2019-07-02 - À la recherce du temps perdu
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Been a little while since I posted. Just keep feeling like I have
so many things I want to say, but when it comes to saying them, I
feel like I make no sense.
I watched the Democratic Primary Debates, saw nothing that's
changed my mind one iota. Elizabeth Warren should be the next
President of the United States, anyone else is a compromise too
far.
The server I've been playing Minecraft on upgraded to 1.14, and
I've spent a little time playing that this week. Not a huge amount,
but enough to have me seeing squares when I try to sleep. Such is
life.
I had a few idle moments over the weekend, and decided to write a
little bot on the Fediverse.
[email protected] just posts the
day according to the French Republican Calendar, its been a fun
exercise.
For those who don't know the history, following the French
Revolution, in the days of the Directory, sincere efforts were made
to implement the values of he Enlightenment across all fields of
tendeavour in France. Some of these, such as metrification and the
decimalisation of currency were succesful, and are still with us
today. Others were less succesful, like the Calendar.
There's a fantastic book on this topic by Dr. Sanja Perovic, "The
Calendar in Revolutionary France:Perceptions of Time in Literature,
Culture, Politics". In the book, Dr. Perovic argues persuasively
that the effort of the Calendar was not simply to mark time, but it
was an heroic effort which defied the simple dualisms which have
been attached to it: religion from history; history from nature;
linear from cyclical time.
The Republican Calendar, moreover, was a deliberate and fundamental
breach with the calendar of Constantine, that christian calendar
imposed by the dying Roman Empire and adopted wholesale by the
catholic church which grabbed the imperial power structures for
itself, for its own ends. The calendar was an attempt to remove
that chokehold over the very idea of time itself which had been
appropriated by the catholic christians, to replace a concept of
time based on the lives of saints and various sacrifices with a
reckoning of time based on the lived experience of people then
living.
It is hard to conceive of any act in the 1,500 years which separate
us from the Romans which has been more audacious, more ambitious,
more revolutionary.
There are many, many problems with the calendar (not least of which
was the loss of rest days for the average worker), but as a
testament of an act of human intelligence and reason it is hard to
object to it. I *love* the calendar, I love what it represents and
what it could have been.
Anyway, please feel free to follow
[email protected] if you,
like me, yearn for a time when the shackles of the past can be
thrown off.
