death except as the party’s shrine, and consciousness except as the crowd’s. A four-storey civic block cannot hold more and is not charged for its form; the figure describes it.
Italo Calvino · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short book of fifty-five cities holds. Consciousness: perception, memory and desire, the subject of most series. Commerce, in the trading cities. Death, in the cities of the dead. The sky, in the cities patterned on the heavens. The state and empire, in Kublai and his decline. History, as the empire’s passing and the cities’ layers. The natural order, in the continuous cities and their waste, and in the wood of the chessboard. Language and signs, in the cities of signs and names. They are integrated through one figure, the city, and held, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the form abstracts: the family, labour as lived, love between persons and the individual life are absent or emblematic, and there are no persons but the two speakers.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 111 minutes holds. Consciousness, the photographer’s, seen from outside by design; art, in photography, painting, fashion and pop music set against each other; labour and class, in the doss house, the models’ work and the Rolls; commerce, in the book, the antique shop and the studio as a business; the city, London across classes from Charlton to Chelsea; politics, glimpsed in a march with placards; sexuality, at length; death, in the body in the park. All are held through one man and one day, and that holds the axis lowest: the family is absent, the state and history stay at the margin, the sacred appears only as the park’s stillness, and the poor of the doss house serve as a portfolio, the film’s point and its limit.
Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure are the household and dwelling; labour and commerce; the city and its traffic; and the natural order, in the wind the structure is shaped against and in the lake and the horizon the top frames. They are integrated, not listed: the structure that answers the wind is the same that makes the stack of home and work possible, and that hold is wider than a single-purpose office tower can reach. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or thin: the sacred, the state, history and death. The tower holds the city’s present tense and little else, narrower than a building that gathers a people’s worship, government or memory. The figure describes the form.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Several orders are held, and held as one structure: labour and wages, in the shares and the engineers’ grievance; the corporation and its law; the body, sexuality and reproduction; the machine as a consciousness, in Ash and Mother; the natural order as an alien biology. They are integrated, not listed: the company, the creature and the body are one design. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the film does not reach. There is no state, no history, no family as such and no sacred, and no consciousness beyond the crew’s surface. Seven people in a closed ship for two hours, and the form reaches no further. A good mark for a chamber genre film, and the figure describes the form.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Orders held: the city, in the public ground and the axis to Statue Square and the harbour; commerce and the institution, in the banking hall and the working floors shown in section; technology and global manufacture, in a building assembled from factories abroad; the natural order, modestly, in daylight drawn down through the centre; history, as the moment before 1997; and, through use rather than design, the colony’s social order, with the domestic workers on Sundays under the bank. The frame holds these together rather than listing them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the sacred and the family are not here, and the state is present only by implication. An office tower holds what an office tower can, and the figure describes the form.
Neil Young · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The natural order is present and, in the title song, held: Mother Nature on the run, the earth abandoned. History is held there too, in a compressed arc from a medieval past through a burned present to a future exodus, and in Southern Man, the slaveholding South and its present. Consciousness is held as tenderness, doubt and loneliness; love as a wound; poverty is glimpsed in an old man by the road. What holds the figure lowest: outside the title song the record holds one consciousness and its loves, the family, labour, the city and the state are absent, and the sacred appears only as an exodus without a god.
Hildegard of Bingen · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held are integrated, not listed. The soul, in Anima’s weariness, desire, fall and penitence; the body, as the garment and as the prison of the Souls; the sacred, as the whole medium of the work; salvation history, from the Patriarchs to the wounds of Christ; the community, as a company of Virtues singing one line; the natural order, as the greening of creation; the world, as what the Devil offers. They are held on one law of consonance. What holds the axis at 7.4, the lowest of the twelve, is absence: the family, labour, the state and history outside sacred history do not appear, and the world is present only as temptation, never as a place. The figure says how many orders an allegory of seventy minutes holds.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 145 minutes holds. Consciousness: Travis’s, held from inside by silence and then by his own story, and Jane’s, glimpsed in her answer. The family across three households: two brothers, a marriage destroyed by jealousy, a child raised by others, and a father’s and mother’s story behind Travis’s own. Sexuality as commerce, in the booth. Land and nation as landscape: desert, highway, the vacant lot, the city seen from its hills. Labour in glimpses: Walt’s billboards, the bank, the club. What holds the axis lowest is that all of it is held through one man and one family: the state, history and the economy enter only as roads and towers, and the sacred is a stranger preaching on an overpass. Above Punch-Drunk Love at 6.0, below In the Mood for Love at 7.6.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Held in one structure: consciousness, in the dreams and the voice-over; the family across four generations, from the mother through Isak and Evald to the unborn child; marriage three times over, Isak and Karin, the Almans, Evald and Marianne; vocation, in the country doctor Åkerman remembers and the scientist the academy honours; youth and age, in the hitchhikers beside the old man; the sacred, in the hymn, the students’ debate and the ceremony in the cathedral; death throughout. Each is reached through Isak, and none is merely listed. What is held weakly keeps the axis lowest, and one man’s day holds less of the world than its range of themes suggests. History and the state are absent, Sweden is a landscape and a professional class, labour is a profession seen from its honours, and the sacred is a question argued by students rather than an order the film enters.
James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: art and its institution, in the galleries and the joining of the old museum with the new; the city, in the right of way, the terraces and the road beneath; history and memory, in the classical museum quoted and opened, and in the German question of monumental stone after the war; the body and its movement, in the climb and the circling; the natural order, in the sky and the planting of the drum; and theatre, in the Kammertheater. They are integrated by the path and the drum, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or thin: labour, the family, the sacred except as an echo of the Pantheon, and the state except as patron. A gallery and its path hold a city’s culture and its ground, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
H. H. Richardson · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Five orders are held. The sacred, as a parish church. The city, as the centre of a civic square on new land. The natural order, in the rock-faced granite and in the fill and water the building rests on and must keep. The arts, painting, glass and sculpture gathered in one campaign, a collaboration that was itself a statement about American culture. And the commercial wealth of the city that paid for it all. What holds the score lowest is what is absent or thin: the household; labour, beyond the hidden labour of the piles; the state; history, beyond a borrowed past; death. The sacred and the civic are integrated in the plan and the square; the other orders are present in the building rather than bound into it.
Shona builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Several orders are held. The state and its rule, in the separation of the ruler’s space. The social order, in stone against daga. The sacred and the ancestors, in the hill and the tower. The natural order, in the granite, the boulders and the hill made part of the building. And, by inference, the ruler’s household, in the division of the enclosures. One act integrates them: the enclosing wall. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, trade and the wealth that paid for the stone are evidenced by finds, not built into the form; the town, the commoners’ life and the body enter only as what the wall shuts out; consciousness and history are absent as built content. A ruin of walls holds the outline of a world.
Bret Easton Ellis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held are several, and one consciousness holds them. Finance and class, in Wall Street and in the homeless men Bateman passes and harms. The consumer economy, at every level from moisturiser to restaurant. The media, in the Patty Winters Show and the pop chapters. Sexuality and violence, above all against women. The family, thinly, in a visit to his mother in a sanatorium and a dinner with his brother Sean. The state appears on television, as a president’s speech. They are integrated, not listed: every order arrives priced. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is absent, by design or not: labour beyond the trading desk, history, the sacred, the natural order, and any consciousness but one empty one. The field is a stratum of one city over a short span.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Six orders are present. The natural order: the hill, its water, its planting. The city: the market, the square and the view over Barcelona. Commerce and property: the estate itself, and its failure. The nation: the Catalan colours at the fountain and the Catalan modern style. Religion: the calvary on the summit. Private dwelling: the houses, almost none of them built. In the core they are integrated, not merely present, and for a landscape work the park holds a good deal. What holds the axis lowest is that the holding is partial: the domestic order is all but absent because the town was not built, and the religious and national orders are signs rather than structure.
Norwegian builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Five orders are held in one structure. The sacred, in the church and its altar; the natural order, in the beasts and serpents, the timber of the forest and the site on the fjord; history, in the conversion carried in the reused carving and in the layers the church has gathered since; the community, a fjord parish of farms gathered in one small room; and the cosmic order, if the portal’s struggle is read as the world’s. They meet at the north door, where history, the sacred and the animal are one wall. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the state, labour except as the parish’s work in timber, and the household; and a small parish church holds less than a cathedral or a city building. The figure describes the form.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
In 699 lines the poem touches the cosmic order and the fate of souls, the natural order of generation, courtly love, the social estates and their politics, procedure and law, books and authority, and the reader’s own frustrated consciousness. The orders are integrated, not merely present: the estates of the birds and the common profit are one structure. What holds the axis at 7.4 is the form. It is short, and each order is held in sketch, the cosmos in summary and the society as types. A low mark on a small form describes the form, and the poem is charged for nothing beyond what it encompasses.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Several orders are present and partly held: the city as a moral and social order, its poverty, prostitution and indifference; the police as an institution, its weariness and its politics in the captain’s office; the marriage and the coming child; the sacred, in the scheme of sin and punishment and the books that carry it; the literary tradition, which the film quotes as its key. They are held together by the scheme, and that is what holds the axis lowest: every order is there to illustrate a sin or to be used by the killer, and none is held for itself. The victims are figures; the city has no inhabitants who are not police, killer or prey; Tracy is the family only as the instrument of the last sin. Consciousness is held well in Somerset, and only there.
Aleijadinho · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Four orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the saint, the Virgin in glory, the Passion through the stigmata. The social order of the colony: a brotherhood ranked by wealth and race, the arms of Portugal over the door, the town’s competition of brotherhoods. Labour and the earth: the gold that paid for the church and the local soapstone it is carved from. And, through its makers, the mixed society it does not name. These are joined in the front more than across the building. What holds the axis lowest is the form’s own ceiling: a single-nave church of a lay order cannot hold the range of a cathedral or a city, and the figure records that limit without charging it.
Ilya Repin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: labour, as the picture’s subject and its form; class, in the gang against the unseen owners of the barge and the viewer’s own place; the ages of a life, from the boy to the broken; the natural order, in the river and the heat; the coming of the machine, in the steamer; and the people as a nation, in the river every Russian viewer names. They are integrated by the strap and the line. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no woman, no state except as the order offstage, no history but the present instant, no consciousness beyond what the faces show. One bank and one instant hold more than most single canvases, and the figure describes a single frieze.
Ilkhanid, under Öljaitü · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Five orders are held in one structure. Death: the royal grave as the centre. The sacred: the shrine and its changed dedication. The state: a dynasty’s claim to Persian and Islamic sovereignty, the tomb as the heart of a capital. The cosmos: dome over octagon. The land: the galleries opening onto the plain the city once filled. They are integrated: the grave at the centre, the heavens above, the realm seen from the gallery. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or slight: labour, the family, the individual consciousness, the life of a people rather than of a ruler; and the city that bound the tomb into a world of use is gone. A single-chambered tomb holds this much, and the figure describes it, not a failure.
Brinkman and Van der Vlugt · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The factory holds more orders than a house can: labour and its daily conditions, the management of a firm, trade and transport by road, rail and water, the workers’ light and air and a patron’s moral idealism, the city’s edge and the polder. These are integrated in the section and the site plan, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what it does not hold: the sacred, the family, history except as the moment of its making, and the natural order beyond light and air. As converted it also holds a story of industrial decline and reuse, which is real but adds an order only as record. For an industrial building the reach is broad; set against the whole desk, it is the narrow range of a single firm’s plant.
Jonathan Demme · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of 118 minutes holds. The institution is held fully: the Bureau, the asylum, a Senator, local police, the press, the Smithsonian. Gender is the film’s spine; class enters through Starling’s origins, read off her by Lecter and by every man who looks at her; the family through her dead father, a town marshal, and through Catherine and her mother; consciousness through Starling’s memory and fear; the natural order through moths and lambs. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve: all of it is routed through one investigation and one consciousness; labour is training and procedure; history and the state as a polity are absent; the sacred is a funeral home and nothing more; Gumb’s own life is withheld. It holds what a thriller can hold, and does not exceed the thriller.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for the album form. Present are the city and the state, as a machine; the poor and the street, in East Hastings; the sacred, in the preacher and in Providence; technology and power, in the trains and the black helicopter; the natural order, as weather after the end; and history, as an ending. One condition joins them, the dying system and those left inside it. What holds the figure here is that nearly every order is a title or a single document, glimpsed rather than held: consciousness appears only as the monologue’s flat witness, and the family, love and labour are absent.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The building holds more orders than its size suggests. The sacred: the prayer hall and its paradise. Commerce and labour: the shops beneath, still in use. The state and its hierarchy: a vizier’s rank expressed and limited. The natural order: the world rendered as flowering. The city: the mosque as a raised node in the market’s fabric. They are integrated, not listed, for the section itself joins market to prayer. What holds the figure lowest is what the unit does not hold: no school, hospice or tomb, none of the civic programme of a külliye, and no congregational centre at the scale of the city. A small form holds several orders well, and its smallness sets the figure.
Inca, under Pachacuti and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held are five: the state, in its levy and its display; labour, made the visible substance of the work; the natural order, the hill made wall and the stone treated as living; the sacred, in the stones as huacas and in the summit’s sun cult, if the chroniclers are right; and history, in the siege of 1536, the quarrying, the city built of the walls and the revived Inti Raymi. They are integrated in one structure insofar as the wall is labour, state and mountain in one fact. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, at 7.4, is what is absent: dwelling, the family, individual consciousness, and the interior life that a precinct of rooms would have held, now gone with the summit.
Barry Jenkins · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Consciousness, one man’s across three ages, held from inside through the form; the family, a mother in addiction and a surrogate father and mother; sexuality, desire and its suppression; the drug economy, as livelihood, as a father’s trade and then the son’s; school and its violence; the law, as arrest, juvenile sentence and prison, almost wholly offscreen; a neighbourhood, Liberty City; labour, in Kevin’s kitchen. They are joined through the one life: the drug trade is the father, the mother’s ruin and the son’s armour at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the state and history are absent beyond implication, the sacred appears only as the shadow of a baptism, and the community is seen only through the few who touch Chiron. A low figure here describes the form.
Paolo Uccello · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state and its war, a victory made civic memory; the individual, in named condottieri commanding or falling; death, in the fallen man and the downed horses; the natural order, in orange trees, roses, hills, hares and hounds; labour and the countryside, slightly, in the small figures behind; and the private household, which the work implies by its form as the furnishing of a room. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent. The sacred is almost missing, and so is the inner life: no face carries consciousness. History is held as pageant, not as cause or cost. And the orders are present more than integrated: the hunting countryside sits behind the fight rather than with it. For three panels nearly ten metres long the reach is moderate, above a cabinet picture and well below a narrative cycle or a work that holds the sacred and the state together.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of two hours holds. Consciousness, in Mark, kept opaque by design, and in Eduardo, open; friendship, the order the film turns on; the university and its class system, in final clubs, an Ad Board and a president; capital, in investors, share structures and dilution; the law, as the medium in which the story is told; technology, as the new order; the sexual economy, in Facemash, the groupies and the women ranked. They are held in one plot: the site, the suits and the friendship are one story. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside it: the family is absent, the state appears only as civil law, the sacred is absent, labour is coding at night, and the millions who join the network are a figure on a title card.
Ikeda Terumasa · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Five orders are held. War and the state: the defence, and the Tokugawa settlement the castle guarded in the west. The household and the dynasty: Ikeda’s keep, and Honda’s bailey for Senhime, widow of the house Ieyasu destroyed. The natural order: the hills, the plain and the seasons on the white walls. History: the stones of earlier castles under the present walls, Hideyoshi and Ikeda on one site. The sacred, faintly, in the shrine at the top of the keep. The approach and the keep place them in one structure, integrated rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the town, the farmers whose tax built the castle, the builders’ labour except as fabric, the body and consciousness. A fortress holds power and its display.
Deerhunter · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as memory and its editing. Adolescence and desire are held, glimpsed through the haze. Death is held in He Would Have Laughed, a particular friend, and in Helicopter, a stranger’s death as an image of use and disposal. The sacred is evoked once, in Revival. The body appears in Helicopter’s violence. What holds this axis lowest of the twelve: the family, labour, the state, history and the natural order are absent or a word; the orders that are present lie close together inside one consciousness’s remembering; and the record does not join them so much as wash them in one light. A small form holding what it holds, and the figure describes it.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: labour, as the meal’s whole reason and in the hands; the family, five at one table, old and young; poverty and class, in what is on the table and in the room; the natural order, the earth and its crop eaten by those who dug it; the sacred, in the rite of a shared meal; time, in the season of dark evenings. The lamp and the earth colour integrate them. What holds the axis lowest on the page is what is absent or only pointed to: the state, history and the world beyond the cottage, and consciousness, since the faces are lit as types more than as minds. It holds more than a pond or a garden intrigue and less than a court or a ceiling, and the figure describes the form.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short novel holds, in a structure that is literally one building. Consciousness, in Laing’s detachment, Wilder’s appetite and Royal’s paternal vanity. Class, in the strata. Marriage and the family, in Wilder and his wife and in Royal and his. The body, in sex, hunger, violence and the doctor’s trade. Technology and architecture, as the environment that shapes the mind. Money and status, in the floors and the parking bays. Something like the sacred, in the rites of the roof. They are integrated, not listed: each is a register of the one regression. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the enclosure that gives the book its force. Labour vanishes almost from the first; the state and history are excluded by design; nature is the river and the sky seen from balconies; and the persons are types, so consciousness is held in outline. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Master James of St George, under Edward I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: war and its machinery; the state, in the seat of a new principality; conquest and colonial plantation, through the town the castle commands; dynasty, in the birth of Edward of Caernarfon here in 1284 and the later investitures; history and myth, in Rome, Constantinople and Macsen; the sea and the river, in the site and its supply. They are integrated through the one figure of the walls. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or thin: the sacred, the household, labour except in the fabric itself, the natural order beyond the site. And much of what is held is held by claim and by setting rather than built inside the work, whose inside was never built.
Built for Bishop Bernward · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: the sacred, as the heavenly city and its host; the Church as institution, a Benedictine abbey under a bishop; the empire, in its imperial bishop and Ottonian ambition; death and memory, the founder’s tomb as the root of the building; number, the measure as the order of creation; and history, in the ceiling’s descent from Adam and Eve to Christ. The double ends integrate death and liturgy; the module integrates number and sacred order. What holds this axis lowest is what lies outside the cloister: the household, labour, the natural world and the common life are absent except as the monastic rule implied them, and the building’s later life, the Reformation, the war and the rebuilding, is carried by it rather than held in it.
Maya, under Jasaw Chan K'awiil I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Six orders are held in one section. The sacred, in the mountain and the temple; death and the ancestor, in the tomb; the state and the dynasty, in the king’s image and the pairing across the plaza; war, in the victory Lintel 3 commemorates; the cosmos, in the vertical from the underworld to the sky and the canoe of the maize god in the tomb; and the city, which the temple faces and gathers. They are integrated: the king lies at the root of the order he crowns. What holds the axis lowest is absence and loss. Labour, the household, the natural order except as the forest the temple rose above, and individual consciousness are not held; and two of the orders it did hold, war and the cosmos of the canoe, are held in objects now elsewhere.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, in death, resurrection and the god; the body, dismembered and gathered; kinship, a wife and sister gathering a husband killed by his brother, held only through the myth; the state, in the pyramid as royal tomb and monument of power; technology and energy, in board and copper; the earth, in the scorched ground; and history, from ancient Egypt to the present. They are integrated by the one act of gathering, which touches all of them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent from the canvas itself: no person, no labour, no city, no visible particular history, and consciousness only as the viewer brings it. More than an abstract field holds, and far less than a crowded history painting.
Ovid · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what one didactic poem holds. Rome: its places, its spectacles, its triumph and its foreign war, all given as stages for courtship. The social order: freedmen and matrons, slaves and go-betweens, the rich rival and the poor lover. The gods, as instruments and as exempla. Gender: the poem’s real width is that it holds both sexes, and in Book 3 gives women the instruction it gave men. The body, in grooming, age, sex and the dinner table. Myth, in its long insets. What it does not hold: labour, family and children, the state as more than a backdrop, the sacred as more than convenience, death except in story. All of it passes through one premise, seduction, which the poem chooses and which bounds it.
Tulunid, under Ahmad ibn Tulun · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Five orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the community at prayer facing Mecca. The state: a governor’s sovereignty built at the scale of the caliph’s capital, the palace once adjoining. The city: the mosque as the centre of a planned capital and its only survivor. History: Abbasid, Fatimid and Mamluk hands in one fabric, and Lajin’s refuge, as the chroniclers tell it, repaid in its restoration. The natural order: light, shade, water and the hour on the court. Court and arcades place them together, integrated rather than listed. What holds it lowest is what is absent: the household, labour except as the market at the ziyada’s edge, the body except in prayer and ablution, death, and individual consciousness.
H. P. Lovecraft · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what a body of tales can hold, and it holds more than most: deep time and the cosmos; the sciences of its day, geology, biology, mathematics and physics, as orders of reality; the history and topography of New England, its decayed towns and old families; heredity, the family as inheritance; the sacred, inverted, as cult and outer gods; the mind breaking under knowledge. The one law integrates them. What holds the axis: the state, labour and the economy appear only as a decayed fishing town’s trade or a university’s expedition; love and marriage barely exist, “The Thing on the Doorstep” the near exception; women are almost wholly absent; society is crowd or mob. The orders held are vast in scale and few in kind.
Rudolf Steiner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Orders held: a world society and its school; a theatre for the mystery dramas and for Faust; a cosmology of nature and soul, stated in the forms; a landscape, the building crowning a hill of houses in the same idiom; and a community’s answer to loss, the second building risen from the fire of the first. One idea, the organism, integrates them, and the theatre is part of the doctrine, not a tenant. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the civic, the political and the everyday. It is a building for a movement, and its world stops at the movement’s edge.
Vijayanagara builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The temple holds the sacred, in the god’s dwelling and its rites; the state, in royal patronage and the god as king; commerce, in the horses and traders on the plinth; performance, in music and dance in the open hall; and the festival calendar of the city. The institution the building houses integrates them; they are not merely listed. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside the unit and the form: the household and labour enter only as carved incident, the natural order only through the boulder landscape, which is context, and the street and the city that would carry the range further are not part of the work. A building’s form limits this axis, and the figure describes it.
Giuseppe Mengoni · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Orders held: commerce, which built and fills it; the city and its public life, in the street made a salon; the state and the nation, in the king’s name, Savoy at the centre and the unification’s cities round it; the world, in the four continents of the lunettes; the sacred, by the borrowed cross and dome set beside the cathedral; history, in the Risorgimento it celebrates; the household, in the flats above the shops; and labour, faintly, in its own making and the death of its architect on it. The cross gathers city, nation and world into one centre, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the sacred and the world are figures in decoration rather than orders lived in the building, and death, the body, the natural order beyond the light and weather, and the single consciousness are absent. A shopping street holds the confidence of one class and one nation at one moment, and the figure describes the form.
Ragnar Östberg · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The city: its government, its banquet and its ceremony. The nation’s history: the Vasa anniversary of the inauguration, the three crowns on the tower. The natural order: the lake and the light, to which the arcade and the tower are turned. Labour: the crafts that made the building, celebrated in its surfaces. And in the Golden Hall’s churchly gold a near-sacred order set over the civic. These are integrated through plan and sequence more than listed. What holds the axis lowest is what stands outside: consciousness and the family, as they stand outside most civic buildings.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Orders held: art and its public; labour and industry, in a power station kept as a monument of the machine age; the city, in the riverfront, the chimney and the line across the river to St Paul’s; the state and the public purse, in a national museum entered free; commerce and leisure, in the shops, cafes and crowds that are part of its use; and history, in the shell’s own post-war making. They are held, not listed: the hall is where the industrial order and the public order meet in one room. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the sacred is evoked by the nave and not held; the family and private life are absent; and the domestic and the natural orders, the river aside, lie outside the building.
Alex Proyas · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 100 minutes holds, the orders are many and one premise binds them. Consciousness and memory stand at the centre; the marriage, with Emma’s adultery and a husband she remembers but does not know; the city as society, its police, hotels, automats, a prostitute and a doctor; the state as total power, in the makers’ rule over time and place; history, held negatively, as a past erased and reissued; the cosmos, in the city adrift and a sun made by hand; the sacred, in Gnostic outline. What holds the axis lowest: the social orders are present as decor rather than lived, with no labour, no family beyond the couple and no community, so the encompassing is diagrammatic, many orders named and few inhabited.
Ray Bradbury · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
One of the two lowest of the twelve. The book holds a consciousness in Montag’s waking; a marriage, his and Mildred’s, the one human relation drawn with weight; the state and its fire service; the mass culture of programme and advertisement; war; the sacred, in Ecclesiastes and Revelation; the natural order, in the river and the woods; and the history of reading itself, in Beatty’s account. That is a good number of orders for a short novel, and the fire holds them in one structure. What holds the axis there is that several are present rather than integrated. Labour is only the fireman’s; the state is a shadow and the war a weather; the family is a single couple and a dead neighbour girl’s household kept offstage. A short form, encompassing much and most of it thinly.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 103 minutes holds. Consciousness, in Mathieu’s account, his self-pity and his blindness; the family, in Conchita’s mother and the transaction made through her; money and class, in a rich widower’s purchase and a poor girl’s refusal, and in labour as service, the maid, the valet, the dancer for tourists; the state and history, in bombings, police and a Europe of political terror; the sacred, mocked, in the Infant Jesus of the terrorists’ name. They are touched more than held. What holds the axis lowest is that everything passes through one man’s obsession, and the orders beyond it are set at the edge as noise; Conchita’s consciousness is withheld by design, and history is a sound off screen. A chamber film of one desire: the figure describes the form.
Gu Kaizhi (attributed) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, in the emperor, his favour and the safety of the throne; the court as a society, with its ranks, guards and rituals; the family and lineage, in the scene of descendants; the moral life of women as the subject of the text; the self, in the mirror and the kneeling lady; history, in the exemplary consorts of the Han; and the cosmic order, in the mountain with its sun and moon. They are integrated by the text’s argument and by the single line, and the mountain makes the tie of conduct to cosmos explicit. What holds the axis is the form and the lens: everything is seen from inside the palace and through precept, there is no labour and almost no nature outside the emblem, and the orders are named by example more than held in one structure. The figure describes the form.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, in the gods, the judgment and the sun hymns; death, as rite, as passage and as grief; the moral life, in the weighing of a heart; the state, in a royal official whose office stands behind his figure; the family, in the women who mourn him; labour, in the priests at the tomb and the scribes who made the roll; the natural order in its sacred form, the lotus and the animals of the gods. One programme integrates them, the passage of one man from his tomb to the presence of Osiris. What holds the axis down is what is absent or only implied: the life weighed is not shown, only its outcome; history is present only as office; nature is wholly sacralised. A large order, held compactly.
Tokugawa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Six orders are held. The state, in the reception of lords and envoys; the court, in the visit of 1626 and the address in Kyoto; the social order, in graded access; war, in walls, moats and the guard chamber behind the decorated doors, though as display; the natural order, painted in tiger, pine, hawk and season and composed in the garden; history, in the record of 1626 and 1867, the building’s first and last acts of state. One plan integrates them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the sacred, except as the garden borrows it; the household, since this was a palace of reception, not of dwelling; labour, death and consciousness, except as the subject kneeling at a distance.
Sedefkâr Mehmed Agha · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The mosque holds several orders in one structure. The sacred: the hall, the mihrab, the community at prayer. The state: the royal pavilion and lodge, the six minarets as a statement of rank, the treasury that paid for it. The city and its history: the Hippodrome before it, Hagia Sophia opposite, the Byzantine palace beneath, all bound into its siting and its axis. The natural order enters as the paradise garden on the walls, stylised. The charitable and economic orders of the foundation, its schools, hospital, kitchen and market, lie outside the unit and are not credited. What holds the score here is that the family, labour and the single consciousness lie outside its range, as they do for most buildings.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. Consciousness: Curtis’s, held from inside through the form. The family: a marriage, a deaf child, a brother, a mother in care, and heredity as fate. Labour: a sand-mining crew, its rules on equipment, a man’s place on it. The economy: a loan, insurance, a flea-market stall, the cost of a child’s surgery. Community: the Lions Club and its supper, the neighbours who watch the digging. The natural order: weather as the film’s medium and its threat. Medicine, in a free clinic and a counsellor. These are one movement, since the job, the insurance, the shelter and the marriage turn together. What holds the axis: Samantha’s inner life comes chiefly through Curtis, history and the state barely enter, and the sacred is present only as figure.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds. Many orders are present: the state and its violence in Derry, the bomb in Seconds, the sacred in the psalm, Easter and Drowning Man, the couple in New Year’s Day and Two Hearts Beat as One, the city and its lost in Red Light and Surrender, the displaced in The Refugee. One frame, war answered by surrender, joins them, and the sacred and the political are genuinely held together in Sunday Bloody Sunday and “40”. What holds the figure is integration: the couple, the city and the refugee are touched by the frame more than held by it, labour and the family are absent, and much is named rather than rendered; ten songs in forty-two minutes describe the form.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness, the self under stimulation, is held in Numb; the market and the medium in the title track and Babyface; Europe after 1989 in the opening’s continent of slogans. The family enters as the indulgent father of Daddy’s Gonna Pay and the father’s house of The First Time; addiction in Daddy’s Gonna Pay; the sacred in The First Time and The Wanderer. That is a wider span than most albums attempt, and the frame of the media city joins several orders. What holds the figure is integration: the orders arrive track by track, history and the state are evoked through slogans, and labour and nature are absent.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 126 minutes holds. It holds a whole social order in one structure: labour and its conditions, in the tail’s food and the children taken for the engine; the state as police and propaganda; religion as the cult of the engine; education as indoctrination; the family, in Tanya and her son, Namgoong and Yona, the pregnant teacher; consciousness, in Curtis’s guilt; history, in the climate experiment and its seventeen years; the natural order, in a frozen earth beginning to thaw. The train is all of them at once. What holds it, with The Bottomless Well the lowest of the twelve: the orders are held schematically, each car one order and each person one position; inner life is thin outside the confession, and the front is a single class drawn as caricature.
Imre Steindl · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Several orders are held in one structure. The state and its constitution are in the plan. History is in the programme of rulers outside and in the dome’s measure. The sacred enters through the doctrine of the crown at the centre, and the nation as an idea governs the whole. The city and the river are the setting the building answers and commands. These are integrated, not listed: the plan is the constitution, and the dome is the crown’s place. Absent or barely present: labour, the household, the body, the common life, the other peoples of the kingdom, and the natural order except as the river the building faces. The register is wide but single, the official life of a nation, and that holds the axis at 7.4.
David Fincher · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The orders held: marriage at the centre; the family, in the twins, in Amy’s parents who sold her childhood as a book series, in Nick’s dying mother and his father lost to dementia and to contempt for women; the economy, in two layoffs, a dead mall and the move from Manhattan to a Missouri river town; the press as judge; the law, in Boney, Gilpin and Bolt; gender, as the performance the film is about. They are integrated: the recession breaks the marriage, the marriage becomes a media case, and the case is decided by gender. What holds the axis among the lowest weighs heavily: consciousness is two people and only one is entered, the town is a backdrop of volunteers and onlookers, the sacred is absent except as a vigil, and the state stops at a county police department. The orders are many, and each is held only as far as the case needs it.
Louisa May Alcott · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Held in one structure: consciousness, Jo’s above all; the family as a body that ages and breaks; women’s labour, paid and unpaid; money and class, in the Marches, the Laurences, the Moffats, the Hummels and Aunt March’s estate; vocation in art and in writing; marriage in three kinds; death; and a Protestant religion of conduct made into a journey by Bunyan. These are integrated well where they are present. The state and history are offstage: the Civil War is the father’s absence, a telegram and a hospital in Washington, never a field of the book, and the town is a backdrop. Nature appears as season and garden. Its orders are domestic, and what is weighed is what the book holds: the household and what presses on it.
Steven Spielberg · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 135 minutes holds. Consciousness: one man’s obsession from inside, and a mother’s terror for her son. The family: a marriage and three children broken by a vision, a single mother and her child. The state: the army, the air traffic controllers, a government that stages a disaster to keep a secret. Science and language: the decoding, the hand signs, music as speech. The globe: Mexico, India, the United States. Labour in Roy’s work as a power lineman; history in the lost of 1945 returning. The sacred frames the whole. What holds the figure at 7.4: the orders are present more than integrated. The state and the family meet only in Roy, the scientists have no inner life, and the cosmic is held as spectacle rather than as a world.
Stephen King · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Several orders, joined through one family. Consciousness, in three minds and a fourth, the hotel’s. The family over three generations: Jack’s father, Wendy’s mother, and the child who inherits both. Addiction, and the hope of recovery. Work and class: the caretaker’s job, the preparatory school, the patron who rescues and controls. American history and money, through the scrapbook’s record of the Overlook’s owners, its mob killings and its rich. Childhood and the child’s knowledge. The natural order, in the snow that seals the house and the mountain winter. The supernatural as the frame. They are integrated through the one house more than listed. Held where it is because the history is told by scrapbook rather than lived, the world beyond the hotel is thin, and the book encompasses less than the novels of a whole society.
Terry Pratchett · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
The book holds the single conscience, the church as an institution, the state and its war, Omnia against Ephebe, with its fleet, its general Fri’it and the sergeant Simony with his secret society, philosophy and early science, in the Ephebian thinkers and the round world argued against the turtle, the sacred, and death. They are integrated, not listed: the theology of belief binds the church to the state and the state to the war, and the coda brings them all to one conscience in the desert of the dead. Held in the low sevens because the family, labour and the natural order are thin, the peoples are drawn in outline as a fable draws them, and the scale is that of a parable at the length of a novel.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The work holds a small number of orders and integrates them: consciousness, in grief, wit, reverie and struggle; the sacred, in the fugue’s church style and the hymn of the semplice variation; the social in miniature, in four equal voices passing a subject and a theme between them; the popular, in the dance of no. 2 and the Presto; time and mortality, in the cycle and the laments. They are held together, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, labour, the state, history and the natural order do not appear. A wordless quartet holds the world of one mind and its few companions; the figure says how many orders that is.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
What the sheet holds in one structure: the natural order, fully, sea, weather, sky and mountain as one system; labour and commerce, in three crews rowing fish to a city’s market; the sacred, as the still mountain at the centre, its cult present only as context; and mortality and consciousness, in the bowed endurance of the rowers. They are integrated, not listed: the wave places each. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, the state, history, the city and the law. There is no building, no road and no second human order. One sheet, one instant and about a tenth of a square metre limit what can be held, and the figure records the form’s limit rather than compensating for it.
John Coltrane · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Consciousness is held fully, one man’s devotion under strain. The sacred is held, explicitly and in the structure. The body is held as labour, in the effort of Pursuance and the endurance of the solos. A community is held in the quartet itself, four players whose interplay is the record’s sound, and through the letter a life’s history, the awakening and the recovery it implies. These are integrated, not listed: each is a form of the one devotion. What holds the figure is everything the record does not name: the family, the state, labour as livelihood, history as public event, the natural order. In December 1964 that silence on the public order is a choice.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what one story holds. The state: the department, the ranks, the police, the significant person. Labour: copying, and the tailor’s trade. Class: a clerk, a tailor who was a serf and his wife, a general. Money: four hundred roubles a year, and months of saving. The city and the natural order: Petersburg and its frost, the enemy of all who earn four hundred a year. The sacred: the calendar of saints, the brother, the dead who return. Death and its effects. Desire, displaced onto a garment, with the significant person’s mistress as its counterweight. They are integrated, not listed: every order passes through one coat. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what the form leaves out: the consciousness at the centre is nearly empty by design, the family and history are absent, and the span is one man’s last winter. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Donatello · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, in the biblical hero and the deliverance of a people; the state, in the myth of the small republic against the tyrant, which the move to the seat of government made public; the body, as the work’s subject and argument; desire, in the eros it does not conceal; death, in the head under the foot; antiquity and art, in the nude reborn and the Mercury in the costume; and youth against age. The pose integrates them: one boy, one act completed, one weight held. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, the family, history beyond the story, the natural order beyond a wreath, and any consciousness but one, closed and unreadable. It is a single figure, and the mark describes the form; a tenth under the Laocoön’s group of three at 7.4.
David Lynch · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held are few and are held fully: consciousness, in dream, wish and guilt; desire, between two women and across a power that chooses one of them; the industry, from casting room to the director’s hill house; the city, from the ridge road to the diner on Sunset. Integrated, since the industry’s choosing is the wound the dream repairs. What holds the axis lowest is absence. There is no family seen from inside: an aunt who dies and leaves money, parents reduced to an old couple who crawl under a door. Labour is the industry’s only, the state is two detectives who do not return, history does not enter, and the sacred appears once, as a magician saying there is no band. It is a film of two women and one wish.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Narrow by design, the film holds more than its size suggests: the individual consciousness, two of them and one divided; the family, a dead mother and the son she governs; money and work, the office, the cash, the car lot, the motel ruined when the highway moved; sex and its frustrations, the lunch-hour affair and the marriage that debt prevents; the law and its experts. They are joined causally: the stolen money brings Marion to the motel, the moved highway made it a trap, the mother’s rule made the son. What holds the axis lowest is absence. The state, history, the sacred and the natural order, save the swamp, do not enter, and the figure records the ceiling of a thriller among a handful of people.
John A. Roebling and Washington Roebling · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Five orders are held, and a sixth faintly. The natural order: the tidal river, the wind, the harbour and the sky. The city: two cities joined, the streets of each running onto the approaches. The public: the walker and the crowd. Industry and the machine: steel, steam, the cable railway, now motor traffic. History and the state: a public work of its decade, and the consolidation of 1898 it helped make possible. Faintly the sacred, in towers dressed as church gates, but the sacred is not held. One structure carries them, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, the body except as walker, labour except as the caisson dead, whom the form does not place, death and consciousness. A bridge holds a passage, not a world.
Huang Gongwang · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, given almost the whole of the scroll, in hills, trees, water and the passage of distance; settlement, in villages, pavilions, a bridge and huts by the shore; labour, in the fishermen in their boats; consciousness, in the scroll’s claim to be a mind’s record and in the scholar seated in a pavilion looking at the water; time, in the journey and in the years of making; and the sacred, in the Daoist sense of a world followed without forcing, implicit rather than shown. They are integrated: the figures live in the landscape, not beside it. What holds the axis at 7.3, the lowest of the twelve, is what is absent by design: the family, the state and history as event. The human world is a few figures in a long river, and the figure describes that refusal.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
A wordless symphony holds orders through its genres, and this one holds several together: the court and the state in the trumpets and drums of the opening call and the march; the church and the learned tradition in the four-note figure and the fugue; the theatre in the quoted aria; the dance in the Menuetto; private feeling in the Andante. They are integrated, not listed, since the finale makes church and dance one counterpoint. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is absence: consciousness as a passage through time, the family, labour, history and the natural order do not appear, and even the inner life of the Andante is lyric rather than dramatic.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Orders held: art and its viewing, made a route; the city, refused as a grid and answered as an avenue and a park; the natural order, in the organic form of shell and growth and in the park the building faces; the public, the crowd made visible to itself across the void; time, built as the walk itself; and, faintly, the cosmos, in the domed void under a glass sky. One section holds these together, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, labour, the state, the sacred except as an old form, and death. A museum holds the viewing of art and the city’s public at leisure, and the figure describes the form.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Six orders are held: the household, family, guest and son each with a room; class and labour, as servants and chauffeur placed on the ground beside the car; the machine, built into the plan; the body, in sun, air, hygiene and the bath; the natural order, in the meadow, the sky and the roof garden; and perception, the moving body and the framed view, as near as the house comes to consciousness. One section places each at its height, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the city, the state, history except as the Palladian echo, the sacred and death. A weekend house holds a family’s leisure, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Within one canvas of about three feet by four the picture holds several orders and integrates them. History: Trafalgar and the nation’s memory, named in the title. Labour and industry: the steam tug and the breaker’s yard it is bound for. The natural order: sun, moon, tide and river. Time and mortality: the day ending as the life ending. The sacred is present only by implication, in the funeral and the vigil. One law of light binds them; they are held, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is that the orders are touched rather than inhabited: there are no persons, no family and no society in operation, the state appears as a memory and labour as a single machine. The figure records the form of one easel picture.
The Beatles · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Love is held, in “Something”, “Oh! Darling” and the wanting of “I Want You”. Money and the end of youth are present in “You Never Give Me Your Money”. The natural order appears as the sun, the turning world and the sea of “Octopus’s Garden”; childhood as a lullaby and a garden under the sea; violence as comedy in Maxwell’s hammer; the state as a joke at Her Majesty’s expense. The farewell joins the orders of side two into one passage. What holds the figure lowest: the orders are listed rather than held, consciousness is a mood, the family is absent but for a cradle song, history and labour are absent but for money, and the figures who might carry a world are caricatures.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Six orders are held: the arts, in rooms made for the seeing of pictures; history, in the vault’s descent from Rome and a collection from antiquity to the modern housed in one order; the natural order, in daylight, weather, hour and season admitted into every room and in the trees and water of courts and grove; the civic public, in a free museum on a park; the body, in rooms of human scale; and perception, the act of looking, made the building’s subject. They are integrated through light and the room, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, labour except as the servant channels, the state, the sacred except as a quality of the light, and death. The figure describes the form.
José Clemente Orozco · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve, and a low mark on a small form describes the form. For a single cupola the orders held are more than the form usually allows, and they are integrated by position. The natural order: the elements, and fire as the one among them made human. Consciousness: the man as the seat of what burns. The sacred: displaced and occupied, a man where the Spirit would be. History: present by position, as the summit of a cycle of conquest, church, state and masses, though the dome depicts none of it. What holds the axis at 7.3 is what the unit leaves out: the family, labour except as energy, the state except by implication, and the history that lies on the walls below rather than in the dome. Above Water Lilies at 6.5, below The Large Bathers at 7.5.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of seventy-five minutes holds. One consciousness, in compulsion and pride; the family, in a dying mother he robbed; the law, in the inspector and the prison; the city, as crowds, stations, a racecourse and a café; love, as a woman’s patience; the sacred, in the turn at the end, shown and not entered. The orders present are integrated: the mother’s death, the theory and the crime are one knot. But they are few, and all are held through Michel. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent by design: labour, until a line of narration in exile; history; the state beyond a policeman; nature, which does not appear. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body, naked and clothed; the sexes, and the relation of men to a woman they do not look at; class and the city, young men and a woman at leisure on the edge of Paris; the natural order, wood and water, thinly; food, in the still life; art and its history, the museum tradition taken apart in the open air; and the viewer, drawn in by the look. The triangle and the look integrate them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, unless posing is labour, which the picture hints; the state; the sacred; history beyond the history of art; the family; and consciousness beyond one level glance. A picnic is a world out of time and work, and four figures in a wood hold less than a court or a crowded bathing grove. The figure describes the form.
Eugenio Montale · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a book of short lyrics holds. Consciousness; the natural order, sea, land, weather, plants and animals, in exact particulars; the sacred in negative, the miracle, the divine Indifference, the absent God; childhood and its loss, in “Fine dell’infanzia”; love, in the later poems’ “tu”; death, in “I morti”. What is absent is absent by choice: history, the state, labour, the city except as a grey courtyard, the family except as childhood’s frame. The book refuses the public world of 1925, and the refusal is part of its meaning, but this axis weighs what is held. That holds it at 7.3, the lowest of the twelve: what the book encompasses is narrow and deep.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Six orders are held in one structure: consciousness, Holly’s as the film’s medium and Kit’s seen only from outside; the family, a widowed father and a daughter, and the destruction of the house; class and labour, in the garbage round, Cato’s farm and the rich man’s house; the law and the state, in the sheriff, the posse and the soldiers at the airfield; the culture’s images, James Dean, the records, the magazine voice; and nature, the river, the plains and the badlands, in which the pair are small. Each is reached through the flight, and each is one or two scenes deep. What holds the axis lowest is that depth: the family is one father in a few scenes; history is present as period, not entered; the sacred is absent except as nature’s indifference. The film is a ballad, and its scope is a ballad’s.
Built for Qabus ibn Wushmgir · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Five orders are held. Death and its memory. The state, as the name and titles of a ruler. The sacred, in the invocation of God and the lunar year of the faith. History, in the solar year of the old Iranian reckoning held beside it. The natural order, in the sun’s daily passage round the flanges and the tower’s place on the plain. They are integrated in one form, not listed: the double date is the meeting of faith and kingship, and the light on the flanges is time made visible on a tomb. What holds it at 7.3 is what a single tower with an empty room cannot hold, and does not claim to: the household, labour, consciousness, the city. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged at the scale of a poem of a little over two hundred lines, and the mark describes the form. What it holds: consciousness at its most inward; the sacred in its liturgical form; erotic love remembered and renounced; the natural order, as sea, garden, desert and birds; the church as a body of words and rites; and something of the world’s loss of faith, “the vanished power of the usual reign” (I). It holds these as one. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the absence of the social and the historical: there is no family on the page, no labour, no state, and no city as The Waste Land had one. An inward sequence holds a narrow world deeply, and no more.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Orders held: the household, parents, children’s playroom, guests and the hearth at its centre; class and labour, the servants given their own wing beside the kitchen; the machine, the car garaged at the end of the house; the natural order, in sun, shade, planters and the horizon line the house is drawn along; and the city, a street to be screened and overlooked, privacy won within the grid. The sliding blocks and the raised floor place these in one structure, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the state, history except as the house’s own lineage, the sacred except as the old meaning of the fire, and death. A family house holds a household’s life, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
Henri Labrouste · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held are fewer than in the greatest buildings, but they are integrated. The building holds the history of letters, in the names cut in chronological order; the state and the university, as the institutions it serves; the city, for it faces a civic square and completes it; technology, the iron frame of the industrial age brought indoors; and the daily life of reading. They are held in one structure, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside the programme: the sacred is absent except as memorial, and the family and labour enter only as the scholar’s work. For a building of one purpose the range is respectable, and it is the building’s narrowest measure.
Joni Mitchell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, in the self-accusation of River and A Case of You. Love and marriage are held, from My Old Man, with its refusal of the paper and its loneliness, “the bed’s too big”, to Richard’s marriage. The family is held in Little Green: a child, an absent father, a mother who gives the child to others. Travel and exile are held across Europe and home. The nation appears in California, where they will not give “peace a chance”, and the sacred is evoked in “holy wine”. What holds the axis lowest is the form: labour, the state and history are glimpsed, not integrated, and the natural order is image. It stands a tenth above Kind of Blue at 7.2, because its words reach the family and the nation.
Fra Angelico · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Held in one structure: the sacred, the incarnation at its first instant; the natural order, in the garden; the built world and its order, in the loggia and the convent; the rule of a community, in the stair, the inscription and the friar’s life; and a consciousness at the moment of consent. They are integrated, not listed: the garden, the loggia and the cell are one sequence from outside to inside. What holds the axis lowest is what two figures in a moment cannot hold: history beyond the sacred, the family, labour, the state, the crowd. It stands above Lamentation over the Dead Christ at 7.0 and just below The Starry Night at 7.4, raised by the way it takes its place, and the life lived there, into the image.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 87 minutes holds. The orders: consciousness, the Tramp’s, given by the body, and the girl’s, given by her blindness; love; wealth and poverty as the city’s law; labour, in flower-selling, street-sweeping and paid fighting; the household economy, in the rent and the eviction notice; the law, in the police and the prison; medicine, in an operation that can be bought; the civic state, in the monument and its speeches. Money integrates them: the rent, the fight, the gift and the arrest are one movement. What holds the axis lowest: the family is a grandmother; history is the Depression held as background; the sacred is absent but for the shape of the healing; nature is absent; and the girl’s inner life is given almost wholly from outside. It is a fable’s scope, carried far.
R.E.M. · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as memory and half-attention. The natural order is held more than on most rock records of its year: fields, kudzu, rivers and weather enter as images and as the texture of the sound. The sacred is evoked, in a pilgrimage and a passion, and the region, the American South, is held as atmosphere throughout. One sensibility joins them. What holds the figure lowest on the page is the kind of join and what it leaves out: the orders are joined by mood rather than by structure, the state and history enter by title only, in Radio Free Europe and Moral Kiosk, and labour, the family, the couple and the body are absent or cannot be made out.
Artemisia Gentileschi · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body, in its weight and resistance; violence; gender, the women’s strength against the man’s; rank, mistress and servant as partners; the sacred, by the biblical subject; the state, by the story of a besieged city saved and an army left leaderless. The body, violence, gender and rank are integrated into one structure, and the locked arms hold them together. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the state and the sacred are present by reference, carried by the title and not held in the image, and that there is no nature, no labour beyond the act, no history but the text’s and no family. A single instant in one room cannot hold the orders of a cycle or a novel, and the figure describes the form.
Van Morrison · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held deeply: memory, desire and the ecstatic state. Love and sexuality are held, from the adolescent crush to the lovers’ walk. Childhood and the city are held together: Belfast’s streets, the avenue, the railway, a party in a house. The sacred is present as longing, rebirth asked for, not as faith. Gender and the marginal are held in “Madame George”, the one order the record sees from outside the speaker, and illness and death enter at the end. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the family, labour, the state and history do not appear, though the record comes from Belfast on the eve of the Troubles. A forty-seven-minute record of one consciousness holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.
Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: the couple and the courtship; labour, in Johnnie’s work as an engineer, the knowledge of a trade the film turns into heroism; the machine, the locomotive as both tool and beloved; war and the state, in the recruiting office, the armies, the generals and the plan of attack; the landscape of rivers, forests and storm; the community of a Southern town. The chase integrates them. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is shown only as a stance; the family is Annabelle’s father and brother, sketched; history is a costume, its causes absent; the sacred is absent; the war is a field for the action rather than an order the film enters. The form is fast and narrow by design, and the figure describes the form.
The Beatles · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form; short songs keep the upper bands out of reach. Consciousness is held, in Nowhere Man’s self-scrutiny and In My Life’s memory. The couple is held in many forms: affair, quarrel, estrangement, devotion, possession. Memory and mortality enter together in In My Life. Ambition and money appear comically in Drive My Car; the sacred faintly, as a doctrine of love preached in The Word; society as the young man of no place and the call of Think for Yourself. What holds the figure: labour, the family, the state, history and the natural order are absent, and what is present is joined by tone rather than by a held structure.
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with Gianfranco Franchini · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Six orders are held: the city, approached from its streets, given a square and shown to itself from the top; the civic public, on the square and in the free library; the arts and knowledge, modern art, books, design, music and film in one frame; technology, the machine and its services as the building’s matter; the state, a president’s commission that bears his name; and information, the library and the centre made for the flow of knowledge. One section places each: the public at the foot, the arts on the floors, the machine at the edges, the city at the summit. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the sacred, death, the family, labour as a subject, the natural order, and history except as the old city seen around it. The figure describes the form.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Five orders are placed in one structure: the sacred, built as structure and threshold; the community, gathered in a ring; the state, through the cathedral’s place on the axis of the federal capital; the natural order, in the sky and the light of the plateau; and the body, pressed down and released by the passage. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or faint: labour, since the capital was built by the work of thousands and the building does not hold it; the family; history beyond the break with the colonial church; death, except as the descent implies it; and individual consciousness. One room and its outbuildings, held in one gesture, is a small form by this measure, and the figure describes the form.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short book of brief pieces holds, not charged for being short. Consciousness, fully: the self divided from its name, the blind man’s memory. Literature and its making, the book’s ground. The sacred: God’s answer to Shakespeare, Christ’s lost face, the “Argumentum ornithologicum”, the thief of “Lucas XXIII”. History: Rosas and Quiroga in the “Diálogo de muertos”, the grandfathers’ wars, Perón and Eva in “El simulacro”, the Saxon pagans of “El testigo”, Rome in “La trama”. The family, in “Los Borges” and the elegies; the body, in blindness and the nails. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is missing or thin, labour, the city as lived, the state except as myth, and love, and that each order is held for a page, joined by idea rather than by structure.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a novella holds. The natural order, fully: the sea, the fish, the birds, the turtles, the sharks, the weather and the stars, all known by a man who lives in them. Labour, as the whole matter of the book. Age and the body: the cramped hand, the cut palms, the failing strength. Consciousness, in the old man’s speech to himself. The sacred, in the prayers he promises and the Passion figures. Poverty and the village, in the shack, the borrowed food and the fishermen’s talk. Popular culture, in DiMaggio and the newspapers. They are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is absent or only glimpsed: the state, history, the family (the boy’s parents appear only as an order obeyed), sex and the life of the town. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of under ninety minutes can hold. A consciousness, given almost wholly from outside; a marriage and a child left behind in the first tableau and never seen; labour, in the record shop and then in the trade, with its money, tariffs and rules; the state, in the police station and in the regulation the catechism recites; the city, the streets and cafés of Paris in 1962; language and philosophy, in Parain; art, in Dreyer and Poe; the sacred, in the shadow of Joan. They are held through Nana, and that is also what holds the axis lowest: the family is a single scene, the state is a recited code, and history barely enters. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Metallica · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, in addiction and in madness, the record’s two inward songs. The state and war are held in Disposable Heroes, the soldier as expendable; religion and money in Leper Messiah; the institution in Sanitarium; the cosmic and the monstrous in The Thing That Should Not Be. One frame joins them, the master and the puppet. What holds the figure lowest: each order is one song’s subject, named more than held, and the orders meet in the frame, not in a life. The family, labour, love, the natural order, place and history are absent, and the orders held are all forms of domination, a list of masters.
Aretha Franklin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as bondage, grief and desire. The couple is held from several sides: the woman wronged, the woman demanding, the woman satisfied. The household and its money enter in “Respect”, where the claim is laid against what she brings home, and the body in “Dr. Feelgood”. The sacred is held through the idiom itself, the church as the form of the singing, and stated in the close. History and race enter with Cooke’s song, and the record ends on them. What holds the figure: labour, the family beyond the couple, the state and the natural order are absent or glimpsed, and most of what is held lies close to the couple.
Otto Wagner · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Six orders are held in one structure, round one room: the state, an imperial institution for its many peoples; money and thrift; the labour of clerks and the routine of the bureau; the citizen as customer; the city, in the front on the Ring and the square; and the technology of its moment. For a single office building that is wide, and the plan joins them, every order passing through the hall. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the sacred, except as a borrowed allegory at the cornice; the family; the natural order; and history beyond the building’s own break with historicism. Against the orders the rubric counts, it is a medium form well filled, and the figure describes the form.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the household, parents, children and nanny each placed in the section; class and labour, the servants’ wing and the chauffeur’s flat set apart from the family’s floor; the machine, in the plant below and the moving glass; the body, in light, air and the warmth of the winter garden; the natural order, in the garden, the slope and the plants behind glass; the city, in the view across Brno to its castle and cathedral, framed by the window as the household’s horizon. The section sets these at their levels, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the house does not hold: the state, the sacred, death, and labour as anything but service. The history that later passed through it is the house’s fortune, not its structure, and is not credited. A family’s house holds a household, and the figure describes the form.
Prince and the Revolution · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as desire and as guilt. The body is held fully, and the couple, in its heat and its failure. The sacred is held, as sermon, sacrifice and hymn, and joined to the body by the record’s law, which is its integration. A crowd, a congregation at a club, is present behind the last three tracks. What holds the figure lowest on the page is how few orders are held fully: two, the body and the sacred. The family enters through one song, the father and mother of When Doves Cry, held there and then gone, and labour, the state, history and the natural order are absent, unless the rain counts as more than an image.
Massive Attack · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as paranoia, wakefulness and desire. The couple is held across the record, in devotion, affair and betrayal, and it is the record’s ground. The city is held as night, a neighbour through the wall, a room. Watching and being watched run through the record as a felt condition, not a placed one. The body is present as pulse and intoxication. The family, labour, history, the state, the sacred beyond a word and the natural order beyond a beetle and a fire are absent. One mood joins the orders the record has, and it has few: one condition, rendered at length. That is what holds the figure lowest.
Interpol · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as estrangement and withheld desire. The couple is held, across most songs, as nearness without contact. The city is present, as public life, the subway and the night. The sea enters as Stella’s depths; history as one name, Leif Erikson, left unexplained; the sacred as angels named in a title. One condition joins them, distance in a city at night. What holds it lowest of the twelve: labour, the family, the state and the natural order beyond the image of the sea are absent, and the orders that appear beyond the couple and the city are single names or premises, glimpsed rather than held. A record in one mood holds few orders, and the figure describes that.
Ovid · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as a collection of short poems in one situation. Consciousness is held fully: each letter is a mind arguing with itself. Love comes in many forms: marital, adulterous, incestuous in Canace, a stepmother’s in Phaedra, the girl tricked by an oath in Cydippe. The family is there in Canace’s father and Hypermestra’s, and in Medea’s children; war and the state at the edge, Troy behind Penelope, Briseis, Laodamia, Oenone and Helen, Dido’s Carthage, the Danaids; the sacred in oaths, gods and Fate invoked; death in most letters. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: every order is seen from one vantage, the separated lover, and at one moment, the writing, so that war, the city and the gods are backdrop, not held in structure. The book holds more than a body of lyric and less than a narrative of its length.
Romano-Egyptian painters · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held are several: the individual consciousness, as a face that addresses; the family, implied in the care of the burial and the presence of children; the social order and the state, in rank, dress, jewellery, the military baldric of some men and the hairstyles that follow the imperial court; history, since the faces change with the fashions of Rome and so carry their century; the sacred, in the burial, the wreaths and the gods of the wrappings; and a mixed culture, Greek, Egyptian and Roman. The body integrates them in one practice, more than a single bust can hold. What holds the axis lowest is the form: each image is one head, with no labour, no natural order, no event and no relation between persons inside the frame.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, in the sovereign and the orders on his chest; the family, three generations and the marriages that bind dynasties, the Parma couple and the bride to come; history, as the succession set out in a row, the heir and the line to follow; and art, in the painter at his canvas claiming his place in the room. The frieze and the light integrate them: the family is the state, and the painter stands at its edge. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no labour beyond the painter’s own, no sacred order though the court was the Catholic monarchy, no natural order, no consciousness beyond the blankness of being looked at. The history the picture is now read through, 1808, is brought by the viewer. A royal group portrait holds what its form allows, and the figure describes the form.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Six orders are held. The state at its smallest, in the council; commerce, in the shops beneath; learning, in the library; the household, in the staff flats; the commons, in the court; and the natural order, in the wood admitted by the turf stair and the grass on the court. They are integrated, not listed: the section stacks them in a single argument. What holds the axis lowest is scale and absence. Each order is present at village scale, and the sacred and history appear only by archetype, in the acropolis and the hall. A small building for a small community cannot hold what a cathedral or a city plan holds, and the figure describes the form.
Joseph Strauss, Charles Ellis, Leon Moisseiff and Irving Morrow · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Orders held in one structure: the natural order at its most forceful, ocean, current, fog, wind and earthquake, which the form answers in every member; the city and its region, joined; labour, in the bridge’s own dangerous making and its net; the state, as a public district, a vote and a bond in the Depression, and the War Department’s interest in the strait; history, in the fort kept under the arch and the gate to the Pacific; and death, in the men lost building it and in the use the bridge has had since, now answered by a net that is part of the work. They are integrated, not listed: the span over the water and the arch over the fort hold nature and history in one line. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what a bridge cannot hold: the household, the sacred, the inner life. A bridge holds a passage, and the figure describes the form.
Unknown (English or French) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held are several, and they are integrated, not listed. The sacred is there in the Virgin, the Child, the angels and the saints; the state and kingship in a reigning king and his badge; history and dynasty in Edmund and Edward, the realm’s royal saints; the person in a young man kneeling with open hands; the natural order in the meadow’s flowers, the trees and the hart. The livery binds the sacred to the state, and the saints bind history to the person. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, the family except as dynasty, the common life of the realm, and any consciousness beyond the posture of devotion. It holds more than a cabinet intrigue and less than a court. It clears its floor of 6.0 by a point and three tenths.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Five orders are held: labour and making, in the studios and workrooms; education, the school as an institution and a community; the natural order, in the north light, the slope of the ridge and the plant forms of the iron and glass; the city, Glasgow seen from the Hen Run and the south, its grid and weather; and history, Scottish building carried into the modern. The body enters in the life room and the studios’ work. One section places them, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest, with The Imperishable, is what is absent: the sacred, the state, the family, death and individual consciousness, except as the student in the light. An art school holds a community of makers, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
Nan Goldin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness and the self, in the self-portraits; the couple and the chosen family; sex and gender, across straight and queer, men, women and drag; violence; addiction and the body; the city, its rooms and bars; and mortality, which closes the sequence. They are integrated in one structure, the sequence, and set against one another rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or thin: labour, though some of the subjects’ work is shown; the state and history, present only as the conditions of a life at the margins; the sacred; and the natural order. The breadth is wide for a photographic work and narrow for a world. The figure describes the form: one circle in one decade, held deeply.
Marc Chagall · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the self, in the I and its green face; the animal and the bond with it; labour, in the milking and the scythe; the village as a settlement; the sacred, in the church; the cosmos, in the sun or moon below; nature, in the lit tree; and memory, which holds them all. They are integrated by the wheel of the composition and the line between the eyes, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or slight: the state; history, for the Pale, the pogroms and the coming war are nowhere in it; the family except by implication; and any conflict. The picture holds a whole remembered world, small and sweet, more than a single painting usually holds, but it holds it without its cost. The figure describes the form.
Leonard Cohen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, in the singer’s watchful, guilty, devoted self. The couple is held in many forms: the muse, the rival’s lover in Master Song, the woman who houses strangers, the parting in So Long, Marianne. The sacred is held as no other order is, Christ, Joseph, the sisters and the master folded into the erotic rather than set beside it. The city enters as Montreal’s harbour and the street of Stories of the Street; money as the gambler’s trade. Labour, the family beyond lovers, the state, history and the natural order beyond river and winter are absent or glimpsed. Few orders, lying close together and integrated by one voice: that holds the figure lowest on the record, below Remain in Light at 7.6.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a silent film of about ninety minutes holds. The orders: marriage and a woman’s inner life, in Ellen; commerce, in Knock’s agency and the sale of a house; the town as a civic body, in the crier, the closed doors and the procession of the dead; science, in Bulwer and Sievers; the sacred, in crosses and the rule of the book; the sea and trade; and the natural order, given a wide place. That is more than Shadow of a Doubt holds at 6.8, and less than The Third Man at 7.8. What holds it lowest: consciousness is rendered from outside except for Ellen’s longing, labour and the state are absent, history is a chronicle’s frame, and the plague is spectacle rather than a society under strain.
Jane Campion · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 121 minutes holds. Consciousness: Ada’s, fully, through image and music; Flora’s, a child’s, fully; the two men’s through their acts. The family: a mother and daughter bound and turned, a marriage arranged and failed. Labour and money: land bought and cleared, a piano traded for acres, a bargain kept as a ledger. The colony, the natural order of sea and bush held as forces, art as voice, the sacred in a burial ground, a pageant and a drowning. What holds the axis lowest: every order passes through one woman and one house; the colony and the Māori are held at the edge rather than integrated; the state and the law are absent; and history is setting more than order. The New World (8.4), on the same ground, holds the native world and the colony as orders, and this film does not.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what ninety-five minutes hold. A child’s consciousness, waking and dreaming; the family, a murdered mother and sister; the army, its ranks, scouts, orders and care; the state at war, at the front and in the victory at Berlin; history, the Eastern front and the fall of the Reich, held in the coda; the sacred, in a ruined church, a bell and Dürer’s Apocalypse; the natural order, birch, swamp, river, rain, apples and sea, carrying meaning rather than setting; love, in the birch wood. They meet in the boy and are not listed. What holds the axis lowest: the family is absence and dream, labour is absent, the enemy is never seen as people until they are dead children in a newsreel, and the state is the army alone.
Fela Kuti and Africa 70 · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The state is held directly, and that is uncommon: the army as an institution, its drill and its chain of command, and behind it the colonial army whose forms it inherited. The body is held, as the drilled body and the dancing body set against each other. Consciousness is held as its absence, the will removed, and in the follower as the will surrendered. The street and the citizen enter on side two. What holds the figure lowest is what is absent or only glimpsed: the family, labour, the sacred, evoked only through the zombie’s sorcery, the natural order, and history beyond the colonial echo. Several orders, joined by one law and one voice, in two pieces.
Almohad builders, under Abd al-Mu'min and Yaqub al-Mansur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Orders held: the sacred, in the oriented hall and the call to prayer; the state, in a new dynasty’s sign over a conquered capital; the community, in a whole city’s congregation in one room; the city, its skyline, its quarters set by the tower’s sight lines, and the booksellers’ market that gave the name; the natural order, the plain, the mountains and the hours of the sun that set the times of prayer and the light on the faces. History lives in the double foundation, a reign’s first mosque and its second side by side. Tower and qibla axis integrate these rather than list them. What holds it lowest is what lies outside: labour, the family, the body and consciousness enter only as the rows of worshippers, and the hall’s single purpose keeps the range narrow.
The Who · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The self is held fully, in the seeker of Bargain and the hidden man of Behind Blue Eyes. The sacred is held in Bargain’s devotion and the music as grace of the middle songs. The crowd and the state are held in Won’t Get Fooled Again, the revolution and the new boss; youth and its generation in Baba O’Riley. Marriage enters comically in My Wife, the road and the machine in Going Mobile, technology in the synthesiser itself. What holds it lowest: labour, the family beyond the couple, history beyond its year and the natural order are absent or glimpsed, and the orders arrive song by song, one seeker’s consciousness joining most of them but not the comic song or the road song.
Sebastião Salgado · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
For a series of photographs the orders held are many, and several are integrated. Labour, at the centre, in its most physical form. The economy: gold, the claim, the carrier paid by the sack, the body wagered on a share, and through gold the world market the pit serves. The state: the police at the rim, the rifle. The natural order: a hill dug out by hand into a pit, the mountain consumed. The mass and the individual, which the form holds in one structure. History and myth, through the archetypes the slope builds. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what stays outside the frame or present only by implication: the family, the town of the miners, women, the sacred except as evocation, and the miners’ own words and lives outside the pit.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a farce of about 121 minutes holds. Labour enters in two broke musicians who will take any job and an all-girl band on the road; crime and the state in Prohibition, gangland and a police raid; class and money in millionaires on a hotel porch and an heir’s yacht; sex, gender and marriage; love and its deceits. They are held in one structure, not listed, since money, sex and survival drive the same plot. What holds the axis lowest: the sacred, history beyond period colour, the family and the natural order are absent or decorative, and the film’s world is a hotel and a train. A comedy of this compass describes its form, and the figure says what that form holds.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure: the state, in a small-town government and its police; the economy, in a resort’s dependence on one season; the family, in Brody’s marriage and his sons; the natural order, in the sea and an animal indifferent to all of it; history, in the war in the Pacific carried by one man’s memory; class, in three men in one boat. The plot integrates them at the hinge, where the estuary attack sets the town’s economy, Brody’s family and the animal in one place. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve: consciousness is drawn from outside, in three types well acted rather than three minds; the town’s people are a crowd; the sacred is absent; history enters in one speech; and from the hour the film narrows by design to three men and a fish, so that what it holds it holds in sequence more than at once.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. Emmi’s consciousness, fully; the family, in her children and the marriage; labour, in her cleaning work, the colleagues’ hierarchy, Ali’s workshop and his ulcer; the state and the economy, in the guest-worker system that is the film’s ground; race and age, in the couple itself. They are integrated: the town’s contempt, the economy of usefulness and the marriage are one discovery. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: Ali’s consciousness is kept largely closed, by design and by the playing; history is touched rather than held; the sacred and the natural order are absent; and the world is two flats, a stair, a bar, a shop and a workplace in one city.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, in the infinite and the sefirot; the cosmic, creation as a breaking; knowledge and the book, a culture’s memory; history, through the maker’s birth in 1945 and the glass a viewer may set beside November 1938; matter, in alchemical lead. They are integrated by one vertical, from the name above to the floor below, and the viewer’s body is placed in it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: history is held by inference, not by anything in the object; and the human orders are absent, with no person, no family, no labour, no state but by implication, and no nature beyond the mineral. The figure describes the form, a single object.
The National · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Consciousness is held fully, one disaffected interior across twelve songs. The couple is held in Apartment Story, Slow Show and Start a War. The professional life is costume and anonymity in Mistaken for Strangers and Brainy, friendship is drift in Green Gloves, and the family is one settled life in Racing Like a Pro. These are held, not listed: one consciousness joins them, and each is a form of the same shelter. What holds the figure here is the rest: the state and its war are only pressure under the surface, the sacred is a title, and nature, history, the body beyond drink and sleep, and labour as labour are absent. The orders present lie close together: one class, one city, one decade.
Woody Allen · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 93 minutes can hold. Consciousness: Alvy’s fully, from inside; Annie’s partly, from outside. The couple, with its education, sex, jealousy and analysis. The family: Alvy’s Brooklyn parents, the Halls of Chippewa Falls, Grammy Hall, Duane. Class, ethnicity and religion, at the Easter dinner and in the Jewish comedian among gentiles. The city as two civilisations, New York and Los Angeles. The culture industry: stand-up, television, the Hollywood party, the cinema queue. Death as a preoccupation. All are routed through one relationship and integrated by it. What holds the axis lowest, with The Sublime: labour is entertainment only, the state and history appear only as the films Alvy watches, the sacred is a joke and the natural order is absent. One affair and one consciousness hold the whole, and nothing exceeds Alvy.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the person, in a young face; the state, in the nemes, the uraeus and the vulture of the two lands; the sacred, in the gods of the brow, the beard of Osiris and the text that gives each part to a god; the cosmos, in the sun’s gold and the sky’s lapis; and death and the afterlife, which are the object’s whole purpose. One structure integrates them: the head as the place where a man becomes a king and a king becomes a god. What holds the axis is what is absent: no family, no labour, no history but the dynasty’s claim, and no consciousness but a calm that is prescribed rather than shown. It is a single head, and the figure describes the form. Under the Narmer Palette’s 7.4, level with the Fayum portraits at 7.3.
Sumerian, under Ur-Nammu and Shulgi · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Five orders are held. The sacred: the god’s house raised over the city. The state: the king as builder, signed in the brick. Labour: millions of bricks made and laid by the dynasty’s organised work, which the mass makes visible as nothing else in Ur does. The natural order: the flood plain against which the mass is raised, and the water its envelope and drains are made to defeat. The cosmos: the mountain joining earth to sky, with the moon god’s sky above it. One form places them, so they are integrated rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside the tower: the household, the economy of the precinct, death and individual consciousness belong to the temenos and the city.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held: the state and its constitution, two houses each given a form; the nation, in a building made its image and a capital built to move the country’s centre inland; the city, at the head of its axis and the end of its ministries; the people, in the terrace as public ground and in the protests that have used it; the natural order, the plateau, the sky and the water; and history, written on the building in closures, an occupation and a riot. The plan integrates them, placing the people’s ground beneath the signs of the houses. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or faint: the family, labour, since the workers who built the city are not in it, the sacred, which the city gives to the Cathedral, and individual consciousness.
Patricia Highsmith · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held are a consciousness; class and money; the family at the edges, in the Greenleafs’ grief and in Aunt Dottie; the law as policing; Americans in Europe as a social fact; and art, as taste and as a commodity that Tom covets and at which Dickie fails. They are integrated, not listed: each enters through Tom’s want. Absent or thin are labour, except as its avoidance; the state beyond the police; history, for the war is a decade gone and barely felt in Italy; the sacred; and the natural order, for the sea is a stage and an instrument. The book is narrow by intention, one mind and its objects, and the figure describes the form rather than faulting it. What holds the axis there is that narrowness: the world the book encompasses is the world Tom can covet.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what a comic film of about 117 minutes holds. It holds a city by its classes: the Venice bungalow, the Pasadena estate, the Malibu house, the Valley home of Larry Sellers, the bowling alley; money as inheritance, charity and ransom; the law as a sheriff and a pair of detectives who ask after the car; war twice, Vietnam in Walter and the Gulf on every television; the politics of the 1960s in the Dude’s past and the millionaire’s contempt; religion in Walter’s adopted Judaism; art and pornography as two markets; friendship and death. The bowling league ties them as the rug ties a room. What holds the axis lowest: each order is touched rather than entered, the women are functions of the plot, family is nearly absent, no one does any labour, and the one consciousness held from inside is a single man’s, and a deliberately slight one.
Algernon Charles Swinburne · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
For a lyric book the range is wider than its reputation: the erotic consciousness in several modes, longing, cruelty, satiety and grief; the history of religion, in the passage from pagan to Christian in the “Hymn”; the natural order, the sea, the seasons, “The Sundew”; politics and revolution, in the songs and the poems to Landor and Hugo; art, in a poem for a painting by Whistler and the dedication to Burne-Jones; and death. In the best poems these are held together rather than listed: the “Hymn” holds history, the sacred and the body in one argument. What holds the axis at 7.3 is what is absent, family, labour, the state as lived and the social world, and that the orders present are mostly held one poem at a time. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Sei Shōnagon · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
More orders are present than the form suggests. The self and its judgments; the court as a state in miniature, in rank, office and ceremony; the natural order through the seasons, fully and finely; the sacred, in temple pilgrimages, preachers and the calendar of rites; love, in dawn leave-takings and letters; labour, glimpsed in carpenters eating and servants at work; and history, the fall of the Empress’s house, held by omission. One sensibility joins them, and the list is the joint. But much is listed rather than integrated, and every order is seen from one room and one rank: the state as ceremony, labour as spectacle, the provinces as rumour, and the history that shaped the author’s life kept outside the frame. A wide small world, wider than a lyric body, narrower than a novel of society.
Antonio Vivaldi · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held are several. The natural order is the whole surface: birds, streams, heat, storm, ice, wind. Labour is there in the shepherd, the harvest, the vintage and the hunt; the social order in the village dance and the feast; the body in heat, drunkenness, sleep and cold; time in the year itself. They are held in one structure, the cycle, and that is the set’s achievement on this axis. What holds it here, the lowest of the twelve, is that the orders are depicted more than integrated: each has its scene and passes. Consciousness is slight, a countryman’s fear and rest, and the sacred, the state, history and the family do not appear.
Gustav Holst · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The suite names a large range: war and the state at arms in Mars; love and peace in Venus; the mind in Mercury; communal festivity, and through the tune the nation, in Jupiter; age and death in Saturn; illusion and its collapse in Uranus; the sacred beyond form in Neptune; and over all of it the cosmos as the frame of a human life. That is a wider span than most orchestral suites attempt, and the cosmological frame joins several orders. What holds the figure is integration: the orders arrive one to a movement, each in its own room, more listed than held together, and labour, the family and history are absent. The form holds its orders side by side, and the figure records it.
Joseph Beuys · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held are several, and one rite holds them together: the nation and its history, the wrong done at its founding and, in the year after America left Vietnam, its present; the natural order, in a wild animal; the sacred, in the offices of shepherd, shaman and trickster; capital, in the newspaper; the body and its healing, in a man in felt; and the institution of art, in a gallery’s opening show. They are integrated, because the encounter touches all of them at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form: a single encounter in a single room, with no family, no labour and no human society beyond the two parties and the onlookers behind the wire. For that form the figure is generous.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Several orders are held along one route across the country: the family, in a mother, two former wives and a marriage at the end; the state, as intelligence agencies, the United Nations, police and courts; history and the nation, at the monument and in the pre-Columbian art; the natural order, as prairie, forest and mountain; labour, as advertising and a redcap’s uniform; and one consciousness, Thornhill’s, rendered from outside in comic reaction. They are joined by the route, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is depth: each order is surface, work is mostly absent, the sacred appears only as the civic sacred of the carved faces, used as scenery, and the film’s own theme is that its hero has no inside.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 115 minutes holds. The family is held fully: a mother left alone with three children, the absent father present in a shirt and a trip to Mexico, the brothers’ rivalry and alliance, the youngest sister. Consciousness is the child’s, given from inside through the form and the sympathetic link. The state enters as a faceless apparatus of science and quarantine; the school as a classroom with a frog; the natural order in the forest and the plants E.T. tends and revives; the cosmos as the place the visitor comes from; the sacred as figure, in the death and ascent. The one house integrates them. What holds the axis lowest: labour, money and history are nearly absent, and the state is a menace without a mechanism.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Orders held: the family, on the main floor built for the Batllós; the city and its rivalries, on the avenue and the block; commerce and new money, textile wealth made public; the natural order, in bone, scale, water and light, which the house is built from rather than decorated with; the sacred, in the cross and the monograms on the turret; the nation, in the Catalan crafts revived to make it. The section places them: shared light in the core, the family on the main floor, the creature and the cross at the roof. What holds the axis lowest: the tenants of the upper floors, and labour, are present only as users of the light well; the state, history and death are thin or absent; and the sacred and national orders rest on signs read partly by the visitor. A house holds a household and a street, and the figure describes the form.
Wang Shu (Amateur Architecture Studio) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders held: the natural order, mountain and water, as figure and route; history, in the city’s past, the museum’s purpose and the strata of the wall; labour, in the masons’ craft visible in every course; the state and the city, in a government’s civic museum in a new district built by clearance; and the village, displaced and reincorporated. They are integrated, not listed: the wall is at once history, labour and loss, and the mountain binds landscape to civic purpose. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or thin: consciousness and the sacred are scarcely present, and the interior does not hold these orders as the shell does. The range is wide for a museum; it is held at the envelope.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held in one structure: the sacred, in the hidden Kannon and the mountain; the natural order, in the slope, the falls, the trees and the seasons the stage is built to show; the city, Kyoto spread below and the townspeople’s pilgrimage; the state, in the shogunal rebuilding, legible as a restoration of order after the wars; and the single life, in the vow and the leap. They are integrated by the section more than listed, which is the building’s strength. What holds the figure is what lies outside: labour, the family and history enter only as the pilgrim brings them, and the hall holds no account of the world as the great monastery plans or cathedral programmes do.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what one book of twelve stories holds, and it holds more of its world than its form promises. Clients and culprits run the scale of city and country: a King of Bohemia, a peer and an American heiress, a City banker, a pawnbroker and his assistant, a typist, a governess, a hydraulic engineer, a gentleman turned beggar, a lodger in an opium den, a ruined baronet with an Indian past. Empire runs under the plots, in the Australian goldfields of “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”, the American South of “The Five Orange Pips” and the India of “The Speckled Band”. Family and money are held together. What it does not hold: consciousness, since no mind is entered beyond Watson’s surface and Holmes’s method; the state as more than a policeman; the sacred; the inner life of any woman it rescues. A wide map at the scale of the anecdote.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what a comedy of about 106 minutes holds. Many orders are present and several are held: the family, in a husband’s wish to keep his wife and daughters; labour and punishment, in the chain gang and the work farm; the state, in an election, a governor and a pardon; the sacred, in a baptism, the devil at the crossroads and a deluge; race, in the Klan and in Tommy; the natural order, in a river and a flood that ends a world; the market, in pomade, radio and the record business. The music joins the sacred, the political and the commercial in one thread, and the flood joins nature, the state and the sacred in one image. What holds the axis lowest: the people are types, and consciousness, an inner life, is not among the orders the film holds.
Sumerian · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held, in one structure: the state and its kingship; war, with its arms, vehicles, soldiers, dead and captives; labour, in the bearers and drovers; the natural order as livestock, fish and draught animals; the economy of tribute; feasting, drink and music; the social ranks from ruler to captive. They are integrated, not listed: the two sides and the upward reading make them one economy. What holds the axis is what is absent. The sacred is not visible on the sides, unless the feast is a rite; there is no family and no inward life; and an object held in the hands sets a ceiling the rubric records. The figure describes a small form that holds a wide social world.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Orders held: trade and labour, in a warehouse of a port’s merchants, the goods that filled it and the cars that fill it now; the river, the tide and the sea, in the site at the point and the ships that pass below; the city, shown to itself from the Plaza and given a figure on its skyline; the civic public, on the open terrace; music and its community, at the core; dwelling and travel, in the flats and the hotel within the same body; the state and its money, in a public commission, its overrun and its inquiry; and history, in a warehouse built on the site of one lost in the war. The section integrates several: storage below, the public at the seam, music at the heart, homes at the crown. What holds the axis: the dwelling and the hotel are stacked more than held; the sacred, the family and the individual consciousness are absent; and the war and the port’s history are present as fabric, not made to speak.
Frank Darabont · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what 142 minutes hold. The orders are several and integrated: consciousness, Red’s fully and Andy’s from outside; friendship as the governing bond; the state as prison, court and parole board; labour, in the roof crew, the work gangs and the warden’s contracts; money, in the tax returns, the laundering and the false name; the law and its miscarriage; the sacred, in a Bible used as cover and as tool; art, in the library, the opera and a harmonica; and history, twenty years outside the walls seen through posters, a street of cars and a grocery till. What holds it: the family is present only as a murdered wife and absent kin, nature chiefly as promise, and the world outside the walls is a sketch.
Terry Gilliam · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 137 minutes holds, and the orders are many. Consciousness: Jack’s guilt from inside, and Parry’s madness through the film’s own eye. The mass media, as the instrument of the first crime and of Jack’s relapse. The city in its classes, from the high apartment and the castle on the Upper East Side to the boiler room, the bridge and the station. Love, in two couples held against each other; grief, mental illness and the care of the mad; the sacred, in the legend made structure. Labour enters as Lydia’s office and Anne’s video store. All are integrated by one chain of cause from the microphone to the cup. What holds the figure: the law and the state hardly enter, history stands outside, the homeless are held mostly as figures in Parry’s world, and the world is held through two men.
Sidney Lumet · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 125 minutes, bound to one day and three places, holds. The state in two forms, the city police and the FBI, and in the prison the chant names; the media and the crowd as a public; the family in Sonny’s wife and children, his mother, and Leon, a second marriage; sexuality and gender in Leon’s need and in Sal’s refusal to be called homosexual; labour in the tellers and the manager, a workplace held hostage; money and class in the small loot, the crowd’s anger and the debt that drives him. The plot integrates them: one man’s obligations become a public event the state ends. What holds it low: the sacred is absent, history is the moment and not its depth, consciousness is Sonny’s seen from outside, and the city enters as a crowd rather than a society.
Martin McDonagh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The film holds more than a story of two men suggests: friendship and its end; the family, in a brother and sister who share a cottage and in a son and the father who abuses him; the church, in the visiting priest and the confession; the law, in the policeman, the shop, the pub and the post; art and mortality, in Colm’s composing; the animals; and the nation at war across the water. These are integrated, not listed, through the one feud that touches each. The ceiling is the form’s: an island of a few dozen people, a few weeks, and a war seen only as smoke. History and the state stand as a parallel, not held in its structure.
Michel Pinseau · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Orders held: the sacred, in a congregational mosque oriented to Mecca; the state and the monarchy, the king as Commander of the Faithful and the building as his figure; the nation, in the subscription that paid for it and the gatherings it holds; labour and the crafts, in the thousands of artisans and the trades it carried; the city, given a landmark on its shore; the natural order, in the sea beneath the platform and the sky over the open hall; and the body, in the ablution halls beneath the prayer. The siting and section join the sacred, the sea and the sky, and the state is in every stone. What holds the axis: the household is absent; the inner life of the worshipper is served, not held; history is held as a style, not as an order; and the poor of the cleared district are present only as an absence. The figure describes the form.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The orders held in one small panel: consciousness, in a face that holds an inner life without disclosing it; the natural order at its widest, rock and water and the geological time the land implies; human use within it, in the road and the bridge; and, through the sitter’s dress and identity, a social station, a merchant’s household. They are integrated: figure and land are made of one matter and placed as one structure. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family in the image, no labour, no state, no history, and no sacred order, for the panel carries no religious sign. One person before one world, more than most portraits hold and a little less than The Starry Night at 7.4, which gives most of its field to the cosmos. The figure describes the form.
Miles Davis · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held, in the interior state of the ballads. The group is held: a small society of equals in which each voice is heard, and the individual and the collective are integrated on every track, which is the record’s achievement. The blues tradition is carried in two of five forms and nearly half the running time, and with it, unstated, African American history, so that the society of the band stands inside an inherited one. Spain is glimpsed in the Phrygian section. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the family, labour, the state, the sacred and the natural order do not appear. A wordless record of forty-six minutes holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.
Gustave Eiffel · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Five orders are held. The natural order: the wind that drew its shape, weather, lightning and the sky it enters. The city: Paris seen whole from it and centred on it, the Champ de Mars and the river on its axis. The nation and its history: the centenary of 1789, the Republic presenting itself as industry. Science and the machine: the names on the friezes, the iron, the lifts, the radio. The public: millions rising for a fee. One structure places them, the city at its foot and the sky at its top, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, labour except as the made object, the body except as rider and viewer, the sacred, death and consciousness. A tower holds an ascent and a view, not a world.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
An abstract canvas holds few orders, and this one holds more than most: the sacred, in the end of days, judgement and resurrection that ordered it; the natural order, flood and storm, the elements loosed; consciousness, the painter’s inward state, which his theory names as the source of form, and the viewer’s, which the canvas means to set vibrating; and art itself, in the claim that painting can do what music does. They are integrated: the sacred, the natural and the inward are one event seen three ways, cataclysm as renewal. History is not held; that a canvas of the world’s end was finished eight months before August 1914 is a fact the viewer brings. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour, no city or state, no story beyond the veiled one.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The work holds a small number of orders and integrates them: consciousness, in lyric, stillness, terror and drive; mortality, in the Adagio’s rupture and the final stroke; the sacred, in the Trio’s chorale; the outdoor and the social, in the Scherzo’s horns and the Finale’s popular dance; the social in miniature, in five equal voices. They are held in one structure, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, labour, the state, history and the natural order, beyond the horn calls, do not appear. A wordless chamber work of under an hour holds the world of one mind and its companions; the figure says how many orders that is, a tenth below Op. 131 at 7.3.
Molière · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what one comedy of five acts holds, without penalty for being a single play. Consciousness, fully, in Alceste’s divided self. Love and courtship, in four suitors and three women. Friendship, in Philinte’s patience. Society as a system: the salon, its talk, its portraits, its economy of esteem. Literature and criticism, in the sonnet. Law, in the lawsuit and the marshals’ tribunal. The court, in Arsinoé’s offer of influence there, which Alceste refuses. The position of women, in a widow of twenty, her cousin and a prude. All of it is held in one room and under one law. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the room shuts out: labour, the family and children, the sacred, nature and history are not present, and the city outside the salon is only reported. The figure describes the form.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short volume of lyrics holds, and not marked down for being short beyond what it holds. Consciousness, fully and at depth. Desire and sexual fear, in “Prufrock”, “Portrait of a Lady” and “Hysteria”. The city, its streets, rooms, smells and poor, in “Preludes” and “Rhapsody”. Class and its manners, in Boston and the drawing room. Age and death, in Prufrock’s balding and the young man’s “what if she should die some afternoon”. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is absent or only touched: the sacred appears as allusion, Lazarus and the Baptist, and is not held; labour, the state, history and the natural order are absent but for the women gathering fuel in the “Preludes”; and one consciousness, or one kind, holds what there is.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: the natural order, in sea, wind, shore, season, flowers and trees, integrated through the myth of a goddess born of nature; the sacred, a divinity arriving into the world in the form of a sacrament; the human body, as beauty and desire; and, through the form and its ancient sources, a culture’s relation to antiquity. They are held together, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, most of what it counts: consciousness beyond one inclined face, the family, labour, the state, history as event. A single moment in a frieze of four figures cannot hold them. It holds more than Water Lilies at 6.5 and a little less than The Large Bathers at 7.5, with its society of bodies and its town across the river. The figure describes the form.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as estrangement, numbness and the loss of memory. The body is held in She’s Lost Control, the seizure that is the self’s loss of its own flesh. The city is held as place and atmosphere in Shadowplay and Interzone, and its emptiness is the record’s ground. History, atrocity and the sacred are evoked in Day of the Lords and Wilderness; the couple appears in Insight and I Remember Nothing, as strangers and as hope given up. One consciousness joins what is present, and the joins hold. What holds the figure is that the orders beyond that consciousness are named in titles more than carried, and labour, the family, the state and the natural order are absent.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Six orders are held, and one structure places each. The body, which is the building’s subject. The senses and perception, as near as the bath comes to consciousness. The natural order: the mountain, its stone, the spring, the weather and the seasons seen from the outdoor pool. History, as the antique bath recovered in a modern form. The commune: a village that built its bath to keep its economy alive. Society in its plainest form, strangers bathing together. The stone of the valley integrates them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the state; labour, except as the quarry is remembered in the wall; the family; the sacred, which stays implicit; and death. A bath holds the body’s pleasure and its place, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no adjustment for the form. Consciousness, in its failure and self-observation, is held throughout. The family and marriage enter in “Isolation”, “Colony” and “Passover”; the institution in “Colony”; spectacle and its audience in “Atrocity Exhibition”; history and war in “Decades”; death and mourning in “The Eternal”; the sacred is glimpsed in “Passover” and “Heart and Soul”. They are held in one structure more nearly than on most albums: one consciousness carries every order, and the sequence moves them toward one end, from the exhibition entered to the elegy for a generation, so that the family, the spectacle and the war bear on the same self. What holds the axis here is that single self: every order is refracted through it, and labour, the state and the natural order are absent.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as a novella, which the form bounds, and not punished beyond what it holds. The orders held are consciousness and its division, above all; the professions of law, medicine and science and the codes of gentlemen; the city as a moral geography, the square and Soho, the front and the back; the law and the police in a murder case; and religion and morality, as Cain, God and damnation in Jekyll’s own terms. They are joined by one structure, which is achievement, not listing. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only glimpsed: the family, since every man in the book is a bachelor; women and love, since no woman has a name of consequence; labour beyond the servants; the state beyond a murdered Member of Parliament; history; and the natural order. The book holds one class in one city over about a year.
Robert Smithson · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: geological time, in the basalt, the basin and the salt; the natural order as process, water level, evaporation, the bacteria that make the red; industrial history, the oil jetty and the tar beside it, the causeway that divided the lake, the railroad’s golden spike at Promontory to the north-east; the body, a walk out and in at the walker’s pace; myth and prehistory, the spiral as the oldest of figures; and, as the lake has dried, the fate of a basin, which the work now measures. One structure holds them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no person but the walker, no family, no city, no state, no sacred beyond the archetype, no story. A wide landscape holds few kinds of human order. The figure describes the form.
Giorgione · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in storm, stream, trees and sky, given most of the field; the family, in the mother, the child and the man; the city, in the walls, the towers, the bridge and the dome; history, in the ruin; and the sacred only if the theological readings hold, which the canvas does not certify. The stream and the light integrate them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, the state as more than a skyline, the sacred as a certainty, and any consciousness beyond two silent looks. A canvas under a metre square with three figures, above the Water Lilies at 6.5 for its people and its city, below the Large Bathers at 7.5, which holds a company and more of the body. The figure describes the form.
David Bowie · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as exhaustion, compulsion and withdrawal. The couple is held in a single plea, Be My Wife. The city and exile are held: a new town, a room, a car. History and the state enter on side two, Warsaw, divided Berlin and the people walled in, through sound and title, glimpsed more than held. The sacred is evoked in Warszawa’s rite; technology is the medium itself. Labour, the family, the natural order and the body beyond the self’s ruin are absent. One consciousness joins the first half; the second half’s orders are joined by the law, not by a person. Several orders, two of them glimpsed: that is what holds the figure lowest.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Six orders are held: consciousness, in the solitary reader at the carrel; the community, the school gathered in the hall; knowledge and history, the collection as the memory of a culture, displayed as the walls of a room; the natural order, in daylight from side and sky and the view of the campus at every window; labour, in the brickwork and the joinery, made visible; and the institution, a school’s idea of itself built into the plan. One section places each at its distance from the centre, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, the city, the state, the body beyond the reader, the sacred except as the cloister’s shadow, and death. A school library holds the life of study, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for the album form. Present are the city and the state, in the world police; broadcast, in static and the antenna; memory, in the old man’s beach; the sacred, in the holy road and the title’s prayer; the natural order, in storm, beach and campsite; and the collective, which the ensemble embodies. One arc and one law join them. What holds the figure here is the missing voice: consciousness is held only in the recorded speakers, the family, desire and labour are absent, and most orders are named by a title and given to sound, which carries their weight, not their content.
Miles Davis · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as one voice in a crowd. The collective is held fully, more than on most records: the ensemble is a society, and the form says how a person stands inside it. The city and the moment of 1969 are held through sound, in rock, funk, electricity and noise. The sacred is evoked as rite and conjuring in the titles and on the sleeve, and the body is present as groove. What holds the axis lowest is absence: history beyond the moment, the family, labour, the state, and the natural order beyond the sleeve’s sea and fire do not appear. Several orders, two held strongly and the rest carried by titles and sleeve. Level with Low and with Kind of Blue.
Akkadian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, as a king, an army and a subject people; war, with its victors and its dead; the sacred, as the stars of the gods and a king who claims their horns; the natural order, as mountain and tree; and the body, in the particular suffering of the defeated. The ascent integrates them: the state climbs nature toward the sacred over the bodies of the conquered. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, the family, consciousness beyond the gesture, history beyond one campaign, any world in which the king is not the measure. A single carved face can hold several orders in one structure, and this one holds more than most single images do; the figure describes the form.
Kraftwerk · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Europe is held as geography and culture, its cities named and its “Parks, hotels and palaces” listed. The inherited past of European art is held in Franz Schubert. Technology and transport are the medium and the subject. The self is held as image and as commodity in the two middle songs of side one. The postwar history of a divided Germany that wants a European past rather than a national one is glimpsed. The family, labour beyond the machine’s own, love, the body, the sacred and the natural order seen for itself rather than through a window are absent, and the orders are joined by the law and the journey, not by a person. That is what holds the figure lowest.
The Strokes · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as a stance of detachment with feeling under it. The couple is held, as seduction, quarrel and refusal across most songs. The city is present, as nightlife and as a name. The law and the state appear once, as the police of New York City Cops, a song absent from the American issue, which narrows the record further. Youth and its pleasures, drink, sex and boredom, are the ground. One stance joins what is there. What holds it lowest of the twelve is what is not there: labour, the family, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent, and what is present lies close together, one age and one class in one city at night.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, in a national gallery built in a divided city, its glass facing the ground of the Wall; the city, in the Kulturforum, the open site and the old church beside it; the tradition of the Prussian museum and the classical temple; technology, in the steel and the lift; and art, which the building was made to show. They are held together in the plate and the podium rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest is what a single-purpose public building of one hall and its basement cannot reach: labour, the family, the natural order and the sacred are held only at a distance, and the art it holds is held uneasily, in a hall that will not hang a picture.
Danny Boyle · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The film holds more orders than its small cast suggests: the single consciousness waking without memory of the fall; the family, made and lost; the city as a civil order whose absence is the subject; the state, in the army that survives it and the broadcast that lies; the natural order returning in the horses and the green north; and science and its abuse in the prologue’s laboratory. These are held in one structure, a journey from the capital to the country, and that lifts the film well above a chamber piece. What holds the figure is what is thin or absent: labour, history and the sacred barely appear beyond a church full of the dead, and the state and the nation are present as types and as the empty set, not as worlds.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body and its mechanism, as science; death, in the corpse and its moral; the guild and the city, a civic body of professional men; law and punishment, in the executed thief whose body is the city’s to use; learning and its authority, in the book and the praelector; and art, a portrait commission made into history. The light integrates them, the city’s dead criminal and its citizens of standing in one field. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only implied: no family, no labour beyond the professional, no sacred order but the memento mori the public anatomy professed, and the state and the punished man present by inference rather than by image. It is one demonstration in one room.
François Truffaut · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the family, at the centre, with its marriage, its stepfather and its small money; the school as a first institution; the state, in the police and the observation centre, its procedures shown with documentary care; the city, Paris as both freedom and street; consciousness, in the boy’s reverence for Balzac and in the interview. They are held together through one child’s experience, and none is merely listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is missing or weak: labour is glimpsed, in the stepfather’s job and the mother’s office; history is absent except as the backdrop of the 1950s; the sacred is a shrine to a novelist; nature is the sea at the end, once. A short form centred on one boy, recorded honestly; the figure describes the form.
Adolf Loos · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Several orders are held: the household and its hierarchy, family and staff placed at their levels; gender, in the lady’s room and its view over the hall; class and money, in a contractor’s wealth spent in marble; labour and industry, faintly, in the concrete of the client’s own firm; the city, in the view to the Castle and in the house’s face to the street; the arts, in rooms built for a collection and for culture. The section places them, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the state, history except as the Castle in a framed view, the sacred, nature beyond a garden, and death. A villa holds a family’s world, and the figure describes the form.
The White Stripes · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Love and courtship are held in several kinds: the suitor, the rejected, the betrayed, the constant. The family enters twice, a mother to be won in I Want to Be the Boy to Warm Your Mother’s Heart and a child out of place in The Hardest Button to Button. Fame and the talk around it are present in Seven Nation Army; craft and tradition run through the whole as a value; resilience is preached in Little Acorns through a borrowed voice. Labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent. What holds the figure lowest is that the orders lie close together, love and its codes seen by one persona.
Steely Dan · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully in Deacon Blues, the inner life of a man who scripts his own defeat. The couple is held in Black Cow, a lover leaving, in the refuge of Aja, and in the woman of Peg, who exists as a photograph. Class and the suburb are held in Deacon Blues’s escape from them; the entertainment industry and the image in Peg; the neighbourhood and its loyalties in Josie; drink, drugs and the death at the wheel; and the inherited myth of homecoming in Home at Last. One ironic voice joins them. What holds the figure lowest: most orders appear in single songs and single images, and the family, labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent or only implied.
David Cronenberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
An 88-minute film of one man’s perception holds more orders than its scale suggests: consciousness, in Max’s perception and its failure; the body and sexuality, made the site of the whole argument; the economy of images, a small station, a pirate dish, a trade in pornography from abroad; politics, a corporate crusade against a soft public run through an optics and weapons company; the sacred in parody, in the Mission and the gospel of the new flesh; the city. The body, the market and the mind are integrated well. What keeps the axis lowest: the family is absent, history is absent beyond the moment of cable and video, the public the conspiracy targets is never seen, and the politics is stated in exposition rather than held. The figure describes the form.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 102 minutes holds. Adolescence as consciousness, held through many minds rather than deeply through one; the family, in Mitch’s mother and sister and Pickford’s parents; the school as institution, with its coach, its team and its pledge, the strongest order after the young people themselves; gender, in the girls’ hazing and the double codes of the night; class, in the cars and the houses; the law, in a police officer on the field at dawn; history, in the Bicentennial, the aftermath of the sixties and Cynthia’s decades. The pledge integrates them, joining school, sport, adulthood and the law. What holds it lowest: labour, the state, the sacred and the natural order barely enter, and everything is held through one age group in one night.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: history, in the destruction of the Jews; the nation, Germany and its idea of itself; the land and the harvest; the body, as hair; poetry, Celan’s poem and through the name Goethe’s; and death. They are integrated in one material: the straw is land, hair and fuel at once, so the nation, the body and the fire are one thing. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that most of these orders enter through the title and the source rather than the canvas, and that much is absent: no person, no family, no labour, no state made visible, no story. The sacred is present only by absence, in the Sulamith of the poem, who is not on this canvas. The figure describes the form.
Metallica · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The state is present in the electric chair, war in For Whom the Bell Tolls, technology and annihilation in the opener, the sacred in Creeping Death’s plague, the cosmic in Lovecraft’s god, and consciousness in Fade to Black. That is a wide span of orders for an album. What holds the figure lowest: the orders are listed song by song more than held together, no figure crosses between them, the sacred and the cosmic are borrowed frames, and the family, labour and the natural order are absent. One law of imposed death joins them, loosely.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Five orders are held in one structure. The sacred: altar, Apostles, Evangelists. The religious community: a convent’s council seated as the apostolic college. The family: the Pazzi name and saint in a convent’s room, a banking house’s piety and standing. The cosmos: the dome, its twelve windows and the light from above. And the humanist idea of a measured order that a mind can hold, which places the other four. One geometry integrates them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the city and the state, except as the family’s power; labour; history, except as antiquity quoted in the order; nature beyond the light; and the single consciousness. A chapter room holds less than a cathedral or a city’s dome, and the figure describes the form.
Radiohead · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as anxiety, paralysis and self-reproach. The body and medicine are held fully, the record’s most original order: the iron lung, the bends, failing bones, plastic surgery, each a way the manufactured world reaches into the flesh. Commerce is present as the plastic world and the music business, joined to the body in Fake Plastic Trees. The couple appears as a “you” and a “she” more than a bond; the city is glimpsed in Street Spirit’s rows of houses; the sacred enters only as its closing soul. What holds the figure is absence: the family, labour, the state, history and the natural order are missing, and the orders present lie close together, seen from inside one young man’s malaise.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 98 minutes holds. Two consciousnesses, kept apart and joined; the family, in two fathers and an aunt; the body, in a weak heart, illness and sex; art in three forms, choral singing, marionette theatre and the writing of children’s books; the political order, in Poland in 1990 and a demonstration crossed in a square; Europe divided and joined, in two countries and a tour bus; the sacred, implied in the whole and never named. They are held through the double, and that is what holds the axis lowest: history is crossed, not entered; labour is a schoolroom and a choir; the state is a riot glimpsed; the sacred is a mood. The orders are present and joined through the double, but none is entered at length, and a low mark on a small form describes the form.
Josef Hoffmann · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Several orders are held and integrated: the household, with the family’s rooms, the children’s rooms and service; art and its collecting, the house a setting for a collection and itself a collection of crafts; performance and society, in the music room, its stage and the dining room for guests; wealth and its display; and a measure of the natural order in the garden made with the house. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or slight: labour, present only as the hidden excellence of the craftsmen; the city and the state, since the house turns from the avenue rather than speaking to it; the sacred, history and death. A house cannot hold what a city holds, and the figure describes the form; within it, the design reaches every object of a domestic life.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and held fully: consciousness and the couple at the centre. The family: the sister, the dead mother, the marriage. Labour: the seamstresses at work through the night, the craft and business of couture. Class: aristocratic clients, a princess, a rich American widow, and Alma raised from waitress to wife. The body: appetite, illness and the poisoned stomach. Fashion as a social order, in the client lost to a more modern house. What holds the axis lowest is what is barely present: history, for postwar London is decor; the state; the natural order beyond the drive into the country; and the sacred, present only as a ghost and a wedding. The figure describes the form.
Tang builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred, in the sanctuary and its approach. The state and its ranks, in the hipped roof and the bracket layers that mark the hall’s place in the imperial order. History, in a hall rebuilt as an answer to the suppression of 845. Patronage and the lay person, in the woman donor named in the frame itself. The natural order, in the mountain slope, the terrace and the western face. The craft and labour of the builders, made visible in the frame. They are integrated: the mountain gives the ascent, the state the grammar, the sacred the centre. What holds the axis low with The Swerve: the body, the family and individual story are absent, and the Buddha land is on the platform, not in the building.
Walter Pater · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve. The orders held are real and are held together under one temper: consciousness and perception, made the ground of the whole; art across its media; history, as the passage from the medieval to the modern; the sacred, in the long negotiation of paganism with Christianity through Pico, Botticelli’s Madonnas, Michelangelo and Winckelmann’s conversion; and desire, under a veil, in the friendship of Amis and Amile and in Winckelmann. What holds the axis there is what is absent or thin: labour, the state and the family, and the natural order except as light and landscape in painting. Politics and the economy of patronage are almost wholly missing from a book about Florence and Rome. The world encompassed is the inner life of a cultivated observer before works of art.
Cass Gilbert · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held: commerce and the retail economy of small sums, which paid for it; labour and trade, figured in the corbels of the men who made it; the city, the building facing City Hall across the park, private power set opposite the civic; the sacred, as the form borrowed to dignify commerce; technology, in electricity, elevators and the frame; and one man’s ambition made public. Base, spire and nave hold these in one figure, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only borrowed: the household, which came only lately, in the apartments, and not by design; the natural order; the sacred as more than costume; and death. An office tower holds an enterprise and a city at one moment, and the figure describes the form.
James Cameron · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders are many and the pursuit holds them in one line. The state and its force, in the police and in the military network that starts the war; technology, everywhere; the family, in Sarah’s mother, a father who is a stranger and a son who sends him; labour, in a waitress’s shift, a diner and a factory floor; history, in the nuclear war and the war after it; consciousness, in Sarah’s change; and the sacred in the annunciation. They are integrated: the fate of history depends on one woman surviving one pursuit. What holds the axis lowest is speed. The orders are sketched at the pace of a chase; 2029 is a few images, the city of 1984 a set of locations for the hunt, the mother a voice on the telephone, the war a backdrop. A small form, honestly held.
Shreve, Lamb and Harmon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held: commerce and finance, which set the height and the plan; labour and industry, built into the method and the schedule; the city, as skyline and as a panorama offered to the public; the state, in Smith as the company’s president and in the tower’s standing as the emblem of New York; and the air, in the mast built for travel by airship. They are held in one figure, the tower whose height is at once a calculation, a feat of labour and a public view. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, the natural order except as the view of the rivers, the sacred except as the borrowed shape of ascent, and death except by later accident. An office tower with a public summit holds a city’s economy and its image at one moment, and the figure describes the form.
John Milton · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
For a masque of about a thousand lines, much is held. The family: an earl’s children, a sister and two brothers, tried and returned to their parents. The state: the Lord President, the Welsh Marches, the country people’s dances admitted to the castle. The sacred: grace and its descent, the virtue that cannot free itself, the soul’s ascent. The natural order: the wood, the night, Nature’s bounty argued as the ground of appetite. Myth and British legend in Sabrina. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: consciousness comes in thinly, the Lady’s fear in the wood the one place the work enters a mind under pressure; history is absent beyond the occasion; labour appears only as a shepherd’s disguise. The orders are held at the frame, in the return to the castle, and elsewhere listed more than held.
Sawai Jai Singh II · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Five orders are held. The cosmos, in the sphere of the heavens and the motions of the sun and stars. Time, in the hour, the season and the calendar. The state, in a king’s claim to measure heaven beside his palace, in a city he founded. The sacred, in the zodiac, the calendar of festivals and auspicious days, and astrology as rite. Knowledge, in the meeting of Sanskrit, Persian and, at second hand, European astronomy. They are integrated, since each passes through the same instruments. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, labour as a subject, the body except as observer, individual consciousness, and the natural order below the sky. The figure describes a form whose subject is the sky and its measure.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 125 minutes holds. Labour and the corporation are held fully: a great insurance company as hierarchy, floors as ranks, keys as currency, promotion as moral corrosion. Consciousness is Baxter’s from inside and Fran’s in strong part. Sexuality and gender enter in the office’s sexual economy and the women it uses; medicine and death in the overdose and the doctor’s night; community in the neighbours and the city’s solitude. The sacred is a calendar, Christmas and New Year, and a word. What holds the axis lowest: the state, history and the natural order do not enter; the family is glimpsed at the margins, a wife and children by telephone and a brother-in-law; and the world is one city in one season, carried through two rooms and one building. The scope is the form’s.
Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint; completed by Kaare Klint · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure: worship and the sung liturgy; the memory of Grundtvig, and through him of the nation’s cultural awakening; the common people as builders and as congregation; craft labour, visible in every course; and the town, since the church was conceived together with the housing round it. They are integrated, not listed: folk, nation and the sacred are made one by the single material and the vernacular gable. What holds the axis at 7.2, the lowest of the twelve, is what is absent. There is no image of the world, no narrative, no order of nature built in, and the domestic and civic orders the church touches lie mostly in the housing outside the work scored.
Rachel Whiteread · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held, in one object: the family and the private life, in the shape of the rooms they lived in; labour and class, in the Victorian working terrace; the city and the state, in the clearance and the council’s will; history, in an old house at the end of a street that had lost its neighbours; death and memory, in the death mask and the tomb; and art and its public, in the dispute that was part of the work’s life. One cast touches them all, because the house is where they met. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that most of them are present as absence and by implication: no person, no story, no nature but the cleared ground around it, no sacred order except as the funerary reading brings it. A wide field held by one form, as a single object can.
The Cure · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as a self looking back over its life and finding it emptied. The family is present and particular in a brother’s death. Love and its strife enter in And Nothing Is Forever and Warsong, and the friends of youth as what is gone. Mortality and time bind these, and the frame of the ending joins them. The natural order enters as the sky and the dark of Endsong, more setting than subject. What sets this lowest of the twelve is what the record does not name: labour, the state, history and the sacred are absent, and the world beyond the self and its dead enters only as weather. Three or four orders, held by one ageing voice, are held well; they are few.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short novel holds. The domestic order: Bag End, its comforts and its spoons, and the auction at the end. Labour and money, more than one expects: a burglar’s contract for a fourteenth share, the trade of Lake-town and its Master, the hoard as wealth that owns its owners. The state and war: the Elvenking’s claims, the Master’s politics, the siege, the five armies. History, in Durin’s line and the ruin of Dale, borne by the present as a debt. The natural order, in Mirkwood, the eagles, Beorn and his beasts. Consciousness, thinly, in Bilbo’s homesickness and his one dark walk. The hoard and the journey integrate them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the family, sexuality and the sacred are absent or a hint, no woman is among the people of the story, and every order is seen at a child’s distance.
Wu-Tang Clan · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The neighbourhood and its economy are held fully: the drug trade, money, the projects, the police and prison. The family enters through the mother in C.R.E.A.M. and the brother in Tearz; the body through violence and disease; the sacred through the Five Percent’s teaching and the temple of the film; the brotherhood of the clan is the record’s society, integrated on every posse cut. Consciousness is held in two or three verses of memory. What holds the figure lowest is integration and absence: most orders arrive in single songs or lines, present more than held together, consciousness enters only as memory, the state is a presence at the edge, and labour beyond the street trade, the couple and the natural order are absent.
Honoré Daumier · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: the family, in three generations on one bench; labour and class, in the basket, the clothes and the price of the ticket; the modern city and its technology, in the railway and the crowd it makes; consciousness, as the inwardness of each closed face and of sleep; the sacred only in the evoked Madonna. They are integrated, since the bench and the carriage hold them in one structure. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no state, no history beyond what the railway implies, no natural order beyond the light at the windows. It is an easel picture of one compartment, and the mark describes the form.
Abbasid builders, under al-Mutawakkil · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Four orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the Friday prayer and the qibla. The state: the caliph’s mosque and the walls of power. The city: the measure and centre of a planned capital and its assembled men. The land: a tower on a flat river plain, read for miles. The axis integrates them, one line from the tower over the plain to the wall toward Mecca. What holds it lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, labour as a subject, the body except as the climber on the ramp, individual consciousness and death. And the interior, which held the human gathering itself, is gone, so the one order of people the mosque was built for is now held only as a plan.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a slim book of short stories holds. Consciousness and the self across time, in “El otro”. Love, once, late and doubted, in “Ulrikke”. The sacred and poetry, many times. Politics and history in “Avelino Arredondo” and in the Irish and Norse fables; the future of society in “Utopía”; institutions in “El Congreso” and “El soborno”; death throughout. The range across ages and places is wider than most collections hold. What keeps the axis at the foot of the twelve is that each order is touched in a story of a few pages, from one vantage, an old scholar’s, and that the family, labour and the social world of any one time are glimpsed or absent. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Andrew Stanton · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 98 minutes holds. Consciousness, in two machines, shown from outside and fully legible; love, as the whole of the first movement; labour, in WALL-E’s endless work and the robots that keep the ship; the economy and the state as one order, a corporation that is the government; the natural order, in a dead earth, a plant and a cockroach; the human body, in passengers made helpless by comfort; history, in seven centuries told by advertisements and, in the credits, by the history of images. They are integrated: the plant is at once the love token, the political act and the ecological proof. What holds the axis lowest: the family is absent, human consciousness is the Captain’s surface only, the sacred enters only through the pattern of the ark and the garden, and the society of the Axiom is a gag about passengers rather than a people.
Denys Lasdun · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve. The orders held: the performing art in three of its modes; the civic public, in foyers open to anyone; the state, as the nation’s theatre; the city and the river, framed from the terraces and answered by the strata; the landscape, made in concrete as a geology; and the classical past, in the Olivier’s amphitheatre. They are held together, not listed: the same strata carry the public, frame the river and step down to the house. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour and the household appear only as a production plant, the sacred is absent, and the natural order is present only as an image of rock. A building is a narrower form than an epic, and the figure describes the form.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
How many orders are held in one structure. The sacred: Hephaestus and Athena. The heroes: Theseus of the city, Herakles of all Greece. Labour and craft, in the god and in the quarter below. The civic order: the market and the council house beneath the east front. The city’s claim to its founder. These are integrated by siting and programme more than by the building’s form, and in a small temple. What holds the axis lowest: most of the cosmic and political orders the great sanctuaries hold are absent here, and what is present is gathered by where the temple stands more than by what it builds. The figure describes the form: a modest temple holding a city’s crafts under its gods.
Canaletto · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
For a single view the canvas holds a good number of orders: labour, in the masons and their stone; the household, in the washing, the balconies with plants and the women at windows and doors; the sacred, in the Carità and its tower; the city and its commerce, in the canal and its boats; weather and nature, in light, sky and water; and, by later fortune, the record of a city as it stood. They are integrated, not listed: the shadow and the light bind them. What holds the axis with The Archetypal Deep at the foot of the twelve is that one moment in one place cannot hold consciousness, the state or history as deliberate subjects, and the canvas does not try. Above The Swing at 6.4 and Broadway Boogie Woogie at 6.6; well below Las Meninas at 8.2.
Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Several orders are held in one structure: the citizen and the state, in the passage from plaza to counter; the hierarchy of government, from mayor and council down to the departments; the city, its ground carried into the building and its old market below the plaza; history, the classical forum invoked and the district erased beneath it; and labour, in the bays of daily work. They are held, not listed: the section is the hierarchy. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or thin: the household, the sacred, death and the natural order, which the first plaza excluded and which the remaking added by other hands. A large public building of one function holds the civic order fully and the others little, and the figure describes the form.
Peter Eisenman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders held: the state, in a reunified nation’s confession set beside its parliament; history, in the crime and in ground near the seat of the regime; death, in the field of grave-like stelae; the individual and the family, in the Room of Dimensions and the Room of Families; the city, crossed daily and woven into its streets; the body, in the narrow passage, the dropping ground and the single file; and memory itself, public and contested. The section integrates them in part: the city at the edge, the body in the field, the named dead beneath. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is missing: the sacred is absent by design; labour, the natural order and the life of the people murdered, as against their death, are hardly present; and field and centre hold their orders side by side more than in one structure.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held are several: one consciousness, given in its own words at length; sex and violence between men and women; class and the city, from the unemployed to the property owner; labour, as its absence and as the watchman’s empty job; the end of the millennium as a public mood; and the sacred, in Johnny’s theology of the apocalypse. They are joined in Johnny’s talk and his walking, not listed. What holds the figure lowest on the page is what lies outside him: the family is almost absent, the state appears only as empty buildings and the street, and history is a mood rather than a structure. For a film of one man and two nights the reach is wide, and short of the films that hold a society.
Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren (OMA) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Five orders are held: the state and its media, a government’s voice gathered into one structure; labour, the whole process of television making set out as a circuit; the city, a figure on the skyline of the new business district answering the towers round it; the global, a European office and an English engineering firm building a national broadcaster in the decade China opened to the world’s architects; and the public, intended in the visitor route and not shown to have been given it. One figure integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, the natural order, the sacred, the body except as vertigo, and the history of the site. An office and production building holds one institution at one moment, and the figure describes the form.
Balkrishna Doshi · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what one campus holds. It holds the institution, in its teaching, its governance and its study; the community, in dwelling for students and faculty and in the meeting the corridors are built for; the climate and the landscape, built into the pergolas and the courts; and an argument about Indian modernity and its inherited forms of the town and the temple. These are held in one structure, not listed, and they are more orders than a single house holds. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is absent: the sacred, the state and history are not held here as a cathedral, a capitol or a city plan holds them. Its order is that of one institution and its daily life.
Cy Twombly · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: war, in the battle canvases; the hero and his rage, in Achilles; friendship and grief, in Patroclus; the city and the family, in the House of Priam; death and the dead, in the shades; the cosmos, in the shield, which in Homer carries the whole world; fire as the natural order turned destructive; and memory and writing, the order the cycle adds. The Iliad’s structure, laid out as a room, integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that most of these orders are held by title and name rather than realised in paint: the city, the family and the sacred are named, not painted. The cycle holds more than a single canvas could; that it holds them chiefly through Homer is the limit.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The titles name the state and war, in the general and the helicopters; the crowd in protest, in the maple spring; the sacred, in the hallelujah and the ascent; and the natural order, in images. One condition, collective force against state power, binds them, carried in sound as feeling. What holds the figure is that these orders are pointed at more than held: the music does not differ in kind between the piece named for a genocide and the drone named for a student strike. Consciousness is only the listener’s, the family and labour are absent, and history enters as two events.
Snøhetta · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders are held, and held in one section rather than listed: the public and the nation, in a state’s gift of common ground; art and its institution, in the halls; labour, unusually present, in the factory where sets and costumes are made, placed openly in the building’s body; the natural order, in the fjord, the light, the weather and the season on the stone; the city and its history, in a port edge given back. What holds the axis, the lowest of the twelve: the sacred is absent, as it should be; the family, the body beyond the walker and the inner life the operas hold are not built into the form. The hall carries art, but the building does not hold what art holds. Fairly wide for a single civic building; the figure describes the form.
Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus (OMA/LMN) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders of reality held in one structure: the city, in the two entrances, the Living Room and the frame of the sloping site; knowledge, in the spiral’s ordered collection; the state as civic provision, a bond-funded public institution; labour, in the staff floors and the sorting that runs beneath; the social, in a building that shelters the homeless reader and the schoolchild under one skin; technology, in the computers of the Mixing Chamber and the building’s argument about media. These are integrated in the section, not listed. Absent or slight are the sacred, the natural order beyond light and view, the family and the private self. Within the limits of one civic building it holds more than most, and the figure records the form’s ceiling.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held in one structure: capital, in a fight for control of a company and a mortgaged house; labour and craft, in a man who began as a workman and repairs the ransom cases with his own hands; the family, in a wife, a son, a chauffeur and the chauffeur’s son; the state, in a police force at full extent and a press asked to keep silent; the city, from the hill to the alley; medicine, in an intern who uses what he knows to kill; the underclass of addiction; and consciousness, in Gondo’s decision. One kidnapping touches company, family and state. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: half of the film’s consciousness is a surface, since Takeuchi’s inner life is withheld; history is the boom present only, and the war that made the city is never spoken; the sacred is absent; nature is heat and a sea seen from a hideout. The orders are many and connected, and several are carried by a single figure or a single scene.
Apollodorus of Damascus (attributed) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Orders held in one structure: the state, in the emperor’s gift and, likely, his offices; labour and trade, in the shops, the street and the stores; the city as a made thing, a quarter built in section with its own street at height; the natural order, in the hill cut and held, the building serving as its retaining wall; and history, through the forum and the column whose height measures the cut. These are integrated by the section rather than listed: the hill, the street, the shop and the state’s forum are one stepped structure. What it does not hold: the sacred, for nothing here is cult; the household and its dwelling; and consciousness. A working building of wide civic scope, short of the encompassing reach of the great sacred buildings.
George Saunders · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what one book of six stories and a novella holds. Labour is its ground: the job and the fear of losing it are in every piece. The economy, as spectacle and service. Consciousness, in each narrator’s evasions. The family: wives, children, a dead wife, a lost sister. History, as the Civil War made a product. The body, in obesity, injury and the deformities that make a caste in “Bounty”. The afterlife, in ghosts and a spirit. One law and one vantage join them. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is what is thin: the state appears in “Bounty” and in the police, and otherwise as absence; the sacred is ghosts without a theology; the natural order is a theme park’s lawn. The orders lie close together, one class in one economy, seen from the bottom.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as dread, insomnia and complicity; the family, in Sail to the Moon and the fear for a child beneath the record. The state and war are present as slogans, a bunker, a judge and an executioner, and the media as the voice overheard in the last track. The natural order appears as weather, the sky falling, rain and leaves, and the sacred as the Flood and the lukewarm. One frame, the parent’s fairy tale, joins them. What holds the figure is that the public orders are glimpsed more than held: the state is a mood, history a year, and labour and the city are absent.
David Lynch · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. The orders are present: consciousness, in Merrick’s reading, his recitation and his model, and in Treves’s conscience; the family, in an absent mother and a doctor’s household; medicine, in the lecture and a hospital with governors and funds; class, from the fairground and the East End to the theatre and a royal visitor; the sacred, in the Psalm, the church and the mother’s promise; art, in Shakespeare and the stage. One man and the law of the gaze hold them together. What holds the axis lowest is how many are only present: Merrick’s inner life is gentle and largely withheld, labour and industry are atmosphere and never entered, the state appears only as royal favour, and history is setting.
Nas · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, the watchful mind of a young man. The neighbourhood is held as a society, with named friends, corners and parks; labour as the street economy and its alternatives; the state as police and, in One Love, as the prison that holds half the record’s people. The family is held in moments: a birthday, a father’s cornet, a mother mentioned with love. Death is everywhere, and history is glimpsed in the record’s own past. What holds the figure lowest: the sacred is evoked and not held, the natural order is absent, and the world beyond the city appears only as a dream of escape. The family and history are glimpsed more than held. One neighbourhood is seen through one consciousness: several orders are joined there, and as many are only glimpsed or absent.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Orders present: the natural world, the body, the family (a father and son, a lost wife, the Arikara chief’s daughter), labour and commerce in the fur trade and its company, the clash of nations among American trappers, French traders, Arikara and Pawnee, and the sacred. Three are held firmly in one structure: the father’s grief drives the body through the land. Commerce and the nations are shown in action, in the pelts, the stolen horses and the burned Pawnee village remembered, and their chain of trade is the film’s clearest finding. What holds the axis low is integration: those orders stay background to one man’s ordeal rather than parts of its meaning, and the sacred is imagery, a church and a dead wife’s voice, without a faith the film examines.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as dread, desire and amazement. The couple is held in the title song and Albuquerque, love said across separation. The state and history enter in White Elephant, racial grievance, a protest, a statue, with force but in one song. The communal catastrophe is the ground of the whole, felt in the arrested travel of Albuquerque and never named. The sacred is evoked constantly; the natural order is rain, fields and morning sun. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is what is missing and how the rest is joined: labour and the family beyond the couple are absent, and the first half’s public world meets the second half’s private one mainly in the sound.
Michael Mann · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Several orders are held in one structure: two empires at war and their codes; the colonial militia and the question of whose war it is; three native nations and their alliances; a family, Munro and his daughters, and an adopted family, Chingachgook and his two sons; love; the natural order of forest and river; and the historical passing of a people. They are integrated rather than listed, because the pursuit carries them all: the empires’ war burns the cabin, the cabin sends the militia home, the arrest puts Hawkeye inside the fort when it falls, the fall makes Magua’s revenge, and the revenge ends the Mohican line. What holds the axis is the scale of an action romance: labour, faith and the inner life of the native characters are present as surfaces, and the state is seen in its officers rather than held.
Eduard Riedel and Christian Jank, under Ludwig II · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Orders held: kingship and the state, as image after the loss of power; the sacred, in the Throne Hall’s church of kingship and the Grail; myth and literature, in the cycles of legend and Wagner’s dramas; the natural order, in a building made for its mountain; technology, in services built into a medieval shell; and one consciousness, a king’s, given a whole building. They are held in one structure through the programme of rooms and the site, integrated more than listed. What holds the axis is that everything passes through one man’s dream. Labour, the household, the people of the valley and history as lived stay outside it, and the sacred and the state are present as scenery for a private life: an order larger than an office tower’s, narrower than a cathedral’s or a palace of real government.
Luis Buñuel · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The orders present are many: the state, in soldiers, police, a court, two prefects and a riot; the church, in friars, a profaned tomb and holy medals; the family, in parents and children, an aunt and nephew, a brother and his dead sister; sexuality, in fetish, incest and the hatter’s confessed tastes; mortality, in cancer, the crypt and the sniper’s victims; history; the natural order, in the rooster and the ostriches. Each is held for an episode and let go. One law of arbitrary convention runs through them, an integration of a kind. What holds the axis: consciousness stays at the surface, labour and the economy are absent, and no order is held long enough to be weighed against another.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. The orders are many and mostly joined by the questions: the family, in two brothers and a dead mother; religion and the state, in the riot and the police; labour and crime, in the begging ring, Javed’s gang and the call centre; the city’s growth, in the towers over the old slum; the media, in the quiz and the crowds before television sets; money, as the prize of twenty million rupees and as Salim’s death; India in the global economy, in Western tourists and calls from Britain. What holds the figure: consciousness is held only from outside, through action, and Latika’s not at all; the sacred is a child in costume and a card; and the orders are crossed at speed rather than held.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Several orders are held together through Ellen. Consciousness: her desire and its torment at the centre, Thomas’s terror in the castle a second. Marriage and family: the Hutters’ marriage, the Harding household and its children. Commerce: Thomas’s commission, Knock’s property business, the house sold to the creature, ambition as the door through which the dark comes. Medicine and reason: Sievers’s science against von Franz’s occult learning. The city: plague, the dead in the streets. The sacred: the old faith of the Roma village and the convent, and the profane rite of the summons. Nature: rats, wolves, the dark. These are joined, not listed; but the state and history enter only as period setting, and the town is backdrop more than force.
David Mackenzie · Film
7.2 · Tier III
Judged on what a historical film of about two hours holds. The state and its succession, in two kings, a crown claimed by murder and an English heir; the Church, as the altar profaned and the excommunication that follows; the family, in a father’s death, a marriage arranged and grown into love, a daughter, sisters and brothers lost; war and its economy, in levies, galleys, raids and the feeding of a band; the land and its people, the fishermen and the clans of the isles; history, in Wallace’s death behind the story and Bannockburn ahead of it. They are integrated through the one war: the marriage is a hostage, the church a battlefield, the land a weapon. What holds the figure: consciousness is mostly exterior, the common people are scenery more than an order, and the women’s world is seen only when it is broken.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
A two-handed chamber film holds three orders in one structure: consciousness and identity, at the centre; the family, in a marriage, a fiancé’s plans, motherhood refused and a son; and vocation, care and performance, both of which are the problem. The rest are touched, not held, and that is what keeps the axis lowest. Sexuality is recounted, never shown. History enters only as two images, on a television and in a book, and is never lived in. Art is present as the medium examining itself. There is no state, no labour beyond the two professions and no community, and the sacred appears only as its absence. The figure describes the form, and the form was chosen.
Franz Liszt · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held are few and held together: consciousness, as one will passing through states; the sacred, in the Grandioso’s chorale and the Andante’s hymn; love, in the Cantando; the adversarial, as the motif that becomes it; time and mortality, in the fall at the opening and the quiet at the end. They are integrated by transformation, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is absence: the family, labour, the state, history, the natural order and the social do not appear, not even as the image of a society that the four voices of Op. 131 or the genres of the Goldberg Variations give. One player, one mind and its extremes: the figure counts those orders and no more.
Salvador Dalí · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held in a small field: time, mechanical and lived, set against each other; memory and sleep, the unconscious as a place; death and corruption, in the dead tree and the ants; the natural order, a coast, a sea, a tree, insects; the self, in the self-portrait creature; and, read with less certainty, sexuality. They are integrated: the sleeper at the centre is the one to whom time, memory and decay happen, and the coast is the ground of his dream. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no other person, no family, no labour, no city, no state, no history, no sacred. The human world is one dreamer, and he is barely human. The field holds more than its size suggests, and the figure describes the form.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Two orders are held fully and joined: consciousness, as sensation, sleep and half waking, and the body in desire. Within them the integration is complete, and it is credited: on this record the body and consciousness are one thing, which is part of what it knows. What holds the figure is the count. The family, labour, the state, history and the natural order are absent, the sacred is touched by the hymnlike swell of the sound and not held, and technology is the record’s means, never its subject. The figure describes what the record chose to hold.
Robert Johnson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, the lowest of its axes. Consciousness is held, in the inward first person of every side. Eros is held at length, from the comedy of “Terraplane Blues” to the violence of “Me and the Devil Blues”. The sacred and the demonic are held: the prayer at the crossroads, the devil at the door, judgment day, the preacher’s form turned to the blues. The road and the machine are there, the Terraplane and the Greyhound bus; the natural order is glimpsed in rain, stones and sundown. What holds the figure is absence: the social order of the Delta is present only by implication, and labour, the family, the state and history do not appear in the words. Sixteen three-minute songs hold this much, and the figure describes the form.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
A single room for a single school holds fewer orders than a cathedral or a city. What it holds: the institution and its pedagogy; labour, in industrial steel made noble and in the work of the studio; the classical past, in the temple; the natural order, as light, season and the sky above the girders; and the city, as the campus plan the hall belongs to. These are integrated in the one structure more than listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: consciousness, the family, the sacred and history as lived appear only as abstraction or not at all. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 154 minutes holds. The criminal economy and its codes of debt, loyalty and honour; marriage, in its tenderness between Butch and Fabienne and its threat between Marsellus and Mia; war and inheritance, in a watch carried through two wars and a camp; the sacred, in the Ezekiel passage, the bullets that miss and Jules’s choice; consumer America, in the diners, the theme restaurant, the television pilot and the brand names; the suburb, in Jimmie’s house; sport and its fixing. The watch, the fix and the conversion run through one structure, and the orders are integrated. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the state and the law (no police enter), labour except as crime, a family beyond one marriage and a dead father’s watch, consciousness shown from within rather than as talk, and a city seen as more than a set of interiors.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the city, as architecture, street and shut commerce; labour, in the counterman at work while others sit; the couple, a relation of sex or love left unstated; consciousness, as solitude in company, four minds that do not meet; the economy, in the open counter, the closed shops and the advertised price; and the natural order only as night. They are integrated by the one light and the one vantage. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no state, no sacred, no history on the canvas (the war is a date, not an image), and no community beyond four strangers. The world it holds is one corner of a city at one hour, with people in it and nothing above them. The figure describes the form.
David Markson · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the book holds. Consciousness, fully: a single mind in grief, in memory and possibly in madness. Culture, as the whole Western inheritance in fragments: painting, music, Homer, philosophy. The family, in the dead son. The natural order, in the beach, the weather and the sea. Art and its making, since she is a painter. Love and its loss. The orders are integrated, not listed: each passes through her solitude. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the premise excludes: the state, labour, society and history as lived are absent by design, since there is no one else, and the sacred appears only as myth. A low mark on a solitary form describes the form.
Eladio Dieste · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The church holds more than its size suggests. The sacred, in a sacramental route from the buried baptistery to the altar. Labour, in the dedication to Christ the Worker and in a church built by the masons of a working town from the local material. The natural order, in the sea’s waves and the light. And the economy of a small country making its own modernity without imported means. These are integrated, not listed: the dedication, the material and the method are one decision. What holds the axis lowest is size: it is one small room for one community, and it does not hold a state, a history or a city. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Consciousness is the centre: an alien attention becoming a self. Sex and gender are held as appraisal, desire and violence. The city is present as a population of strangers, its shopping streets and a nightclub. The natural order is sea, moor, forest and snow, and a dog drowned. Disability is held in the man whose face makes him alone; mortality and the family appear only in the drowned couple and their child. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or nearly so: labour, the state, history, the sacred, and any community beyond the passer-by. What is present is held through one consciousness and joined by it, not listed, and the narrow reach is by design.
Portishead · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully: distrust, exhaustion, self-doubt and the will to go on. The couple is present as loss and need through most of the words. Faith is glimpsed as something lost, and the sacred appears only as an old rule spoken in a foreign language at the start. Technology is the medium itself, set against the voice. The family, labour, the state, history, place and the natural order are absent, except as figures in the titles. One consciousness joins what is there and holds it whole. What holds the figure lowest is the narrowness of the field: nothing beyond that self enters except as a sound.
Franz Marc · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held in one field: the natural order, in the forest and beasts of several kinds; the cosmic, in the light that falls from outside the forest; the sacred, as judgement, sacrifice and the end of things; suffering as the condition of every creature; and, by implication, history, a catastrophe the picture names without picturing. They are integrated by the one fracture that passes through all of them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no human figure, no consciousness but the animal’s, no family, no labour, no state. The war is brought to the picture, not held in it. It encompasses more than a landscape, a world and its ending, and less than a picture of human society. The figure describes the form.
David Lynch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 89 minutes holds. Consciousness, in Henry, from inside; the family, in the X household, a marriage and a child; sexuality and generation, the film’s centre; labour and the industrial order, in the waste, the pipes and the pencil works; the body, in birth, disease and wound; the cosmic, in the planet and the radiator’s heaven. One dread holds them, and they are integrated, since the factory, the child and the heaven obey one law. What holds the axis lowest is what is missing: the state and history are absent, society beyond a family and a neighbour does not enter, the city is a set of empty streets, and every order passes through one consciousness, so that the world the film holds is narrow by design.
Mastodon · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for being an album. Four orders are present. Consciousness is held as obsession and madness, in I Am Ahab and Aqua Dementia. The natural order, as sea, beast and element, is held most fully. The sacred is glimpsed in “holy grail” and in the whale as an object of worship and hatred. The body, deformed and exhibited, enters in Joseph Merrick. All four are held under one condition, the hunt. But labour, which in the novel is the whaling trade itself, is absent, and so are the family, the state and history. Few orders, held under one condition rather than set against each other: that is what holds the figure lowest.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 106 minutes holds, and it holds several orders in one structure. The army as a mass; the state, in officers and a naval command deciding whose troops go first; the nation, in civilians and their boats and in the press making the legend; the family, in Dawson, his son and the elder son he has lost; war as machinery; and the natural order, tide, sea, oil, fire and air, held more fully than any other. They are integrated: the tide is the plot and the state’s decisions are the queue. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: consciousness is withheld by design, no inner life entered except by sound and face, and the allies, the enemy and the history beyond the beach are left out of the frame.
William Van Alen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held: commerce and the speculative market, which built the tower; the machine and its product, built into the ornament; labour and transport, in the lobby’s mural and in the building’s own rapid making; the city, as skyline and as rivalry among builders; and individual ambition, a man’s fortune and name made public. The setbacks, the ornament and the lobby place these in one figure, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, the natural order, the sacred except as borrowed form, the state and death. An office tower holds a market’s confidence at one moment, and the figure describes the form.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimitsu; rebuilt 1955 · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure. The state: the shogun’s power and the court’s ranks set storey on storey, and a villa made to receive an emperor. The sacred: the Buddha’s relics and the Kannon, the Pure Land made a garden. The natural order: the pond, the islands, the borrowed hill, the seasons doubled in the water. History: since 1950 the building also holds its own destruction and rebuilding. The view integrates them, one figure in one water. What holds the axis lowest is the small form and what stays outside it: labour, the family, the body and the individual consciousness, except as the arson’s reception brings consciousness in from outside, which is not credited.
Soundgarden · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness, as depression, dread and the death wish, is held fully and is the record’s centre. Death is held in its frame. America enters as the festival of 4th of July and the corrupt suburb implied in Black Hole Sun; wealth and its fall in Limo Wreck; the street and its music in Spoonman; the natural order in the water of Let Me Drown; the sacred as a prayer turned upside down. That is a wider span than most heavy records attempt. What holds the figure is integration: the orders arrive track by track, most glimpsed rather than held, and the family, labour, the state and history are absent or present only as images. One consciousness listening holds them, not a structure.
Queen · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held in Bohemian Rhapsody; the family in its son and mother and in the father’s counsel of Good Company; the couple in Love of My Life and You’re My Best Friend; trade and a working life in Good Company and, as grievance, in Death on Two Legs; judgement and the sacred in the Rhapsody’s trial and the flood of The Prophet’s Song; the cosmos and its physics in ’39; the nation in the anthem; the machine in the car. The span is wide. What holds the figure is integration: the orders arrive one to a track, joined by the bill and not by any consciousness or argument, and several, the nation, the machine and leisure, are present as jokes.
Horace Jones and John Wolfe Barry · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
The orders held: the river and the tide, the natural order the bridge must yield to; the port and the trade of an empire, which set the clear opening; the city’s road and its working districts east of the Tower, joined across the water; the state and the City Corporation, in the Act, the bridge trust and the public cost; history, in the Tower beside it and the dress chosen to answer it; and labour, in the engine rooms, the bridgemasters and the crews whose passage stops the road. The lift joins several of these in one act, and the joining is real. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, the sacred, death and the inner life have no place in it, and the history it holds is costume more than memory. A crossing holds a city’s traffic and trade at one point; the figure describes the form.
Guðjón Samúelsson · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Orders held: the sacred, in a Lutheran church; literature, in the dedication to the poet of a nation’s hymn book; the natural order, the island’s stone figured in the front and the northern light in the nave; the nation, in a newly independent state’s chief church; the city, which the tower orders as its landmark; and death, in the crypt and in a dedication to a poet of the Passion. The tower and front hold these in one figure, integrated rather than listed, though some are held by symbol only. Absent: the household, labour except as the long communal effort of the building, the body, history except as dedication, and the individual consciousness. A church holds the sacred and the nation more than a world.
Pearl Jam · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully: a self examined under attention. The market and the medium are held in Not for You and Corduroy, the audience as buyer and lover at once. The couple and the household are held in Better Man and Nothingman, a marriage endured and a love lost. The body is held in the package, a manual of health laid over a record of strain; death in Immortality. An institution and its inmates enter as voices in the closing collage, and the sacred is named in two titles more than held. What holds the figure: these orders arrive song by song, joined by the voice and the frame rather than by one structure, and labour, history and the natural order are absent.
Yousef Abdelky · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Several orders are held, some integrated. The sacred: a house of prayer turned to Mecca, the names of God on its wall. The state: the founder’s mosque, the nation’s emblem, his tomb beside it. Death: the grave at the threshold. The natural order: water, sun, heat, and the moon’s phases built into the lighting. Labour and the world: craftsmen and materials gathered from many nations into one fabric, which the building means to show. What holds the axis: the orders are placed side by side more than held in one structure. The tomb stands beside the mosque, not within its plan; the world’s crafts are present as a catalogue; the family, the inner life and any history beyond the founder’s are absent. The figure describes a large building that holds a nation’s claim and its faith, not a world.
The Beach Boys · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully: one adolescent interior across thirteen tracks. The couple is held through courtship, the wish to marry, devotion, doubt and loss. Time and age are the record’s subject: the passage from youth, the girl changed. The sacred is evoked, in God Only Knows and I Know There’s an Answer, more as word than as order, and the natural order enters only at the close, as animals and a train. Society appears only as the times the self was not made for. Labour, the state, history and technology are absent, and the family is a future wished for. Three orders held and two glimpsed, joined by one consciousness: that count holds the figure lowest.
Béla Bartók · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders the work holds, bound by one subject: consciousness, in the fugue’s lament; the natural order, in the Adagio’s night; the community and its play, in the village dance of the finale; the learned and sacred traditions, in the fugue and its church style; and time, in the passage from dark to light. They are held together, not listed. What holds the axis at 7.0, the lowest of the twelve, is absence: the family, the state and history are not present, except as a listener hears 1936 in the dread, which the work does not ask for. A wordless half-hour work for strings and percussion holds fewer orders than a song cycle or a set of variations that holds a person or a household, and the figure says so.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held on one small board: consciousness, as the whole subject; the natural order, sky and fjord, as the medium of that consciousness; the social, in the two walkers, as the world that does not hear; and the sacred by its absence, since the cry comes out of nature where a voice from above once came. They are integrated, not listed: the walkers are part of the argument. What holds the axis lowest is what is only touched or missing. The social and the historical are touched, not held; labour, the family and the state are not there at all. A board with three figures cannot hold more, and the rubric records that ceiling without compensating it. The figure describes the form.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held in one small field are integrated by a single act: the family, a father and his child; succession and the generations; time, in the god who is Time; the sacred, in a god; the body, as eater and eaten; consciousness, in the terror of the eyes, the one mind in the picture. The state is held by reading, as the sovereign who devours his subjects, a reading the myth’s own theme of rule supports. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no nature, no labour, no society, no place and no history except as the viewer brings them. It is one figure against black, and the figure describes the form.
Andrea Mantegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, in the dead god and the anointing; death and the body, as matter; the family, in the mother and the son; consciousness, in grief and in the watcher placed at the feet; and, faintly, ritual, in the slab as altar and the jar. They are integrated: the one viewpoint places each and makes them one event. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is most of the rubric’s list: no state, no labour, no history except what the viewer brings, no natural order, no society beyond three mourners. It is a small devotional canvas of one body, and the figure describes the form: below The Starry Night (7.4), which holds the cosmos and a village in a field of similar size, and above The Swing (6.4).
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, a republic representing itself and a king received; the natural order, sky and water, light, and the geology of onyx and marble made wall; the body, the one figure, the chairs and the visitor moving; the machine and industry, chrome, plate glass and rolled steel, German industry shown as finish; art, Kolbe’s bronze and the chair as a made object; and perception, the visitor seeing himself in the building, as near as it comes to consciousness. One grid places each, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, labour, history except as Schinkel’s echo, the sacred except as the court’s hint, death and the city. A pavilion with no programme holds fewer orders than a house, and the figure describes the form.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the couple and marriage; the body and its touch; consciousness, in the two inward faces, each alone with what the touch means; the sacred, as covenant, and if the subject is biblical, the patriarchal line of Genesis; and the material world, in the substance of cloth and gold. They are integrated by the gesture: the body’s act is the covenant and the inward thought. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no state, no history except what a Genesis reading brings, no natural order beyond a vague foliage, no society beyond two. It is a picture of two people, and the figure describes the form.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held in one field: the natural order at its most elemental, sea become stone; human enterprise and its history, the voyage of discovery, in the hull; death, in the wreck and in the tomb the ice builds over it; the sacred, implied by the monument and by its absence, a grave with no sign; and the viewer’s consciousness, placed on the floe. They are integrated, and the one law of fracture holds each. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour seen, no state except by allegory, history only as an implied voyage. The human world is a few square centimetres of broken timber. The figure describes the form.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order at its most violent, in sea, snow and wind; technology and the industrial age, in the steamer; human peril and labour, implied in a crew who signal and sound the depth; the witness, the consciousness the title claims as the painter’s own; and, by implication only, the old question of providence and the abyss. The vortex places each, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no figure visible, no family, no state, no history beyond the steamer’s date, no sacred order except as implication, no society. The human world is a small dark hull. The figure describes the form.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, as sleep, dream and the faculty of reason; art, in the instruments and the owl’s offer, so that the work of making is part of what is shown; the natural order, in the creatures of the night; and, through the title and the set the plate opens, the social order of an Enlightenment Spain at odds with its superstitions and its Inquisition. One figure integrates them: reason, art and the night meet at his back. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour beyond the artist’s, no state shown, no history but what the title implies, the sacred only as its inversion. It is one man at one block on a plate the size of a book page, and the figure describes the form.
Willem de Kooning · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held, in one figure: the body and sexuality; the sacred, as the mother idol; mass culture and commerce, in the advertising grin; consciousness, the painter’s and the viewer’s, desire and fear; art’s own tradition, the Venus and the odalisque turned round; and the city, faintly, in a ground that can be read as street and glare. They are integrated: one face holds the idol and the advertisement, and one stroke holds figure and ground. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no second person, no family, no labour, no state, no history but what the viewer brings, no natural order beyond the body. A single figure on one canvas; the figure describes the form. Below Cézanne’s Large Bathers, which hold a company and a town; above the abstract fields of its decade, which hold no person.
Ornette Coleman · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held, in the grief of “Lonely Woman” and the reflection of “Peace”. The group is held as a small society of equals: no instrument rules the harmony, and each voice listens and answers, which is the record’s social form. The blues and the Texas rhythm and blues behind Coleman are carried, and with them, unstated, African American history in 1959. Time is named in “Chronology” and heard in the double tempo of the opening. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is absence: the family, labour, the state, the sacred and the natural order do not appear. A wordless record of thirty-eight minutes holds what it holds, a little less of the world than Kind of Blue’s blues-centred span, and the figure describes the form.
Knut Hamsun · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short novel holds, and the lowest of the twelve. One consciousness, one city, one season. The mind is held fully; then the body under deprivation; money, credit and the pawnshop; the literary marketplace, in the editor called the Commander and the articles written and turned down; the classes of the city, glimpsed in its streets; the sacred, as the God he curses; desire, in Ylajali. They are integrated through the one mind, not listed. What holds the axis here is what is absent or nearly so: the family, labour other than writing, the state except as a policeman, history, the natural order. Every order present is held in one vantage and one condition. A low mark on a short form describes the form.
Ife · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The heads hold the person; the office of the king; the sacred, in ori and the divine descent of the Ooni; the dead, if the funerary reading holds, which is proposed and disputed; and the social order, in the striations and the crown. That is a real reach for a body of heads, and it is integrated, not listed: every one of those orders is held in the same calm face. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form. A head cannot hold labour, the family, the natural order or history told as narrative; the body shows no scene, no second figure and no world around the face. The figure credits how much these heads compress into one feature and records that the form can widen no further. Under Laocoön and the Terracotta Army, above Nefertiti and the Riace Bronzes at 6.6.
Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: desire and the self; the sacred, as grace and as the beauty of God in a human face; the court, its architecture and its wealth, and through Zulaykha the house of a great official of Egypt; scripture, poetry and their interpretation, built into one surface with the words of two poets; and Timurid Herat itself, recorded as architecture. They are integrated by the building, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, the state as more than a palace, history, the natural order, any society beyond two figures. A small form on a single page cannot reach the upper bands, and the figure describes the form.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Five orders are held, and one structure places each. The sacred: the faith and its sign. The congregation: a small community gathered in one posture, facing one light. The natural order: the sun’s course and the seasons, carried into the room by the cross. The body: the turn at the entry and the passage into the dark. Economy: poverty of means made visible in board and concrete. The box and the cut integrate them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the city, from which the box turns away; the state; labour, except as the scaffold boards remember it; the family; history, except as the long Christian figure of light. A small chapel holds a congregation’s worship, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The rubric does not adjust for a form’s limits, and the figure says how many orders the set holds. It holds the social order in miniature but integrated, as ranks of instruments given and denied the lead; the court, in its dances and its princely instruments; the hunt and the outdoors, in the horns and perhaps the echo flutes; play and contest everywhere. Consciousness enters only in the slow movements, and briefly. What holds the axis here is absence: the sacred, the family, labour, the state as such and history do not appear, and the natural order is glimpsed. Ninety-odd minutes of instrumental music hold a court and its society of players, and no more.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Consciousness is held fully, a soul seeking stillness. The sacred is held, in the hymn of Wealth, the choir of I Believe in You and the biblical frame. I Believe in You is a plea for someone loved, said to be a brother in addiction, and wealth and appetite, the market as a moral condition, are named in the titles and enacted in Desire’s violence. The natural order enters as the garden and the rainbow. One sensibility and one law join them. What holds the figure is that most are glimpsed through titles and sound rather than held as subjects, the words being too few and too veiled to carry them; the state, labour, history and the couple are absent.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The work holds more orders than an emblem or an abstract field: a person, one actress and her face; the mass media and the industry of celebrity; commerce, the face supplied like a product; death, in the date of the making and in the black panel; the sacred, in the diptych and the icon, present as form and emptied; and the viewer’s own consumption of images, since the grid gives the face as it was met, many times and never once. These are integrated: person, product, icon and death are one image seen fifty ways. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, labour beyond the process, the state, the natural order, history beyond the moment of the news, any world around the face. The figure describes the form.
Robert Wiene · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 77 minutes holds. Consciousness is held fully: the whole film is a picture of a mind, and a second mind, the doctor’s, is opened in the diary. The state and its authority are held: the town clerk, the police, the licence to exhibit, the asylum and the doctor’s institutional power. Medicine is held, as psychiatry and as experiment on a human subject. Love is present in two friends’ rivalry for Jane, friendship in Alan’s death, the crowd in the fair, history in the legend. What holds the axis lowest: the family is barely present, labour is absent, nature is absent from a painted world, the sacred is absent, and the town’s society is a few officials and a crowd. It is a nightmare’s scope, carried to the edge of what that form can hold.
Olmec · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are several, and each head integrates them rather than listing them: the individual, in the face; the office and the state, in the helmet and in the labour the stone commanded; the sacred, in the emblems and whatever the makers’ cosmology placed there; the natural order, in the stone of the volcano made into the face of the ruler; and history, a succession of rulers in seventeen faces. What holds the axis lowest is the form. A head without body or setting leaves out the family, labour as it was lived, the interior life and the world of the governed, which are present only by inference from what the stones cost. What the archaeology knows of that world is not what the work holds, and the work is scored on what it holds.
Parmigianino · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, as Incarnation and Passion in one body; the family, as mother and child; death; the human body and its ideal; art itself, the picture as an argument about beauty and making; architecture and space; and, through the prophet, history as prophecy. The neck and the column bind them in one vertical. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no state, no social world beyond a court’s taste, no consciousness beyond the Virgin’s lowered, unreadable glance, no nature but a faint sky. It is a single altarpiece of one sacred group, and the mark describes the form; the reach of its typology sets it above a cabinet picture.
Nicolas Poussin · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held in one small field: death, in the tomb; the natural order, in the Arcadian landscape; the human community, in four figures with a common question; knowledge and language, in an inscription read aloud; history and antiquity, in the Latin and the statuary woman; and art, if the shadow is taken as the origin of painting. They are integrated by their position round one stone. What holds the axis lowest is absence: no family, no state, no labour beyond the shepherd’s staff, no sacred order beyond mortality itself, and consciousness given only as one shared mood. A small form, honestly small: above The Swing’s 6.4 and Water Lilies’ 6.5 on this axis, below The Large Bathers’ 7.5.
Luis Barragán · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the single life and its daily order, work in the studio beside dwelling; faith, in the crosses, the cell and the garden as paradise; the natural order, in the garden and the sky; memory and childhood, the Jalisco village built into wall and colour; the household’s service, placed and separated. The city is held too, but as what is refused. One sequence places each order, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form itself: one house for one man, the family absent, the state and history present only as what the walls keep out, and labour present only as service. A house built as a withdrawal from the world holds a life, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
Hilma af Klint · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: a human life in its four ages, the whole span of a person; time, as duration across the sequence; the natural order, in cells, seeds, flowers and shells; the sacred, as a spiritual order the life passes through; sex and generation, in the paired forms; and consciousness, as the development the notes describe. One structure, the growth of a form, carries all of them, and they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family made visible, no labour, no city, no state, no history; and the person is held only as a process, never as a body or a face. More than an abstract field holds, since a whole life is here; less than a figure painting of like ambition. The figure describes the form.
Edward FitzGerald, after Omar Khayyam · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a lyric sequence of four hundred lines holds; a low mark on a small form describes the form. The sacred, as question and accusation. The natural order, in the rose, the dust, the rain, the season and the moon. History, in the fallen kings and the courts given to the lion and the lizard. Death throughout. Love, in the “Thou” and the Sákí. Learning and its vanity, in the doctors, the saints and the sects. They are held together in one argument, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, at 7.0, is count and vantage: the family, labour except the potter’s as a figure, the state, and any mind other than the speaker’s are absent; and everything is seen from one place, the cup, so that what is encompassed is a stance toward the world rather than the world.
William Blake · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, as a mode of attention made visible in posture; the natural order, as rock, growth and sea; knowledge and science, as instrument and diagram; the sacred and the mythic, in the type of the fallen god; and history, in a named man of the century before made a figure of his age’s thought. They are integrated: the body is where consciousness, nature and science meet. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state, no other person. The image holds more orders than its single figure suggests, because its subject is a view of the world, but it is a sheet with one man in it, and the figure describes the form.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held as appetite, restlessness and gratitude. The couple is held in several kinds: desire, contempt, devotion. The road is held, the wandering of Ramble On and the touring life the record was made in; a world of fantasy is glimpsed through Tolkien, and the dream through What Is and What Should Never Be. The body, rendered in sound, is the record’s ground. What holds the figure lowest: the other orders are absent, no labour, no family, no state or history beyond the borrowed past of the blues, no sacred, no natural order except as image, and what there is lies close together, gathered in one male voice.
Itō Jakuchū · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, wide, across birds, fish, insects, shells, plants and weather; the seasons and the course of the year; the sacred, in the set’s place round the Buddha and the teaching that every being shares his nature; and the family, in a gift made for the memorial rites of the painter’s parents, his brother and himself. The configuration integrates them, for the creatures are both the congregation and the gift. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no human figure in any scroll, no labour, no city, no state, no history, and no consciousness beyond the act of looking that the scrolls embody. The family and the sacred are held by the gift and the rite more than within the images. The figure describes the form.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
A single small house, and it holds more than a small house often does. The family’s daily life. The city, as the thing walled out, and the terrace the house remains part of. The natural order of weather, light and season, brought inside. A quiet ethic of dwelling. These are integrated, not listed: the one section places each. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the state, history and the sacred are absent or only implied. A house of four rooms on a narrow plot holds a household and its sky, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
Louise Bourgeois · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the family, the mother and the child, the work’s whole subject; labour, the mother’s craft of spinning and repair carried by the spider’s; the natural order, an animal at its most functional; the body, the viewer’s, small beneath it, and the creature’s; memory, an old woman’s of a mother dead for nearly seventy years; and myth, the weaver and the great mother. They are held in one structure, because the spider is all of them at once. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no city, no state, no history beyond one household, no sacred, no story beyond the relation of two. A single creature cannot hold a world, and does not try. The figure describes the form.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Four orders are held along one spine. The sacred, in the church room. The parish as a working community, in its meeting rooms, offices and courts. The natural order, as light, sky and cloud brought indoors, and as the trees seen through the corridor glass. Industrial labour and the building economy of the welfare state, in the prefabricated parts. They are integrated in one plan, not set side by side. What holds the axis lowest is what a small parish church cannot hold: the city, the state and history, which a cathedral or the Pantheon (9.3) holds in one structure, stay outside. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Björk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as desire, anger, self-reproach and calm. The couple is held in several states: the plea and the absence of Unravel, the indictment of 5 Years, the claim of Bachelorette. The natural order is held, by sound more than by word, in the land the strings and beats make; the nation is present only as that land, by the maker’s account. Technology enters as the medium and, at the close, as a world in which love is general. The sacred is glimpsed in the rebirth of the close. The family, labour, the state and history are absent, and the community beyond the couple barely appears. One consciousness joins what is held, and few orders are held: that is what sets the figure lowest, below Low’s 7.2.
Euripides · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
One house in Pherae, a single day, weighed at its own scale. It holds several orders: marriage and its terms; parents and children, with Pheres refusing, Eumelus orphaned and a stepmother feared; the guest and the host; kingship in a small realm; the bargains of the gods and of death. They are integrated, not listed, for hospitality ties the gods to the household and the household to death. What holds it lowest of the twelve is what lies outside the house: history, labour, the city and the natural order. Nothing in the play exceeds its walls. A short play is not marked down for being short; the figure describes what it holds.
Qutb ud-Din Aibak and Iltutmish; upper storeys by Firuz Shah Tughlaq · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held are five. Conquest and the state, in the sultans’ names and titles; the faith, in the Qur’anic bands and the minaret’s office; the labour and craft of a conquered people, in the carving itself; the land and the city, which the tower dominates; and the sky, as the place the tower claims. The shaft integrates them, bearing them in its rings. What holds the axis lowest is the form itself: a single tower with no room holds no dwelling, no household, no common life and no death, and only the shadow of the natural order. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Wifredo Lam · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, as the cane and the forest; labour and its history, through the cane field of the plantation and the scissors, with slavery present by implication rather than shown; the sacred, as the Afro-Cuban spirits of the monte; the body and sexuality, insistently, in breasts, buttocks and feet; and a cultural order, the Caribbean set against its colonial image. Several are integrated: land, labour and the sacred are one substance in the fused figures. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only implied: no state, no family, no individual consciousness, no story, and history only by inference from the cane. The figure describes the form.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a cycle of twenty elegies holds. Consciousness, in the speaker’s joy and his northern past. Eros and the body, fully. History, as Rome’s ruins and the ancient poets read through them. Art, as study, sculpture and the making of verse. The city, its taverns, streets and seasons. The sacred, as the old gods made present in play. These orders are held together by one love, not listed. What holds the axis at 7.0, the lowest of the twelve, is what the cycle declines: the family and labour enter only at the edge, and the state is absent, as is the revolution that Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams would meet. The figure describes a lyric book that holds several orders and declines the rest; it is not a charge against its length.
Michael Jackson · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as pressure and paranoia, in Billie Jean and Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’. The couple is held in several keys: desire in P.Y.T. and Baby Be Mine, devotion in The Lady in My Life, a false claim in Billie Jean. The street and its violence enter in Beat It, the city and its night in Human Nature, and public life, gossip and fame, in Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’. What holds the figure lowest on the page is the join: the orders arrive one song at a time and are joined by nothing deeper than the voice; the family is glimpsed only in a child claimed and denied; and the sacred, the state, labour, history and the natural order are absent.
Winslow Homer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The canvas holds one man’s consciousness at the limit; the natural order at its least human; death; and labour and trade, in the cane and the working boat. History and race are held in the figure and the waters, by implication more than by structure. For a single figure in one boat that is a good deal held together, and it is integrated: the cane, the boat and the man are one situation. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the state, the family and the sacred have no place in the picture, and the form, one man on one swell, makes the upper bands unreachable. The figure describes the form.
Michel Gondry · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 108 minutes holds. Consciousness, held from inside through the form; the couple, in its whole arc from meeting to contempt; childhood and the family, in the memories Joel hides in, with their humiliations; labour and commerce, in a small clinic that sells forgetting and its underpaid technicians; medicine and consent, in Mary’s erased affair and Howard’s power; a little of work and class in a bookstore and an office. They are integrated, since the clinic’s night and the mind’s journey are one event. What holds it lowest: the state, history and the natural order enter only as settings, a river and a beach; the sacred appears only as quotation; the world beyond two people and a clinic is not held. A small form, held tightly.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Five orders are held, and the process binds them into one wall. The sacred: a consecrated chapel to a saint and the hermit’s way. The natural order: forest, fire, earth, rain, sky and the hour, each made a material or a condition of the room. Labour: the farmer and his neighbours who built it, and the old rural craft of charcoal burning, both legible in the fabric. The family: a farming couple’s thanks given form on their own land. History: a fifteenth-century Swiss hermit honoured in a twenty-first-century German field. What holds the axis lowest is the form: one small room for one or a few people, with no state, no city and no common worship beyond the visitor’s, and the social order present only as the commissioners’ gift. The figure describes the form.
Claude Lorrain · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve, and the figure describes the form. The orders held: the natural order of sun, sea and sky; the city and its architecture, an imagined classical state; trade and labour, in the bales, the boats and the porters; the sacred story of the queen’s journey to Solomon; and history as remembered antiquity. The light holds them in one structure rather than listing them. But each is held thinly. Labour and ceremony are staffage; the sacred is a title more than a presence; and consciousness is absent, since no face in the picture can be read. For a single landscape canvas that is a wide holding, and the form does not reach the upper bands.
Cindy Sherman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness and the self, the question the series turns on; gender, as a social order of roles; the family and domestic labour, in the kitchens and the housewife; the city, in the street and the office girl; mass culture and the cinema as an industry of images; the gaze, the viewer’s own desire made part of the work; and, faintly, landscape and the American road. One question integrates them, how a woman is made by the image, and the integration is achieved across sixty-nine images rather than listed. What holds the axis at 7.0 is what is absent: no history but the screen’s, no state, no sacred order, no death except as the menace of genre, and no other person in any frame. A world of one figure in many rooms.
Dashiell Hammett · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as a short novel, on what it holds. The city, as its hotels, offices and streets. The law, in the police, a district attorney and a lawyer, in their corrupt or indifferent workings. Money and greed, the book’s engine. Sex and love, in Spade’s affairs with Iva and Brigid, and in Effie’s loyalty and her final recoil. Death, four times: Miles Archer, Floyd Thursby, Captain Jacobi on the stage of the book, and Gutman reported in the last chapter. History, in the bird’s passage from Malta through Sicily, Paris and Constantinople to a Russian general’s house, told by Gutman. Labour, in a small way, in the business of a detective agency. They are integrated, since greed binds them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the count and the depth: the family, the state beyond its police, the sacred and the natural order are absent, and consciousness is withheld by design. A small form, honestly small.
Gerrit Rietveld · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the household, a mother and three children, each place on the upper floor made and unmade daily; the body, in sleep, washing and daylight, with washbasins in the rooms; work, in the ground-floor studio and study; a woman’s independence, a household without a man or servants ordered on its own terms; the natural order, in the garden and the open land once seen from the corner; and, by programme, the universal order of De Stijl. One plan places these, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the city except as the row it abuts, the state, labour beyond the household’s own, history, the sacred and death; and the landscape, once part of the house’s world, is now a road. A small house holds a family’s daily life, and the figure describes the form.
Greek colonists of Poseidonia · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
How many orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the god’s house and its approach from the altar. The civic: a colony’s assertion of identity and wealth, the polis as a community that builds and sacrifices. The natural order, in a limited way: the orientation east to the sunrise and the altar, and the stone of the place. Pronaos, cella, opisthodomos, peristyle and altar form a programme, not a single cell. What holds the axis lowest: the household, labour, the institutions of the state and the life of the individual are not held, and the temple was not made to hold them. A temple as a type holds less than a cathedral or a city. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Peter Behrens · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: labour and the shop floor; the industrial corporation, and through it the economic power of the new German state; technology, in turbines, electricity and steel; the classical tradition and the sacred, transferred to production; and the city street on which the building takes its place. They are integrated in one structure, not listed: the temple form is the factory section, and the factory is the corporation’s face. What holds the axis lowest is what the building does not hold: the dwelling, the family, the natural order, the individual consciousness. It is one large room for one kind of work, and a single-purpose industrial hall cannot encompass what a city, a palace or a cathedral does. The figure describes the form.
Nick Ut · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held are several, and held together in one frame. The body, burned and bare. The family: children of one village running together. The state and its army: soldiers of the government whose own air force made the strike. War and its technology: the napalm, present as the smoke and in the wound. Nature is reduced to the road and a darkened sky; the press stands outside the published frame, and the sacred only in the temple out of sight. It is a great deal for one instant: a child, a family, an army and a war in one line. What holds the axis, the lowest of the twelve, is that most orders are present as signs rather than worked, and that there is no time in the image but the instant.
Victor Fleming · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what a fable of about 101 minutes holds. The family, in an orphan girl raised by an aunt and uncle on a working farm; labour, in the hands at the hog pen and a farm too busy to hear her; the law and property, in Miss Gulch’s order from the sheriff, which can take a dog; the natural order, in the cyclone; power and the state, in the Wizard’s city and its hidden machinery; consciousness, in the whole of Oz as a dream. They are held in one structure by the doubling, so this is integration, not a list. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the scale at which they are held: the farm is never seen in its economy, the law is a single spinster, the state is a humbug, and history and the sacred are absent.
Toyo Ito · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The building holds a fair spread: the city’s street and its avenue of trees, the civic plaza, the library, art and film, the public with impaired sight and hearing, the earthquake country it stands in, and, in its image, water and the growth of plants. These are held in one structure and integrated by it, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the sacred, the family and labour, and the state except as a city’s provision. Its whole is a single institution in a single block; a modern public building of this kind holds a city’s service, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
Mike Nichols · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
A film of about 106 minutes holds consciousness, Benjamin’s fully and Mrs. Robinson’s by glimpses. It holds the family: two households, two marriages, a father’s ambitions, a mother’s despair and a daughter’s. Money and class enter as the house, the pool, the cars, the Taft, the Alfa Romeo given for graduation and the one word of advice. Sexuality and the generations are the core; the university enters as Berkeley, the sacred as a church whose cross becomes a weapon. What holds this axis lowest is what is missing in 1967: no war, no politics, no work but a future refused, and history held only in the shape of the parents’ affluence. The orders are held through one young man and two families.
Burnham and Root; south half by Holabird and Roche · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held: the city’s commerce and its land economics, in the narrow lot, the rent and the light; the technology of building at a turning point, held in one block as two methods; labour and the life of the office; the city’s street carried inside along the ground floor. Absent or only touched: the sacred, the family, the state, and the natural order beyond the material’s own weight. A speculative office building is a small form in the sense this axis means, and the low mark describes the form. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that narrowness; what lifts it to 7.0 is the rare achievement of holding two moments of building technology in one structure and making the difference between them legible.
Bichitr · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the state, in an emperor and two foreign kings; the sacred, in the shaikh and the shrine he stands for; time and mortality, in the hourglass; the cosmos, in sun and moon; the relations of empires, Ottoman and English, set in one hierarchy; and art and the artist, in the painter who places himself on the page. They are integrated by the stair of rank and the halo, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent and what the form allows: no labour, no family, no nature but the emblematic sky, no ordinary life; the world is the court and its claims. A small form holds a great deal, and the figure describes the form.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the family, in a troupe of man, woman, youths and child whose kinship is implied and left unclear; labour, in the performers’ trade and the drum carried on the back; art, in the performer as the artist’s figure; the margin of society, in the condition of the wanderer; and nature, as bare ground and sky. One condition, separation, integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only implied: no state, no history, no sacred except by echo, no city, and a natural order that is a ground rather than a world. Six figures hold more than the cabinet scale of The Swing, at 6.4, and less than a world.
Max Ernst · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The picture holds the natural order (geology, growth, decay, weather), history (the continent and the war, by title and by date), the human figure reduced to remnant, and a hint of the mythic couple; the state and labour enter only as ruin. These are integrated in one terrain rather than listed, and that is the achievement. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the human orders, consciousness, the family and the social world, are present only as traces: what the war did to people is shown as what it did to matter. For a single canvas it is a fair reach, and the figure describes the form.
James Gibbs · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Held in one structure: learning and the life of reading; the university as a community, its colleges round the square; the town as civic space; patronage and memory, a dead man’s money made a monument; the sacred as form, the dome borrowed from church and tomb; and, in its first purpose, natural knowledge, medicine and science. What holds the axis lowest on the page is what lies outside the ring of stone: the household, labour, those who built it and those who serve it, the state, the natural order beyond the square, and death beyond the frame of the memorial. A building of one room and one idea cannot hold many orders, and the figure describes the form rather than faulting it.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The field holds more orders than a field painting usually does, because the field is country in the Anmatyerre sense. The natural order: season, rain, plant, seed, the growth of the yam. The sacred: the Dreaming and its law, which is the subject. The body and ceremony: the dot and stripe of awelye, the women’s designs painted on breasts and shoulders, from which the under layer descends. Labour and sustenance: yam and seed as food gathered by women. Time: the season of growth, and the ancestral time present in it. Kin and law are held by implication, since country is held through them. What holds the axis lowest is that most of these are present by implication, not shown: there is no person, no community, no history of dispossession and no state in the image. The figure describes a single field and credits what it holds.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Several orders are held, and integrated in the one section rather than listed. Technology: the jet, the vehicle, the cable. The state: a federal gateway to the capital, dedicated by a president. The public, as a body moving through one room. The landscape: a flat field read against a long horizontal roof. What holds the axis lowest is what stays outside: the sacred, the household, history and the individual life, which a room of passage does not hold, as the Sydney Opera House (8.6) holds a city’s harbour and the Villa Savoye a way of dwelling. A terminal of one room is a narrow form, and the figure describes the form.
Spike Jonze · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of 112 minutes holds. Consciousness, given as a place one can enter; marriage and its quiet failure; sexuality and gender, through Lotte and Maxine; labour, the filing job on the half floor; art and its market, the street puppeteer despised and the celebrity puppeteer applauded; celebrity and the selling of experience; age, mortality and the wish to escape them; the animal, in Elijah’s memory; the next generation, the child as vessel. These are integrated, since the portal is the one mechanism by which each is reached. What holds the axis at 7.0, the lowest of the twelve: the state and history do not enter, the sacred appears only as parody, the persons beyond the four principals are sketches, and the world beyond the building and two apartments is barely seen.
Alfred Stieglitz · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
For a single photograph the orders held are many, and the ship’s architecture integrates them. Class and the state, in the division of decks and in the category of steerage itself, set by law and by fare. Labour and migration, in the people below, travelling as workers travel. The family, in the mothers and children and the domestic work done in the open. The machine, in the ship, its iron and its chains. The observer and the image, in the watchers above and the photographer among them. History by implication, in the great migrations of the years before 1914. What is absent is the sacred order, the inner life of anyone below and the natural order beyond a strip of light; this is the lowest of the twelve, and it is high for the form.
Massive Attack · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The city is held throughout, through sound more than words: the street and its threat in Safe from Harm, the crew in Blue Lines and Five Man Army. Consciousness is held in Daydreaming and in the inwardness of the whole. The couple is held in Unfinished Sympathy and Lately. The world and its inequality enter in Hymn of the Big Wheel, the turning earth with the struggle of some and the ease of others, and the sacred is glimpsed in the hymn and in One Love’s union. Labour, the family, history and the state are absent, or implied only by the city’s mixture of peoples. One sound joins what is there, but the orders are few and more glimpsed than held, and that holds the figure lowest.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Orders held: the household, in a house for each family with its garden; the city, as density, as the street lifted into the air and as the old city across the water; the natural order, in light, sky, river and planted terraces; industry and the machine, in the factory on the site and the house made as a product; and the state, in a federal demonstration at a centennial fair. The section integrates them: the industrial unit makes the house, the stack makes the city, the stagger gives each house its sky. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or thin: work and commerce, for the shops were never built; the school and the institutions of a community; the sacred; history, except as the Mediterranean village quoted; and death. A fragment of housing holds a family’s dwelling and a city’s density, not a world. The figure describes the form.
Ana Mendieta · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body and its sex; the natural order, earth, water, fire and plant, and the seasons that end each piece; death and burial; the sacred, in the ritual cast of the actions and their pre-Columbian and Afro-Cuban sources; history, in the ancient site of Yagul; the nation and exile, in a Cuban woman’s figure laid in Iowa and in Mexico. One figure integrates them, and the integration is achieved, not listed: the tomb at Yagul holds body, death, history and the sacred in one act. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what lies outside the figure: no family except as the mother earth, no labour, no state except in the silence of the absent homeland, no other person. A wide field around one figure, not a world.
Thomas Bohier and Catherine Briçonnet; gallery by Philibert de l'Orme and Jean Bullant · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Six orders are held in the one structure. The natural order, the river built into rather than beside; the household, with kitchens at the waterline, rooms and the routines of a great house; money and the state, in a financier’s ambition and the crown’s seizure for debt; the court and dynastic power, passed between mistress and queen; the sacred, in a chapel of modest scope; and, by later history, war and the line between occupied and free France. More orders are held here than in most houses, and river and house are integrated, not listed. What holds the score lowest is the form: it is a house, not a city, a church or a seat of government, and much of the history it holds is held by the record of the fabric rather than by the structure.
Russian carpenters · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Four orders are held in one structure. The sacred: the Transfiguration, the liturgy, the icons. The community: the parish, its refectory, its graveyard in the pogost. The natural order: the lake, the island and the seasons, the summer church paired with the winter church. Labour: peasant carpentry, the material of the forest made the material of worship. Each is integrated in the building rather than listed. What holds the score lowest is what lies outside: the state and history enter only as context, not in the fabric, and consciousness enters only as the worshipper’s passage from the water to the low room. It is a strong reach for a parish church of one material.
Richard Rogers · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Orders held: commerce and risk, the market as a body of people, built into the Room; the institution and its history, in the bell, the Adam Room and the old front; the machine and labour, in a building whose making and upkeep are its face; the City, its medieval plot and narrow streets answered by the towers; and, faintly, the sacred, in the nave and its relics. One section places them in a single figure, the room within the machine within the City, so they are integrated rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the household, the body except as served by pods, the natural order, the state and death. An office building for one market holds a working world, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
Nok · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: the person and the self, in the head; social rank, in adornment and posture; the body in health and in disease; the animal world, in the animal and composite figures; and, by inference only, the sacred or the dead, in whatever the figures were for and in their deliberate breaking and burial. They are integrated in one figurative convention, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or beyond recovery: no labour shown among the figures known, no narrative, no family as such, no history and no landscape, and the sacred present only by inference. The form sets the limit: a body of single figures cannot hold what a programme of reliefs or a narrative cycle holds. Level with the Ife Heads and the Olmec Colossal Heads at 7.0.
The Walkmen · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held: a man turning from youth toward settling, through drink, travel and vows. The couple is held, in the title and through the songs of loss and return. Time is held as the calendar, holidays counted in years and the new year, and as the long time ahead. Place enters as the bar, the shore, the islands, the country left and the new one. The sacred is evoked in Red Moon’s hymn, and the natural order enters as the sea. What holds the figure: labour, the family beyond the couple, the state and history are absent, and the orders that are present lie close together, joined by one voice.
John Constable · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in river, trees, meadow and sky, given most of the canvas; weather and time, in the midday light and the moving cloud; labour, in the wain, its drivers and the haymakers in the far field; the household, in the cottage, its smoke and the woman at the water; the animal, in the horses and the dog; and a place, one parish of Suffolk, as a settled world. They are integrated: the wain carries the harvest from the field across the stream past the house, so that labour, home and nature are one action. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or muted: no state, no history, no sacred, no consciousness in any figure, and a labour too small and distant to be more than a sign of itself. The figure describes the form.
Grant Wood · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
For a small two-figure panel it holds a good deal, and holds it integrated: the family, in the pair and their relation; labour, in the fork, the overalls and the barn; the sacred, in the pointed arch and the spire; the house and its domestic order, in the plants, the apron and the curtain; and the region and the nation, named in the title. The orders are not listed; they are worn by the two figures and rhymed into one structure. What it does not hold is history in motion, though the panel is dated 1930, the first year of the Depression, and shows nothing of it; society beyond the household; and the natural order beyond a few round trees. High for the form, and the form is small.
Norman Rockwell · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve, and the form explains it. The orders held: childhood, in the one face; race, in the slur and the girl; the state and the law, in the federal marshals and the court order they enforce; education, in the school she walks toward, which is never shown; public violence, in the wall; history, in the morning the picture fixes; and the viewer’s conscience, in the place the frame assigns. One walk integrates them, and the integration is achieved, not listed. What is absent or only implied holds the axis: the family, since her parents are not there, labour, the city, the sacred, the natural order, and any consciousness but the child’s composure, given only from outside. The figure describes the form.
Decimus Burton and Richard Turner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The house holds the natural order, the plants of the tropics and their climate; science, botany and classification and the economic garden; industry, rolled iron, coal and the engineer’s craft; empire, the colonial routes by which the specimens came; and the public, a garden open to the people. These are integrated and not listed: the iron and the fire exist to keep the plants, and the plants are there because of the empire and the science. What holds the axis lowest is everything a house of plants has no room for: the household, the state as such, history, the sacred, death, the inner life. For a building of one purpose the reach is wide, but it is a building of one purpose, and this is its narrowest measure.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 115 minutes holds. The sacred is held, decisively at the close; history enters in the Nazi search for occult power in 1936 and in the Ark’s biblical past; the state, in Army Intelligence and its warehouse; learning and its trade, in the college, the museum and the market in antiquities; love, in the old injury between Jones and Marion; and a debt of fathers, Marion’s father who was Jones’s teacher, in one scene. The orders are present and linked by one object, the Ark, which passes through each of them in turn. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve: consciousness is drawn from outside and stays the same from first scene to last; family, labour, the natural order and the peoples of the lands the film crosses are absent or surfaces; and history is a backdrop to the chase more than an order the film holds.
Talk Talk · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as longing, doubt and something near prayer. Childhood is held, in the choir and the lesson handed down. The natural order is held in the season and the date, spring and April. The sacred is approached in the last piece and in the devotional cast of the words, without a theology. The couple appears in I Don’t Believe in You, and the social world enters only as received wisdom, the maxims of happiness and self-making, held at a distance. What holds the figure: labour, the state, history, place and the family beyond the children are absent, and two of the orders present, the sacred and the social, are glimpsed rather than held.
Sex Pistols · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The state is held, as the Crown in God Save the Queen and the political words of Anarchy in the U.K.; labour and its absence, a generation idle and told it has no future, in Pretty Vacant and Seventeen; commerce, as the record industry in E.M.I. and the holiday trade. History and the Cold War are glimpsed at the Berlin wall; the body is held, harshly, in Bodies; consciousness as one voice of scorn. The family, the sacred except as blasphemy, and the natural order are absent. What holds it lowest is integration: each order is named and spat at in its own song, and only the voice joins them.
Park Chan-wook · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held in one structure: consciousness, in a mind given fifteen years of confinement and then the ruin of its memory; the family, in a daughter lost and found, a brother and sister, a father and child made lovers; sexuality and taboo; memory and its manipulation; the economy, in a private prison sold as a service to anyone who pays, the film’s most pointed social image; history, as fifteen years of news seen on a television in a cell. They are joined in the plot: the cell, the gossip and the incest are one design. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is thin. The state is absent but for a police station; labour and the city are surfaces; the history is a clock rather than a subject; the sacred is absent; the world beyond the two men is slight. The film holds a few orders deeply rather than many together.
Jean Nouvel, with Architecture-Studio · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders held: the city, in the river, the curve of the quai and the cut aimed at Notre-Dame; the diplomatic order of a republic and a league of states; the order of learning, in library, museum and auditorium; the natural order of sun and season the screen was made to answer; and, through geometry, the sacred art of Islam without its worship. They are held in one structure, chiefly through the skin and the cut. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is thin or absent: the sacred is present only as pattern; labour, the family and dwelling are absent; and the natural cycle is held in principle more than in fact while the mechanism is idle. An institute’s envelope holds the meeting of worlds as a figure, and the figure describes the form.
Paula Rego · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: family and generation, in the ring of girl, woman and old woman; sexuality and marriage, in the couples; the self and loss, in the woman apart; the natural order of moon, tide and night; and, faintly, the state, in the building on the rise. One structure, the dance, integrates them; they are not merely listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no sacred order beyond the archetypal, and a state that stays a building in the background rather than a force in the scene. It is a wide domestic world gathered in one ritual, not a society, and the figure describes the form.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders are several: history, in the camp and the year 1944; death, in the bodies burning in the open that the photographs record; the witness, in four images made at mortal risk; the nation, in German memory and its forms; representation itself, in the question of what may be shown; and nature, in the birch wood of the name. One act, the covering, binds them in a single structure. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that they are held almost wholly by reference: none is visible on a surface that shows paint. The person, the family and labour are present only as what the photographs record and the paint conceals, and the sacred only as the rite of burial.
John Wood the Younger · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders held in one structure: the household, thirty times over, and the polite society that joins the households; the speculative economy of the Georgian town, its plots, builders and buyers, visible in the very split of front and back; the city at its edge; and the natural order as prospect, the lawn and the country beyond made part of the dwelling. They are held, not listed: the curve, the common front and the ha-ha join household, society and landscape in one figure. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or hidden: labour, the servants below stairs and at the back, out of sight of the front by design; the state, the sacred, history and death. A residential terrace is a smaller form than a cathedral or a city plan, and the figure describes the form.
Pallava, under Narasimhavarman II · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders held: the sacred, in two gods, their myths, the mountain and the cosmic waters; kingship, in shrines reported to carry the king’s names; the natural order, in the sea, the sunrise and the bedrock taken into the shrine; and the commerce of the coast, through the mariners’ landmark and the port of Mamallapuram. History of a narrow kind is present in the sequence of making. These are held in one structure, by site and orientation, rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent, as the form expects: labour, the family, and consciousness as the novel or the city holds them. It is a small precinct of three cells, and its encompassing is done by site rather than by a programme of rooms; the figure describes the form.
Charles and Ray Eames · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders held: industry and its products, in every column and panel; the household and a marriage; work, held at the same scale as dwelling and facing it; the natural order of a meadow and trees; and the collected world of objects from many cultures. These are integrated, not listed: the frame comes from the factory, the household lives in it, the studio faces it, the trees shade it and the things fill it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, level with The Archetypal Deep, is what is absent: the city, the state, the many and the sacred. Its prototype claim, that the factory house could hold the many, is the order it reached for and did not achieve, and the axis scores the achieved. A house and workshop for two people on a private hillside can encompass only so much, and the figure describes the form.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
For a single figure the orders held are more than usual, and they meet in one image. The person: a young man at a moment of his own life. The family: the title makes him an uncle, so the descendant who paints and the household that kept the photograph are inside the picture. The state and its war: the uniform of the Wehrmacht. History: the German past, carried into a present that was then trying it in court. Death, which the soldier’s uniform and the kept image bring with them. And the image as an order of reality, the photograph as the way the dead are kept. What holds the axis is that most of these are carried by title, costume and what the viewer knows rather than held in the canvas: no labour, no nature, no sacred order, no other person. The figure describes the form.
George Lucas · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. The orders are present: the state, in an Empire whose Emperor has dissolved the Senate, a governor and a war; the sacred, in the Force and the fallen order of its knights; the family, in a lost father, an uncle and aunt and an inherited sword; labour, in the moisture farm, the harvest and the Jawas’ scrap trade; technology as power; and consciousness, in Luke’s longing. The plot integrates them: the father’s sword, the farm’s loss and the Rebellion’s need converge on one boy. What holds the axis low is that each order is a sign rather than a world: the state is a meeting room and a line about the Senate, the sacred a creed stated by an old man, labour a few minutes on a farm, the family two people seen in three scenes. A galaxy is shown, and little of it is entered.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form: one consciousness in collapse and attempted recovery; a beloved who is the frail thing to be kept; the bond of two in We’re in This Together; addiction and the wish to die, by the title of I’m Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally; grief; and in Starfuckers, Inc. a gesture at the culture of fame. The sound and the two-disc frame hold these together, and the length lets the one consciousness be explored at depth. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve: the orders are few, with no family beyond the pair, no labour, state or history, nature only as the sea in an image, and the social world present only as a target of contempt.
Nicholas Ray · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 111 minutes holds. The family is held in three households, each in a different failure: the Starks’ weakness and quarrel, Judy’s father’s withdrawal from his daughter, Plato’s absent parents and the housekeeper who stands in for them. Consciousness is Jim’s chiefly, Plato’s in part, Judy’s thinly. School, police and the law enter; the cosmos enters through the planetarium; death, ordeal and sacrifice through the bluff and the observatory; gender as the film’s governing anxiety about what a man is. Class enters in Plato’s wealth, race only at the edge, in the housekeeper. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, money beyond comfort, the state beyond the precinct, and history are absent, and every order is reached through the family and its children in a single day.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what a chamber film of about ninety-one minutes holds. Consciousness, in four women, each given her memory; the family, in three sisters, a remembered mother and two marriages; the body, in illness, death, sex and self-wounding, held as an order of its own; class and labour, in Anna, who nurses, lays out the dead and is dismissed, and in the husbands’ talk of the estate; the sacred, in the pastor’s prayer, the Pietà and a God the film neither affirms nor denies; time, in the clocks. They are held through Agnes’s dying, not listed. What holds the axis lowest: history is a period setting and nothing more, the state is absent, nature is a park at dawn and a page of the diary, labour is one servant, and the world beyond the house does not exist. The figure describes the form.
Diébédo Francis Kéré · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
For a school of three classrooms the building holds more orders than its size suggests, and holds them in one structure rather than listing them: childhood and learning, in the rooms and the shade; the family and the village, in the labour of the whole community and a maker who was the village chief’s son, went away and came back; labour and the economy, in local earth against imported cement and sheet, and money raised abroad in small gifts; the natural order, in sun, heat, rain and the earth itself, answered in the section; and the post-colonial state’s dependence on outside models of development. What holds the axis at 7.0 is what is absent: the sacred, and history beyond the present generation except as the background of the material. A small form, which the figure describes.
César Pelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Orders held: the state, which wanted the building as its sign; commerce and the oil economy, which paid for it and whose company it houses; the nation and its claim on modernity; the sacred, present as the geometry of Islam made plan, though as identity more than as worship; the city, as skyline and as a new centre on the old racecourse; and the world beyond, in the race with America and in the foreign makers and contractors. The one figure of the gate integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, labour except as the record of a building race, the body, individual consciousness, the natural order, left to the park, and death. An office pair holds a state’s confidence at one moment, and the figure describes the form.
James Cameron · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held: one woman’s trauma and recovery; the family, lost, found and made by choice; the military as an institution; the corporation and the colonial labour of a settlement making a world breathable; a non-human biology with a social order of its own; and, through Bishop, the question of the made person. They are joined, not listed: the corporation’s greed sets the trap, the military’s confidence springs it, and the family is what survives it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is scale. Each order is held at the size of one action over a few days, and the state, history and the sacred are absent or only gestured at.
Antony Gormley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held are more than a single figure usually carries, because the setting brings them in. Labour, in the steel of the figure and the industry of the region. History: the end of heavy industry in the North East, at the time of its building. The body: one man’s, cast from life. The sacred: the angel, and the cruciform stretch of the span. The natural order: the hill, the weather and the sky it is seen against. The polity and the community: a council’s commission, and a public that opposed it and then adopted it. These are held, not listed, but carried by the setting as much as by the object. What holds it lowest: the family, the inward life and the social life of people are absent. The mark describes the form.
Fariborz Sahba · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
How many orders of reality are held in one structure? The sacred is held, in a form that admits several religions at once. The natural order is held as image and as working: the flower, the water, the light, the cooling air. The community is held in the empty room entered from all sides, and the region’s history through the lotus. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent. The state and labour enter only as the history of the building, not as anything it holds; the household, the city and the body’s daily life are outside it. It is a single room for a single purpose under a single figure, and the figure records that form. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
John Bradfield and Ralph Freeman (Dorman Long) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Orders held in one structure: the natural order, the harbour, the sandstone, the tide and the shipping that set the clearance; the city and its plan; labour, the riveters and the dead of the building, in a Depression; the state and its politics, the Public Works, the Premier and the New Guard at the opening; empire and trade, British steel and an English contractor in a dominion; transport in four modes on one deck; and the yearly civic rite of the fireworks. They are integrated more than listed, because the structure answers the harbour and the use binds the city. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the household, the sacred, death and consciousness are present only in history round the bridge, not held in it, and much of what is integrated is integrated by use rather than by form.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held: society, in a company that mixes classes; labour, in the proprietor’s children, who are also serving, and in the boatmen, whose sport is their trade’s leisure face; commerce, in a restaurant; friendship and courtship, in the pairs; the art world, in a collector, a painter-patron and the painter’s circle; appetite, at the table; nature, in river, leaves and sky. They are integrated: the table and the light place every one of them in a single afternoon. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, level with The Archetypal Deep, is what is absent: no state, no history, ten years after the Commune and nothing of it shown, no sacred order, no family as family, and no consciousness beyond glance and mood. The figure describes a form whose subject is an afternoon.
The National · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held fully, in every song a mind under quiet strain. The family is held: marriage in Conversation 16 and Runaway, parenthood in Afraid of Everyone. Money enters as debt in Bloodbuzz Ohio, though labour is absent. Ohio and England give place and origin. The sacred appears as a title, Little Faith, and as the form of the closing hymn; public life touches Afraid of Everyone obliquely; nature, history and technology are absent or glimpsed. The joins are real: one consciousness makes them, and Bloodbuzz Ohio holds love, home and money in one song. What holds the figure is the count and the vantage: the orders are few, and the public ones are seen only from inside the house.
Herzog and de Meuron, with Ai Weiwei and Li Xinggang · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Orders held: the body in contest, on track and field; the crowd, as one ring; the nation and the state, as host, client and image, on the capital’s ceremonial axis; the world, as the Olympic movement it housed; the city, on its axis beside the Water Cube; the natural order, as the image of the nest and the sky cut by the roof. The ring, the shell and the axis join crowd, state and world in one figure, so these are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, at 7.0, is what is absent or present only as cost: the labour that built it; the households cleared across the city for the Games; the sacred; the household and the inner life. A stadium holds an event and a nation’s presentation of itself, and the figure describes the form.
Tang, under Emperor Gaozong · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The orders held are wide: the sacred, in relics, sutras and the cosmic axis; the state, in an imperial foundation and imperial texts in its base; the family, in a temple founded for a dead mother; learning, in Xuanzang’s translations and the names of the examined; and the city it overlooks. What holds the axis, the lowest of the twelve, is how they are held. They gather by history and use around a laconic form more than they are integrated in its structure. The building is a tower, and a tower holds them as an emblem rather than as a world.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The orders the film holds are held through one woman: her consciousness, given in full; labour, the trade of the Passeggiata with its rivalries and its rates; property and money, the little house, the savings, the sale; the sacred, in the pilgrimage and its commerce; spectacle and celebrity, in Lazzari and the stage; class, from the borgata to the Via Veneto; love and the promise of marriage. Each is reached through Cabiria and none is listed. What holds the axis lowest is absence. The family is missing, since she has none that the film shows; the state appears as a policeman at most; history is not entered; the natural order is a lake and a wood at the close. Charity and the poor, which the cut sequence would have added, the release lacks.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what a feature film holds. The family is held fully, across three households and two generations, with a death at the start and a birth long ago at the centre. Labour is specific: a box factory, street sweeping, a photographic business, a professional practice. Class is held as lived difference, in houses, speech and money, and race as a fact of a city. The state enters once, in the adoption records and the social worker. Consciousness is shared, most fully Cynthia’s and Maurice’s, and all of it is one movement. What holds the figure at 7.0: history is absent, the sacred enters only at a graveside, the natural order and the wider city scarcely appear, and race is declared and then set aside.
Ai Weiwei · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The orders held are several, and they are integrated in one object. Labour: the workshops, the hands, the economy of a town. The state: the people as a mass, the imagery of the sun and the sunflower. History: a thousand years of Jingdezhen porcelain, the Cultural Revolution, the export trade. The global market: “Made in China”, the commodity, and later the work’s own sale by weight. Food and hunger: the seed as the shared snack of hard years. These are held, not listed, because each seed carries all of them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only implied: no family, no nature beyond the image of a plant, no sacred order, no single person but the anonymous many. A larger world than most single objects hold, bounded by one gesture.
Maya (Puuc) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Orders held in one structure: the sacred, as mountain, cave and summit sanctuary; the natural order, as rain and a riverless plain’s dependence on it, built into the stair; the state, as the city’s tallest work, raised and renewed by its rulers and commanding the view over the Nunnery and the palace; and history, as the building’s own past carried inside it, five campaigns in one mass. They are integrated, not listed: the burial of earlier temples is the device that holds history and the sacred together. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is thin or absent. The household and labour are present only as the anonymous effort the mass implies, and the sky is evoked rather than built, since no alignment to it is documented. A pyramid holds a few orders powerfully; the figure describes the form.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds. Two hours give room, and it holds more than one consciousness: the solitary young self in rage and longing, which is its ground; the family in glimpses, as in the domestic tenderness of Thirty-Three; love and its loss; death faced as sleep; and a cosmic register of stars and oceans. These are present more than integrated. Labour, the state, history and the social world beyond the self barely enter, and the cosmic register is atmosphere rather than an order of reality held in structure. The long form allows more than this record achieves, though it reaches further than most single albums of its kind. That is what holds the figure lowest, level with The Inevitable.
Dolly Parton · Music
7.6 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds. The title song alone integrates several orders in one structure of a few minutes: the family, in the mother; labour and poverty, in a coat made by hand from rags; the community and its judgment, in the schoolchildren; the sacred, in the Bible story told as she sews; and the consciousness of a child who holds her own valuation against theirs. Across the album further orders appear track by track: the couple and its betrayals, madness in “If I Lose My Mind”, the natural world in “Early Morning Breeze”, a social hope in “A Better Place to Live”. What holds the axis lowest is that these are added more than joined, and the state and history are absent.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The orders held in one structure: the family, in fathers, mothers, sisters, a marriage and a child, with the father’s authority as the last sanction; sexuality and fidelity; labour, in the shop, Olga’s wages, the road menders and the boy who works the railway at dawn, set against men who do not work; class, in the idlers’ contempt; religion, in the shop of religious goods, the angel, the nuns and the monks; art and its vanity, in Leopoldo’s play, the touring variety show and the old actor; the province against the city; the sea and the seasons. What holds it lowest: consciousness is rendered from outside, through behaviour; the state and history, with the war only eight years gone, are nearly absent; and the sacred is merchandise. It is a provincial chronicle’s scope, held together.
Alex Garland · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 109 minutes holds. The state, in its collapse and its President; war and its forms, militias, regular forces and the press; labour and vocation, the photographer’s trade and its ethics, handed from one generation to the next; the nation as a landscape of cities, towns, farms, forests and monuments; and consciousness, Lee’s above all, given through face and sound. They are integrated: the road binds them, and the vocation is the lens through which the state is seen. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is what the design excludes: politics as cause, the family, spoken of and never shown, faith, and the ordinary life of the people the war passes through, who appear as tableaux.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held, the anxious, fragmented self of the first half. The couple is held in The Lightning and the family in Unconditional I, a parent speaking to a child. Society and its media are present as the feed and the rabbit hole; history as the empire’s end; the natural order and the cosmos as the storm and the black hole. That is a wide span for forty minutes, wider than most albums attempt, and the frame of I and WE joins several of these orders. What holds the figure is integration: history and the state are evoked as frame rather than held as subject, the cosmos enters for one short track and leaves, and the sacred is absent or only implied.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Orders held: commerce and finance, in the offices; travel and the city’s movement, in the station beneath; hospitality, in the hotel and restaurants; the household, in the apartments, thinly lived; the public and the city as a whole, made visible from the gallery; foreign capital and a foreign state as owners; and the natural order, in the sky and the weather the glass takes. More orders than one hall holds, joined by the section rather than listed. What holds the axis is that they are stacked, not interwoven, and that the absent orders are many: labour, except as office work; the sacred, except as the spire’s distant echo of the churches; history, except as what the tower was set against; death and the body. The figure describes the form.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged at its own scale, as a single story. Held in one structure: the artist and his art; the body, starving; the market and its impresario; the public and the history of its taste; the sacred, in the ascetic pattern; the animal, in the panther; and death. They are integrated, not listed: the fast joins them all, and each order is one more thing the fast is taken for. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the count and the vantage: the family, labour beyond the trade, the state, the natural order and the inner life of anyone but the artist are absent, and the artist himself is an emblem without a past. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, a self regarding itself; the sacred, in the schema of the holy face and the doctrine of the image of God; art and labour, in the hand and the named colours; social rank, in the fur and the gentleman’s dress claimed by a craftsman’s son; the city, in “Noricus”; time and mortality, in the stated age and the date at the half-millennium. One structure integrates them, the face as icon. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no state, no nature, no history beyond a date, no other person. It is a single half-length figure on a panel under half a metre wide, and the figure describes the form.
Robert Schumann · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders the work holds are held by its one law: consciousness, as self-aware feeling; erotic love; the natural order, as flowers, nightingales, the Rhine and the summer garden, all of them signs; the sacred, in Cologne cathedral and the Virgin’s image, made a vessel for the beloved; the social, at its edge, in the wedding and the comic triangle; art itself, in the songs that are buried. What holds the axis here is absence, and most of the list is absent: labour, the state, history and the family do not appear, and mortality enters only as metaphor. A half hour for one voice holds one love and the mind that remembers it. Below Winterreise (7.7), whose winter world is the whole surface and whose outsider is social, and below the Goldberg Variations (7.4).
Franz Schubert · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The rubric does not adjust for a form’s limits. A wordless solo sonata holds few orders, and holds them together: consciousness, in serenity, dread, grief and play; mortality and time, in the suspended tempo and the trill; the sacred, faintly, in the hymn of the opening; the social, in the dance of the Scherzo and the Viennese song inflection of the themes; the natural order, by figure only, in a form often heard as landscape. The family, labour, the state and history do not appear. One mind and its weather. This is what holds the axis lowest: the instrument and the form hold one consciousness. Held below Op. 131, at 7.3, whose four voices make a society in miniature that a single piano does not, and below Winterreise, at 7.7.
Francis Bacon · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body, as the work’s whole matter, flesh, neck and mouth; pain, consciousness reduced to its edge; the sacred, present as an absence, the cross withheld; myth, the Greek order of blood-guilt laid on the Christian one; the animal, since the figures stand between beast and human; and history, the war, present only as the pressure of the date and in no sign. They are integrated: one structure, the altarpiece without its victim, places each. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state, no natural order, no person who can be named, no world beyond the three fields. A small triptych holds few orders by its form, and the figure describes the form.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, river, meadow, trees, season and flood, which is the house’s subject; individual consciousness, as solitude and contemplation, one person alone in a room open to the world; the body, in the services gathered at the core, the bath, the hearth, the bed; industry and technique, the material of the steel age made into a dwelling; and the sacred as form only, the temple without a god. The section places each, so they are integrated rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, labour (there is no service and no servant), the city, the state, history and death. A weekend house for one holds a single life’s leisure in nature, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
Alain Resnais · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 94 minutes holds. Consciousness, held as memory and its persuasion, is held deeply; desire and coercion, a marriage or a guardianship, and a leisure class in its rituals are integrated with it; art and its forms, the play, the statue and the photographs X offers, are part of the structure. What keeps this the lowest axis is what the film excludes by design: labour, the state, history and the natural order are absent, and the sacred appears only as an underworld implied. The exclusion of history is itself a meaning, a film of 1961 set in a hotel where nothing from outside arrives, but the axis scores what is held, not what is pointedly left out. A small world, held tightly.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: a consciousness, rendered through the face; the state and the Church, one office, in the robes and the throne; the sacred, as the office’s claim, worn rather than shown; the business of power, in the paper; and the painter’s own relation to his sitter, the one who looks back. They are integrated by the single red and the single gaze. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour, no history beyond what the viewer brings, no natural order, no other person. It is a portrait of one man, and the figure describes the form, a little above Fragonard’s Swing for the weight of the orders it holds.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve, and the form holds it there. The orders held: the natural order, in the glade, the trees and the sea; eros, in the couple and the recliners; music, in the piper; community and festival, in the ring; pastoral labour, lightly, in the herdsman; and by implication the ages of man, since the Golden Age is a figure of time. They are held in one field and one rhythm, integrated rather than listed. Absent by design: work as it is lived, the state, history, the city, death, and the sacred except as nature. A pastoral holds the world by leaving most of it out, and this one does so on principle; the range of activity in the glade sets it a little above the single motif.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: the natural order, in rock, mountain, cloud and weather; consciousness, in the one who looks and whose looking is the subject; and, by implication only, the sacred, in a height and a vastness the picture neither names nor builds. They are integrated: the converging slopes and the fog place each, and the self is set in nature as its measure. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is nearly everything else the rubric lists: no family, no labour, no settlement, no state, no other person, and no history, since the costume brings history to the viewer and not into the image. The Starry Night, in a field of similar size, holds a village, a church and a cosmos, and its Encompassed stands at 7.4. The figure describes the form.
U2 · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Six orders are present: public history and its violence, in Pride, MLK and the title’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki; addiction, in Bad; the sacred, in Pride’s Judas and A Sort of Homecoming; home and Ireland, in that song and Promenade; America as myth, in Elvis Presley and America and, by its title alone, 4th of July; and weather, in Indian Summer Sky. What holds the figure here is the join. Nothing lets the addict, the martyr and the fire of 1945 bear on one another; labour, the family and the state are absent; the political appears only as assassination.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held in one half-length: consciousness, a mind caught in attention; the natural order, in a wild creature held and tamed; the court and its power, in the lord’s emblem in a young woman’s arms and in the fashion of the Milanese court; the erotic and the bond of keeping, implied in who she was and whose emblem she holds; and a moral order, in the emblem of purity. They are integrated in one gesture, the hand on the animal. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state as structure, no history, no sacred order beyond an emblem, and no setting at all. One person and one creature, below The Starry Night at 7.4, which gives its field to the cosmos. The figure describes the form.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, in six separate faces; office and the civic order, the guild as an organ of the city’s self-government; labour and trade, the cloth whose quality these men certified, present only as the occasion; social rank, between the syndics and their servant; and the moral order, judgment and accountability. The one moment of judgment integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no women, no nature, no history beyond the year, no state above the guild, and no sacred order, unless one reads the men’s confessions into their faces, which the picture does not ask. It is a board at its table, more than a single figure or a landscape holds, and the figure describes the form.
Roman · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and they are integrated in one section. The natural order: river, gorge, flood and gravity. The state: the empire’s power over a province’s land and water. The city, whose baths and fountains are the bridge’s reason, though they lie fifty kilometres off. Labour, in the blocks, the quarry and the assembly marks. History, in the second life as a crossing and the place the bridge took in the Enlightenment’s idea of Rome. Water above, river below, the state’s line laid across nature. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the sacred, the household, the body, consciousness and death; and the life of the city, which it serves, lies outside the unit, at the other end of the aqueduct. A conduit holds less than a temple or a palace.
Chris Marker · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 28 minutes holds, and the low mark describes the form. Consciousness, held through one man’s memory; love, a whole affair in a few meetings; war and the state, a destroyed capital and a camp of victors and prisoners; science, in the experiments; history, an undated past and an imagined future; the natural order, in the museum’s animals and a tree’s rings; and death, which the whole structure is built to reach. They are integrated, since the war, the love and the death are one loop. What holds it lowest of the twelve: everything is given in outline and at a stroke, the woman’s consciousness is withheld, labour, the family and the sacred are present only as figure, and the future is a sketch.
Thelonious Monk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Consciousness is held: one singular mind, heard most fully alone in “I Surrender, Dear”. The small society of the band is held, and held in strain, which is more than most records hold of it: players meeting a demand and partly failing it. Friendship and patronage are held in two titles and a portrait. The inheritance is carried: the blues, the stride behind the solo, the popular song of 1931, and with them, unstated, African American musical history. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the family, labour, the state, the sacred and the natural order do not appear, and patronage is drawn as affection, not as an order of society. A wordless record of forty-three minutes holds what it holds.
Bill Evans Trio · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held, in the inward attention of the ballads. The small society is held: three equals, no leader in the sound, the individual and the group integrated in every performance, which is the record’s achievement. The public world is present as a room, the club audible behind the music, an order of reality a studio record could not hold. Grief is held in the dirge, and the child’s dream glimpsed in the waltz, but only by title and tune. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the family, labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order do not appear, and the blues tradition is fainter here than on Kind of Blue. A wordless forty-two minutes holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.
Can · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as trance, dissolution and return. The body is held, through the groove. The group, five people making one mind, is held fully, and it is the record’s social order. The sacred is evoked in Aumgn, the syllable and the rite, and in the magic of the title, glimpsed more than held. Domestic life enters once, at the very end, in a request for coffee or tea. The state, history, labour, the family and the natural order are absent, and the record does not reach for them. A few orders, joined by method rather than by a person or a world: that is what holds the figure lowest, under Low at 7.2 and above m b v at 6.6.
Built for Yajnavaraha · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held are the sacred and its cosmology; the royal court and its servants, a Brahmin’s foundation under two kings, recorded in its inscriptions; myth as narrative; and the forest and water of the site. They are integrated, not listed: the cosmology governs the plan, the myths speak from the gateways, and the court is present as the patron who built at his own measure. What holds the axis lowest, at 6.9, is that the form is small and the patron’s world narrow: the temple holds less of a society’s life than the royal temple-mountains or the city temples, and labour, the state as such and the common worshipper are hardly present. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held in the one structure: the body and its illness; love and its loss; sexuality, and the politics of a plague years from any cure in 1991; commerce, in mass-produced sweets, consumption, ownership and purchase; the institution and its duties; and the sacred, through the structure of communion. They are integrated, because one act, taking a sweet, touches all of them at once. What holds the axis lowest is the form: a pile and a rule cannot hold history, labour, the state or the natural order except by implication, and the family appears only as the couple. A low mark on a small form describes the form. It stands above Fountain and the Water Lilies here, because more orders are held, and held as one.
DJ Shadow · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as solitude, memory and grief, and the night is its place. The history of recorded music is held as material, decades of it, and as a subject, the archive and what a culture throws away. The market enters through the joke about hip hop and money and through the discarded records themselves. The dream and a vague apocalypse are evoked through the Transmissions. The couple, the family, labour, the state and the sacred are absent, or glimpsed only in the tone of the choral passages. Three orders are integrated and one evoked, and that sets the figure lowest of the twelve.
Gustave Caillebotte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the city as built order, its planning shown as a structure that arranges people; class, in the dress, the quarter and the leisure of the walkers; the couple, as a social unit; consciousness, in the averted gazes and the private enclosure under each umbrella; the weather and the light, the natural order brought into the street. The geometry integrates them; they are placed, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour at most at the far edges, the state present only in its streets, history only as the new city, the sacred not at all, and no event. It is a large canvas of one moment in one quarter, and the mark describes the form.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and each is reached through the couple: consciousness, deeply, in both principals; marriage and sexuality, at the centre; work, as each profession mirrors the marriage, Marianne a lawyer in family law who hears other people’s divorces, Johan an academic whose poems a colleague judges; the generations, in the obligatory Sunday dinners with parents and Marianne’s talk with her mother; class, the Swedish professional household of its time. None is merely listed. What is held weakly keeps the axis lowest, and by design: the couple’s two daughters are spoken of far more than seen; the state and history are absent; the sacred, which Bergman’s earlier work could not leave alone, is gone without trace; the natural order is a frame of images of Fårö. The figure records a chosen narrowness and does not compensate for it.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Consciousness is held, in an inner life saved by a song; the household in Sweet Jane’s couple and the suburb of Rock & Roll; the medium itself, in the radio that is the record’s subject; show business and its ruin in New Age; poverty and the street in Oh! Sweet Nuthin’; a broken love in Who Loves the Sun and a devotion in I Found a Reason. The radio joins several of them, and in Rock & Roll the suburb, the city and the medium meet in one song. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the orders arrive song by song, labour is touched only in a clerk’s job and the street, the state and history are absent, the sacred is a hymn’s tone, and the second side adds little to the span.
Woody Allen · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 96 minutes can hold. Love, friendship, marriage and divorce; the work of art and the work of commerce, in Isaac’s television job, Yale’s unwritten book on O’Neill and Mary’s novelisations; the culture of a class; and a city. They are integrated: the city is the frame in which the private failures are set, and the culture is the medium in which they are committed. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside that milieu. Labour appears only as profession; the state is absent; history enters only as nostalgia; the sacred is absent; the natural order is the weather and a planetarium’s moon. A comedy of manners in one milieu, well made at its size, and the size is modest; it clears its own floor by a good margin.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Six orders are held: the machine and its technology, the jet age built into image and section; commerce and the corporation, an airline’s name made a place; the public in motion, the crowd as passengers and audience; the body, moving through a shaped space, rising, waiting, turning; the city’s threshold to the world, the airport as a modern gate; and, faintly, the sky and the field beyond the glass. They are integrated in one passage from curb to aircraft, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the household, labour, which is hidden behind the counters and below the floor, the state, the sacred, history and death. A terminal holds a moment of departure and a period’s confidence, and the figure describes the form.
Joseph Maria Olbrich · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders held: art and its institution, the society and its exhibitions, built into plan and section; the city, the building set against the academy and the Ringstrasse; the generations, the young leaving the old house, carried by the myth of the sacred spring; the sacred, as borrowed form for art; and the natural order, as laurel, tree and owl. The threshold and the crown place these in one figure, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, labour, the state except as the authority left behind, death, and the life of the city beyond art. An exhibition house holds a movement’s claim at one moment, and the figure describes the form.
Jordan Peele · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: consciousness, in Chris and in the Sunken Place, where two consciousnesses share one body; the family, in the Armitages and in Chris’s mother; history, in slavery and the auction; the economy, in the body as commodity and the bidders’ wealth; medicine and science, in the surgeon and the operation on the brain; the state, in the officer on the road, the police station and the flashing lights; friendship, in Rod. The plot integrates them: the weekend, the sale and the surgery are one act. What holds the axis lowest is the narrowness of the vessel: everything is held through one weekend, one house and one man; the sacred is absent but for the ritual of a tea set; labour is servitude only; and the white world is a single type at a party.
Daniel Burnham · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders held: the market in land and its leftovers, which made the shape; the street plan of the city, grid and old road, which the building holds in its plan; office labour, in its floors; commerce and shopping at its base, on the Ladies’ Mile; and the weather of the city, made visible at its corner. They are integrated in one figure, and the site carries more of them than the building does. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, the sacred, the state, death, and the natural order except as wind and the trees of the square. A speculative office tower holds a narrow world, and holds it with less programme than the Chrysler Building, which celebrates its client’s product and argues in its lobby.
Peter of Illyria, under Pope Celestine I · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: the sacred, in the altar and the way toward it; the Church as a social body, in the congregation of nave and aisles and in the Jews and gentiles of the inscription; the city and its history, in the classical colonnade taken into the Church; and the natural order, in the daylight the room is built to receive. The state enters only through the bishop’s primacy named in the inscription. Labour, the family and consciousness do not enter. A single hall of one purpose holds a few orders cleanly, and that is what holds the axis, the lowest of the twelve. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Roman, under Augustus · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held are four. The sacred: the god’s house and its threshold. The state and the dynasty: the honorands of the inscription and the Augustan order. The city and its civic square, at the head of the forum. And, by its place, the meeting of Rome and Gaul. They are held together in the form, not listed: the podium is at once a religious, civic and political instrument. What holds the axis low is the size and singleness of the form: with the forum lost, the city is held only by inference, and consciousness, labour, the family and the natural order hardly enter. A low figure on a small form describes the form; it clears its own floor.
Peter Gabriel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The sacred is held fully, as suffering, ecstasy and sacrament, and across several faiths at once. The body is held through the Passion’s wounds and through dance and trance in Zaar. The natural order is evoked by title and sound: sand, breath, night, shadow, a wilderness. Community is held in the rite and the shared meal. What holds the figure at its lowest: consciousness is held only as states, doubt, trouble, dread, and never as a person; the state, labour, history and the family are absent or present only by the story’s inheritance. One frame joins what is there, but it holds few orders, and most of them by title.
Howard Hawks · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held in one structure: the press as a trade and an industry; the state, in a mayor, a sheriff, a governor’s reprieve and the gallows; the law and capital punishment; politics, in an election and a red scare; marriage and the family, in a divorce, a remarriage and Bruce’s mother; class and respectability, in the insurance man from Albany; and the woman’s work set against the woman’s place. The farce integrates them: the hanging, the election and the remarriage are one night’s plot. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: consciousness is all surface, at speed, with no interior; the sacred is absent and the natural world does not appear; Williams and Mollie are held as victims rather than as lives; and the city is one room. A comedy of 92 minutes holds much for its form, and the figure records the form’s ceiling.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Orders held: music and the community that performs and hears it, in the room built round the orchestra; the civic public, in the street, the foyers and the garden; the city, given a centre on its hill and a figure on its skyline; family and memory, in a widow’s gift and the rose fountain made for her; money and patronage, in the Disney fortune and the long campaign that rescued the work; the natural order, faintly, in the garden and the sky on the steel. The section places music at the core and the public round it, so these are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour; the state, except as the County’s garage; the sacred; the body beyond the listener; and the history of Bunker Hill before the hall. The figure describes the form.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
What orders does the building hold in one structure? The city and its plan, L’Enfant’s diagonal made a building; the nation’s institutions, a national gallery on the Mall facing the Capitol; the public, in the court as a gathering place; scholarship, in the study centre joined to the galleries across one line; art, as the purpose; and history, in the answer to Pope’s building across the street. These are integrated, not listed, through the site’s geometry. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the sacred, the natural order, labour, the family, and the self as anything but a visitor. For a single building the reach is moderate.
Andrew Haigh · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 105 minutes holds, with no discount for the form, which the figure describes. Adam’s consciousness, held from inside through form; the family, a mother, a father and their only child, across the gap of death; sexuality and love, two men of different generations; a social history, the 1980s of the fear of AIDS and its long shadow in one man’s life; the city, a near-empty tower in a London of new building; work, a screenwriter who cannot write. They are integrated: the family, the history and the love are one wound. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour and the state are present only as background, the natural order and the sacred enter only as image at the close, and the world outside Adam’s four people is all but absent. A small form held tightly.
Interpol · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as a man’s desires and the poses he takes up to manage them; the couple is held, in the lover addressed from song to song; the city is present as a setting of night, temptation and exposure, and the flight from the town to it is offered at the start. Within that scope the integration is real: the private pose and the public city are one sound. What holds it lowest of the twelve is that the orders held are few and closely joined. Labour, the family, history, the state, the sacred and the natural order are absent, and the city is a backdrop rather than an order of reality the record holds in structure.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The film holds the family, a marriage, two children and the bargaining of each; a profession, the hospital with its hierarchy and its alibis; justice as a law of exchange; the sacred, as a myth, a rite and a sacrifice; and the body, heart, legs, appetite and blood from the eyes. These are joined: the body is where the law is enforced, and the family is where the sacrifice is chosen. What keeps the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent. There is no society beyond the house and the hospital; the city is empty; history, and work beyond medicine, do not appear; and Martin’s world, a widowed mother, a television, a dead father, is a sketch. A chamber piece that reaches beyond its size and stops short of the larger orders.
Fleet Foxes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. The natural order is held fully: sun, mountains, winter, woods, birds, rain. The family is present and integrated: the brother in two songs, the grandfather’s table and the house in “Oliver James”. Death is held in “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” and touched in “Your Protector” and “Oliver James”. The sacred is evoked through the hymn and the round more than held as a subject, and community is held through the form itself. What holds the axis lowest: labour enters only as the peasant of a title and a made table, and the state and history are absent, the record’s older country being placed deliberately outside time. Three orders held, two evoked, joined by one sensibility longing for home.
Beach House · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form, and the axis is the lowest of the twelve. Consciousness is held, as longing. The couple is held, the love song’s “I” and “you”, across many songs. Glamour, cinema and fame appear as images, superstar, masquerade, illusion, with no world behind them. What holds the axis there is absence: the family, labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order do not appear, unless a sunset and some bells count. One mood joins what is present, and what is present is close to one order seen from many angles. The double length adds time, not orders. A narrow world, held whole.
Buena Vista Social Club · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds. Love, mostly lost or remembered, is held fully, and age with it, carried by who sings rather than by what is sung. The countryside and its labour enter in El carretero and Chan Chan; the social life of the city in the dance forms and in the title, a members’ club of Havana; the nation in La bayamesa; desire as fire in Candela and El cuarto de Tula. History is present only by implication: a repertoire from before the revolution sung in 1996, in the hardship of the Special Period, which the record never mentions. The sacred, Afro-Cuban religion, the state and the family as a structure are absent. The orders arrive song by song and are joined by the ensemble and by age, not integrated by an argument. A record of songs holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.
Stuart Rosenberg · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 126 minutes holds. The state is held as a penal institution with its full hierarchy, captain, bosses, trusties and walking bosses, and its law; labour as the gang’s work on the roads, with its rhythms and pleasures; the community of men, with its rivalries, its gambling and its need for a hero; the family in one visit and a telegram; the sacred in the church and the Christ figure; war in Luke’s medals, mentioned and left unexplored. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve: consciousness is rendered from outside by design, Luke’s inner life withheld; women are nearly absent but as a mother and a fantasy; history and the society that fills the prison, race in a Southern road camp among it, are left out of frame; nature is heat and swamp, a setting rather than an order.
Alex Proyas · Film
7.6 · Tier III
How many orders of reality does the film hold in one structure? Love and its loss; the dead and the living, through the crow and the graves; a child’s need and an adult’s duty, in Sarah and Eric, and in Sarah’s mother drawn back from drugs; the law and its failure, through Albrecht, demoted for pursuing the case; and the city’s corruption under one master. These are held on one line, with grief as the joint, and they are integrated, not merely named. What holds the figure lowest is how lightly most of them are held: the city’s crime is emblem rather than society, the law is one man, the sacred is a church and a myth, and the family is a sketch. A film of about a hundred minutes on a revenge spine is not asked to encompass a world, and the figure describes the form.
David Childs (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
Orders held: commerce, in the offices; the state, as a public authority builds the tower and the police set its ground floor; the nation, in a founding date given in feet; the city, in its skyline and its economy; death and memory, in the lost towers measured into plan and section and the memorial at its feet; and broadcast media, on the mast. That is more than an office tower usually holds. They are placed in one structure more than held in one form: memory and commerce sit side by side, the sacred is left to the memorial, and the household, labour and the natural order are absent. The figure sets the reach of the orders against the thinness of their joining.
Claude Debussy · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The orders held are few. The natural order is held entire, light, water and wind as one physics; time, as a day and as the cycle of return; perception, the consciousness that hears the sea, implied in every bar and never named. The sacred enters only as the sublime of the elements and is not held as such. The orders present are held together, not listed, and the natural order is held as completely as in any orchestral work. What holds the axis here is absence, by design: the human figure, the family, labour, the state, history and the social world do not appear. One order held completely is still one order, and the figure says so.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held: desire, in the god’s pursuit; the divine, in a god who cannot have what he wants; the natural order, in a woman becoming a tree and rooting in rock; the body, as flesh and its loss; art and its honour, in the laurel that will be the poet’s crown; and, by the couplet, a Christian moral of vanity. The change integrates them in one figure. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, for Peneus, the river father who answered her prayer, is not there; no state, no labour, no history; consciousness only as fear and as unknowing. A two-figure group can hold no more, and the mark describes the form.
Donatello · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body, in its age, hunger and decay; the sacred, as penance and prayer; consciousness, in the face and in the intention of the hands; time, in a life read backward from its end, beauty to ruin; the legend and its scripture, the sinner and the saved; and, by its place, the city’s baptismal church and the community that came to it. They are integrated in one figure. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state, no natural order beyond the desert the figure implies, and no company. A single standing saint is the form, and the mark describes the form.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
A small form, scored as it is. The garden holds the natural order: stone, water given as gravel, moss, and the trees beyond the wall. It holds the sacred, as the garden of a Zen hall and a ground of meditation; consciousness, for its subject is perception; and, faintly, labour, in the daily raking and in the names reported on one stone. The orders it holds are integrated, not listed, and that lifts it. What holds the axis lowest is what stays outside: the state, the family and history are absent, or present only as context. The Hosokawa foundation and the Ōnin War are the temple’s history, not the garden’s matter, and a form’s limits are not compensated.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: art, in the painter’s own works, a career shown in a ring; labour, since the studio is a place of work and the crayons are on the table; consciousness, in the room as a mind with its maker absent; time, in the clock without hands and in works made over thirteen years; the body, in the nudes of the depicted canvases and sculptures, at second hand; the natural order, in the plant and in the landscapes and sea within the pictures. The red integrates them as one place. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no society, no state, no history, no sacred, and no person in the room; most orders are present only as pictures within the picture. It holds more than an abstract field, because there is a self in it. The figure describes the form.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held are five: the sacred, as a place and not a doctrine; consciousness, in the viewer, whose attention is the work’s medium; death, in the darkness and in the room’s use as a place of mourning; the community of creeds, gathered in one room with no sign that belongs to any; and the natural order, entering only as light, the day and the weather over the skylight. One structure places each, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is nearly everything else: no history, no family, no labour, no state, no body, no story. The room does not hold many orders of reality; it holds a place into which the viewer brings their own. The figure describes the form’s choice.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, in the girl’s inward gaze and the woman’s grief; the family, a sister, an older woman of the house, and the absent painter who remembers; illness and death; memory and time, held in the surface itself; and faintly the sacred, through a devotional vocabulary emptied of its promise. They are integrated, not listed: family and memory are what the surface is about. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside the room. Labour, the state, the social world of the disease and the natural order are absent or only implied. For a single easel painting of two figures this is a good holding, above Water Lilies at 6.5 and Broadway Boogie Woogie at 6.6, which hold fewer human orders. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Pérotin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
A liturgical form of about twelve minutes, mostly melisma, cannot hold the orders a novel or an opera holds, and the figure says so rather than compensating. What it holds, it holds together: the sacred, as the whole ground; the liturgy and the community that sings it, soloists and choir in alternation; the cosmos and the nations, all the ends of the earth, in the text and in the sonority; time and eternity, in the tenor under the measure; and the building, which the sound was made to fill. What holds the axis here is absence: consciousness, the family, labour, the state and history do not appear, and the human person is present only as one of the voices. The figure describes the form.
Andrea del Verrocchio · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the individual, in the face and the will; the animal, in a horse fully realised as a creature; war, in the armour and the stride; the state, in the commission, the placement and the bargain they record; the city, in the square, the confraternity and the church that frame the group; history, in the condotta as an institution. They are integrated in one structure, chiefly through the setting and the commission, which the bronze carries. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what a single rider cannot hold: the family, labour, the sacred (the church stands beside the statue, not in it), the natural order beyond the horse, and any consciousness other than one temper. The mark describes the form.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a single short poem holds; a low mark on a small form describes the form. Consciousness, fully, in its paralysis. The sacred, in the prayer, the rose and death’s kingdoms. The communal, in the chorus of “we”. History by implication: the condition after the war, and the end of the world as the poem’s last subject. Death and what lies past it, in the Dantean frame. Childhood and custom, in the guy and the nursery rhyme. They are integrated, joined by the one condition of hollowness. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, near its own floor, is the count and the mode: labour, the family, the state, the natural order and the body are absent or glimpsed only as landscape, and history is never present as event, only as the mood it left.
Henri Rousseau · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held in one field: the natural order, in the lion, the desert, the water and the hills; the cosmic, in the moon and the night; the human individual, in the sleeper; art, in the mandolin; the means of a life, in the jar and staff of a wanderer; and consciousness, in sleep and dream, which the whole picture enacts. They are integrated: each is placed by the one held moment. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is most of what the rubric names: no family, no labour beyond the road the jar implies, no society, no state, no history, and the sacred only as a pattern the viewer brings. Two figures and a landscape on about 2.6 square metres. The figure describes the form.
Paul Valéry · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a book of lyrics holds, and what it holds it holds deeply. Consciousness above all. The body, in “La Pythie”, “La Dormeuse” and “Les Pas”. The natural order: the sea, the plane tree, the palm, the pomegranate, the bee. The sacred in its classical and biblical figures, the oracle and Eden. Death and the dead, in the graveyard by the sea. Inside the major poems these are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis at 6.8, the lowest of the twelve, is what is absent: the family, labour, the state, history and the shared social world. A book written in Europe in the years just after the war holds no trace of it, except perhaps as absence.
Television · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as expectancy, nerves and dread. The city is held as night, light and signs. Love is glimpsed in Venus and Guiding Light; death in the graveyard of the title song and in Torn Curtain; the sacred in Elevation and the rent veil, glimpsed more than held. The detective of Prove It brings the city’s crime and law into view as a figure, and the band’s interplay holds one social form, two players as equals. What holds the figure lowest on the page is how few orders there are and how lightly most are held: labour, the family, the state, history and the natural order beyond the night sky are absent, and one consciousness in one city at night joins the rest. The figure describes the record’s chosen narrowness.
Robert Maillart · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in the gorge, rock, forest and weather the structure answers; labour and craft, in a mountain road built with local carpenters and builders; technology and calculation; and the state in its smallest form, a public road for a village. They are held together, not listed: the bridge is where the village meets the valley, and its form is where the rock meets the load. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what a bridge cannot hold. It is a short form among buildings: no dwelling, no rite, no history beyond its own passage, no interior where consciousness is housed. The figure describes the form and is no failure of it.
Elvis Presley · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Desire and the couple are held throughout: the courtship of “I Got a Woman”, the jilting of “One-Sided Love Affair”, the pursuit of “Trying to Get to You”. Youth as a social order is held in the sound more than the words, the dance and its clothes in “Blue Suede Shoes”; money enters lightly in “Money Honey”. The South and its two musics are held unstated in the voice, the record’s widest order, and it is wide: region and the colour line meet in one manner of singing. Consciousness is reached once, in the loneliness of “Blue Moon”. What holds the figure: labour, the family beyond the couple, the state, the sacred despite the gospel in the voice, and the natural order are absent, and what is present is reached through courtship and the dance.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the trained and labouring body of a child; labour, in the Opéra’s school as an economy; class, the girl of a poor family and the subscribers who watch; the institution, present in the practice dress and the position; science, in the physiognomic and natural-history gaze the case invokes; childhood at its end; and art, in a sculpture that asks what sculpture is made of. One figure carries them all in its pose and its materials. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no history, no nature, no sacred order, no second person, and consciousness only as the closed eyes withhold it. The mark describes the form: one figure under glass, holding more than a single figure usually holds.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, as light, weather, season and the hours of the day; the sacred, as the building, though as object rather than as faith; history, in the Gothic stone of a medieval city, again as object; and consciousness, in the series’ real subject, the act of seeing through time. They are integrated, not listed: the seeing holds them. What holds the axis at its lowest is what is absent, and it is wide: no person, no labour, no family, no state, no city beyond the façade, the square below cut away by the crop. A series of canvases on one wall of a building cannot hold what a crowded history painting or a novel holds, and the figure describes the form.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the erotic and the bond of the couple; the sacred, in the gold of the icon; the natural order, in the meadow and its flowers; and danger, or mortality, in the edge. They are integrated: the gold makes the love sacred, the meadow grounds it in nature, the edge limits it. What holds the axis lowest is what the canvas removes on purpose. Consciousness is given only in two faces, one of them hidden; the social world, the family, history and labour are absent, and the couple is set apart from any world by design. A square with two figures cannot hold more, and the rubric records that ceiling. The figure describes the form.
Walter De Maria · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, land, sky, weather, light and the day’s cycle; time; measure and the human ordering of land, with the surveyor’s grid of the West behind it; the body, walking the rows and keeping a vigil; and, faintly, the sacred, through the precinct and the ritual of the visit. They are integrated in one structure, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: history except as the grid implies it, society, labour, the family, the state, and consciousness as anything but perception. For a single site work this is a large holding, larger than most single paintings or objects; the form sets the ceiling, and the figure describes the form.
Oscar Wilde · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what a three-act drawing-room comedy can hold, and the figure describes the form. What it holds is held, not listed: the family as inheritance and genealogy; marriage as property and as a market; class, land, income and politics, down to the Liberal Unionists and the side of Belgrave Square; religion as social form, in the christening and in Chasuble; literature and fiction, in Prism’s novel, the diaries and “That is what Fiction means”; and the self as a role, all joined by the single law. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that every order is present as manner only: labour appears in Lane and Merriman as wit, the state and history not at all, the natural order only as the country garden, consciousness only as performance.
Konstantin Melnikov · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the family and its sleep, the body; work, in the studio; the economy of building in a starved state, carried in the lattice; the individual against the collective state, carried in the inscription and in the very fact of the house; light and the turning of the day, in the windows. One small structure integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the city beyond the lane, labour beyond the maker’s own, the sacred, and the natural order beyond light. A single family house cannot hold what a city or a cathedral holds, and the figure describes the form.
James Brown · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Desire and loss are held, in every song. The congregation is held: a Harlem audience in 1962, its women’s voices answering the singer, a community made present in sound, and with it the Black theatre circuit and its economy of the star who works hardest. The sacred is held by transfer, the church’s forms inside a secular show. What holds the axis lowest: the family, labour except the performer’s own, the state, history and the natural order are absent. The night of the recording fell inside the Cuban crisis, and nothing of it is in the record, and nothing is credited for it. A record of love songs a little over half an hour long holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.
Antonín Dvořák · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders the work holds: the inner life of the exile, in longing and homesickness; the natural order, open country and forest, in drone fifths and wind colour; communal life as dance and feast in the scherzo; death and burial in the Largo; and the nation, the question of what a people’s music is, carried by the idiom itself. The cyclic theme integrates them. What holds the axis at its figure, the lowest of the twelve, is that several of these orders are named by the composer’s statements rather than held by the score, and that the family, labour, history and the sacred beyond the chorale’s colour are absent. The question of race is in the work’s context more than in its structure.
Maqsud Kashani (named in the inscription) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, in the lamps and the image of a sanctuary; the state, in a dynastic shrine and a court workshop, with the maker named as a servant; poetry, in the couplet of Hafiz; labour, in tens of millions of knots and the years of weaving they took; and the natural order, as a garden. The centre and the inscription integrate them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no figure, no family, no history beyond a date, and no consciousness but the one voice of the couplet. It is an ornamental field. The figure describes the form.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, in her absence and his turning away; the couple; the city and its public rooms; class and the working artist, an actress and an engraver as the sitters; the social fact of drink and of a woman alone in public. They are integrated in one arrangement rather than listed: the gap on the banquette carries the couple, the class and the city at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what a small canvas of two figures cannot reach: no family, no labour as such, no state, no sacred order, no natural order. The form caps the figure honestly, and the mark describes the form.
Victor Horta · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
A private house for one man holds less of the world than a church or a city. It holds some orders together: the individual life of a scholar; the natural order as the house’s governing form; the industrial order brought indoors; the bourgeois city, in the row house type it reorganises; and light and the body moving through space. These are integrated, not listed: the iron is at once industry and plant, the plan at once the city plot and a living organism. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the family, since the client was a bachelor; labour and service, present only as a basement; the state; the sacred; history, except as a tradition refused. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Henry Fuseli · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, in the dreaming mind made visible; the body, as the site the dream acts on; desire and sexuality, in the incubus’s place and the woman’s posture; the supernatural of folk belief, in the demon and the mare; and the domestic world, in the bedchamber. The one image of a mind entered in sleep integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state, no history, no sacred order beyond folk demonology, and no second person who wakes. It is a cabinet of one night, painted at exhibition scale. The figure describes the form.
Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held: commerce, a fortune made from brewing set in a speculative block; labour, the anonymous clerical work of the new city stacked in identical cells; the city itself, the street, the shops at the base and the skyline the building begins to make; technology, frame and elevator, declared in the elevation; and the natural order, in Sullivan’s foliate ornament and the organic theory behind it. The elevation places these in one figure, so they are integrated and not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, the state except by its later occupation, history except as the classical column, the sacred, and death. A ten-storey block holds the commercial city at one moment, and holds less of it than a larger tower. The figure describes the form.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held, and how they are integrated. The state: the building is the regime’s seat, and the picture is its architecture. History: the room’s making, its use, its destruction and its afterlife in memory are present in the burned image. The sacred, as its counterfeit: the hall as a temple of a cult of power. Art: painting’s inheritance and its complicity, a German painter facing the aesthetic of his country’s crime. Consciousness: the viewer’s, set on the axis and made to feel its pull. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour (neither the labour that built the hall nor the victims of those who used it), no natural order. The orders present are bound by one structure, the hall, and they are few.
Egyptian (Old Kingdom) · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body, an ageing and sedentary body given honestly; consciousness, as attention; labour and the state, in the office of a bureaucracy that ran on writing; the sacred, in the ka statue’s purpose and its eyes made to see for ever; and writing itself, as a technology of power. They are integrated in one figure, not listed: the papyrus on the knees is at once his labour, his rank and his claim on eternity. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: family, history as event, the natural order, and any other person, since the speaker is implied and never shown. A single statue of a single man holds more than its scale suggests, and the form limits it.
Burial · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as solitude, longing and memory. The city is held more fully than on most records: London at night, rain, a fast-food room, sirens, a homeless figure, a dog’s shelter, places named and heard. The crowd is held as an absence, the collective the rave once made. Love is present as the longing of the cut voices, and history in one sense, a musical culture’s past as the record’s subject. The family, labour, the state, the sacred beyond the titles’ angels and the natural order beyond the rain are absent. What holds the figure lowest is that it is a little more than one self and a good deal less than a world.
Vladimir-Suzdal builders, under Andrey Bogolyubsky · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The church holds more orders than its size suggests. The sacred: the Intercession and the liturgy under the dome. The state: a prince’s votive church on the water road below his residence, Davidic kingship over every door. The family and grief: by tradition, a father’s memorial for a son. The natural order: the flood and the meadow made part of the work. The created world: beasts and birds praising round the psalmist. They are held by one figure, not listed. What holds the score lowest is the form itself: a single votive church cannot hold labour, the city or history as a cathedral or a city’s centre can.
Court of Benin · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the family, as mother and son, the king’s body carrying the mother’s image; the state, as a dynasty and an office made for her; the sacred, as Olokun, the mudfish and the protective rite; history and commerce, as the Portuguese and the sea trade that made the court rich; nature, as the creature of land and water; and consciousness only as the composed calm of a royal face. One crowned head binds them, and the crown binds the sea to the family and the state. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form: a pendant under a foot high, one face, no action, no labour, no person beyond the one. The mark describes the form, above The Swing at 6.4 and Fountain at 6.0 because more orders are bound.
Ansel Adams · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in moon, mountains, cloud and sky, at a scale the frame makes cosmic; the sacred, in the church and the crosses; the dead and the community, in the cemetery and the houses of the village; time, in the hour between sun and moon and in the graves; history, by implication, in a Hispanic Catholic village of northern New Mexico. They are integrated in one view and held by one light. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that most of them are signs rather than worlds: no living person is seen, no labour, no family, no state, no story. The figure describes the form: a single landscape photograph that holds more orders than most and holds them in one structure.
Abraham Darby III; designed by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure: the river and the gorge as the natural order; labour and the industrial company, whose furnace stood a short way up the valley; commerce, in toll and traffic; the landowners of the district who subscribed to it; and the new age itself as a matter of history. The siting holds the natural and the industrial together more firmly than most bridges do. What holds the axis lowest is what a short form of a single purpose cannot hold: the household, the sacred, the state as more than a licence, consciousness and death are absent. The figure describes the form.
Ray Charles · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as heartbreak, regret and resignation, in the string tracks above all. The couple is held in every song. Fate is held, in Born to Lose and You Win Again. Beyond the songs the record holds a social order in its premise: race, region and the market, the South and the city, carried by the fact of who sings what. The voice integrates that order, but no song takes it as subject. Labour, the family beyond the couple, the state and the natural order are absent, and the sacred enters only as the gospel inflection of the voice. Three orders held and a fourth carried by the act: that is what holds the figure lowest on the record.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Achieved, not attempted. The orders the canvas reaches for are many, by the readings of its motifs, which are not settled in their particulars: the sacred, as the end and renewal of the world; history and the state, in signs of war; love, in a couple; the natural order, in mountains, sun and water; and consciousness, the inner life it claims to express. The plan holds them in one structure, left against right. What holds the axis lowest is the veil: consciousness and the passage from turmoil to calm are achieved, but the sacred, the war and the couple are achieved only for the viewer who decodes them. No family, no labour, no city and no particular history are held at all. The orders are integrated as signs, not shown.
Etruscan · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: marriage and the family, in the pair; the social order, in the banquet, its couch, its cushions, its manners and the place of the woman at it; death and the sacred, in the vessel and the hope it states; the body, in two persons at about life size. They are integrated: the couch binds them, being table, bed and grave. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no state, no history, no natural order beyond the feast itself, no gods by sight, and no consciousness beyond the poise of a moment. It is one couple on one couch, and the figure describes the form. Four tenths above the Venus of Willendorf at 6.4, and two tenths above the Bust of Nefertiti at 6.6.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimasa · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The buildings hold more orders than their size suggests. The private consciousness, in the study; the sacred, Kannon above and Amida in the hall; the natural order, pond, hill and moon; the arts of reading and display; and the state by its absence, a ruler’s withdrawal from a country at war. They are held together, not listed: the vertical order of the pavilion and the sequence of rooms in the hall integrate them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is compass. These orders are held at the smallest architectural scale, and labour, the city, the family and the public stay outside. The low mark describes the form; it is not a charge against what the form holds.
Neil Young with Crazy Horse · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Seven songs in forty minutes hold few orders: love and its failure, a killing, a wish to leave the city for the country, a woman worn by being looked at, and a band as a small society that thinks aloud in sound. These are held in one structure rather than listed, for the band’s way of playing is the medium in which each is felt. What holds the figure lowest: work, the family, the state, history and the sacred barely appear, and the Vietnam years and the city the record was made in are absent except as the nowhere its title names. The world is narrow, and chosen.
Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Held: the body, in comfort, rest, washing and sun; the household of two and its guests, each given a life apart; the natural order, sea, sun, wind and the rock the house sits on; leisure and the imagined voyage. Through the work as it stands a further order enters: the history of authorship, and of a woman’s work overwritten. These are integrated in the section and the furnishing, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the city, the state, labour, the sacred, and death except in the house’s later story, which is not its design. A summer house for two holds a small world, and the figure describes the form.
Built for Frederick II · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Four orders are held in one figure: the state, as imperial power shown as order; the sacred, in the octagon’s inheritance; learning, in the geometry and the court’s science; the natural order, in the hill, the hunt and the land commanded from the crown. That is an achievement. But they are held thinly and by inference. The household, labour, the city, the family and history as lived are absent from a building whose life inside is not documented and whose rooms are alike. A castle of sixteen rooms does not encompass what a cathedral or a city palace does, and that is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Louise Nevelson · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve. The orders held: the city, as its discarded matter; labour, in the gathering, cutting and assembling, the maker’s own and that of the trades whose objects are reused; the domestic, in the parts of furniture; the sacred, in the cathedral form; and the natural order faintly, in night and sky, through the title and the black. One idea integrates them, the refuse of the city raised into a sacred order, and the integration is achieved. What holds the axis low is what is absent: no family, no state, no history in any particular, no consciousness but the maker’s implied labour, no figure. A low mark on a wall without figures describes the form.
Mimar Hayruddin · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Several orders are held: the natural order, in the river and the gorge the bridge answers; the state, in the sultan’s commission and the empire’s road; trade and the town, in the crossing that made Mostar and named it; the social order, in a town of several communities passing over one arch; the body, in the climb, the crown and the dive; and history, in four centuries of crossing. The one figure joins them, so they are integrated rather than listed, but the integration is thin. The sacred enters only through the town around it, labour only as the making, the household not at all, and the war of 1993 came to the bridge from outside. A bridge holds a crossing in one structure, and the figure describes the form.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The form is small, and the score describes the form. Held: the sacred, as a parish church and a shelter for worship; the state and its modernising project, in one pavilion of a planned suburb under a mayor who would build Brasília; the natural order, in the lake, the sky and the garden the church is set to face; regional history, in the memory of the baroque of Minas and of its tile, carried largely by work not scored; and, through the refusal, the Church set against the modern. What holds the axis lowest is that these orders are present as setting and circumstance more than integrated in one structure: the chapel holds them about it rather than within it.
Eddie Adams · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
More orders than a single frame usually holds, and held in one act. The state and its law: a chief of police killing without trial. War and history: the Tet Offensive, a city fought over, an army and its enemy. The body and death: the face at the instant. The public and the press: the witness inside the frame, the cameras outside it, a public that would read the image the next morning. The city: a street, buildings, daylight. One gesture touches all of them, and they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, labour, the sacred, the natural order, any story before or after; the lives of the victim and the general lie outside the frame, which is the substance of the maker’s own complaint. The figure describes the form.
Robert Rauschenberg · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held are several: the natural order and the animal, in the goat; industry and the machine, in the tyre; the city and its waste, in the junk; the body and desire, in the coupling; myth and rite, in the masked animal; and the history of art, in a painting laid on the floor. They are integrated by one arrangement, and the integration is achieved in the central figure. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what lies outside: no family, no labour beyond the traces of used things, no state and no history, no human figure, no sacred order beyond what the goat brings with it, and a self present only by inference and in the title. A wide gathering of things, held by one figure, and not a world.
Ovid · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as a book of elegies. It holds erotic consciousness fully; the body, in sex, illness, abortion and impotence; the city of Rome, its races (3.2), porticoes and theatres, and a triumph imagined (1.2); slavery, in the door-keeper and the maids; money and the bawd (1.8); the poet’s vocation and its fame (1.15); religion, in the festival of Juno at Falerii (3.13); death, in the parrot and in Tibullus. One wit and one situation join them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the vantage: everything enters as an occasion for the lover, the state is glimpsed only in the triumph and the soldier’s metaphor, history and the family across time hardly appear, and the natural order is decoration. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 93 minutes holds. Max’s consciousness, seen from outside through his productions; a family as absence, a dead mother, and as quiet presence, a barber father; a second family, Blume’s, collapsing at its edges; a third, Rosemary’s, a widow and a dead man’s room; the school as an institution of class, with a scholarship boy, a headmaster and a public school across town; labour, in a barbershop and a steel company; art, in the plays; war, as Blume’s Vietnam and Max’s play about it; grief throughout. Each is a cause of the plot. What keeps the axis lowest: the state and history appear only as figure and memory, the natural order not at all, the sacred only in a chapel, and the world is one school, a town and a few houses.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: art and its seeing; light and weather, the natural order brought into the gallery; the neighbourhood and its domestic life, held by the cladding and the veranda; patronage and the private collection made public; and, faintly, the sacred, in a contemplative stillness that the chapels on the same campus carry more fully than this building. They are integrated rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest is the form itself: small and single in purpose, with history, labour, the state and the city at large present only as the street outside. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
David Cronenberg · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about ninety-six minutes holds, and the form is described, not discounted. Consciousness is held fully, Brundle’s from inside his changes and Veronica’s in her watching; sexuality and the couple; pregnancy and the fear of birth; science and its funding, in Bartok’s company and Brundle’s secrecy; the press, in Veronica’s magazine and Stathis’s editing of her; the body, ageing and death. They are integrated: the science is the romance and the romance is the disease. What holds the figure lowest: the social world is almost absent. There is no family, no city, no state and no history beyond a company party and a bar, and the sacred enters only as the shape of the myth.
David Lynch · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 134 minutes holds. Consciousness is held deeply, in dissociation, guilt and the refusal of memory; marriage, in a couple who cannot touch or talk; sexuality and possession, in the double woman; crime and its economy, in Mr. Eddy’s pornography and Andy’s house; the family, in Pete’s parents and their silence about what they saw; the state, in the police, the trial and the sentence. All of it is held through one mind, and that holds the axis lowest: the family is a sketch, the state is procedure compressed into a few shots, labour is a garage, history and the sacred are absent, and Los Angeles, present in every frame, is seen as a set of interiors rather than a society.
Louis Sullivan · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders held: commerce, as the building’s purpose and its argument; the city and its crowd, at the busiest corner of the Loop; the natural order, in the growth of the ornament; labour and the modern frame, in the plain grid of the upper floors, where people worked; and perception, the walker’s eye at the window. One elevation places them in a single section, base below and grid above, so that they are integrated and not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, the state, history except as one architect’s doctrine, the sacred, and death. A store is a narrow programme, and the building does not widen it. The figure describes the form.
Gordon Bunshaft (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: the corporation and its management, in the slab of uniform floors; office labour, in the bright, controlled interior; the city and its public, in the ground given to the street and the court; commerce and the product, in the clean glass that stands for the soap; and, faintly, the natural order, in light, sky and a roof garden. The section places the public beneath and the firm above, so these are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the household, the sacred, the state, history and death, and the body beyond the worker at a desk. An office building holds a firm’s self-image at one moment, and the figure describes the form.
Joe Rosenthal · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held and integrated within the frame: the body at labour; the comradeship of the unit; the state and its emblem; war; the ground of a ruined island and the weather of its sky. They are held, not listed: the state is raised by the body’s labour, and the wind is what makes the emblem live. What holds the axis, with The Swerve the lowest of the twelve, is what is absent: the person, since no face and no consciousness is shown; the family; history beyond the instant; the enemy and the dead; the sacred except as civil religion. For a single photograph the hold is wide, wider than The Swing’s at 6.4 or Water Lilies’ at 6.5, and the form puts the upper bands out of reach. The figure describes the form.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders held: the state, a President’s commission placed at the heart of the former royal palace; history, the palace of many centuries seen through and above the glass, and the royal axis taken up; the public, crowds gathered and sent on as a modern people; art, through the threshold to the collections, which is the unit’s purpose though the collections are not scored; the city, on the axis to the Champs-Élysées; and the natural order, the sky and the water in the court. The section places each, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, labour, the body beyond the walking visitor, the sacred, and death, the last only as an allusion in the pyramid’s form. An entrance holds the threshold of a world, not the world, and the figure describes the form.
Sigur Rós · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held fully, as wonder, waking and the edge of sleep. Birth and childhood are present in the titles and in the sound’s sense of beginning. The sacred enters as angels and as the otherworld of Avalon; the natural order through weather, flies and an elf of folk belief, by tone more than by statement. War appears once, in a title. What holds the figure is that most of these orders arrive as a word or an image and are carried by mood, and the family, labour, the state and history are absent or only glimpsed. A little above m b v at 6.6, below Low at 7.2.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders held: finance and insurance, which commissioned the tower and now trade it; the city, as skyline, plaza and the planning of a district; the natural order, in wind, light and air built into the plan and section, more as programme than as presence; and history, faintly, in the bomb site, which the form does not take up. The section integrates the first three: the plaza, the spirals and the figure on the sky place commerce in the air and light of the city, so they are joined, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, labour beyond the office, the state, the sacred, death and the body. An office tower holds a financial city’s confidence at one moment, and the figure describes the form.
Doris Salcedo · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held are several, and they are held in one line: the state and the border; colonial history and migration; the institution of art and its building; the body, which can fall; language, as the test; the sacred, by the scripture of the title. They are integrated through the title and the site, not listed, which is the achievement. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or present only as abstraction: no person and no family, labour only as the power station implies it, the natural order only as the earth that opens. The orders are present as ideas, not as lives. A single gesture in one material can hold only so much, and the figure describes the form.
Beach House · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form, and the axis is the lowest of the twelve. Consciousness is held fully, as longing, memory and the wish to keep a moment. Love is present, though the beloved is never particular. Time is held as a subject, in New Year and in the record’s repeated sense of an ending in progress. The natural order is glimpsed in the sea and the sky, as images more than as an order held. What holds the axis there is absence and closeness: all that is present lies within one sensibility, and the family, labour, the state, history and the sacred are absent; the record declines to name the world around its feeling. The figure describes the reach of this record, not a limit of the form.
Rem Koolhaas (OMA) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Orders of reality held in one structure: music and its institution, in the hall and the rehearsal and education rooms round it; the civic public, in the plaza, the terraces and a house open through the day; the city, seen through the hall’s glass and given a figure on its ring road; the nation’s craft tradition, by quotation in the tile room; the institution’s economics and politics, in the festival commission and its overrun, though these belong more to the history than to the form. The section integrates music and the public: the house is built round the hall and every route passes it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, the sacred, the family, the natural order except as weather on glass, and Porto’s history except as quotation.
Adrian Smith (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Orders held: the state, in its patronage and its renaming; finance and the speculative market, which built the tower and nearly broke it; the city, as its sign and centrepiece; the natural order, in the desert wind the form is shaped against and the heat the glass keeps out; and the individual, as resident, guest and visitor on the deck. The state, the market and the wind are integrated in one figure: the wind in the shape, the state and the market in the height and the name. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is absent: labour, which built the tower and is not admitted by it; the household as lived; the sacred, except as the shape of an ascent; death and history, except as a record to be broken. A tower of rooms, apartments and offices holds one moment’s ambition, and the figure describes the form.
Duke Ellington · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds. It holds the band as a society: a dozen and more voices, each soloist stepping out and the composition holding him, the individual and the collective integrated as Ellington’s orchestra always integrated them. It holds a public, and that is its distinctive order: the crowd is in the music, not outside it. It holds history, unstated: an African American orchestra at a festival in a resort of old money in 1956, a piece of 1937 revived, a career turned in a night. What holds the axis lowest is absence: consciousness appears only as a collective state, and the family, labour beyond the band’s own working life, the state, the sacred and the natural order are not there.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as grief, dread and the wish to be kept. The couple is held as absence more than presence: there is no second person with a face. The crowd and the state enter in Burn the Witch, as the mob that hunts and the authority that licenses it; the earth enters in The Numbers, and water through the title and the sinking songs; time, as the years spent, in Daydreaming. What holds the figure there is that the public orders are glimpsed and joined to the private only by juxtaposition, and labour, the family beyond the couple, history and the sacred are absent.
Carl Orff · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Several orders are named: the natural order of sun, spring and the green; the body and its appetites; the society of the tavern, the abbot, the gambler and the drinker of every rank; love from courtship to consummation; and Fortune over all, the nearest the work comes to the sacred and to history. What holds the axis here is absence and arrangement. Labour, the family, the state and the inner life beyond appetite are absent or touched in passing; Estuans interius names a divided self, but the setting does not hold it. The orders arrive in sequence as tableaux, more listed than integrated, and only the frame holds them in one structure. The world is wide in appetite and narrow in everything else.
Chuck Palahniuk · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The orders are several, and one question holds them: where a man finds a self when the economy has sold him one. Consciousness, split. Work, white-collar and service: the arithmetic of the recall, the banquet hall, the projection booth. The consumer economy, in the catalogue home and the soap sold back to the women whose fat it is. The family, as absence: fathers gone, Marla the one bond. The body, in illness, fighting and wounds. The state, at its edges, in a police commissioner threatened with castration. The sacred, as a God who is a father who left. They are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the field: one man, one city, a year or two, two hundred pages, with history, the natural order, politics beyond a terrorist fantasy and any community beyond the cult absent or gestured at.
Chinese builders (Northern Wei foundation, Ming and Qing rebuilding) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The orders held: the sacred, in three teachings at once; the natural order, in the cliff, the void, the river and its floods; the body, in the climb and the fear; the pilgrim’s way; and, more faintly, the state, in the Northern Wei capital nearby and the sacred peak of the empire’s north. They are joined in one image and one passage, which is a real integration. What holds the axis, the lowest of the twelve, is size and absence: the building is small, no community lived here at scale, labour and the household are not held, and the state is context rather than structure. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Sahelian builders · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The orders held: the sacred, in the call and the prayer; the town, whose people keep the building and from whose roofs it rises; the state, in the sultanate of Aïr; trade, in the caravan city the tower marks; labour, in the renewal written into the fabric; and the natural order, in the earth the building is made of and the weather it must be repaired after. Labour and earth are integrated, not listed, since the form is made of them. What holds the axis, the lowest of the twelve, is that the state and the trade are present only as context, not held in the structure, and that the inner life of the worshipper is barely given. A tower and a hall describe the form.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The orders held: language, in the colour words; perception, in the scales of colour and grey and in the shadows; the body, in the cast; the domestic object, in the chair; the public world, in the newspaper; the history of art, in the hidden elder; and faintly the self, in a painter’s inventory of his own means. One question integrates them, how a thing stands for another, and the integration is achieved. What holds the axis among the lowest is what lies outside the question: no family, no labour, no state, no history beyond the history of art, no nature and no sacred order. The newspaper brings the world in as print and leaves it there. A wide field of signs, not a world.
The Walkmen · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for the album form. Consciousness is held: a self looking back on its own wildness, in “Juveniles” and the title track. Time is held twice, as the passage from youth to middle life and as the turning seasons, summer in “Angela Surf City” and winter in “While I Shovel the Snow”, and the two are joined, the season standing for the age. Love is present, mostly lost or watched from afar, and travel and the far city give the record an outward edge. One voice binds these, and within its scale the record is complete. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what it declines to hold: no labour, no family beyond the couple, no state, no history, no sacred.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 108 minutes holds. The family is held fully: two parents, three children, the mother’s brother, a mother’s girlhood and its loss. Consciousness is the girl’s, fully, and the uncle’s through his speeches only. The town enters as bank, library, church, women’s club, police and telegraph office, with a bar on its far side; money in the widows’ fortunes; the law in two detectives and a manhunt; gender in Emma’s lost self and the widows as prey; the sacred in a eulogy that honours a murderer. What holds the figure lowest is that every order is held through one family and one house: labour and the state are glimpsed, the war is at the margin, and history is the uncle’s nostalgia for the world before 1914, a line rather than an order.
The Smiths · Music
7.6 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Consciousness is held, the excluded self of “I Want the One I Can’t Have” and “What She Said”; the school, an institution of the state, in “The Headmaster Ritual”; the family in “Barbarism Begins at Home”; class and the poor in “I Want the One I Can’t Have”; the crown in “Nowhere Fast”, glimpsed as a joke; desire and its failure in “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore”; the natural order, the animal and its death, in the title track. The roster is wider than most albums carry, and the frame joins school, home and slaughterhouse in one argument. What holds the axis lowest is integration: the joining is stated rather than made, the nation and the crown are gestures, and the sacred is absent.
John Nash · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Orders held in one structure: the monarchy in its private pleasure; empire and trade, as images of India and of China; the service on which a court stood, in the Great Kitchen; music, dining and the social life of the Regency; the sea and the resort town, of which the building is the emblem. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what stays outside. The sacred is absent; labour appears only as service; the natural order only as painted plantain leaves and iron palms; the family only as one man’s appetite; the state only as costume. The later history of hospital and museum is survival, not content. A palace of pleasure holds pleasure, and the figure says so.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. The orders are several and joined by the premise: the state and its law, in the Hotel as an institution; sexuality and the couple; the family, in a brother made into a dog and a child assigned to a quarrelling couple; the body and its mutilation; the natural order, in the woods and the animals that were people; the city and its commerce. They are held by one idea rather than lived in their own right. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or kept shallow: labour, history and the sacred are not there, and consciousness is kept thin by design, since David’s inner life is withheld and the narrator’s is reported. A small form fully held, with no history and no inner life given at depth.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
The orders held are several, and the walk integrates them: the natural order in a made landscape, the trees, the weather, the winter; the city, its paths and its crowds in their winter clothes; the state, the permits, the hearings and the officials, the twenty-six years, all counted part of the work; the economy, a free public work paid for by the sale of drawings; and art and its public. The walker holds them at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only implied: no person but the crowd, no family, no labour shown, though hundreds of paid workers installed it, no history beyond the park’s, and no sacred order but by projection. A single repeated unit in one landscape is wide in extent, not in orders.
William Friedkin · Film
7.4 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 122 minutes holds. The family: a single mother and a daughter, an absent father on a call that does not come through; a son and his mother, poor, ill and committed. The sacred, in two priests, a Jesuit university, the Mass, profanation and ritual. Medicine and psychiatry as an institution. Class, in a rented house against a tenement and a ward. The city, in Georgetown’s streets and steps. Work, in film-making and the Jesuit life. These are integrated through one house and two mothers. What holds the axis lowest: Regan’s consciousness is withheld by design, the state and the wider society appear only as police and doctors, and the ancient order is a prologue, not a held stratum.
Chris Sanders · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Several orders are held. Consciousness: a machine coming to a self. The family: a foster mother and a child, his estrangement and return. The natural order: the seasons, migration, predation, the winter’s culling. The community: the truce in the lodge. These four are integrated, each feeding the others. At the edges stand technology, labour and the end of the human world, in the robot farms and the corporation that wants its property back, and these are present rather than held: the world without people is glimpsed and left, and the corporation is a device of plot rather than an order of reality. The sacred is absent and history a backdrop. That untaken edge holds the axis lowest of the twelve; for a feature of about a hundred minutes the figure describes the form.
Giorgio de Chirico · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: childhood and play, in the girl and her hoop; the city and its architecture, in the arcades; history and the classical past, in a statue present only as a shadow; commerce or departure, in the van; time, in the hour of long shadows; consciousness, in the dream logic of the whole, a mind’s image of a place; and death or fate, as the shadow’s meaning. The diagonal of the run integrates most of them: child, street, shadow and hour are one event. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no labour beyond the empty wagon, no state, no sacred order but a statue’s shadow, no natural world but a sky. It is a single small canvas of a single figure. The figure describes the form.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
A small genre canvas holds few orders, and this one holds five. Labour, in the men themselves, workers at rest whose hands and clothes are of work. The social order, men of one class among themselves at a table. Consciousness, in the absorbed attention that is the subject. Contest and chance, in the game. And the material world, the table and the bottle given the same weight as the men. One structure integrates them, the duel across the table. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no women, no state, no history and no sacred order, and the natural world, so present in the painter’s landscapes, is shut out of the room. The figure describes the form, and it is the price of the concentration everything else here is credited for.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in field, weather and birds; the self, the state the letter names, carried by the image rather than depicted; and by implication labour and the cycle of life, in ripe wheat awaiting harvest, paths through farmed land, and harvest as death. They are integrated, not listed: the same expanse is the farm, the state of mind and the season. What holds the axis lowest on the page is what is absent: no society, no family, no history, no sacred order except by inference, and no figure at all. Among landscapes it holds more than most, through its doubleness, and it sits a little above Water Lilies (6.5) and Broadway Boogie Woogie (6.6) for the human order the field’s double reading carries. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
A single emblem holds few orders, and the figure describes the form. What it holds: the state, in its own sign, which is the work’s whole image; history, in the forty-eight stars of a particular half-century and the day’s news sealed under the wax; perception, since the object is about how a known thing is seen; and labour, in the hand’s slow building of the surface. These are integrated: the nation and its news, the sign and its seeing, are one surface. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is most of the scale: no person, no family, no body, no landscape, no sacred, no story. The nation is present only as its emblem, and the history only as fragments that cannot be read whole.
Antoine Watteau · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the erotic, in courtship as a sequence; time, as the stages of love and as departure; society, a company of a class at play; the sacred, as a cult of Venus with its shrine and its pilgrims; the theatre, in costume and source; nature, as slope, water and distance; and art, in the herm. The procession integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour but the oarsmen’s, no state, no family, no history except what viewers bring, the Regency and the end of the old king’s reign, and consciousness only in a glance. It holds more than a single intrigue in a bower and less than a court or a cycle. The figure describes the form.
Nick Drake · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully: a single mind, its withdrawal and its knowledge of its own state. The natural order is held more than in most records of its kind, moon, sun, harvest and morning, the turning year as the frame in which the mind moves. The two are held together, not listed: the withdrawal is measured against the year, and the turn to morning at the close belongs to both. Love is held at the edge, in Know and Which Will, as a question more than a relation; the city is glimpsed in Parasite. The family, labour, the state, history and the sacred are absent, or present only as the faintest evocation. Two orders held as one and two glimpsed, all in one voice: that small compass is what holds the axis lowest, and the figure describes the record, not a limit of the album.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The figure describes the form. The orders held are few, and the light integrates them: labour, in a servant’s work given full weight; the household and its sustenance, bread and milk; the material world of made things, each attended to; and, faintly, desire at the floor and the sacred in the figure’s votive calm, if one admits them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no state, no history, no family and no relation between persons, no natural order beyond light from a window, and consciousness only as absorption, seen from outside. It is one figure in a corner at cabinet scale. It clears its floor of 6.0 by seven tenths, above The Swing at 6.4, because labour and sustenance are held as well as desire.
New Order · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as mood: longing, solitude, the wish to be left. The machine is the medium itself, and its meeting with the body is the record’s matter, the body heard as dance. The natural order is a glimpse in The Village and in the sleeve’s roses, and grief is held without being named. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve: the title names power and corruption, and the record does not hold them; the state, history, labour, the family and the sacred are absent. The orders held are few and close together, and they are held by sound rather than placed in a life or a world.
John Everett Millais · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in a whole riverbank set down species by species; a consciousness gone beyond its own distress; death; love, in the violets and the song; the sacred, faintly, in the open hands; and literature, a play folded into a landscape. They are integrated: one law gives them in one field. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside the frame. The family and the state of the play, a father killed, a brother away, a court, are absent; there is no labour, no history, no society; the girl is alone with a river. A small canvas holds one death in one place. The figure describes the form.
Michel Virlogeux and Norman Foster · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Orders held: the natural order, in the gorge, the river, the two plateaus and the weather that fills the valley; the state and the region, as a national route completed and a region given its emblem; money, in a private concession under toll; labour and technique, visible in the making; and the town below, relieved of its traffic and given a skyline. They are joined in one structure, which carries the road over the land and so sets the state’s route against the natural order in a single line: a real integration, but a thin one. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, the sacred, the body beyond the passing driver, consciousness, death, and history before the road. A bridge holds a crossing, and the figure describes the form.
Sofia Coppola · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 102 minutes holds. Two consciousnesses, held through face and form rather than speech; marriage at two stages, both spouses absent or distant; labour in two kinds, the celebrity selling himself and the photographer always working; the commercial order of advertising, celebrity and the hotel; the city by night and by day; another culture, and the sacred, in Kyoto’s temples and Charlotte’s self-help tapes. They are integrated through the two, since every order is met as something they stand outside, and the integration is tight. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that outsideness: Japan is surface, the state and history do not enter, the family is a fax and a phone call, and the sacred is visited rather than held.
Wes Anderson · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 87 minutes holds. The family: a marriage, a son, a nephew, a father’s pride and failure. Labour and status: Fox’s newspaper column and his dissatisfaction with it, Badger as a lawyer and his professional caution, Rat as a hired security man. Property and money: the tree bought beyond his means, the farmers’ industrial wealth. The community of animals, gathered and endangered; the wild, given in the wolf; consumer society in the supermarket. They are integrated, one economy of appetite seen from below ground. What keeps the axis lowest: consciousness is held by wit, not interiority; the state, history and the sacred do not enter; and the farmers’ world is schematic.
Erich Mendelsohn · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Orders held: the natural order and the cosmos, quite literally, for the building exists to bring the sun’s light into a room and read in it the curvature of space; science as an institution, with its instruments and its public; the nation and its history, a defeated country’s investment in a new physics; and the person, faintly, in the body-like figure. The section integrates the first two, sky to shaft to laboratory; the others are present as circumstance more than held in the form. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, labour, the city, the sacred except as the oracle’s echo, and death. A small observatory holds a measurement and a hope, and the figure describes the form.
Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
What orders does the building hold in one structure? Labour, plainly, and the conditions of work: light, air, sight. Industry and commerce, in the firm’s production and its rivalry, announced to the railway. Technology and the machine age, as a theme carried in the wall. A little of the social order, in the Werkbund’s reconciliation of art and industry. These are held, and integrated in the main building. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is absent or incidental: the town, the river valley, the household and the family, the sacred, death. The orders are few and the form is small, a works of modest buildings on a provincial site, and a low figure on a small form describes the form. It sits below Villa Savoye’s 7.3, which holds dwelling, the machine and the landscape.
Christopher Nolan · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held: consciousness, at the centre and joined to the form; the family, in a marriage seen only in fragments, a bed, a book, a hairbrush; the law, in Teddy, a policeman who uses an amnesiac to kill a drug dealer; commerce at the edges, in insurance (Leonard was a claims investigator who denied Sammy’s claim), a bar, a motel and drug money. The plot integrates them: the insurance case is the lie, the policeman is the manipulator, the money is what Teddy wants. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the state, history, labour and the sacred are absent; the town and its society hardly exist outside a few interiors and a flat edge of road; and the other people are functions of Leonard’s condition. A small form held tight, and the figure describes the form.
George Gershwin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what sixteen wordless minutes hold, with no discount for the form. The city is held, its speed and its mixture; the machine, in the train rhythm; romantic longing, in the Andantino; the meeting of peoples, in the idiom itself, Black American, Jewish and European; popular entertainment, the dance hall and the variety stage, as the work’s frame. They are held in one idiom, which integrates them rather than listing them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is absence: the family, labour, the state, history named as such, the sacred and the natural order do not appear, and consciousness is present as feeling rather than as a mind. A single movement of this length holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.
Arctic Monkeys · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, a young observer’s, sharp and divided. The couple is held in Mardy Bum and Still Take You Home. The town and its class are held across the record with real precision. The law and its force enter with the riot van and the bouncers; the economy of sex with When the Sun Goes Down; the music trade with Perhaps Vampires. What holds the figure is the span: labour is glimpsed only in those who police and serve the night, and the family, history, the state beyond the police, the sacred and the natural order are absent. Several orders, joined by one voice in one town.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of under two hours holds. The family: a father, a mother, a son and a friend who becomes kin, held fully and the structure’s centre. The sacred: a community’s scripture, with the boy as its object. The state: the FBI and the National Security Agency. And a cosmos beyond ours, a people living on a world laid over this one. They are joined in one chase, with economy. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the orders beyond the family are present more than held, the Ranch drawn through a raid, a sermon and two pursuers, the state through one analyst, the other world through one speech and one vision; labour, history and the South it crosses are textures, not orders it takes up.
Tracey Emin · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The orders held are several, and the bed holds them in one place. The body: sex, blood, illness and sleep. Consciousness, in its collapse, the depression the bed records. Intimate relation: a lover’s absence and the traces of sex. Gender: a woman’s body and its management, set where the nude had been set for a male gaze. Consumption and its harm: alcohol and cigarettes. Childhood, faintly. They are integrated, because they are one person’s days. What holds the axis low is what is absent: the family only by implication, no labour, no state, no history beyond one life, no natural order and no sacred order except as viewers bring the deathbed to it. The figure describes the form: one bed.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The orders held are few and integrated in one figure: the individual consciousness, the head as the site of vision; labour, the writer’s night work in its working dress; the body, bulk and appetite and, through the studies, sex; the public order, a learned society, a city and its honouring of the dead; and the natural order, in the standing stone and the tree trunk of the silhouette. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: Balzac’s own subject, the whole society of the Comédie humaine, enters only by inference; there is no family, no history, no state beyond the commission, no sacred order except as the standing stone recalls it. A single figure is a small form on this axis, level with The Thinker at 6.6, and the figure describes the form.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body and its death; the sacred, in the claim that this corpse is God; nature, as the process of decay begun in the extremities; history, in the inscription and in the execution behind the wounds; and the viewer’s own mortality, set at the measure of the viewer’s body. They are integrated, joined by the format in one length. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no other person, no family, no labour, no state except as the sentence behind the wounds, no landscape, no consciousness but an extinguished one. It is one dead man in a box, and the figure describes the form: below The Ambassadors (8.4), which holds two men, the sciences, the arts, the church and death.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body; the collective, the ring as society at its simplest; the natural order, earth and sky reduced to two colours; and, by implication, the sacred, in the dance as rite. They are integrated, not listed: the earth is the curve the bodies make, the community is the grip of hands. What holds the axis here is what the canvas removes on purpose, as a programme of serenity requires: consciousness as an inner life, labour, the family, the state and history. The scheme of the staircase would have encompassed more, but it is not the work. A single canvas holding this much at this scale earns a little above the floor, and the figure describes the form.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in full, ground, plain and mountain under sky; geological time, in a mass far older than any looking at it; the inhabited world, in the small houses among the fields and the cultivated patchwork of the plain, labour present only as the order of fields; consciousness, in the act of looking the whole surface records; and, by the mountain’s crown and the devotion it implies, a pressure toward the sacred. They are integrated: the one stroke places each. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour seen as labour, no state, and no history but the mountain’s own. A landscape on one canvas is a small form, and the figure describes it, above the abstract and object pieces on this desk and below landscape that holds more of human life.
Frédéric Chopin · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
A form’s limits are recorded, not adjusted for, and this is the lowest of the twelve. The set holds consciousness, in twenty-four states of it; mortality, in No. 4, No. 6, No. 20 and the end of No. 24; the sacred, in the chorale of No. 20 and the processional middle of No. 15; the dance and the social, in the mazurka of No. 7, which brings Poland in for sixteen bars. Nature enters only through the listeners’ rain. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, labour, the state and history do not appear, and the national is a dance rhythm, not an order held. The orders present are integrated by the key cycle and the one law, but they are few: one mind, at the piano, in a winter.
Tawaraya Sōtatsu · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in the weather; the sacred, in two deities from a Buddhist programme; the comic body, in their bellies, toes and grins; and, by implication, the human world under the sky, which is absent. These are integrated, not listed: the sacred and the natural are one storm. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is not there: no family, no labour, no state, no history, and no consciousness beyond the gods’ own vitality. A small set of orders, fully held, in a form of two figures on a field of gold; the figure describes the form.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and they are integrated: the person and consciousness, a self looking at itself; age and mortality, in a face of about sixty; labour and craft, in the tools in hand and a painting that shows its making; art as an order of knowledge, in the circles, whatever they are; perhaps the world, if the circles are hemispheres, but only perhaps. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, the state, history, the natural order, any second person, and the sacred except as an echo in the hieratic pose. The form is one figure on one canvas, and the figure says so: a small form held to its own ceiling.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The form is small, and the figure describes it. The orders held are few: one consciousness, in a single voice; the social order of the court, in the dance types and their characters; the body in motion, since these are dances; and, in its listeners’ reading, the devotional. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, labour, the state, history and the natural order do not appear, and the sacred is not built into the score. Two hours and more is large for one instrument, and the rising plan holds a progress across it, but that is extent in one order, not more orders held. One instrument holds one voice, and a quartet or a song cycle holds more.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
An abstract field holds few orders, and this one holds five: the city, as a structure of streets and movement; music, as pulse and syncopation; the body, in the dance the title names; consciousness, in the viewer’s eye kept moving by the field; and a cosmic order, the universal equilibrium of the painter’s doctrine, held in the grid. The first four are integrated, one rhythm seen four ways; the fifth is present as doctrine and not made visible. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour, no state, no story, and no history, for the war the painter fled is outside the frame. The figure describes the form.
João Gilberto · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on what a short record holds. Consciousness is held, as the interior of the singer, feeling kept under the voice. The couple is held, in nearly every song. Rio is present as a place and a manner of living. The tradition of Brazilian song is held more fully than anything else, three decades of it gathered and remade, and through it, unstated, the Afro-Brazilian ground of samba, abstracted into a guitar figure. Music itself is a subject, in “Desafinado”. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the family, labour, the state, history as events and the natural order do not appear, and the sacred enters only as a love song’s image. Twelve short songs hold what they hold, and the figure describes the form, a little below Kind of Blue (7.2), which holds more and runs far longer.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body and desire; the divine, as a goddess made a woman; art and its images, in the mirror as a picture within the picture; the viewer’s consciousness, made part of the work; and, faintly, love’s bonds in the ribbons. They are integrated by the mirror. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no labour, no state, no history, no family, no natural order beyond the body, and only a reflected trace of the woman’s own consciousness, which the picture withholds by design. It is a single figure in a closed room, and the figure describes the form, a little above Fragonard’s Swing and below the court of Las Meninas.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
An abstract field holds few orders, and this one holds five, unevenly. The body, in the act the skeins record. Consciousness, in the painter’s absorption and in the viewer’s eye sent down into the depth. Daily life and its economy, in the coins, key, matches and cigarettes sunk in the paint. The natural order, the sea, by colour, depth and title. And death and transformation, the drowned father, by the title alone. The first three are integrated in the canvas itself: one act deposits the body’s motion and the day’s refuse in one surface. The last two are brought by the title, and are present rather than held. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person seen, no family, no labour shown, no state, no history; the war two years past is outside the field. The figure describes the form.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body, at full strength; consciousness, which the work exists to show; labour, in the worker’s body put to thinking; art, in the poet and maker; and the natural order only in the rock. They are integrated in one gesture: the body is the mind’s labour. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the single figure cannot hold and the door could: the sacred and the damned, history, the family, love and death, the crowd of the leaves. Alone, the figure has no world to look at and no one with it. The mark describes the form: one seated figure holds what one figure can, and holds it closely. Level with For the Love of God and Broadway Boogie Woogie at 6.6, under the company of fourteen in The Large Bathers.
Correggio · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, a god and his manner of presence; the erotic and consciousness, as one state of rapture; nature, in the stag, the water and the bank; and art and patronage, by implication, in an image made for a prince’s cabinet. They are integrated by the one law of touch. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, the family, the state, history and any society; Juno and the rest of Ovid’s story stand outside the frame. One figure in one instant, two tenths above The Swing at 6.4, which holds no sacred order. The figure describes the form.
Gandharan · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body, its physiology carried to the limit; consciousness, in the face composed above it; the sacred, in the halo, the cult function and the story of awakening the figure serves; mortality, and the natural order of a body that must eat or die. They are integrated by the one body in which flesh and mind meet. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, though the household and the kingdom renounced stand behind the story, unshown; no labour, no state, no history, no landscape. It is a single devotional figure, and the mark describes the form. Level with The Thinker and the Riace Bronzes at 6.6, under the Penitent Magdalene at 6.8.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
An abstract field holds few orders, and this one holds five: the body, as the trace of a person moving round the canvas; consciousness, the act of painting as attention and abandon together; the natural order, as energy and growth, a field like weather or undergrowth; a ritual order, in the method and in the standing poles, present as evocation more than as structure; and a cosmic order, chaos and measure in one field. The first three and the last are integrated, one act seen four ways. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no labour beyond the trace of work, no state, no history, no story, no named person. The field is wide and holds little by design. The figure describes the form.
Thutmose (attributed) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held, in one gesture: the state, in the crown and the queen’s own regalia; the sacred, in the lost uraeus and her place in the cult of the Aten; the body, in the neck, the skin and the face of a woman no longer young; labour, in the object’s own nature as a workshop model, the made image of a ruler, its ideal laid over a real face. Consciousness is present only as poise and gaze. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, for the king and the daughters are not here; no history, no natural order, no world beyond the head. Integrated, not listed, but few: a single small object, and the mark describes the form.
Arvo Pärt · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The rubric does not adjust for a form’s limits, and the figure says how many orders the work holds. It holds consciousness, as attention slowed to stillness; the sacred, carried by sound, in the bells, the chant-like line and the canon, rather than named; time and ending, in the descent of Silentium; and play, in Ludus, the game of the title. They are held, not listed: the one law carries all four. What holds the axis at its place, the lowest in the work, is absence. Most of the rubric’s orders do not appear: the family, labour, the state, history and the natural order are missing, and the human figure barely enters. A concerto of two movements holds a state and its ending, and no more.
Steve Reich · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on what the work holds, with no allowance for the form. The body is held, in the breath as the measure of the phrase. The group is held, and that is the work’s achievement: a society of equals without a leader, cued by listening, whose separate parts make a composite that no one of them plays. Time is held as experience. The ritual music of Ghana and Bali enters through the method, as a model of collective making, not as a world. Consciousness is held only as attention, not as a person’s inner life. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, labour, the state, history, the natural order and the sacred named as such do not appear. A wordless work of an hour holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: death, faced directly; the natural order, in the predator from the open sea; consciousness, named in the title and made the site of the work, since the work happens in the viewer’s mind; science, in the specimen and the cabinet; and, as context more than content, the market and the institution, which the work’s life has drawn in. The box holds them together, integrating nature, science and display. What holds the axis lowest: there is no human figure, no family, no labour, no state and no history, and the sacred enters only by the analogy of the reliquary. A single object with a single proposition cannot encompass much. The low mark describes the form.
Hellenistic (Roman marble copy) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: war and the state, in the battle lost and the kingdom whose monument this was; a people, a foreign nation marked in a body; the body and its death; consciousness, in the turned face and the effort of staying up; and art, in the claim of the Greek nude to carry anyone. The single body integrates them rather than listing them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no labour, no sacred order, no gods and no rite of death, no nature, no history beyond the event the viewer brings. One figure at one moment. The mark describes the form. Level with The Thinker and the Riace Bronzes at 6.6, a little above The Swing at 6.4 and Water Lilies at 6.5, for the state and the nation it carries.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the divine, in a god of the dead; the natural order, implicitly, since the myth is of the earth’s fertility and the seasons, though the group does not show it; desire and sexual violence; power, as the asymmetry of a crowned god and a girl; the threshold of death, in Cerberus. The single action integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, for Ceres, the mother whose grief is the other half of the myth, is not there; labour, the state and history; and any consciousness beyond the instant of terror and grip. It is a single group of one moment, and the figure describes the form.
Jean-Pierre Melville · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 105 minutes holds. One consciousness, rendered from outside only; the underworld economy of contracts, payment and betrayal; the state, in a police apparatus of round-ups, line-ups, microphones and surveillance; the city, in streets, garages and the Métro; love, or its shadow, in Jane’s devotion and in Valérie; and a borrowed sacred, in the code. All are held in one structure, the two days of one contract. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is withheld by design; the family, labour beyond the trade, history and the natural order are absent; society appears only as police and criminals; and the women are held as functions of Jef’s fate. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Frank Sinatra · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Consciousness is held fully: one mind awake at night, between denial and memory. The couple is held, from absence, in every song. The city is held at the edge, a street and a lamp at a small hour, more by the cover and the title than by the music. The inherited American song of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley is carried as a tradition, and with it, unstated, the singer’s own past, since these are the songs of his youth. Labour, the family, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that what is held lies close together, in one voice and one condition. The figure describes this record’s reach.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Several orders are held in one structure: the natural order, in the curve of gravity, the river and the sky the arch frames; the state and its history, in a national memorial to an expansion; the city, whose sign it became; and the body of the visitor, who rides inside it and looks down from its crown. They are integrated, not listed: the shape of gravity is made the shape of a nation’s passage. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside the work. The peoples of the West, the labour of the expansion, its violence, the life of the riverfront the arch replaced, and the sacred are not present; the family and consciousness are not held at all. A monument of one figure has a form-limited reach here, and the figure describes the form.
Greek (Classical) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
A short form holds few orders, and the figure says so; it is the lowest of the twelve. Held: the body and its life; age, in the difference between the two figures; the polis, in the discipline of the citizen-hoplite; war, in the readiness held in reserve; the heroic and the sacred, in figures made for a dedication. These are integrated in the bodies, not listed. Absent: the family, labour, the natural order, history as event, since the occasion the monument commemorated is lost, and consciousness beyond the single act of attention. Two figures cannot hold a world, and the loss of their setting removes the orders a monument would have placed them in. The mark describes the form. Level with the Bust of Nefertiti and The Thinker at 6.6, above the Winged Victory of Samothrace at 6.4.
Georges de La Tour · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, in a mind turned inward, the whole picture its interior; death, in the skull carried and the flame consuming; the sacred, in the penitent, a conversion seen from inside; the body, in a young woman’s bare shoulders; time, in the oil burning down and the smoke. They are integrated, each placed by the one light. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state, no history but what the viewer brings, the war in Lorraine outside the frame, and no natural order but the flame. The sinner’s past and the gospel’s story are present only as the title. It is a single figure in a dark room, and the figure describes the form. It clears its floor of 6.0 by six tenths.
Donald Judd · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
What the work holds in one structure: the object, the building, the land and its light; industrial making; and, through the converted sheds, a trace of history, the army post, which the work does not take up. Consciousness enters as perception only. The family, the state, the sacred and labour as lived are absent or present only by implication. That is what holds the axis lowest. The orders held are few, but they are held together: the building and the land are integrated with the boxes rather than listed beside them, which lifts the work above a single object. A low figure on a deliberately narrow form describes the form.
Henry Moore · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
A single figure in stone holds few orders, and this one holds five: the body, a woman lying and looking; the natural order, the land her body is; the sacred, in the earth mother the carving builds; deep history, in the chacmool and the ancient reclining figures behind her; and the modern, in a work made for the terrace of a new house facing old country. The first three are integrated, one form seen three ways; the last two stand as source and as setting rather than being held in the stone. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state, no story, no society, no consciousness beyond the outward gaze. Level with The Thinker at 6.6. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body and its pain; consciousness, in the face that witnesses its own condition; medicine and technology, in the corset; the sacred, in the martyr’s signs; culture and history, faintly, in the classical column as a ruin of the European order; and nature, in a land as broken as the figure. They are integrated, one condition seen through each. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no other person, no family, no labour, no state, no society. It is one body on one ground, and the figure describes the form.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
An unobjective field holds few orders, and this one holds more than most. The natural order: water, flood and storm, given as force. The sacred: the Flood and, behind it, the Last Judgement, the world ended and begun again. Consciousness: the inner sound the painter made his subject, the viewer’s experience as the work’s medium. Time: before and after, destruction and creation held in one field. They are integrated: the two centres place the destruction and the renewal, and the current joins them. History is not credited; the readings that see the war of 1914 coming bring it from outside. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent, which is nearly everything else: no person, no family, no labour, no state. It stands with Broadway Boogie Woogie (6.6) and Water Lilies (6.5).
Eva Hesse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body, as skin, bandage and hide, present in the work whatever its maker intended; mortality and time, in the decaying material and the title; the history of art, Minimalism kept and answered, in an object that is neither painting nor sculpture; labour and industry, the factory resin beside the household cloth; and the space of the viewer, who walks among the sheets. Left out: the family, the state, history beyond the studio, the natural order except as decay, the sacred except by allusion. This is the lowest of the twelve, and what holds it here is the form: a small form held well rather than a world. The low mark describes the form, not a failure in it.
Vladimir Shukhov · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
How many orders of reality are held in one structure? The natural order, in the geometry of ruled surfaces and the action of wind and weight; labour and industry, in the steel and the method of raising it; the state, in a regime’s first priority, to speak; history, in the Civil War’s scarcity written into the height; and communication, the new order of radio, broadcast across a country. They are held together, because each is legible in the one form. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the household, the body that inhabits, the sacred except by evocation, death, and the city except as skyline. A mast is a narrow form, and the figure describes the form.
Tarsila do Amaral · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body, as weight and labour; the natural order, as earth, plant and sun; the nation, in the flag’s colours and the claim to a Brazilian origin; the colonial history named by the title; and consciousness, in the small, resting head. The first two are integrated as one substance, the nation through colour; history and the colonial encounter are carried by the title more than held in the image. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, the state as an institution, the sacred except as an earth-cosmos, and any second person. A single figure in a landscape cannot hold many orders, and the figure describes the form.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held, in one process: the natural order, as the biology of a life cycle; death, of the beast and of the flies; agriculture and industry, in a slaughtered head and an electric appliance from a kitchen or a butcher’s shop; time, in the cycle and in the title’s span; and consciousness, as the act of watching, which the glass makes part of the work. The sacred is touched by evocation only, in sacrifice and the watching god. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the person, the family, labour as human labour, the state, history and society. The human appears only as the beast that was killed and the viewer who looks. The figure describes the form, one case and one cycle, and stands above Fountain’s 6.0 because it holds the natural order and death as well as the institution.
Robert Venturi · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Orders held: the household, a mother’s life on one floor with a room above; the hearth as the centre of domestic life; the street and the suburb, to which the gable speaks as a public sign; history, Mannerism, Palladio and the American Shingle Style, taken into the fabric; and the language of architecture itself, which is the house’s real subject. The plan and the front place these in one figure, so they are integrated rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or thin: labour and class, the state, the natural order beyond a lawn and trees, the sacred, and death, though the house was built for an ageing widow and that life is barely stated in it. A small house holds a household and an argument, not a world, and the figure describes the form.
John Huston · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 100 minutes holds. Consciousness is held only from outside, by design. Money is the medium of every relation; the law is present in the police and the district attorney, briefly, and in Spade’s dealings with both; sex and love are held in Spade, Brigid, Iva and Effie; history enters as legend, in the title card and in Gutman’s account of the bird’s journey from Malta through Sicily, Paris and Constantinople, told rather than held. These are joined in the plot of the bird rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: there is no family, no labour beyond the detective’s trade, no state beyond the police, the sacred only as a counterfeit relic, and the city is a handful of rooms. A small form, and the figure describes it.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: the household and the family, in the women and the children; labour, in the needlework and the washing in the yard; the city, as a street and its fabric; time, as the age written on the walls and as two generations; nature, as the vine and the sky. The structure of façade and passages integrates them: the house holds the work and the play, and the street holds the house. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no state, no history beyond the house’s own, no sacred order, no consciousness beyond the absorption of a glance, and no public or commercial life, though it is a town. It is a cabinet picture of one house front on a quiet day, and the figure describes the form.
Jean-Michel Basquiat · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: the body and its anatomy; death; consciousness, in a head that stares back; race and the condition of being seen, through the subject and its making; the city, faintly, in a line that came from the street; the sacred and the ancestral, evoked in the mask and the skull. One image integrates them, the head opened, and the integration is achieved. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what lies outside the head: no family, no labour, no state, no history beyond what the maker’s person implies, and no natural order. A single figure on a single canvas: the low figure describes the form, and it is not a charge against what the head holds.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held are five, and four of them are integrated. The state, as a political schema of borders and names, not as power or people. The land, as the natural order seen only through its coast and outline. Language, as names that are also shapes. Consciousness, in the gap between what the viewer knows and what the viewer sees, which is the work’s real medium. And the history of painting, in the borrowed gesture. These are held in one structure, the given sign and the paint that covers it. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour, no city, no history of the country the map shows, and nothing sacred. The figure describes the form, a single sign that holds a territory and not the lives within it.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel; completed by Hawkshaw and Barlow · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what one span holds. The natural order: the gorge, the tidal river, the rock the chains anchor into. Transport and the town: Bristol reaching across to the Somerset side. Labour and a profession: a memorial built by engineers to an engineer. Money and its failure: a civic venture that ran out of funds. And, through the riots of 1831 that interrupted its first work, a glimpse of the political order of its day. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is only present or absent. Death has lived with the bridge since it opened, and its barriers and signs now acknowledge that, but it is present, not integrated. The household, the sacred and the state are absent. The form is one span, and the figure describes the form.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: the social, a hall where classes and trades meet, the painter’s friends, the dancers and an aristocrat’s son; the commerce of pleasure, as a business with performers and customers; gender, in women who are the spectacle and men who are the audience; consciousness, in faces each turned inward; art, in the painter walking through his own picture; and death, evoked in the green face. The light and the rail integrate them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour seen as labour, no family, no state, no history beyond one season of Montmartre, no nature, no sacred except in its parody. It is a large canvas of one room at one hour. The figure describes the form.
Fleetwood Mac · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, in the self-justification of Go Your Own Way and the cool distance of Dreams. The couple is held fully, from several sides at once. The company is held: the band as a working body in The Chain, a society bound by labour after the bond of love has failed, which is the record’s widest reach. Appetite and addiction enter in Gold Dust Woman, consolation in Songbird; weather appears only as image, the thunder and rain of Dreams. The state, history, the sacred and the world outside the studio are absent. What holds the figure is that all of it lies close together: a few people in one house of feeling.
Roman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: the natural order, in water drawn from the mountains and the ground’s fall made visible; the state, in the empire that built the supply and named itself on the attic; the town, in the square and streets that live beneath the arches; labour, in the cut stones and the sockets in their faces; and, by later accretion, the sacred, in the images in the niches, and civic identity, in the arms of the town. The first three are placed in one figure, water above, town below, the state’s line between them. That is a real integration and a thin one, and the later orders are attached, not built in. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no consciousness, no household, no rite of its own, no death. A low figure here describes a utilitarian form of one purpose, not a failure of it.
Andrew Wyeth · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: the body and its limits, in the arms; consciousness, in the turned head and the gaze; the home, in the house; the land and the farm, in the field and the barn; and, by implication, the family and the life lived in that house. They are integrated: one diagonal relates body, desire and home. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour is shown, no society, no state, no history beyond one place, and no sacred order except as longing. It is a single panel of about a square metre with one figure in it, and the world it holds is one woman, one field and one house. The figure describes the form.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Three orders are held: one consciousness, at the end of a long life; the sacred, evoked by tone and lineage; and time itself, made the medium rather than the container, which lifts the axis above the low end. They are integrated, each heard through the others. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the absence of the rest. The social world, labour, the family, the state and history do not appear, except as the history of a musical tradition carried in one player’s sound. A forty-six-minute instrumental work holds what it holds closely, and holds little.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Achieved, not attempted. The orders held in the one structure are four: light and perception; the sacred, as the house the light enters; chance, as an order without a designer; and history, the figurative glazing lost in the war and the plain glass that stood in its place, which the window answers by refusing a picture. These are integrated in the light itself, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the person, the body, the family, labour, the state, any story. A form that withholds every figure cannot hold what lives through figures, and the figure says so.
Nam June Paik · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held: consciousness and self-regard; the sacred, in the figure and its tradition; technology and the mass medium; culture, East and West, the old and the new; the gallery and the viewer’s own body. They are integrated, not listed, because one loop holds them all. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, labour, the state, history beyond the meeting of two cultures, and the natural order. A small form honestly holding five orders in one emblem; the figure describes the form.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held: the body, in its full interior; the family, in the mother and the child, held as a pair and as a parting; the animal and agriculture, in a cow and a calf of the herd, and behind them food and slaughter; the sacred, in the title’s Madonna; science, in the anatomical section; death, in every part. They are integrated, because one cut touches all of them at once: the section is anatomical, butchered, sacred and maternal in a single plane. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no person, no labour shown, no state, no history, no consciousness but the viewer’s in the gap, and no natural order beyond the two animals. The low mark describes the form.
Amrita Sher-Gil · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held: consciousness, in three withdrawn inner lives; the family and the household, in sisters or kin grouped as one; the social order of gender and of class, in women of a household held in waiting, their dress marking station; and, by implication, a colonial and national moment, in the very fact of an Indian modern painting of Indian women. The grouping and the stillness integrate them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no place, no landscape, no state except by implication, no sacred order, and no history in the image. It is a figure group in a shallow space. The figure describes the form.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about a hundred minutes holds. Consciousness, in the voiceovers of two policemen; the city, in Chungking Mansions, Lan Kwai Fong, the escalator and the snack bar; labour, in police work, the counter and the airline; trade and migration, at the edges, in the couriers and the traders of the Mansions; history, faintly, in the approach of 1997. They are joined in one sensibility rather than one structure: the city is the ground of the lovers’ solitude, not a society the film opens. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family is missing, the state is a uniform, and the sacred and the natural order do not appear. Two near-romances in a short film describe the form: above the floor, low on the scale.
SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held in one structure: art and its public; the city, its ground and its daily passage; education and childhood, in the workshops, the children’s rooms and the library; the civic institution of a provincial capital and its wish to be modern beside its feudal castle and its daimyo garden. These are held together, not listed: the ring lets them meet. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is absent, and absent by design: the sacred, labour, the state beyond the municipal, history except by adjacency, and the natural order except for the lawn and the sky in the courts. The building holds a narrow band of life, the leisure and the learning of the public, and holds it well; a low figure on a single-purpose civic building describes the form.
Pierre Koenig · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Orders held in one structure: the family’s dwelling and its leisure; the industrial means of the period, stock steel and glass; the natural order of the hillside, the sun and the climate; and the city below, present in every room as the view. These are joined, not listed: the steel reaches out over the hill so that the family can live in the sun before the city. Absent: labour beyond the house’s own making, the state, history, the sacred and death, and the city is held as a picture, not as a society. This is the lowest of the twelve axes, and the form holds it there: a small domestic building holding a postwar doctrine of the good life. The figure describes the form.
Jenny Saville · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held: the body and the consciousness that inhabits it; the gaze of others as a social pressure, a standard of how a woman should look; the history of the nude, held as the tradition the canvas answers; and the order of theory and language, scored into the surface. These are integrated in one image rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, the family, the state, the natural world, and the sacred except as the summoned shadow of the Venus. A single figure on a stool is a small form, and the figure describes the form. It holds more orders than Hirst’s skull or Gursky’s river, which hold one or two, and far fewer than works that hold a household, a court or a city.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held are few and are joined: one consciousness, a loss in a family, and the natural order in its plainest form, the planet, physics and the passage from water to land. The grief, the body and the physical law are one structure, not a list. The state and history stand at the edge: the debris begins in a Russian missile strike on a satellite, and the escape runs through American, Russian and Chinese vehicles, so that the stations of national programmes become the stations of one life, but this is setting and is not opened. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, in Stone’s work on the telescope, faith, in her saying that no one taught her to pray, and other people, in a man on the radio with a dog and a child, are touched and left. A short form, and the figure describes the form.
Agatha Christie · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what one detective novel holds. The village of King’s Abbot as a society: its gentry, its doctor, its servants and their own order of rank, its gossip as an economy of information. Money: speculation, debts, inheritance, blackmail, and a household that lives on Ackroyd’s purse. The family: brother and sister, a stepson, a widowed sister-in-law and her daughter, a housekeeper’s illegitimate son. The law and its officers, the inquest and the police. Consciousness, in the narrator’s concealing mind. These are joined by the plot, not merely listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve: consciousness is withheld by design; the state and history are absent; the sacred and the natural order are absent; labour appears as service and is not examined. A small society held in one structure, with most orders of reality left outside the gate.
Bonanno Pisano (attributed) and Giovanni di Simone; Tommaso Pisano · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
A bell tower holds sacred time, the hours and feasts rung from it, with civic standing and a city’s wealth; and here, unusually, the natural order, for the ground beneath it is an actor in the work. History is present in the fabric, three campaigns and an engineering century written in its curve. These are held in one small form, held rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form itself: a single tower, while the larger orders it serves, the liturgy and the life of the city, belong to the cathedral and the Piazza. The household, labour, the state and the body enter only as the climb gives them. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
The White Stripes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form and no credit for its absence. Consciousness is held as the self under first attention, in Little Room and The Same Boy You’ve Always Known. Childhood and the school are held fully in We’re Going to Be Friends; the household and marriage in Hotel Yorba and This Protector; desire throughout. Class and the family’s authority are glimpsed in I Think I Smell a Rat, and money and power enter through The Union Forever. The city is Detroit by implication. What holds the figure lowest: most orders arrive as single images within short songs, the state, labour, history and the sacred are absent or only glanced at, and the record’s chosen smallness, its virtue under The Living Form, limits what it can hold together. Level with m b v at 6.6.
Robert Altman · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of 124 minutes holds. The industry is held whole: executives, writers, story editors, security, stars, the pitch, the test screening and the recut. Consciousness is Mill’s, seen from outside but steadily, in fear and calculation. The law enters as the police and a lineup; love and sex in June, held at a distance; art against commerce in her paintings and in Bicycle Thieves against the studio’s slate. They are integrated, murder, career and romance in one movement. What holds the axis lowest: everything is held inside one industry and one class; labour beyond the studio, the city beyond the hills, history, the natural order and the sacred barely enter; and June’s and Kahane’s inner lives are withheld. A narrow world, held tightly.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Several orders are held, and integrated in one house: love and sexual reputation; consciousness, in Alicia above all and in Sebastian’s wound; the family, in a traitor father and a mother who owns her son; marriage, a contract under law used as a weapon; the state, in a service that trades a woman’s body; politics and history, in Nazis in exile after the war. What holds the axis lowest is how much of that is thin. History is a pretext by design and the uranium explicitly a device; labour is servants and a butler; nature is a Rio skyline in back projection; the sacred is absent. The state itself is a few offices. It is a chamber thriller’s scope, held tightly, and the figure records the ceiling of a house.
Minoan · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The orders held: the natural order, in the bull as the measure of animal force; the body and its discipline; the social, in a team acting together and, on one contested reading, in men and women together; the sacred or ceremonial, in an act that belonged to the palace’s public life, though its meaning is not legible; and art itself, in the border’s patterned stone. The one act integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, unless the act is labour; the state, except by implication; history; the family; consciousness. A small panel of one act holds what its form can hold. The figure describes the form.
Marina Abramović · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The orders held are few and held in one act: consciousness and attention; the body and its endurance; the stranger and the encounter; the crowd and the institution; celebrity and the market, which the work stages as much as it holds. Love and its end enter once, through Ulay. Absent: the family, labour, the state, history, the natural order, and the sacred except as the shape of the queue. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form itself: one gaze touches every order the work contains, so they are integrated, but a sitting can hold no more than a sitting holds. The figure describes the form and stands above its floor.
Soundgarden · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Consciousness is held most fully: depression and self-contempt in Outshined and Mind Riot. Religion appears as its abuse, in Jesus Christ Pose and, by its title at least, Holy Water. Power and domination appear in Slaves & Bulldozers, and the body is present everywhere in the sound. What holds the figure lowest is absence and division: the family, labour, history and the natural order are absent or present only as images of rust, flies and water, and what is present is set side by side, not integrated; the religious songs and the inward songs share a mood but not a structure. A fifty-eight-minute heavy record is limited by its form, and the figure describes the form.
Anish Kapoor · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The orders held: the natural order, in sky, cloud, weather and season; the city and its architecture; the public as a crowd; the self, in each viewer’s image; and faintly the sacred, through the navel of the world in the hollow. They are integrated by one operation, reflection, and integrated truly: the self is shown inside the city inside the sky on one skin. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the work holds these by reflecting them, not by bearing anything about them: no history, no family, no state except as the site, no death, and no labour, since the labour of its own making is erased by design, the seams ground away. A wide image of the world, not a world. A single object that is its surface; the low mark describes the form.
Tame Impala · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held fully, as self-consciousness, anxiety and drift. The social world is present as the thing kept at bay: the party, the crowd under Keep On Lying, the woman who will not believe, the people who will not talk. A city is present through title and cover more than through song. These orders are held by one sensibility and integrated by it, and within that scale the record is complete. Labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent, and the social is held only as an outside. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Olafur Eliasson · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The orders held: the natural order, in the sun, the weather and the cycle of the day; perception and the body; the urban public and its behaviour; the institution and its sponsor; and the industrial past of the building, a power station given a sun. They are integrated, since one configuration touches all of them at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person but the visitor, no history beyond the building’s, no family, no labour except as the site recalls it, and no sacred order beyond the evoked worship. The figure describes the form, one effect in one hall, and stands above the floor.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for being an album. Consciousness is held fully, as drowsiness, attention and drift. Erotic intimacy is present, carried by tone more than by any statement the words make audible. The machine enters through sound, as engine noise and programmed rhythm, and the record carries the drowsing body of its opening into it at the close. Those are three orders, two of them carried by texture rather than held as subject, and a single sensibility listening holds all three; within that scale the record is complete. What holds the figure low is everything the record declines to name: the family, labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent.
R.E.M. · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for being an album. Consciousness is held: the self that has said too much, in Losing My Religion, and the self at the end of a love, in Country Feedback. The couple is held across distance in Half a World Away and Low, and answered in Me in Honey. Faith enters as metaphor in the title of the hit and as a quiet reach in Belong; the medium and the market in Radio Song’s complaint about what radio plays; place as Texarkana and the South of the voices. What holds the figure: labour, the state, history and the family beyond the couple are absent, nature appears only as image, and most of what there is lies close together, love and its loss in one voice.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Held in one structure: one man’s consciousness, divided and possibly ill; a family, an ex-wife and a daughter just out of rehabilitation; the labour of a company putting on a play, its money, its lawyer and producer, its understudy; the institutions of art, the critic and the theatre; the economy of fame, the franchise and the feed. These are integrated by the take, which moves among them without a cut. What holds the figure lowest: there is nothing beyond the theatre district and the self, no larger society, no history, nothing of the sacred except the window. The film is a chamber of mirrors on a single block, and its scale is the scale of its subject.
Lal Chand Ustad · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Orders held: the royal household and its women, as subject and user; the city and its street, the bazaar and the festival procession, as the thing watched; the state, as the palace that owns both; and the natural order, in the wind and light the lattice admits, built into the form. The gaze through the screen joins household, street and state in one relation, so these are integrated, not listed. The sacred enters, if at all, only through the contested reading of the outline. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent, or present only as what is withheld: labour, the body except as hidden, worship as practised, death, and history beyond one court’s custom. A screen holds one relation between a court and a city, and the figure describes the form.
Norse · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The orders held: the state, in the king and queen; the church, in the bishop; arms and the knightly order, in knight and warder; the common many, in the faceless pawn; the sacred, in crozier and mitre; war and its frenzy, in the shield-biter; and play, which holds them all, since the whole order of society is made a game. They are integrated: the board is the structure in which they meet, and their relation is the game’s rule. What holds the axis among the two lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no family beyond the royal pair, no nature, no consciousness beyond a fixed expression, no history but the history the hoard carries. It is a set of small figures of rank. The figure describes the form.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Several orders are present: the ground and the landscape, lifted into the building; the city, the Soviet grid it answers and the capital of oil wealth whose image it is; the state, in a national commission and a dynastic monument with the founder’s museum inside; culture and the arts, in a hall, a museum and galleries; and the civic public, on the plaza and in the lobby. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is how they are held: present more than integrated, the state and the dynasty housed in rooms the form ignores, the city answered by contrast rather than held. Absent are the sacred, labour, the family, the body, individual consciousness and the natural order beyond the slope and the light. A cultural building of one gesture holds fewer orders, and the figure describes the form.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The orders held: the body and its sickness; medicine as science and as industry; commerce and design, in the packaging; belief, in the secular form the room proposes; the natural order, in the insects and the honey; and, faintly, the history of the trade from the alchemist to the dispensary. They are held in one structure, the shop, and not listed. Absent: the person as a consciousness, the family, the state, labour, history as event, and the sacred except by analogy. For a single room that is a fair reach, above a single found object and below the paintings that hold a household or a city. The low mark describes the form.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The orders held are several, and the object touches them in one gesture. Death and the body, in a real skull’s teeth. The market and money, in the cost and the price as material. The sacred, in the relic, the idol and the title’s address to God. History at a reach, in the remains of a stranger and the old forms of jewelled bone. Labour and the earth are there in the stones, mined and cut, but held only by implication. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the person whose teeth these are, the family, the state, the natural order but for carbon and metal, and any world beyond the room where the object is lit. Integrated, not listed, but few: a single small object, and the figure describes the form.
R.E.M. · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as guilt, reticence and grief. Friendship and the dead friend are held fully in Camera, and the friend or couple estranged in So. Central Rain. Place is held: the small Southern town that Rockville will not let its friend go back to, the rain and the floods, the road across the country in Little America, and the working band as a small society. The sacred is evoked by the sleeve and the drone, not held. What holds the figure lowest on the page is what is missing: the family, labour beyond the band’s own, the state and history are absent or glimpsed only as weather. Three or four orders joined by one voice and one place: the figure describes this record, not a limit of the form.
David Fincher · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The orders held are few. Consciousness, one, rendered from inside through voice and sound; labour, as a job with methods, costs and the logistics of a gig economy; capital, in the platforms he moves through and the billionaire who paid; and a love glimpsed in the woman he returns to, kept in hospital and off screen for most of the film. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or nearly so: the state, with no police presence of weight; the family; history; the sacred; the natural order. Those present are integrated, since the logistics and the consciousness are one subject, but the design, one man and his list, keeps them few, and the axis credits what is held, not what a theme gestures at.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The orders held: a single consciousness living by a chosen law; a friendship across tongue and race; the city’s decline and the failing economy of an aged mafia; the bond of a man and a child who share books; the natural order, glimpsed in the birds and the bear; the inheritance of a culture’s ethic by a stranger to it. They are integrated through the code rather than listed, which lifts the axis above a register of themes. What holds it lowest of the twelve is that each order is touched lightly, and that the family, labour and the state are present only as sketches. A film of one man’s few days in one city holds a modest compass, and the axis credits what is held.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Orders held: art and architecture, the building’s two museums, under one roof; the city, in a plan drawn from the streets and a public route across the site; the state, as the national museum of its century and a public client; military history, in the barracks kept on the site; and the body moving through space, which is the building’s whole subject. The section places the public route and the galleries in one field, so these are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, the family, the sacred, the natural order beyond daylight, and the history of Rome, which the building faces through one window rather than holds. A museum of one gesture holds few orders, and the figure describes the form.
Jun Xia (Gensler) · Architecture
7.4 · Tier III
Orders held: the state and its enterprises, as client and as meaning; capital and commerce, in the offices and the hotel; the city, as the head of its skyline and the end of a plan; history, in the tower’s place across the river from the Bund and its standing as an emblem of a nation’s century; the natural order, in a form shaped by the wind and gardens set in the sky; and the working lives of thousands, stacked in zones. The section joins city, state and weather in one figure, and that joining is achieved. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or thin: the household, the sacred, the body beyond the lift and the view, death, and the labour that built it. The figure describes the form.
The National · Music
7.4 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held fully: depression, self-watching, drink, the social performance of a man at parties. The couple and its dependence are held fully, in I Need My Girl and Pink Rabbits. The family enters through the brother of the opening track, and only there. The sacred enters as idiom, grace, heaven, demons, salt, and is not held as an order. The city and its comfort are present as setting. Labour, the state, history and the natural order are absent. Three orders held and two more present, joined by a single consciousness, and within that scale the record is complete. What holds the figure is the scale itself, which is the scale of one interior.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.1 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 137 minutes holds. Lee’s consciousness is held fully, from inside and in image; desire and the body, ageing and addiction; the expatriate society of Mexico City around 1950, Americans at leisure on the GI Bill and cheap living; the colonial appetite of the traveller in Latin America; science at its edge, in Cotter’s botany; mortality, in the epilogue; and behind it all a writer’s life. They are integrated through the one need. What holds the figure: Allerton’s consciousness is absent; Mexico itself, its people and its labour, is scenery; the family and the state barely enter; and history is the margin of a private story.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in sea, sky, shore and weather; the cosmos, as the boundless sky; the sacred, in the monk and in what he faces; and consciousness, his and the viewer’s, which is the work’s medium. They are integrated, and the single figure before the field places each. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is most of what the rubric lists: no family, no labour, no city, no state, no history, the human world reduced to one man with his back to us. The monastic order is implied by the habit and by nothing more. Water Lilies holds four orders in its own empty field and stands on this axis at the same 6.5. The emptiness is the form’s choice, and the figure describes the form.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The orders held are four: the natural order, in water, plants, trees, sky and weather; time, in the course of a day and the change of the light; consciousness, in the viewer’s perception, which is the work’s medium and its subject; and the heavens, held only as reflected in the water. They are integrated: one structure places each, and the reflection binds the sky to the pond. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is nearly everything else: no person, no family, no labour, no city, no state, no history and no sacred. The war, the gift to the state and the old man’s death are outside the frame. That is the form’s choice, and the figure describes the form.
Alberto Giacometti · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body, as the whole matter; movement, the body’s one act; perception, since the figure carries the distance from which it is seen; consciousness, implied in the forward head and the direction of the walk; and the human condition as such, persistence without a destination, the order the work most claims. History is present only as the date, the years after the war, and in no sign. They are integrated: the stride places each. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour, no city, though a plaza was its first destination, no state, no sacred, no natural order beyond the ground under the feet, no other person. One figure holds few orders by its form, and the figure describes the form.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The sacred is held most fully, as the whole frame and the whole mood: burial, ascension, flood, renewal, a voice seeking grace. Consciousness is held as that single voice in its humility and struggle. The natural order is present in the titles and the sound, a flood and new grass, and in the sense of weather and season the pieces give; mortality is present in Myrrhman. What holds the figure: the family, the couple, labour, the state, history and the city are absent, and the orders that are present are few and lie close together, a spirit before its God and its world in the abstract. Held deeply and narrowly.
Three Kingdoms Korea · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the sacred, in a being between enlightenment and the world; consciousness, as thought made visible in a body; the body itself, young and at ease; and, through the bodhisattva’s purpose, the suffering of others, which the thought is for, present only as implication. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what one figure cannot give: no family, no labour, no state, no history, no natural order beyond the lotus at the foot. One figure in one state holds what it can, and the mark describes the form. A tenth under The Thinker at 6.6, another single body holding one act of mind, and far under the Chola Shiva as Lord of the Dance, which builds a cosmos into its ring.
Li Chun · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held are four. The natural order: the river in flood, the soil the abutments sit on, the weight of stone resolved. Labour and craft: the stone cut, the rings built in stages, a craftsman named. The state: the road of a reunified empire. And, by inheritance rather than structure, folk belief, in the legends attached to the deck. The structure integrates the first two fully and the third by purpose, for the bridge exists because a state needed a road across a flood river, and its form answers the river. What holds the score lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the household, the sacred, death, consciousness, history beyond the road. A bridge is a short form, a crossing, and the figure describes the form.
The Stooges · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The body and its appetite are held fully, as lust, abasement and release. Consciousness is held, but as a single state, compulsion, not as a mind moving among states. The street and the Saturday night stand for a youth with nothing to do; television enters in T.V. Eye as the eye of desire. The year is held in a title and a chant, and the end of a decade is felt in the sound. The sacred, inverted as a rite, is evoked by the shape. Labour, the family, the state, history beyond the year and the natural order are absent, and the city that made the band is heard only in the force of the playing. Few orders, held hard: that is what holds the figure lowest.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held in one structure: the individual, in a face and hands; class and wealth, in the gold and the commission; the sacred, as a form borrowed from Byzantium; eros, faintly, in the parted mouth and bare shoulders; and the history of art, in the archaic motifs. One law, person into ornament, integrates them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, though a family commissioned the picture; no labour, though the gold is the fruit of a sugar fortune; no state; no history, the Vienna of 1907 present only as a style; no natural order. The later history of the canvas encompasses the century; the picture does not. A low mark on a single portrait describes the form.
Richard Serra · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held are few and held through the body. The natural order, as gravity and weight. Consciousness, as perception, balance and memory along the walk. Time, as the title and the sequence state it. Labour and industry, in steel rolled in mills, by a sculptor who worked in steel mills as a young man, set in a city built on iron and steel; present more as fact than as anything integrated in what is seen. Architecture and the city, in the room and the building around it. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: there is no person but the visitor, no family, no state, no history beyond the material’s, no story, and the sacred only as the labyrinth’s shape. The form sets the ceiling, and the figure describes the form.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held are four: the natural order, in sun, water, sky and the hour; labour, in the boatmen and the working harbour; industry and the modern city, in funnels, chimneys and smoke; and perception, the consciousness that sees, which is the canvas’s real subject. The haze integrates them, making smoke and mist one substance and the boatman one tone with his boat. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, the state, history, the sacred, and any person seen as a person. The human world is three small dark shapes and a skyline in fog on 0.30 square metres. The figure describes the form: above Fountain (6.0), for holding nature and labour together, and below The Starry Night (7.4), which holds the sacred and death as well.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve. The orders held: commerce, in the shopfronts; the domestic, in the rooms above with their blinds; the city, as a fabric of such rows running past the frame; time, as an hour and a day of the week, and through the moment of 1930, obliquely, history; and the natural order, as the sun, the one actor. They are integrated: the light falls on shop and home alike, and the hour holds work and rest in one suspension. What holds the axis here is what is absent: no person, so no consciousness but the viewer’s; no family seen, no labour in act, no state, and no sacred order beyond the hush of a Sunday, if Sunday is the painter’s word. A long easel picture of a facade. The figure describes the form.
Jean-Siméon Chardin · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: the animal and its appetite; food and the work of the kitchen, implied by the knife, the pot and the cut; death and the body; and the material world as matter, flesh, shell, metal, clay and linen, rendered as the painter’s subject. The face on the fish brushes the human, and the sacrifice brushes the sacred, both by suggestion only. The one light and the one law of use integrate them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no household but its tools, no labour except the cut already made, no state, no history and no sacred order but what the composition evokes. It is a kitchen still life of exceptional weight, and the figure describes the form. The Encompassed clears its floor of 6.0 by half a point.
Philip Johnson · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Orders held: the natural order, as walls and as season, which is the house’s real subject; the household of host and guest, set in two buildings; the hearth, with its old meaning of the house’s origin; art and the inheritance of building, in the painting on its easel and the cited sources; and perception, the body looking out and being looked at. They are integrated in one plan. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour and class, kept out of the glass room and out of view; the family, the city, the state; history, except as citation; the sacred and death, though the burnt village brushes it. A house for one man’s leisure holds less of the world than Villa Savoye’s household of family, servants and car, and the figure describes the form.
Billie Holiday · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Consciousness is held fully: a self in love with what harms it, knowing it, and going on. The couple is held, always in absence or in failure. The body and time are held through the voice itself: age, damage and mortality are audible, and they are joined to the songs’ subject rather than set beside it. What holds the axis lowest is the absence of every other order. Labour, the family, the state, history, race, the sacred and the natural order do not appear in the record as heard; what of them listeners find belongs to the singer’s life and her other records. Three orders, closely joined in one voice.
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of 103 minutes holds. The industry, as studio, contract, publicity, premieres and gossip; technology, the microphone and the coming of sound, as history; labour, in the extras, the stunt falls of Don’s way up, the voice that goes uncredited; celebrity and its public; romance and friendship, Don with Kathy and with Cosmo; class and speech, in Lina’s accent and the elocution lessons; art, in the vaudeville past and the ballet’s hoofer. They are integrated: the voice problem is technology, labour and romance at once. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is held from outside, through song; the family is absent; the state, the sacred and the natural order do not enter, except the rain; history is the industry’s own. A small world, held tightly.
Daft Punk · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held as pleasure, longing and memory. The couple is held in three songs, Digital Love, Something About Us and Face to Face, the last a reckoning between two people. The crowd and the party are held in One More Time and Too Long. Labour and the machine enter in Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger and through the medium itself, and childhood through the substance of the sound; the frame of mediated feeling joins them, so they are held rather than listed. What holds the figure lowest is what is absent: the family, the state, history, the natural order and the sacred, beyond the borrowed solemnity of Veridis Quo, with labour sketched rather than held. One sensibility in one register.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The orders held: the natural order, as a real life cycle in a room; death and the body; art, as painting made habitat and grave; commerce, in the decorative value of the butterfly; and love, named in the title and carried only by analogy. One cycle integrates them. What holds the axis lowest: the person, the family, labour, history and the state are absent, and the sacred enters only by the old emblem of the soul. A two-room form built on one creature and one cycle cannot encompass much. The low mark describes the form and is not a judgment on it.
Robert Zemeckis · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 116 minutes holds. The family is held fully: two parents at two ages, three children, a household’s fortunes. Adolescence and sexuality are held in both generations. The town is held as courthouse square, diner, school, dance and a busboy’s ambition; history as the distance between 1955 and 1985, in prices, songs, a television set and a president who was an actor; invention in Doc; labour in George’s servitude to Biff. What holds the figure lowest: consciousness is Marty’s surface; the state, the economy and the sacred barely enter; race is a margin; and every order is held through one family and one square, as a set for comedy.
Michael Graves · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
Orders held: the city and its government, as client, programme and subject; commerce, in Portlandia’s source on the city seal and in the budget that made the building cheap; history, in the classical vocabulary of public dignity, quoted rather than inherited; the natural order, in the coding of earth and sky by colour, more emblem than presence; and the working life of the clerks inside, held, if at all, as what the building cost them. The front gathers city, commerce and history into one figure, so they are joined in the image, but thinly held in the building. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with The Sublime, is what is absent: the household, the sacred, the body except as a metaphor for the elevation, death, and the state beyond the city. A city office block holds a civic gesture of one decade, and the figure describes the form.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.4 · Tier II
Many orders are present: the family, in a father, a former wife, two children, a sister and a nephew; the Church, as bank, as sacrament and as the papacy; the economy, in a European property holding and the votes on its board; history, in the Vatican bank scandal and a pope’s death; the land and its people, in Sicily; consciousness, in Michael’s guilt and illness; and the sacred, which this film alone of the three takes as its subject. The opera folds art itself into the structure. They are present more than held. Family, finance and Church are tied together only at the climax; the papal line runs beside the family rather than through it; the state is nearly absent; and consciousness is Michael’s alone, with Kay and Mary held to their surfaces.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
An abstract field holds few orders, and this one holds five: the maker’s body and attention, a consciousness in motion over some weeks, recorded without remainder; labour, since the painting is the trace of its own work, and nothing on this desk shows work more directly; the natural order as process rather than scene, gravity, flow, the pattern of growth; time, in layers the eye reads as a sequence; and law and chance held together, the painting’s one argument. They are integrated, because they are one event seen five ways. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is nearly everything else: no person but the absent maker, no family, no city, no state, no history, no sacred, no story, no world beyond the surface. The field is not small, and it holds little by design. The figure describes the form: a tenth below the Water Lilies, which at least hold a world.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are few: the body, in the trace of the arm; consciousness, in the act of making and in the viewer’s eye kept travelling; the natural order, as process and as weather, the mist, the growth and dispersal of a field, a word the name supplies and the canvas does not state; and the cosmic, evoked only, a nebula no one painted. They are integrated, one trace read four ways. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person but the maker’s hand, no family, no labour beyond the labour of painting, no state, no history. The war and the bomb that some critics brought to the poured paintings are outside the canvas. The figure describes the form.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and the cycle integrates them through its one structure. Consciousness: the viewer’s perception in the dark, the slow emergence of the image, which is the work’s medium. Space and architecture: the enclosure, the wall, the room made of thresholds. Mortality and the tragic: the closed door and the tomb chamber, carried by the form rather than depicted. The sacred is evoked by the chamber and not built. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour, no history and no natural order. The restaurant and the city the cycle was made for are outside the canvases, and are context. That is the form’s choice, and the figure describes the form. Below The Rothko Chapel (6.8), which admits the natural order as light.
Ogata Kōrin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in the plant and its season; literature and memory, in the Ise episode carried by absence; the journey, exile and the beloved left behind, through the poem; time, in the season of flowering, which the spring showing repeats each year; and the decorative order of household and temple, in the screen as an object of use. They are integrated, since the absence is the structure that binds the poem to the plants. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no figure, no labour, no city, no state, no history, and no sacred order beyond what a setting brings. That is the form’s choice, and the figure describes the form.
Hellenistic · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The orders held are the divine, in Nike; the sea and the weather, in the wind and the hull; war and the state, in the warship and a dedication for a victory at sea; the made world, in the shipwright’s form; and the body. They are integrated, not listed: one wind binds sea, ship and goddess in one diagonal. What holds the axis lowest is that most are present only by implication. No human being is in the work, and no consciousness is held; the head that might have carried a face is lost, and that is not charged here. There is no family, no labour but the ship’s shape, and no history now that the occasion is gone. One figure at one instant can hold no more; the mark describes the form.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body, single and ideal; desire and the gaze, in the turned look; luxury and possession, in silks, pearls and fur; the imagined Orient, a world beyond Europe made into property; the tradition of the nude, in the Venus behind her; and, faintly, empire, in the harem the picture imagines. The long line integrates what is there. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no family, no state on the canvas, no history but what the viewer brings, no natural order beyond flesh, no sacred, and no consciousness beyond the cool interiority of one glance. It is one figure on one couch. The figure describes the form.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and held by placement. The body, in four faces, cut and boxed. The public sign, the target of sport and arms. Print and the public world, in the newsprint under the wax. Violence, in the mark that exists to be aimed at and the row of faces above it. Consciousness, in a gaze divided between faces that cannot see and a viewer who must. Art itself, in the gesture of the school the work answers. They are integrated: one vertical relation binds the faces to the target, and the wax binds the print to the sign. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state named, no history, no natural order, and no sacred except as a viewer brings it. The figure describes the form, one emblem and four casts.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
A near-abstract frieze holds few orders, and this one holds four, integrated by the rhythm: the natural order, as the herd and the open land the procession evokes; the body, in the gesture that made every curve and in the figures the uprights almost are; consciousness, in the eye carried along the field; and history, the American West as myth and the public mural of the 1930s, present as inheritance and not made visible. The first three are one rhythm seen three ways; the fourth is context more than content. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour, no city, no state, no sacred, and no history the painting itself shows. It stands level with Autumn Rhythm (6.4). The figure describes the form.
Henri Cartier-Bresson · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and held in one view. The individual body, in the man’s leap. The city and labour, in the building lot behind a railway station, the ladder, the debris, the railings. Leisure and spectacle, in the posters of a dancer. Chance and time, in the instant itself. Perception and the image, in what a camera can hold that an eye cannot. They are integrated: the posters share the man’s space and comment on him, and the yard is not a backdrop but the ground he must cross. What holds the axis, the lowest of the twelve, is everything absent: no family, no state, no sacred order, no history beyond the date, no story beyond one step. The figure describes the form, a single frame of a street.
James McNeill Whistler · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, faintly, in the withheld gaze and the stillness; the family, in a mother painted by her son, which the subtitle states and the painting withholds; age and mortality, in the black and the seated posture; art, in the framed print and in the doctrine the title states; the domestic interior. The sacred is evoked by the widow’s black and the donor’s profile but not shown. They are integrated, held at one pitch by the arrangement. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, the state, history, the natural order, any society beyond two persons, one of them outside the frame. A single seated portrait cannot hold many orders, and the figure describes the form.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the family, a father and the daughter he paints; consciousness, in the turned head, a mind with its own object of attention; art, in the meeting of the figure and the blank field; and time, in the years between the photograph and the canvas, childhood seen from after its end. They are integrated, one turn seen four ways. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent, which is most of what the rubric lists: no labour but the painter’s own, implied; no state; no history in the frame, for the year of the October cycle stands outside it; no sacred order and no natural order. A half-length figure before a grey field cannot hold more, and the figure describes the form.
Francisco de Zurbarán · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held are four: the sacred, in the whole meaning of the image; the natural order, in the living animal; death and sacrifice, in the rite the binding implies; and the devotional consciousness of the one viewer before whom it is laid. They are integrated, the animal at once nature and sign. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent, which is nearly everything else: no person, no family, no labour, though the butcher’s slab is implied, no state, and no history beyond the typological. A single-figure still life cannot hold the world, and the figure describes the form. It clears its floor of 6.0 by four tenths.
Edward Weston · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and held in one form. The natural order, in the plant and its growth. The body and eros, in the form it is seen as. Perception and the image, in the question of what the camera shows and what the eye brings. Appetite and the household, faintly, since this is food bought to be eaten. Art, in the resemblance to sculpture. They are genuinely integrated, held at once in a single object rather than listed, which lifts the axis above its floor. What holds it lowest of the twelve is the method: there is no person, no labour, no state, no history and no sacred order, and everything is taken out but one thing. The figure describes the form: a single still life on a small sheet.
Pierre Bonnard · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, as remembered perception, which is the picture’s medium; the couple and the domestic life, in the daily ritual of a shared house; the body and its ageing, present by its denial; time and mortality, in the long enclosure and the beloved preserved by memory; and the natural order only as light. They are integrated, since the colour that binds the room binds them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no city, no state, no history (the picture was painted as Europe moved toward war, and nothing of that enters), and no sacred except as the viewer brings the bier to it. It is a domestic interior with one figure, and the figure describes the form. The Encompassed clears its floor of 6.0 by four tenths.
Robert Capa · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and held by implication. The body and its death, wholly present. War, present. The state and its politics, the Republic and the people’s militia, present through dress and cause, though much of it is carried by the caption. The land, a dry slope, present as ground. Labour, faintly, in the civilian clothes of a man who was something else a month before. They are integrated in one instant, which is the form’s strength. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, the enemy, the town, any order of the sacred except as viewers bring it, any history but the one the title supplies. The figure describes the form, a single frame of one man, and stands above its floor because the orders it holds, death and the state at war, are among the largest.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and they are held in one sign. The state: the nation’s emblem, with all that a flag carries of allegiance, war and the public world. History, held incidentally but legibly, in the forty-eight stars of a country that would add two more within two years. Art: painting reflecting on what a painting is, image or object. Perception: the act of looking at what is never looked at. And the made: the hand’s labour visible in the wax. They are integrated, because the one object raises each of them at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no family, no nature, no sacred order beyond the civil sacred of the emblem, and no event. The state is present as a sign and not as a society, and the figure describes the form.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: the body, in its weight, its sex and its age; generation and sustenance, in breasts, belly and vulva; adornment and therefore a social world, in the dressed hair and the bracelets; perhaps the sacred, though what order of it cannot be known; and the natural order only as the stone itself. They are integrated in one form. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no consciousness given a face, no family beyond what the body implies, no labour, no state, no history, no landscape. A figure of eleven centimetres holds what its form can hold, and the mark describes the form. Level with The Winged Victory of Samothrace at 6.4, and two tenths under The Thinker and the Bust of Nefertiti at 6.6.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, in the man’s absorption; poverty and the street, the social order, by implication only; art and music; blindness and the body; the sacred, by posture. They are integrated in one figure, and the integration is real. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is nearly everything the rubric names: no family, no labour beyond the begging trade, no state, no history, no natural order. One person, one object, a blank ground. The figure describes the form: a single-figure picture of this size does not reach the upper bands, and this one holds less than the sky and the sleeping village of the Starry Night, which stands at 7.4.
Yves Klein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held are few, and held in one gesture. The body and its peril. The everyday order of a suburb: house, wall, street, a man on his way somewhere. Art and the artist’s claim, in the suit and the act. The sacred, in the pattern of levitation and faith, by the gesture rather than by any sign. The world of the press and of public event, in the newspaper and its news of a man in space, in the year of the space race. These are integrated, because the one leap touches all of them at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state but by implication, no history but the date, no nature but the sky. The figure describes the form, a single photograph of a single instant.
Bernd and Hilla Becher · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held are several and are held in one structure, though mostly by implication. Engineering and the economy of water, in the tanks and their supports. The civic order, the town’s supply, in a building that stands over the town. Regional and national history, in the variation of type by country and decade. Architecture and style, in the ornament and its loss. Labour, in the riveting and the shuttering, though no worker appears. The landscape, in the margins of the frames, a field or a roofline. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the method excludes: the sacred and the family are absent, and there is no person anywhere in the body, so most of the orders the axis names stay outside the frame. Integrated in the grid, few and impersonal, above its floor.
Roy Lichtenstein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: war and the state at arms, in the dogfight; the machine, in the aircraft; mass culture and the printed media, in the code and the source; the self, in the “I” of the caption; death, in the burst where a man was. They are integrated, one conversion seen in each, and the integration is achieved. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the dead pilot as a person, any family, any labour, any history beyond the genre’s, nature but for a cloud, and any sacred order. It is one moment in one code, and the figure describes the form; it clears its own floor of 6.0 with room.
A. M. Cassandre · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The sheet holds more than its single object suggests: industry and engineering; the nation, in a ship of French prestige named for a French province; commerce and travel; the natural order, in the sea and the birds; and the human scale, present only by its absence and by the viewer’s placed position below the bow. They are integrated, not listed: the birds make nature the measure of the machine, and the name makes the nation its base. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the person, labour, the family, history and the sacred. The passengers, the crew and the builders are nowhere. A poster cannot hold what a large painting holds, and the figure describes the form.
Joan Miró · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held: consciousness, in the hallucination that is the subject; the body, in hunger and its wound; art and music, in the Harlequin, his guitar body and the notes; the animal world, in the cats, fish and insects; the domestic room; and the cosmos, in the globe and the star beyond the window. The room integrates them as one festival seen by one mind. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or merely present: the city is a shape in a window; there is no labour but the painter’s want, no state, no history, since the poverty of the Paris years stands outside the image, no family, and the sacred only as carnival’s inversion of it. The figure describes the form: a room of one mind.
David Hockney · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held: the natural order, in sky, water, light and palm; the built world, in the modernist house; leisure and wealth, in the pool, the chair and the board; time, in the instant against the enduring; the body, present only as the water it moves; the self, in an unseen private pleasure; and representation, in the picture as a print of a photograph. One structure integrates them, the single event in the still field. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no face, no family, no labour (someone built the pool, and the picture does not say so), no state, no history beyond what its style now records, no sacred order. One afternoon at one house; the figure describes the form.
Lucian Freud · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held: the body, at its fullest weight; consciousness, in its absence, since sleep is the one state in which the sitter is not performing; labour and the state, by the title alone, a benefits office of the welfare state; class, in the worn furniture and the job; and art, in the studio and in the genre the canvas both joins and questions. The single body integrates them, but labour and the state are held only in words. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: family, history, the natural order, the sacred, any world outside the studio. A single figure on a single sofa cannot encompass much. The figure describes the form.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held: desire and the erotic; the triangle of age and youth, with marriage or patronage in the old man’s place; class, as an aristocratic world at leisure and at play; art itself, in statues that act and in an image made for one man’s looking; and nature, as a cultivated bower. The swing’s arc and the light integrate them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour but the comic labour of the ropes, no state, no history except what the viewer brings, the Revolution twenty-two years off, no sacred order but Cupid’s, and no consciousness beyond the moment of a glance. It is a cabinet picture of an intrigue. The figure describes the form.
Paul Klee · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The orders held are few and lightly held: the sacred, in the angel; the self, in its startled and estranged look; perhaps writing and learning, in the scroll curls; and, faintly, the natural order, in the bird’s claws and the creature’s animal mouth. They are held in one figure, not listed. History, which its reception has made the figure’s whole burden, is not on the sheet except as the date of an image made after the war. A single figure on a small sheet cannot hold labour, the state or the family, and does not try. That is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve; the figure describes the form, and the floor is met.
P. G. Wodehouse · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The lowest of the twelve, and what holds it there is the size of the world the book chooses. The orders it holds are present and integrated in the plot: the family, in aunts, an uncle, a cousin and the marriage of the Traverses; courtship, four times over; labour in its comic form, the valet, the chef, the butler Seppings, and a household’s dependence on Anatole; money, in the baccarat debt, the cost of running a magazine and Tom Travers’s grievance against the income tax; the school and the parish, in the prize-giving and the scripture prize; and a parody of the sentimental sublime in Madeline Bassett’s fancies. Consciousness is present only as comedy; the state, history and the sacred barely. A small form, honestly held: the figure describes the form, and it clears the floor of 6.0.
René Magritte · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Held in one structure: the person, a portrait and its face; the social type, the bourgeois uniform of hat and coat; the natural order, sea and sky; and the sacred, the Fall and the Son of Man through apple and title. These are integrated rather than listed, since the apple carries the sacred and the natural at once, and it is the fruit before the face that joins the person to both. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: family, labour, the state, history, any second person. It is a small form, a single figure before a single view, and the figure describes the form. It clears its own floor.
Yayoi Kusama · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The orders held are few, and held in one gesture. Consciousness: a self seen from outside, multiplied and dissolved. The natural order at its widest: the night sky and the cosmos, made in a room. The dead, by the title: souls, and the light of stars that may be gone. Perception: the room is an instrument of how the eye takes space. And the self as an image among images, the order its decade added. They are integrated, since one effect touches all of them at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no other person except as a reflection, no family, no labour, no state, no history, and no sacred order beyond the title’s souls. The low mark describes the form, one room and one effect, and sits a little above a single object because the room holds the viewer and the cosmos as well as itself.
Alfred Eisenstaedt · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The orders held: history and the state, the end of a world war on the day it ended, carried by the uniforms; the erotic, in the embrace; the city and its public, in the crowd and the square; gender and power, in who holds and who is held; class and service, a sailor and a woman in a working uniform. One gesture at the centre integrates them in one instant, which is the image’s achievement. What holds the axis, with The Swerve the lowest of the twelve, is that most of these are present only by implication: the war is wholly absent except as uniform, there is no labour but in the white dress, no family, no sacred order, and no consciousness, since both faces are hidden. A single frame of a single gesture: the figure describes the form.
André Waterkeyn; André and Jean Polak · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Orders held: the natural order, at its smallest scale, as the subject of the whole; science, and the state’s faith in it; industry, in the steel; the nation, as host of a world’s fair; the city, as the emblem it became; and the visitor’s body, set walking inside the figure. They are joined in one image, which is a real integration, but a thin one, and this is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve. The atom is shown, not the world the atom made: the bomb, the reactor, labour, the household, death and the sacred are absent. A fair’s emblem holds the confidence of one decade in one figure, and the low mark describes that form.
The Cure · Music
7.4 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no allowance for the form. Consciousness is held well: the self in dread, in desire, in self-disgust, in dream. The couple is held at close quarters in In Between Days, Six Different Ways and Close to Me. The sacred enters once, in The Blood, joined to drink and to abasement. Dream and night terror form a further order across Kyoto Song and the title’s image, and time, as ageing, is held in In Between Days. What holds the axis lowest is absence and closeness: no family, no labour, no city or state, no history, no natural order beyond the weather of mood. What is held lies in one voice and one inner room, and the sacred meets the couple only in passing.
Kehinde Wiley · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The orders held: the person, in a likeness and a posture of attention; the state, in an office indicated by nothing but the commission and the place the canvas hangs; history, in the first Black president entering the national sequence; the family and its genealogy, in Kenya, Hawaii and Chicago; the natural order, as cultivated emblem. The coded garden integrates them, joining the man to his places and his history on one surface. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that most are held by implication and caption: no labour, no other person, no sacred order, no city but a flower, and the state present only by its absence from the image. A single seated figure before a ground; the figure describes the form.
Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Orders held: the city, in its row, its river and its bridgehead; history, in the bomb gap of 1945 and the opening of 1989, joined in one gesture; the couple, as image; commerce, in an insurer that paid for an emblem; and the natural order only as the river the front reflects. The building joins city and history in its corner figure, and that joining is achieved, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or thin: the household, the sacred, labour, the state beyond a president’s support, death except as the site’s story, and the inner life of those who work, sleep and eat in the building. A corner office building of moderate size holds a civic gesture of one decade, and the figure describes the form.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Orders held: commerce and the leisure trade, in the hotel and in the deck above it; the state, in the policy that licensed the resort and in the city-state’s wish for an emblem; the city and its skyline, on reclaimed ground facing the financial district; the natural order, faintly, in the trees and water on the roof and the sea at its foot; and engineering as public spectacle. The section stacks them, money in the podium, sleep in the slabs, display on top, so they are joined in one figure, but thinly. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, except as a cost the building does not show; the household; the sacred; death; and history before the reclamation. A resort hotel holds a market and a state’s ambition at one moment. The figure describes the form.
Deafheaven · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held: an anxious, inward self, in the soft voice and the mood of the songs. The body is present, in the titles and in the physical release of the close. A band’s own history is held, in a sense the rubric may not count as an order of reality: the record is about what this band is, and its form carries the question. The cosmic is summoned in titles and image and not held. What holds the figure at its level is everything else: no family, labour, state, larger history, sacred or natural order is held as subject. One sensibility, inward and close, holds two orders and gestures at a third.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
An abstract field holds few orders, and this one holds four or five in one structure: the body, as the arm and the walking that made every line; time, as the duration of the act laid out in space and read back by the travelling eye; the natural order, as energy and growth, the field seen as weather, foliage or a galaxy, permitted and not depicted; consciousness, in the painter’s absorption and the viewer’s; and labour, faintly, in the industrial paint and the visible work. One act integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent, which is nearly everything else: no person seen, no family, no state, no history, no sacred order except as the name “One” reaches for it. The war and the decade are outside the frame. The figure describes the form.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in rock, forest and weather; time, in the hour and the season; and the sacred, in the mountain as an object of pilgrimage, implied rather than shown. They are integrated, one form carrying all three. Consciousness is present only as the viewer’s own. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, nearly everything the axis lists: no person, no family, no labour, no state and no history, all of which the rest of the series gives and this sheet removes. Its sister sheet, The Great Wave, holds the rowers’ labour and endurance and stands a full point higher here. One mountain, one morning and one sheet set the limit, and the figure describes the form.
Umberto Boccioni · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
A single figure holds few orders, and these are integrated in one stride. The body, its muscle and its motion. The machine: the modern man fused with speed. Perception: the eye that sees movement as continuous form. And, implicit, the state and war, in the armoured, faceless will that the doctrine round it celebrated. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no other person, no family, no labour shown, no nature, no sacred order, no place. The mark describes the form: one striding figure under life size holds what one figure can, and holds it in one action. Level with Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 at 6.3, under The Thinker at 6.6 and Walking Man I at 6.5.
Félix Candela · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in the water, the gardens and the light on the vault; structure and material as an order of their own, the law of the membrane made visible; the social pleasure of eating and gathering; place and memory, faintly, in a vault set as a flower in a district named for flowers and worked by its chinampa farmers for centuries; and labour, faintly, in a form made possible by cheap skilled formwork and written into its ruled surfaces. They are held in one structure but lightly, present more than integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the state, the sacred, the family, history beyond the name of the place, and individual consciousness. A single room under a single roof for a single pleasure: the figure describes the form.
Antonio Canova · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the erotic and the tender, sleep and waking, death and return, the human and the divine in a mortal soul and a god, the sacred in its mythic form. They are held in one structure, not listed, and the passage from death to life is the most serious of them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what two figures on a rock cannot hold: labour, the state, history, society, the family except as the myth’s unseen background of a jealous goddess, the natural order beyond the stone. The mark describes the form rather than charging the work. It holds a little more than an intrigue of the garden, because death and return are in its one action, and far less than a picture that holds a court.
Brian Eno · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as a state of calm, diffuse attention. The public room is held, implicitly, as the space the music is for: the airport, and with it modern travel and its technology. The sacred is glimpsed in the voices of 2/1. The family, labour, the state, history, the body and the natural order do not appear. Nothing is integrated because almost nothing is present to integrate; the record is designed to hold less, so that the listener and the room can supply the rest. A wordless record, by deliberate choice smaller in content than in form: the figure describes the form. Just above It’s My Life at 6.2, and below m b v at 6.6.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
An abstracted field holds few orders, and this one holds four, integrated by the spiral: the natural order, as growth, the snail and its shell given as a law; time, as unfolding outward from a seed; the body, in the scale of the planes and the reach that placed them, an old man’s arm at the end of a life; and the cosmic, as the whorl the eye reads in it. What holds the axis lowest is absence: no person, no family, no labour, no city, no state, no history and no sacred order except by evocation, and the consciousness held is the viewer’s eye in motion more than any mind. It is a wall of colour that names a creature. The figure describes the form.
John Cage · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what the work holds, with no discount for its brevity or its silence. Consciousness is held, as attention turned on itself. The natural order enters, as wind and rain at the premiere, and the design admits it on purpose. The social order enters as the concert institution and its audience, whose behaviour becomes material. The sacred is present only as the background of Cage’s Zen. The family, labour, the state and history do not enter, nor the body beyond its own sounds. And what enters is admitted, not integrated: the frame holds the orders in one space without relating them to one another. That, not the length, sets the figure; it is an honest reach for a frame.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held are four: the body; the marriage and the household; the history of painting, the nude from Venus to Duchamp; and the photographic medium as the way a modern eye sees the nearest things. They are integrated by one image and one distance, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no state, no natural order, the sacred only by allusion, and no history. The German past that the painter’s family portraits of the same years carry stands close by in his work and is not in this picture. One person on one stair. The figure describes the form.
George Stubbs · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, an animal’s body and instinct, carried to the point of anatomy; breeding and the turf, as the culture that made this horse; the aristocratic world of the patron, present in the horse’s breeding and the scale of the canvas, and the state, present only as the absent rider of the equestrian monument; and art itself, in the claim on the grand portrait. The bare ground integrates them by excluding everything else. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no human consciousness, no family, no labour, not even the groom the genre provided, no history and no sacred order. It is one animal on a field. The figure describes the form.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
A single figure on a stair holds few orders. Held and integrated: the body, as mechanism; time, as a sequence of states; the machine age, in the chronophotograph and the body made of hinged parts; and the history of art, in the nude it refuses. Present faintly: the domestic interior, a staircase in a house, and the self, if the figure is taken, as it has been, for the painter’s own departure. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: other people, the family, labour, the state, history beyond the history of art, the sacred, the natural order. The four held orders are one movement seen four ways, and that integration is real. The figure describes the form, which is one body in one passage.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
An abstract field holds few orders, and this one holds four, unevenly integrated. The cosmic order is held in the circle as sun or planet, in a field that reads as space. Music is held as counterpoint, voices of form sounding at once. Consciousness is held in the viewer’s felt response to tension, which is the work’s medium. Geometry is held as a lawful order of form, and the first three are integrated through it: geometry is the means by which cosmos, music and feeling are held together. A fifth, the spiritual, is present as Kandinsky’s doctrine and is not made visible on its own. What holds the axis lowest is absence: no person, no family, no labour, no city, no state, no history. Nothing of 1923, of postwar Germany or of the Bauhaus as a community enters the frame. That is the form’s choice, and the figure describes the form.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: consciousness, in the turned and watchful face; the state, in the collar of the king’s service; rank and wealth, in fur and velvet; learning and business, in the paper. They are integrated in one figure, the chain lying on the scholar. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family (the household was another picture, now lost), no labour but the office, no history but what the viewer brings, no natural order, and no sacred order in the panel at all, though its sitter would die for one. A single portrait at half length holds one person and his station. The figure describes the form.
John Singer Sargent · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held: the self as public image, in the profile and the pose; society and its codes, in the Salon and the season; marriage, in the husband’s name as the title’s only fact; gender and display, in the body offered and the face withheld; fashion and commerce, in a gown made to be seen; a sacred order in figure only, in Diana’s crescent; and art itself, in a portrait about the making of an image. One silhouette integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no family but by name, no state, no history, no nature, and no consciousness given from within, since the face does not look. The figure describes the form.
Meret Oppenheim · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held are few, and held in one gesture. The body: the mouth, the skin, the sexual body under the domestic. Nature: the animal, hunted, its hide on the table. The domestic and its manners: the service, the afternoon, a class’s ritual of civility. Gender: a woman’s table, a woman’s object, carried in the form and drawn out by readers. They are integrated, since one material touches them all at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no history, no labour except by implication, no state, no sacred order, no world beyond the table. It stands a little above Fountain for the body and the animal, which are present in the thing and not only in its reception. The figure describes the form, a small set of things.
Mary Cassatt · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: the body, the child’s and the woman’s hands; the household, with the open question of mother or nurse; labour, the daily work of care, which is the subject; the home, as an interior of furniture, carpet and vessels; the sacred, as the Madonna group behind the pair; and art, in the meeting of the Japanese print and Western figure painting. The converging gaze integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no state, no history, no nature beyond the bodies, no public world, and consciousness only as absorption in one act. It is a domestic picture of one moment. The figure describes the form.
Maurice Ravel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what the work holds, with no discount for the form. A quarter of an hour of dance on one melody holds few orders, and holds them as implication. The social is held: the crowd assembling voice by voice is an image of a collective. The body and desire are held, through the dance and the crescendo. The machine and industrial labour are held only as a reading the form permits. Spain is a colour. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is everything else: consciousness, the family, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent. Two orders held and one permitted, in a small form, and the figure describes the form.
Sesshū Tōyō · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: the natural order, in shore, trees, water, mountain and mist; a human settlement in its least form, a roof, a wine-shop banner and a boat, implying the tavern, the traveller and the boatman; consciousness, in the act of seeing the manner enacts; and, through the inscriptions, history and institution, a painter’s journey to Ming China, a lineage of masters, a pupil leaving, and the Kyoto Zen temples adding their voices. That last order is the scroll’s distinction among works of its size. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that these are joined by the format, not fused by the image, and that the family, labour beyond the boatman’s and the state are absent. A small form, and the figure describes it.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held are few and held in one gesture. Commerce and consumption, in the toy and in the cost of the steel. Childhood, in the toy and the Easter rabbit. Sex, at one remove, in the bunny. The viewer and the self, in the mirror, which draws the room and its people into the work. Industry and labour, in the fabrication, by implication only. They are integrated by the surface, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no family, no history but the decade’s, no state, no nature, and no sacred order except as the idol is felt. A single figure a metre high: the figure describes the form.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
An abstract canvas holds few orders, and this one holds four. The cosmic, in the disc and the painter’s doctrine of the circle; the human, in the presence at the left, if it is taken; consciousness, as the field of perception and of inner response to colour that the painting is built to act on; and music, by analogy, the opposition and resolution of forces that the painter’s theory compared to harmony, present as doctrine more than made visible. The first three are integrated, one opposition seen as person and cosmos and as the eye’s own response; the fourth is attached. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour, no city, no state, no history, no story. The Bauhaus and the Germany of 1925 stand outside the frame. The figure describes the form.
Aphex Twin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as solitary reverie and remembered childhood; the machine is held, as medium and companion. The natural order is glimpsed, through titles and a sound some hear as sea and weather, which the music does not establish. The cosmos and antiquity are named in titles, not held, and the sampled voices of Xtal and Tha suggest other people at a distance, unheard. What holds the figure at 6.3 is plain: family, labour, the state, history and the sacred are absent, and the record’s subject is in part that absence, one person alone with a machine. Two orders held, two glimpsed: below m b v’s 6.6, which holds intimacy as well.
The Stooges · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as a young man’s boredom and want. Desire and the beloved are held in the dog, in Ann and in the doll. History is named once and sharply in 1969, where the year stands for the end of a decade and is the record’s first word. The sacred is gestured at in We Will Fall’s chant and stays gesture. Labour, the family, the state, the natural order and the city that produced the record are absent, present only as the condition the boredom implies. Three orders, one of them glancing, in thirty-four minutes: a short form that holds a little and holds it tight, and that is what holds the figure lowest.
Robert Motherwell · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
An abstract frieze holds few orders, and this one holds some by integration and more by naming. Integrated: death and the act of mourning, carried by the rhythm; the body, in forms at human scale and in the bodily readings the ovals permit; and a public order, the state, since the elegy is for a republic, carried by the title and by the solemnity of the frieze, as a monument carries it. Named rather than held: history, the Spanish war of 1936 to 1939; Spain and its culture; the politics of the painter’s generation. Absent: the family, labour, nature, any person, any story, and any sacred order beyond the ritual shape of lament. That is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve. The figure describes the form: a few orders held in one structure, more brought in by the title than built.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The orders held are four. Childhood and play, in the toy and the party. The commodity and the market, in the material, the fabrication and the price. The self, in the reflection that puts each viewer and their surroundings on the surface. The public site, which each setting takes in, a palace in one place and a museum in another. Labour is present only by implication, in the industrial making of the steel. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order appear, if at all, only as the room reflected. The orders are integrated rather than listed, but few: a single figure of one toy, and the figure describes the form.
Shepard Fairey · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The orders held are few, and held in one gesture. The state and the nation, in the candidate and the colours. History, in the person: a Black American figured as the national leader, which the image carries without stating. Politics as a public, in the street and the multiple: the image was made for the many and carried by them. The individual, in a recognisable face. Commerce and the law enter the work’s life, through the editions and the lawsuit, but not the image. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, labour, nature, the sacred except as the borrowed pose of the visionary, any world around the man. The form, a head and a word, describes the figure, which clears its own floor.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 131 minutes about three people holds, and the figure describes the form rather than compensating for it. Consciousness, of three people, seen from outside more than within; desire, in three directions; marriage and the family, with a child, run as a business; labour, in the professional sport as work, injury as the end of a career, the coach’s trade, sponsorship and money, Patrick’s poverty against Art’s endorsements; class, lightly. These are integrated, since the money, the marriage and the match are one plot. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the state, history, the sacred and the natural order do not enter, the world beyond the sport is barely present, and Tashi’s mother and the daughter are functions.
Tom Wright (Atkins) · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Orders held: the sea, as setting, figure and moat; the state and its ruler, as the client whose name the building made; commerce, in the hotel and in the nation as a brand that it stands for; history, in the sail of the pearling and trading Gulf, quoted rather than inherited; the body at leisure, served. The island and the sail join sea, history and state in one image, and that joining is achieved. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, though the building was raised and is run by a great many workers from abroad; the household and the city behind the beach; the sacred, though the client’s culture is a religious one; death, and the natural order beyond the sea as a view. A hotel tower holds a state’s ambition at one moment in one figure, and the low mark describes that form.
Barnett Newman · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and they are held as one. Consciousness: the viewer’s awareness of presence is the work’s medium and its subject. The body: its height and reach are the measure the canvas is built to. The heroic and the sacred, by the title and the reading of creation, the self put in the place of the cathedral. Place, as the site where a person knows they are there. One encounter holds them, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is nearly everything: no person but the viewer, no family, no labour, no city, no state, no history, no natural order. A single field holding one relation; the figure describes the form. Below Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm, which records labour and natural process.
Hasegawa Tōhaku · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are three, perhaps four: the natural order, in trees, air, weather and mountain; consciousness, in the perception the work makes its subject, the eye going into the mist; time, faintly, in season and hour, the cold of winter or early spring and the stillness of morning; and the sacred, only as the pine and the peak evoke it. They are integrated: the one scale of ink places each. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is everything else: no person, no dwelling, no labour, no city, no state, no history and no family, though readers have brought a family to it in the dead son. The form chose this, and the figure describes the form. It stands below Water Lilies (6.5), which holds the course of a day and the heavens reflected, where this holds one moment of one weather.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
An abstract field holds few orders; this one holds three with any force. Consciousness: the viewer’s perception and feeling, which the painting makes its medium and its subject. The body: the scale is set to the standing figure, and the encounter is physical. Mortality, or the sacred: the grave dark and the suggestion of a threshold point toward death and toward a religious order, and the painter said those who wept before his pictures shared what he felt in painting them; but this is evoked, not held, and counts as a fraction. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour, no city, no state, no history, no natural order. The figure describes the form.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: the natural order, in the flowers and their growth; time, in the cycle from bloom to seed, which the arrangement makes simultaneous; the domestic, a vase on a table against a wall, the house in its smallest form; and the sun, carried as colour rather than depicted. They are integrated by the key: the flowers are the sun’s colour, and their decay is the sun’s work. What holds the axis lowest on the page is what is absent: no person, no labour, no society, no state, no history, no consciousness made visible, and the friendship the canvas was made for lies outside the frame. A still life is among the smallest of forms, and the figure describes the form.
Han Gan · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
One animal, its fear and its will, and by implication the stable and the court that hold it. Two orders are present and integrated: the natural order, in the living creature, and the order of power, in the emperor’s tether, which is where the two meet. The sacred and the cosmic enter only through the horse’s place in the culture, the heavenly horse of the tradition, and not through anything the picture builds. Beyond these the sheet holds nothing, and it does not try to. This is the lowest of the twelve, and what holds it there is the form itself: one creature and one post on one small sheet. The figure describes the form, honestly low.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
A field of colour holds few orders, and this one holds three with any force: consciousness, in the viewer absorbed before the field, which is the work’s medium; the body, in a canvas at the scale of a standing person and made to face one; and a natural order, horizon, earth and sky, warm and cool, held as suggestion rather than as structure. The sacred is claimed by the painter and by his interpreters and is not made visible here. The three are integrated as one encounter. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour, no city, no state, no history, no story; 1953 and its world stand outside the frame. That is the form’s choice, and the figure describes the form.
Georgia O'Keeffe · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
A single flower holds few orders, and this one holds four, integrated: the natural order, in a living bloom exactly seen; the body, in the form the flower shares with it, whatever the painter intended; perception and consciousness, in the act of looking that the magnification enforces; and faintly the threshold of the sacred or the abyss, in the dark centre. Sexuality is held only as a reading the form admits, not as an order the work integrates, and it is not counted as a fifth. What holds the axis lowest on the page is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour, no state, no history, no place. The figure describes the form.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
An abstract field holds few orders. The ones held here: the natural order, as horizon, earth and sky reduced to their division; and consciousness, in the viewer before a field of the body’s size and the long looking it asks. Those two are integrated, one division seen as world and as limit. Death and the cosmic dark are present only as readings the format permits. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour, no city, no state, no history, no sacred made visible. The year of the moon landing and the painter’s death lie outside the frame. The figure describes the form.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
An abstract field of one form holds few orders. Here there are four: the heavens, the circle as sun, moon and planet in a void; the order of forces, tension and balance among bodies; consciousness, the eye moving among the discs and reading depth; and the spiritual, the painter’s doctrine of the inner sound of form, present more as doctrine than made visible. The first three are integrated in one structure; the fourth is asserted. Music, so present in Kandinsky’s thought, is not built here as it is in a picture titled for it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no city, no labour, no family, no state and no history. The figure describes the form.
Diane Arbus · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and integrated in one view. The self and its double, the axis of the picture. The family, by implication: two children dressed alike by someone, a wish for sameness visible in the clothes. Childhood, in its stillness and its public face. Society and its season, faintly, in the dress and haircut of a suburban occasion of 1967. Perception, in the viewer’s forced comparison. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no state, no history beyond the costume’s date, no nature, and no sacred order except as the old myth of the double reaches toward it. A single frame of two figures cannot hold more, and the figure describes the form; it sits a little above its floor because self, family and the act of looking are bound together in the one relation.
Arnold Böcklin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held: death and the passage to it; mourning, in the white figure and in the loss the picture is made to answer; the sacred, as a place of rest without a creed; nature, as rock, water and trees; and architecture, the human made into the tomb. The crossing integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: consciousness beyond the single attitude of the shrouded figure, the family, labour (the oarsman’s rowing is a sign, not a labour), the state and history. It is a small form on a single subject, one island at one moment. The figure describes the form.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held are few, and held in one field. Language, in the names. Perception, in the colours and the eye’s work between them. Consciousness, in the viewer divided between reading and seeing and caught in the act of judging. Art and its history, in the gestural painting of the decade before, taken as material and named. The social world leaves a trace only in the title, a race begun too soon, present as a word. These are integrated, one collision seen four ways. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no body, no family, no labour, no state, no history beyond painting’s own, no natural order and nothing sacred. The figure describes the form.
Agnes Martin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
An abstract field holds few orders, and this one holds four, by implication more than by presence. The sacred, in the gold. The human bond, in the title, made visible only as evenness and constancy. Perception and the self, in the viewer’s changing relation to a surface that alters with position and light. And order as such, the measured grid, which her writings make an order of mind. They are integrated in one surface, but the second rests on a word and the fourth is doctrine. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no figure, no family but by the title, no labour, no state, no history and no story; the America of 1963 is outside the square. The figure describes the form.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held are few, and held by one image. Commerce and industry, in the brand and the product line. Daily life and the body, in food eaten every day. The nation, as a shared visual ground. Art and its market, in the set shown as goods and kept as a set. They are integrated, since the can carries them all at once. What holds the axis low is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour shown, no state, no history, no nature, and no sacred order except as viewers bring it. The work’s subject is a surface, and the figure describes the form.
Helen Frankenthaler · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
An abstract field holds few orders, and this one holds four: the natural order, a coast with its rocks, hills and water held as memory; consciousness, in the passage from a summer’s seeing to an autumn’s remaking; the body, in the method, the canvas on the floor and the painter over it; and the history of painting, in its answer to Pollock and his school. The first three are integrated in one act; the fourth lies outside the canvas, in its consequence rather than in its image. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour beyond the painter’s own, no state, no history in the image and no sacred order. The figure describes the form.
Man Ray · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held are few, and held in one image: the body and eros, in Kiki’s back; art and its history, in Ingres and the nude, and music, in the instrument and the hobby; the relation of artist and model, love and possession, the private life of two people in Montparnasse, carried by the title’s idiom; and the image as a medium, in the mark on the photograph. They are integrated: one stroke touches all of them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent, which is nearly everything else: no labour but the model’s, no state, no history beyond art’s own, no natural order, no sacred, no family, no world outside the studio. The figure describes the form, a single photograph of one body, a little above the floor because maker and model are held as well as body and art.
Egon Schiele · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held: consciousness, in the gaze and its wariness; the body, as raw surface; the artist and his role, a figure placed in nothing and looked at; and nature, in one plant and its season. They are integrated, the plant answering the head and the body carrying the consciousness. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent by choice: no family, unless the pendant is admitted, and it is context; no labour, no state, no history, no sacred order but what the viewer brings, no world around the figure at all. The emptiness is the picture’s meaning, which is why it is not charged on the other axes, but it is also its limit here. A head and a plant on a panel smaller than a page of newspaper. The figure describes the form.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The orders held: the family, in the mother and daughter; consciousness, in the two looks; the sacred, by the Madonna pattern secularised; art and the artist’s self, by the brush pointedly absent; the antique, by the dress; and, faintly, the court and the class of a royal portraitist. The embrace integrates the first three well. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, though the picture is a professional woman’s self-portrait and her work is exactly what it hides; no state, though the year is 1789; no nature; and no history except what the viewer brings. It is a two-figure portrait on a plain ground, and the figure describes the form.
Berthe Morisot · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
What is held: consciousness, in the mother’s withdrawn attention; the family, mother and child and the absent rest of it; the bourgeois interior; and, by implication, the life cycle, the sleeping infant at its beginning. They are integrated, not listed: the veil holds the family and the consciousness in one structure. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, since no nurse or servant is shown; the state; history; the sacred except as echo; the natural order beyond the room’s window. It is a small form, an interior of two people at one moment, and the figure describes the form.
M83 · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held, as one young sensibility’s sense of the vastness of its own feeling. The natural order is evoked through titles and sound: birds, sea, lake, mountain, sun. The city is named in the title and given a ruin, not a life. The sacred is touched in In Church, as a mood. Technology is present as the medium and in the figure of the cyborg. What holds the figure low is that none of these is held as an order of reality with its own weight: they are images within one feeling, listed by the titles more than integrated by the music, and the family, labour, the state, history and other people are absent. One consciousness and a weather of images, which is the scale of the form as this record uses it, and above the floor.
Steve McCurry · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
The orders held are few, and most by implication. Consciousness, in the gaze, held fully and particularly: the one order held from within. Childhood, in her age. Poverty, in the holes of the shawl. Custom and gender, in the head covering, worn as everyday dress. War and the state only by implication: the refugee and the absent country, with nothing of either in the frame. The relation the picture holds most strongly, the watched and the West that watches, is what the image does more than what it holds. No family, no sacred order, no story within the frame. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, just above its floor, is that a single cropped face leaves out most of the world; what lifts it at all is that a person is in it. The figure describes the form.
Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The orders held are few, and held by refusal. The unit and its hierarchy; the body under wounding; the military apparatus overhead and at the gate, in jets, vehicles and radio; the Iraqi family and the Iraqi soldiers attached to the platoon, present at the edge; the city beyond the walls, implied by its fighters. What is present is integrated, and the family’s confinement in its own house is the one point at which a second order of the war enters the frame. What holds the figure near its floor: the state, history, the reasons of the war and the inner lives of the men are deliberately absent. The figure describes the form chosen, and the film does not reach past it.
Keith Haring · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The orders held: the body and its consumption; money; death; the city and its public space; the child at play beside the sign. Labour, the state and the family are present only by implication; the arrest, the court and the absent parents of the playground are not in the image. The wall holds a few orders in one sign and holds them clearly, but it does not integrate them into a structure that shows how they bear on one another. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form itself: a slogan and a frieze on one wall cannot hold the orders a cycle of walls can hold, as Detroit Industry Murals shows. A low mark on a short form describes the form, and the figure clears its floor, level on this axis with It’s My Life and above Rhein II.
Talk Talk · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held: the self that wants its life and doubts it can have it, in Such a Shame and the title song. The couple is held at a distance, in Renée and in Does Caroline Know? Chance and the surrendered will are held in Such a Shame’s premise, and one voice joins the three. Beyond them the orders are absent or only glimpsed: no labour, no family beyond the couple, no state or history, no sacred, and no natural order in the record as heard. What holds the figure this low is that what there is lies close together, three orders in one voice. The figure describes the reach of this record, not a limit of the form.
Mogwai · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held, as a sensibility moving between calm and force. The city enters in title only, Glasgow as a joke giant and We’re No Here in its speech. Travel and danger are named in a title. A foreign voice enters in I Chose Horses, the record’s one other person, but what he says stays closed to most listeners and is not integrated as a subject. The family, labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent, unless the weather of the sound is counted as nature, and it is texture rather than an order held. One sensibility holds one order fully and touches two others, and that is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve. It sits below m b v, at 6.6.
James Montgomery Flagg · Visual art
7.2 · Tier III
The orders held: the state, as the personified nation; the individual, as the singled-out “you”; war, by implication; the family, in the patriarch who calls up the young; national history and myth, in the figure’s costume. They are integrated in one gesture, which is the poster’s real achievement on this axis. But most of them are present by implication only, and labour, the sacred, the natural order, and any consciousness beyond the one moment of being summoned are absent. The figure clears its own floor and sits second lowest of the twelve; a low figure on a small form describes the form, one man and one demand on a sheet made to be read in passing.
Coldplay · Music
7.2 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as regret, longing and the wish to undo. The couple is held throughout: The Scientist, In My Place, Warning Sign and Green Eyes each address one absent or wronged person. Time is held as a subject in Clocks and The Scientist. Beyond these the orders are glimpsed: the public world enters once, in Politik, and is dropped; the sacred is a title; violence and despair enter as moods more than worlds. Family, labour, the state, history and the natural order are absent or only named. What holds the figure there is closeness: two or three orders, lying near together in one voice.
Kazimir Malevich · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
A single form on a field holds few orders, and the figure describes the form. What is held: the sacred, as the icon’s place and the absolute set into it; the cosmic, the void or infinity the black opens onto, which Malevich’s own writing claimed; consciousness, the pure feeling his movement claimed to make visible, offered to a viewer who must supply it; and art’s own history, ended on the canvas. They are integrated, one form read four ways. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is nearly everything else: no person, no body, no family, no labour, no city, no state, no nature, no story. The revolution, the war and the later suppression are facts the viewer brings, and the canvas does not hold them. It holds less than any painting near it, by design.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The figure describes the form: a tronie is a head, and the rubric records the ceiling rather than compensating for it. Held here: consciousness, the sitter’s in her turn and parted lips and the viewer’s, made part of the picture by the gaze; an intimate order, held in the mouth and in the distance between the two; and a far world, as costume, the turban and its blue, present but not joined to anything the picture knows. Absent: the family, labour, the household, the state, history, the sacred and the natural world. Even Vermeer’s own interiors, with their maps, letters and scales, hold more. The Encompassed clears its floor of 6.0 by a tenth, and is the lowest of the twelve.
Thomas Gainsborough · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
The orders held are few. Consciousness, in the face. Class and its theatre: a boy of the merchant class in the dress of a court, a social order held in a costume. History, as the past worn in the present: the 1630s on a boy of about 1770. Nature, as a backdrop of sky and land, joined to the figure by nothing more than the opposition of colour. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, labour, the state and the sacred. What is present is integrated in the single image, and a single portrait is a small form; the figure describes the form and does not compensate for it. It clears its own floor by a tenth.
Haddon Sundblom · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The orders held are few: the family and childhood, in the interrupted visit, the letter and the child awake; the household and its night; the festival; and consumption, fused into one scene. Nature appears only as the winter outside. Labour appears only by its absence, Santa at rest, the pause. The state and history do not appear. The sacred is removed, the festival made secular and domestic. They are held together, not listed, which keeps the figure above its floor. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form: a single advertisement, one figure in one room with one product, cannot reach further, and the body repeats that form rather than widening it. The figure describes the form.
Constantin Brâncuși · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and held in one form. The natural order: the bird, flight, the air, distilled. The sacred, or the spiritual: ascent, the soul rising, carried without a sign. The material order and the machine age: a hand-polished surface that looks machined, of a kind a customs officer took for manufactured metal. Folk tradition, through the Măiastra lineage, present in the series more than in this bronze. They are integrated, since one rising form carries each. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour shown, no history, no state, no story, no world but the room it reflects. The figure describes the form’s choice, a single object reduced to one motion.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The orders held: perception, in the felt balance that is the work’s medium; the natural order in its most abstract form, the vertical of growth and the horizontal of the horizon, as the painter conceived them; the made order of architecture, in planes and bands that reach toward the wall and the room; and the cosmic order, the universal harmony the painter meant. One law integrates them. What holds the axis at its floor, the lowest of the twelve, is that most of these are present by the theory and not by the object, and everything else is absent: no person, no consciousness but the viewer’s, no family, no labour, no state, no history, no sacred but in the painter’s intention. The figure describes the form, which chose to hold almost nothing.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The orders held are few, and held in one gesture. Industry: a mass-produced thing from a catalogue. The body: excretion, and the male body in particular, brought into a hall of art. The institution and its law: a society’s constitution tested and broken. Commerce and authorship: a trade name made a signature. And art itself, as a social order of naming. They are integrated, because one act touches all of them at once. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is nearly everything else: no person but the pseudonym, no family, no history, no nature, no sacred order except as the viewers of 1917 brought it, no world beyond the hall. The editorial in The Blind Man reaches toward a country of plumbing and bridges; the object does not. The figure describes the form, a single chosen thing.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
An abstract field holds few orders, and this one holds few. Consciousness, in the viewer’s perception and feeling, which the work takes as its medium and its subject; light, in the white centre and the inner glow of the fields; the body, in the scale of the canvas set to the standing viewer and the upright stack that answers it; and an emotional order, the state the colour carries. One field holds all four, so they are integrated. The sacred is present only as Rothko’s later direction and as viewers bring it; it is not made visible here. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, at its floor, is what is absent: no person, no family, no labour, no city, no state, no nature as such, no history and no story. That is the form’s choice, and the figure describes the form.
Alexandros of Antioch (attributed) · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on what one figure holds. The body, idealised and female. The sacred, in the goddess and the cult she presumably served on Melos. Eros, at the drapery’s threshold. Art itself, as the classical ideal, more by reception than by making. History, held by the damage: the figure as the ruin of antiquity, which the object carries and the maker did not. They are integrated through the one body. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: consciousness beyond a turned and unreadable face, the family, labour, the state, the natural order, any narrative. One figure can hold no more; the mark meets the floor and describes the form.
Vilhelm Hammershøi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held: consciousness, as an inner life implied by a turned figure and not shown; the household; the city house, the architecture of an old Copenhagen dwelling; and the natural order, as the sun and the time of day it marks on the floor. They are integrated: the room, the woman and the light are one stillness. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no state, no history in the frame, no sacred order but what the viewer brings, and no society beyond a single woman in a single room. It is a small canvas of a room with a figure and a light, and it does not reach for more. The figure describes the form, and it stands exactly on the floor the rubric sets.
The Beatles · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on what thirty minutes of love songs hold, with no discount for the form, which the figure describes rather than compensates. The couple is held fully, in courtship, doubt, jealousy, quarrel and parting. Consciousness enters in If I Fell and I’ll Be Back as a lover’s caution and indecision. Labour is glimpsed in the title song’s working day, money in Can’t Buy Me Love, time and memory in Things We Said Today, and these are joined to the love song, not merely named. What holds the figure at the floor: the family, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent, and most of what is present is one order seen from several sides. The record holds what its form allows and does not reach past it.
Alphonse Mucha · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The orders held: the theatre and its star; commerce and the street; the sacred, through the liturgy of Palm Sunday and the icon tradition; history, through the Byzantine Athens of the play. They are fused in one image rather than listed, and that earns the floor. What holds the axis at its floor, the lowest of the twelve, is that each order is held as a sign rather than developed: no labour, no family, no state, no natural order, no consciousness beyond the composure of one face. A poster of one figure cannot hold what a great history painting holds, and this one does not try. The figure describes the form.
Frans Hals · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The orders held: one consciousness, a young man in a moment of amusement and self-regard; class and wealth, in the lace and gold of a prosperous burgher of a new republic; love and courtship, if the embroidery is read so; the body and its display, in the pose; and art, in the visible pleasure of the painting. The low viewpoint and the meeting gaze integrate them into one presence. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, at its floor, is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state except by implication, no history, no sacred order and no natural world, nothing beyond the man and his clothes. It is a portrait of one sitter against a bare ground, and the figure describes the form.
Andreas Gursky · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The orders held are few, and held by implication. The natural order, in sky, water and grass. Labour and administration, in the mown banks, the canalised river and the path: nature as managed ground. Industry, held by its absence, the buildings removed. History, held only by the river’s name. Perception and the image, in the question of what a photograph shows. They are integrated in one view, but most are present as absences: the picture’s method is to take orders out rather than hold them. There is no person, no family, no state but by implication, no sacred order and no story. That holds the axis lowest of the twelve, at its floor: the figure describes the form, a single, emptied view.
Harold Ramis · Film
7.4 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of 101 minutes holds, with no discount for the form. One man’s consciousness, fully, across an unstated span. A small town in a dozen figures: the diner waitress, the insurance man, the landlady, the old man, the boy, the couple at the wedding, the drinking men at the bowling alley. Labour, in local television and in the crafts Phil learns; death and its limit, in the old man; the sacred by figure, in the purgatorial structure and the omen of the groundhog; time as the condition of a life. They are integrated: the town is the place of the self’s reform. What holds the axis at its floor: the family is absent, the state, history and the natural order enter only as weather, Rita’s consciousness is not held, and all of it is held through one man in one day.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 95 minutes holds. Barry’s consciousness, held from inside through form; the family, seven sisters and a brother-in-law, as chorus and wound; labour and small commerce, a warehouse business selling novelty plungers, with Lance and the morning routine; the consumer economy, in the pudding promotion; sexuality as commerce, in the phone line and its extortion; travel and the city, the Valley and Honolulu. They are integrated, since the promotion, the extortion and the romance are one movement. What holds the axis at its floor, the lowest of the twelve: Lena’s consciousness is nearly absent; the state, history and the natural order do not enter; the sacred is present only as figure, in the harmonium. A small form held tightly, and the figure describes the form.
Wes Anderson · Film
6.9 · Tier II
Judged on what a film of about 91 minutes holds. Friendship among men, its jealousies and loyalties; the family, present in absence, no fathers, Anthony’s young sister, Bob’s rich and distant parents and his brother; class, glimpsed in the gap between Bob’s house, the motel’s workers and Mr. Henry’s predation; the exurban Texas of highways, motels and lawns; a love across language. They are held together in one picaresque, but held lightly. What keeps the axis at its floor: the state appears only as a police raid and a prison wall, labour only as a housekeeper’s job and a gardening business, and neither is examined; consciousness is given from outside, through behaviour, which suits the deadpan and limits the reach.
Thomas Heatherwick · Architecture
6.8 · Tier II
Orders held: the body, climbing; the crowd, made visible to itself across the bowl; the city, in the view over the Hudson and the West Side; commerce, in the development the structure was built to draw people to and to make photographable; and, by its history, death and the duty of care. They are present, and some are joined in one image, a crowd climbing in a bowl set among the towers of commerce. But the integration is thin, and the most serious orders it holds came to it by its failures rather than by its design. What holds the axis lowest, at the floor of 6.0 exactly, is what is absent: labour, the family, the state, history and the sacred are absent or merely implied. A climbing structure in a plaza holds a few orders in one figure, and the figure describes the form.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.7 · Tier II
Judged on what ninety-four minutes hold. Consciousness, in the Motorcycle Boy’s alienation, given from outside, and Rusty James’s want, given from inside but thinly; the family, in an alcoholic father on welfare, a mother gone to California and two brothers; town and class, a declining city on the wrong side of the river; the law, in Patterson’s hatred; time, in the clocks and skies; the natural order, in the fish, the river and the sea. The fish join the family, the law and the death. What holds the axis at its floor: labour is absent but for the father’s dole, the state is one policeman, the sacred is absent, the women are held at the edge, and history, the gang era already over, is glimpsed rather than entered.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The orders held are few. The natural order, in the living animal, and with it creaturely consciousness, the wariness of a wild thing. Perception and the image, in the window in the eye that places a person and a room behind the picture. Labour, faintly, in the visible patience of the making. They are integrated in one structure, which is the sheet’s merit, but the structure holds a single creature. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, and just below its floor of 6.0, is what is absent: no family, no state, no history, no story, and the sacred only as something the viewer may bring. The figure describes the form, a study of one animal, and does not charge it.
Indus Valley (Mohenjo-daro) · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The orders held: the body, wholly; adornment as a social order, in bangles that imply a world of rank, wealth or marriage and of the craft and trade in shell and metal; consciousness, in an attitude that implies a self; and, if the title is right, music and dance, which the figure does not show and the viewer brings. They are integrated in one pose. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, a tenth below its own floor of 6.0, is what is absent: no other person, no family, no labour but the maker’s, no state, no history, no nature and no sacred order that can be shown, no world beyond the figure. A single figure about 10.5 centimetres high holds no more. The figure describes the form.
Oasis · Music
7.2 · Tier III
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form, and this is the lowest axis. Consciousness is held, as a mood of longing and release. The hoped-for rescuer is held at a distance in Wonderwall; memory and forgiveness in Don’t Look Back in Anger; the artist and his gift in Cast No Shadow; youth and intoxication in Champagne Supernova and Morning Glory; a crowd implied in every chorus. Class, the north of England and the Britain of 1995 surround the record, in its legend and its audience, and are barely in it. The family appears as a joke in She’s Electric. Labour, the state, history and the sacred are absent. What there is lies close together, held in one mood and joined by no structure.
Buster Keaton · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on what a film of about 45 minutes holds. Consciousness is held in a form: the dream is the film’s real subject, and the wished self against the waking self is integrated with everything else. Courtship and the family enter through the girl’s father and his watch; money through a dollar, a pawn ticket and the price of candy; the institution of cinema, its booth, its screen and its audience, is held fully; the law is a detective manual and a parody of the detective picture. What holds the figure lowest, below its own floor, is extent: labour is a sweeping boy and a projectionist’s job, the state and history are absent, the sacred and the natural order appear only as backdrops in the montage, and every order is seen through one boy’s wish. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
René Magritte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
One object and one sentence hold few orders, and hold them by design. Representation, the image and its claim on the real; language, the word and its claim on the image; the object world, a common thing of use; the schoolroom, the scene of learning to name, which the composition quotes; and consciousness, the viewer’s mind caught confusing sign and thing. They are integrated: one problem seen five ways. What holds the axis lowest, below its own floor, is what is absent, which is nearly everything the rubric lists: no person, no family, no labour, no state, no history, no sacred, no natural order, no place. The work’s power is that smallness, a whole theory carried by two marks. The figure describes the form.
Bridget Riley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
A perceptual structure holds few orders. This one holds perception itself, the eye’s construction of depth; the body, in the balance it unsettles; consciousness, in a viewer made aware of seeing; and space, in the illusion of a surface that folds. The four are integrated, one event seen four ways. The old perspectival pavement, and order with its failure, are present only by evocation. Absent are the person, the family, labour, the state, history, nature and the sacred. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, and below its own floor, is that absence, which the form chooses: the figure describes the form, and the form chooses its smallness.
Samuel Barber · Music
7.8 · Tier III
A low mark on a small form describes the form. The work holds one consciousness in one state, grief, and integrates it with time, in the breath and the long unbroken duration, and by evocation with the sacred, in the chant-like line. The social enters only through use, which is not the work. The family, labour, the state, history and the natural order do not appear. What holds the figure below its own floor of 6.0 is that count: eight minutes, one line and one feeling hold fewer orders than a song cycle, a variation set or a quartet in seven movements. The figure is the form’s, and it is stated, not excused.
Banksy · Visual art
7.0 · Tier III
The orders held are few: childhood, love and loss, and on the first wall the city’s public space and whoever passed through it. No family, labour, state, history, natural order or sacred order is present except as a viewer brings it, and the faceless figure, open to any cause, holds none of its own. What is present is integrated, since the few things the image holds are held in one gesture. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, and below its own floor, is the size of the form: a single small figure and an object, which hold little because there is room in them for little. The figure describes the form, and the form is an emblem.
Maurizio Cattelan · Visual art
6.7 · Tier II
The orders held are few, and held in one gesture. The market and money, in the price as material. Food and the body, in a thing made to be eaten and eaten in public. Labour and global trade, by implication only, in a fruit grown far away and sold cheaply; the readings of a banana republic lie outside the work, brought by viewers. The institution of art, in the fair and the gallery. Comedy as a social order. They are integrated, since one act touches them all at once. What holds the axis below its own floor is what is absent: no person, no family, no history, no nature beyond the fruit, no sacred order, no world beyond the wall. The figure describes the form.
Jack Vettriano · Visual art
6.5 · Tier II
The orders held: love and the couple; class and service, in the two servants and the evening dress, the one order the composition integrates; nature as weather, sea and shore; music by the title only, a song the picture cannot sound; and a remembered era of glamour, as costume rather than as history. They are held in one arrangement, the canopy over the dancers, and that is real integration over a small field. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, with The Bottomless Well beside it, is what is absent: no consciousness the picture gives access to, since the couple turn from us and the servants are blank; no family; no labour beyond the holding of an umbrella; no state, no history and no sacred order. It is a cabinet scene of one moment between four people. The figure describes the form.
Muqi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The orders held: the natural order, in fruits of a season; consciousness, in the act of attention the image both asks for and shows; and the sacred, by the sheet’s making in a Chan monastery and its reading since, present as context more than as a structure the image holds. Labour is present perhaps in the gathered fruit, faintly. These are integrated in one act of seeing. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, and below its own floor, is what is absent, which is nearly everything: no person, no family, no society, no state, no history, no story, not even a landscape. It is a small sheet of six fruits. The figure describes the form and asks no compensation for it.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
7.0 · Tier III
Judged on what a film of about 99 minutes holds. The orders present: crime as a trade, with its planning, its professionals and its pay; the law, in an undercover policeman, his handler, a policeman taken hostage and the force waiting outside; a family of sorts, Joe, his son and the man he raised in the trade, and the bond between White and Orange; consciousness, in Orange’s fear, rehearsal and guilt; race and masculinity, in the talk. They are integrated: the robbery, the rat and the loyalty are one movement. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, below its floor, is what is absent: women are seen only as victims through windscreens and as the subject of talk; the state is a waiting police force; history, the sacred, the natural order and any society beyond the gang do not enter. A small form held tightly, and the figure describes the form.