totally digging that extra hour of sleep today
a thought, certainly not original, but one I want to put down: the entire schematic of the gregorian calendar posits a backwards countdown to the Christ-Year 0 and a subsequent upwards-and-onwards exercise in addition -- 2006 years of value (to date) added year by year to the temporal black hole of Year 0. no wonder we believe so much in going forward, improvement, whigs, progress, enlightenment, climax, nirvana, revelation. no wonder postmodernism so often descends into despair or desperate, faux hope. and no wonder eschatology came to be. it's written into the very stuff of our daily lives -- each nonchalant flip of the calendar page is an affirmation of the arrow that's spent two millennia plowing forward, and before christ, time was just wrong, topsy-turvy, an unnatural backward flow. this simple, loaded schematic has formed the locus of a whole slew of assumptions upon which we (often unquestioningly) base our telos...and it's so easy to lose sight of this amidst the ebb and flow of our daily lives.
AD 2006. anno domini. what comes after the lord? what can? either the notion of an infinitely increasing value to the human race from the point of its christian genesis, or an eschatology, a Judgment Day, an End. reject the latter and stagger immediately under the burden of infinity. and religion has always been about comfort -- in Christianity's case, a bulwark against this monstrous and unthinkable infinity, the relief of the Alpha and the Omega, but also the greatest and most consoling conceit: that there is an alphabet at all.
all this, encoded into our mondays, our octobers, our lunchtimes and seven-o'clock-news, our mistletoe, birthdays and fireworks. an insidious regiment emblazoned into our alarm clocks. I suppose I'm only thinking about this because the clocks moved backwards today, and I found myself wondering a little about time: whether it's really time that we've yoked into some notional semblance of order, or whether, armed with our minutes, months and years in the face of icy, infinite chaos, the yoke (hee) is on us.