Join the Calendar Revolution!

Saturday, December 31, 2016

“I have found it fascinating how an arbitrary measure of time can become personified, despised, & blamed for all the events we've decided it contains. Someone with more time should write about this.”

That was the challenge my brilliant archaeologist friend Jane Baxter posted on FB a couple of days ago in response to the endless comments of people hoping for the many sorrows of 2016 to end.

“Get lost, 2016… Fuck you 2016... 2016: What else can go wrong?” They’ve been all over my feed as people mourn the losses of favorite musicians and celebrities, the ascendance of a nasty, dangerous cartoon character to the most powerful job on the planet, the virulence in social media, the endless reports of lethal bombings around the world, equally lethal cold waves radiating across North America, and the coughs and fevers of the first wave of winter flus. Get lost 2016. Good riddance.

Her equally smart FB friends pointed out that we are always looking for a way to cap an end to pain and sorrow, to point toward hope for a better future. Turning over a new leaf for a new year accomplishes that. So do the accompanying resolutions that rarely survive the first month. I have nothing profound to add to that wisdom. But I do have the time to write about it.

As an archaeologist, Jane fully knows that time isn’t arbitrary. It shapes our lives. Sunrises and sunsets. Phases of the moon. The earth’s annual journey of 365 ¼ days around the sun. Those are physical process and govern the behavior of our planet and everything living within it, from plankton to physicists.

This is true of human cultures too. Stonehenge, Chaco, Giza, Newgrange, and just about every other ancient monument are all aligned to solar or lunar positions. Human calendars go back to the beginnings of our species, if Alexander Marshack has it right. Even the ancestral Homo naledi seemed to ponder the idea of a future by deliberately burying their dead 2+ million years ago.

What Jane is questioning is the choice of a 12 month calendar which randomly ends at a date called December 31, at which time the cycle begins anew. We can blame Julius Caesar for that one. Or Pope Gregory XIII, since the Vatican typically couldn’t leave well enough alone. Why December (literally the tenth month) 31-- rather than a more nature-driven date like the solstice ten days earlier—is puzzling.  And why choose the middle of winter to start the new cycle, when the weather report on 12/31 won’t be much different than the one on 1/1?  

Instead, we should begin a new cycle somewhere near the start of spring.  Even the Romans did that. So did the Old Testament Hebrews.  What can be more decisively symbolic of an end to pain and beginning of hope than that first benign day when new shoots break through the cold ground? This from a guy who has lived almost his entire life in California.

We need that hope. After all, time only matters to us because we know it will end. Permanently. Inevitably. Usually without fanfare and trumpets.  Enveloped in professional work, child rearing, and using every moment to complete unfinished obligations or pursue happiness, it’s easy to view time as a vague annoyance to be put off for some future date.

Until a year ago when I retired. Time looks different today. It has a new weight. An expiration date. Beginning a new year is more than the decision of whether to have a second glass of champagne at midnight.  

Assigning a calendar date of 2017 to this next cycle is equally random. It was supposedly decided by anno domini, but scholars’ best guess is that Jesus’s birth was 4 or maybe 6 years before his era begins. Nothing really happened in the year 1, unless you’re making a movie with Jack Black. Maybe they should have picked 45 BC, when Julius Caesar became the first Roman emperor and declared a new calendar by fiat. If you want to stick with a Christian-driven system, move the tipping point to 30 AD, when Jesus was crucified and supposedly resurrected. Before that he was just another Middle Eastern socialist rebel. That would make tomorrow New Year’s Day 1987. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were in charge the last time 1987 cycled through. They’re looking much better in the context of 2017. Prozac, Ninja Turtles, and the Simpsons were introduced. Bowie, Prince, Glen Frey, and Leonard Cohen were in full flower. Creationism was invalidated as a substitute for evolution by the Supreme Court. Vida and I were married. Ah, the good old days.

If it were 1987 again, I would be 30 years younger.

What is this calendar thing all about? Order. Predictability. Regularity. Animals don’t need calendars. Neither do children, foragers, farmers. Nor most of the rest of us. Calendars are for governments and industries and CEOs and accountants. Julius really couldn’t tell his legions that they’d get paid whenever the moon was full because that sometimes happened 12 times a year, sometimes 13. On cloudy nights, there was no moon at all. Not surprising that our calendar comes from the longest-lasting empire in the western world. Army revolts were nasty. So are corporate annual reports.

Probably the most revolutionary thing we could do to improve our world would be to throw out the imperial Julian/Gregorian calendar and go back to a system based the cycles of the rhythms of nature. The year begins when the first new green appears on our aged neighborhood oak tree or when the first California golden poppy shakes its stuff in a spring breeze.  If we’re lucky, it will be after April income tax filing and property tax paying (at least locally), so there will be reason for a new hope. Come join me in the Calendar Revolution! 

But I’ve taken enough of your time. We can plan this tomorrow. Go celebrate the new year.  

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