Keep The Giraffe Burning (22 page)

Others have carried the cyclic error to its two possible extremes: In
A.D.
628, Brahmagupta declared that the world is destroyed by fire and recreated once every 4,320,000,000 years. On the other hand, Buddhist writers have seen a different cycle, in which the world is destroyed and created anew 75,000 times each second. But we fall into the same abyss in saying that Winter has returned, or that it’s March again.

T
HE RIVER ERROR.
The numbering of days in each month, or of years, supposes that time flows on in an orderly progression, like a series of numbers. Mr L. Sterne, among others, has proved that it does not.

T
HE TORTOISE ERROR.
This, the most serious fault in our calendar system, assumes that time moves at all. It is self-evident that time is as motionless as the tortoise.

The simplest solution is not to abandon our calendar, but to introduce an unexpected month: Undecember. It may be shuffled in among other calendar pages, to break the predictable pattern of flow. Or it may be ignored entirely; the very knowledge of its existence is enough to demonstrate that time has no revolution, no progression, no movement and in fact no qualities whatever.

Undecember records days wasted in waiting, spent in dreaming, gathered up in trivial memories.

It records days which somehow get away from us, or come upon us without warning.

It records days looked forward to, which never arrive; days we wish were over or wish would never end; days we must recall but cannot; and days of which we can say nothing.

It records the
déjà vu
moment; the entire life of the amnesiac; the tomorrows of the improvident; and all the anniversaries of time.

Some Notable Anniversaries:

17
TH:
Anniversary of Heraclitus’ river-error: ‘One cannot go down to the river twice.’ We still speak of time as a river, flowing out of the tributaries of the future, down through the present, and on down to the delta of the past, where it deposits all the shit and silt we call History. But there’s something wrong with this image: All that flows flows at some speed. Time, then, must also flow at some speed (measured in hours per hour) which we could find out. Using some meta-clock, or time-speedometer, we could then time time, to decide whether an hour really passes as slowly as it seems.

What’s wrong with it all, is that time would then be measured against some other time which could itself flow … and could in turn be measured … so on to an infinite series. This seems unfair.

11
TH:
Next Sunday, a Tuesday a few weeks ago, or today (Thursday). There is no contradiction in holding all three times in one’s mind at the same time. Perhaps all are the anniversary of some impending, long-forgotten event.

16
TH:
Unbirthday of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who invented the unbirthday. He was born on January 27th and died 13 days earlier.

8
TH:
Bank Computer Holiday
, England and Wales. Computers, operating in what is called ‘real time’, are considered real entities.

8
TH:
Might also be written the 1/8th of the month. Notice that days in this month are not numbered serially, because any series 1, 2, 3, … implies a future and a past which may or may not exist. In the same way, our method of numbering the years promises that a year ‘1984’ will arrive, and that a year ‘1884’ has passed. For this reason, Undecember is numbered randomly.

23
RD:
On January 22nd, 1932, the USSR began its second Five-Year Plan, again demonstrating the fallibility of number as a means of measuring and controlling time.

3
RD:
In 1899, Alfred Jarry wrote ‘How to Construct a Time Machine’. He died in 1907. In 1913, as Marcel Proust, he began scribbling about time once again. This has led some to suppose that Jarry somehow succeeded in building his time machine. A simple disproof of this follows:

Had Jarry succeeded, he might have travelled back in time and assisted at the difficult breech-birth of his own grandfather. He might indeed have been the clumsy male midwife who caused the infant’s death – a man using the alias ‘Marcel Proust’ but who is otherwise unknown. But others have shown that the midwife was not Alfred Jarry; moreover the real Proust had no access to the time machine built by H. G. Wells to Jarry’s instructions. QED, ‘How to Construct a Time Machine’ is fiction, developed without the assistance of a midwiving author.

14
TH:
Pendulum clock invented by Christian Higgins, 1656.

22
ND:
On January 22nd, 1932, the USSR began its second Five-Year Plan, again demonstrating the infallibility of number as a means of measuring and controlling time.

7
TH:
Another river-day: On June 7th, 1849, between 4.10 and 4.11 a.m., we are told
^*
, Huckleberry Finn awakens on his river-raft. He perceives ‘stars’, and ‘then he sinks into an immemorial sleep that envelops him like murky water’; real worlds and their times are no more than an interruption in the dream of a fictional character, himself not entirely believable, but dreamed up by someone using the name ‘Mark Twain’ (river slang again), whose real name, we are told, was Samuel Clemens. Clemens, of course, does not exist. There is a chance that he once existed, if only, in the fertile delta of the imagination of Jorge Luis Borges.

19
TH:
Non-discovery of two celestial -objects, OH 471 and 4C 05.34, said to be the oldest objects in the universe, being primeval galaxies. Radiation from these objects has taken the entire lifetime of the universe to reach the University of Texas at Austin.

24
TH:
Persons using a special device at the Institute for Parapsychology, Durham, North Carolina, have shown an uncanny ability to see into the future, 1/250,000th of a second.

15
TH:
It was not on the 15th Undecember 1938 that paleontologist Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer discovered among the catch of a South African trawler a fish called the coelacanth, previously thought to have been extinct for several million years.

8
TH:
Anniversary of a week ago Thursday.

26
TH:
J. W. Dunne, in
An Experiment with Time
, shows how dreams not only come true, but everything else works, too.

8
TH:
At noon, GMT, on December 8th, 1859, Admiral Henry Fitt set out on his famous round-the-world ‘Beat the Sun’ cruise. Sail, oar and special elastic engines enabled him to keep a constant westerly speed of 460 knots, staying ahead of the Sun. In principle this meant that when he had circumnavigated the globe, shipboard time would be (still) noon of the 14th, while shore time would be noon of the 15th. He intended to recoup the enormous cost of the cruise by reading advance copies of the newspaper stock market reports, and gaining a 24-hour jump on other investors. This scheme seems to have failed in some way, and the controversy it aroused led to the establishment of the International Dateline, which ships are forbidden to cross for 24 hours at a time.

20
TH:
St Zeno’s Day. Zeno proved motion to be impossible, since even the slightest motion must require an eternity of time to be completed. The proof of this has never been completed.

21
ST:
The discovery of
entropy
proves time to be neither a river nor a turning wheel, but merely a direction. Entropy means disorder, and as we move forward in time, disorder increases. Thus when we watch a film, we know whether it is running forward or backward by entropic indications: A pane of glass is shattered, a banana peeled and eaten, a tortoise drops on the head of Aeschylus and kills him – all indicating forward movement in time. A shattered pane coming together, a banana disgorged and reclothed in its skin, or Aeschylus coming to life, standing up and firing a tortoise off his head into the air – negative entropy, or backward movement in time. Time is an arrow.

14
TH:
Black Saturday. Henry Ford says: ‘History is bunk’, but proves automotion possible.

20
TH:
St Zeno’s Day. Zeno said that, for an arrow to reach its target, it must first move ½ the distance, then ½ of the remaining distance, and so on: ½ + ¼ + c + …, an infinite series that can never be completed in a finite time. Likewise he arranged a race between Achilles and a tortoise (or perhaps Aeschylus and a tortoise) proving that same point. Time to Zeno must have seemed an arrow divisible into an infinite number of points. He did not believe the story of Aeschylus’ death – how an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head – even though such a death seemed to fulfil an oracle. The oracle said that Aeschylus would die from a blow from heaven. Rational Zeno would have said it meant no more than an instant bolt of lightning.

6
TH:
Discovery of the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second.

22
ND:
Believing in history is like believing oracles. The past is a phantom like the future. Nevertheless, the USSR put great trust in both: Having awakened on their river raft from one dream of a Five-Year Plan, they dozed and dreamt of a second to come.

6
TH:
The speed of light being known, Einstein was able to dazzle the world with his special theory of relativity. It declares that, to an observer moving at the speed of light, there is no time. An arrow and a tortoise fired at one another at the speed of light, to us will seem to collide instantly. Nevertheless, the tortoise will himself have an eternity in which to contemplate his impending death. To him, the arrow will be Zeno’s arrow, suspended forever at a safe distance.

25
TH:
A suitable founding date for the fictitious United States of America, home of Huckleberry Finn again, awake. In honour of Undecembrist philosophers and poets, the United States took its emblem and slogan from Zeno. That many points in time cluster together to form a continuum, they express as
One from Many
(E Pluribus Unum), below an eagle, holding arrows and bolts of lighting. On its breast are ‘stars’.

28
TH:
Reputed founding of
Time
magazine by Henry Luce (= ‘light’).

4
TH:
The Babylonian New Years Day (1st of Nisan) began on April 4th, 786
B.C.

27
TH:
In the Bodleian Library there recently existed an uncatalogued item, namely an almanack, containing entries of a peculiar nature. Under ‘Gardening tips’ it recommended ways of glueing petals on to blossoms (‘You’ll be rewarded by the sight of these blossoms closing into beautiful little buds’); glueing dead branches on to the cut stumps of tree-limbs; planting whole carrots and later digging up carrot seed; depollination, etc.

Under ‘Astrology’ it described persons having a letter full of important news, which they then sealed up and gave to the postman to deliver to the sender; it spoke of useful advice from a friend, which was first followed and then received; it spoke of many famous persons who had died in Taurus, but subsequently lived long and useful lives.

Of world events, it spoke of a peace treaty between two major nations, from which the signature had recently been removed; war would follow. The main concern in wartime, evidently, was for the millions of new lives which would be created – to cope with such a population boom would require, eventually, an enormous number of pregnancies. Again, could the farmers cope with the great volume of food which these new millions would expel? The land seems hardly able to bear the burden of such bumper crops as will appear, nor are the farmers, in the foreseeable past, able to pay for such crops.

The entire book went on in this way, even to its advertisements, for wrecked cars, worn-out shoes, fingernail parings and other body wastes.
For adolescent readers, a certain cream guarantees the eruption of real pimples, as no other cream or lotion can do. Broken appliances are said to add filth to clothing ‘scientifically’ (when they begin working), to remove heat from cooked foods, to stain teeth or scuff shoes to a low shine. Electronic apparatus promises to remove radio or stereo noises from any room.

This almanack no longer exists. Having reached its own copyright date, it was of course sent to the printers to have ink removed from its pages, to be pulped and processed, and now it is a coniferous free in Finland, where they say it loses one ring per year, disappearing up its own annulation, annually. There is some question as to what becomes of it: It may be that, reaching the seed or cone, it will then grow up again in some negative time, becoming once more a solid tree and finally cut down to make matches, one of which will strike a light at some necessary moment. (Proust begins his story by striking a match to look at his watch. Nearly midnight.)