On the Clock

My only photo of the 8/2017 eclipse (a solar timepiece)

The official NG track for May is now Yukiyo-e. It started in March and is marching up in time. I've decided at this point the heuristic that I'm going to be using is that a piece for a month will be either when it started or when it was finished. So that span might be 3 months, or 6 months. It actually makes more sense because I don't want to necessarily be on a clock with creative work, although that can be a powerful constraint because it prevents endless dawdling over detail after detail and to make executive decisions on things. This is why many studio recordings are less interesting than live versions because it took more time for the song to fully resolve.

I was just reading a book by Jenny O'Dell titled Saving Time. There's this idea of solar time, which I think makes more sense because that's what most non-human organisms follow. There isn't a mental model of a physical clock defining a temporal commons. One of the central ideas in Nostalgia Galaxy is of the overlay of Earth time in space, including the idea of months and seasons. (It is essentially the idea of zeitgeber, something that organizes and patterns your time).

When we talk about things being millions or billions of light years away we're still on the earth clock, which at the beginning of time never existed. But it's the way that we have to orient ourselves to everything on an infinitesimal dust mote of a planet, but nonetheless affects our lives in profound ways.

Sound patterns in our environment become clocks as well, like the rise of the volume of traffic around 5:30 a.m., or the sounds of doors opening and closing as people come and go, adherence to the clock.

***

From Saving Time, p. 196:

"Eviatar Zerubavel notes in his study of standardized time that Muslim countries insist on solar time (based on the apparent position of the sun versus the reading of a clock) for scheduling prayers. In a move similar to Seventh-day Adventism's Saturday service, Twin Oaks, one of the 1960s communes I mention in How to Do Nothing, purposely set all its clocks one hour ahead of "outside time,"  observing what they called Twin Oaks Time (TOT). And until 1911, the French stubbornly refused
to observe Greenwich Mean Time-based as it was in England-and even when they did, they called it "Paris Mean Time, retarded by nine minutes twenty-one seconds."