Timekeepers. Simon Garfield
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Название: Timekeepers
Автор: Simon Garfield
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9781782113201
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An artist involved in reinventing time faces dilemmas that do not befall the modern printmaker or ceramicist. The trickiest thing about Ewan’s Back to the Fields calendar show was obtaining the obscure plants and objects that had fallen out of favour in the last 200 years. ‘I thought initially that you could get everything you want online,’ Ewan acknowledges, ‘but I know now that you can’t.’ The last object to join the show was a winnowing fan, a type of basket. ‘Not that long ago they were probably everywhere, but the only place we could find one was in an Oxford professor of basketry’s own collection. You’ll see one in a painting by Millet. It was literally used to sort the wheat from the chaff.’
One visitor to Ewan’s show at Camden Arts Centre knew more than most about the dislocations of time. Matthew Shaw, a curator at the British Library, had written his Ph.D. on post-revolutionary France and turned it into a book. He had also turned it into a 45-minute talk that began with that famous bit of optimism from Wordsworth: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!’ Shaw explained that the calendar was an attempt to lift an entire nation out of the earth’s existing timeline, to start history afresh and give each citizen a shared and finite collective memory; it was a good way to impose order on a disordered country.
Shaw examined the calendar’s secular elements (it abolished religious festivals and the saints’ days), and stressed its inbuilt work ethic – the way time was newly arranged to make pre-industrial France more productive in the field and battlefield. The month was split into three 10-day décades, granting only one day off in ten rather than one in seven. With the Sabbath gone, the population found that the new day of rest carried many active obligations. ‘The observant of you will notice there’s a pattern here,’ Shaw said as he guided his visitors round. ‘Every fifth and tenth day there’s something slightly out of sequence, either an animal or an implement. On the tenth day you’re all supposed to gather in your village, sing patriotic songs, read out the laws, have a big meal together – and learn about the pickaxe.’
This, perhaps, was one explanation for the calendar’s eventual failure. But there were other, more astronomical, reasons, such as a misalignment of the equinox. It was also a calendar that was more than a calendar: it was political, radically agrarian, and imposed its own weighty sense of history. Besides, Shaw observes, ‘it was quite hard to rule an empire with it.’ To complicate matters further, the 12 months had new names too, each selected by the flamboyant poet and playwright Fabre d’Églantine (who was guillotined not long afterwards for financial misdemeanours and his associations with Robespierre; he died on the day of the lettuce). Brumaire (Fog) lasted from 22 October (the day of apple) to 20 November (the day of roller), while Nivôse (Snow) lasted from 21 December (the day of peat) to 19 January (the day of sieve). All very simple when you get the hang of it, which few French citizens did, or seemed to want to.
Shaw was reaching the end of his tour, and his audience was beginning to pull away, shaking heads. He paused at 15 February, represented by hazel. ‘It’s very appropriate, as today we’ve just heard the news that Michele Ferrero has passed away at the age of 89, who made his fortune from Nutella.’ Shaw’s penultimate stop in the room was at the 10th of Thermidor. This was Republican high summer, and the day (28 July 1794) when Robespierre was executed. The Terror was eating its own. The day was represented by a watering can.2
Insane and wonderful as it was, the utopian French Republican calendar seems to have existed outside time. From today’s perspective it appears as absurd as the prospect of a global commune or free money, but it is only routine and time itself that has brought us to this judgment. Earth has many calendars in which it has set its frame, and all blend logic, natural science and arbitrariness to their cause. The calendric system of time that apportions our lives into a semblance of progressive shape – and perhaps, we hope, consistent meaning – is not something that may be conclusively proven or even relied upon. One day we may wake up, as did the citizens of Auvergne and Aquitaine, and find that Tuesday is not where it used to be, and that October has gone completely.
The Republican calendar was also unusual in one other respect. It was history overnight, and unrecognisable from what had preceded it; it destroyed what calendrical historians like to call the ‘deep fixity’ of all earlier conceptions.3 Previously, or so we would like to assume, calendars in Europe and the civilised ancient world had progressed gradually with emerging astral awareness and mathematical computation. Religious calendars also built upon each other, drawing on common baselines of solstice, equinox and eclipse.
But we’d be wrong to believe that the French Revolutionary calendar was the first to impose a political perspective upon the days. All calendars impose order and control to a greater or lesser degree, and all are political in their own way (particularly the religious ones). The ancient Mayan calendar, for example, was a beautiful and truly baffling thing, intricately maintaining two years in parallel, one of 365 days and one of 260. The 260-day system, or Sacred Round, contained 20 different names of days, including Manik, Ix, Ben and Eiznab, and these ran on the perimeter of an inner circle of 13 numbers, so that the year ended on 13 Ahau. The 365-day calendar contained 18 months of 20 days each, but as this made up only 360 and rendered it out of step with lunar and solar cycles, the remaining five days were judged fateful, with Mayans wont to stay indoors and pray to the Gods lest terrible things occur. These were terrible religious prophecies, an indication of the power of the priesthood. The Aztec calendar of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries ran on similar cycles, and institutional control: disparate provinces of a vast empire were purposely unified by religious festivals and other dates. (The Aztec calendar culminated in the New Fire ceremonies performed at the end of the full cycle every 52 years.)
We will be more familiar with the Julian calendars (effective from 45 bc, and consisting of 12 months and 365.25 days, based on a solar year), and the Gregorian reform of 1582, which retained the Julian months and lengths but slightly shortened the duration of the year (by 0.002 per cent) to accommodate more accurate astronomical rotations and reposition the date of Easter to the date it was first celebrated.4 The Gregorian calendar took a while to be widely accepted, with the grudging adoption by Catholic countries causing anomalies throughout Europe. When Edmond Halley observed a total solar eclipse in London on 22 April 1715, much of the rest of Europe saw it on 3 May. Great Britain and its American colonies finally switched over in 1752, but not without a bit of half-hearted rioting from people shouting ‘Give us back our eleven days!’ Japan only changed in 1872, Bolshevik Russia came in at the end of the First World War, and Greece in 1923. Turkey clung on to its Islamic calendar until 1926.
The apparent arbitrariness of how we have chosen to govern our lives was expertly parodied by B.J. Novak in the New Yorker in November 2013. ‘The Man Who Invented the Calendar’ wrote plainly of the great logic of his invention: ‘A thousand days a year, divided into twenty-five months, forty days a month. Why didn’t anyone think of this before?’ Things go well for the calendar initially, but the first crisis hits after four weeks. ‘People really hate January and want it to be over,’ the inventor noted. ‘I tried to explain that it’s just a label, and that ending it wouldn’t make any difference, but no one got it.’ On 9 October, the inventor writes: ‘Can’t believe I haven’t written in so long! Summer was amazing. Harvest was amazing . . . This year has been amazing and it’s still only October. There’s still November, December, СКАЧАТЬ