Timekeepers Read online

  The items were divided up into groups of 30, representing the days of the month. Each month was divided into 3 weeks of 10 days, while the number of days in a year remained the familiar 365 or 366. The 5- or 6-day shortfall in the new calculation was made up by festival days: Virtue, Talent, Labour, Conviction, Humour and, on leap years, Revolution. But the whole concept was a revolution, and certainly more than just elaborate and provocative art: it was a vivid representation of the idea that time could begin anew, modernity running wild in the fields of nature.

  Ruth Ewan was recreating the French Republican calendar. This was both a political and academic rejection of the ancien régime, and the practical conclusion to the logical theory that the traditional Christian Gregorian calendar should be stormed alongside the Bastille and the Tuileries.

  Astonishingly, this new calendar caught on for a while (or perhaps not so astonishingly: the guillotine still glistened in the autumn sun). It came into being officially on 24 October (Poire of Brumaire) 1793, although it was backdated to 22 September (Raisin of Vendémiaire) 1792, which became the start of the Republic Year 1. This radical notion lasted more than 12 years until 1 January 1806, when Napoleon Bonaparte presumably reasoned ça suffit.

  Outside this agricultural and seasonal room in north-west London was a second Ruth Ewan re-creation, hung high on the wall: a clock with only 10 hours. This was based on another Revolutionary and doomed French experiment in the reformatting of time – the decimalisation of the dial, a complete refiguring of the day.

  Four years earlier, Ewan had tried to confound a whole town with her wrong clocks. The Folkestone Triennial of 2011, a show utterly reliant on time passing regularly and predictably, featured 10 of her 10-hour clocks positioned strategically throughout the town, including one above Debenhams, one above the town hall, one in an antiquarian bookshop and one in a local taxi.

  For a few minutes, the 10-hour clock seemed to make sense, or at least as much sense as the 12-hour one. The day was reduced to 10 hours, while each hour was divided into 100 minutes, and each minute split into 100 seconds. (One revolutionary hour was thus 2 regular hours and 24 standard minutes, while 1 revolutionary minute was 1 standard minute and 26.4 standard seconds.) The midnight hour 10 was at the top, the noon hour 5 at the bottom, and, if you were used to the regular 12-hour face, 8 minutes to 4 on the Revolutionary one was in fact anyone’s guess. The French – or at least those French citizens to whom precise time was important in the 1790s and could afford a new timepiece – struggled to come to terms with the new state-imposed clock for 17 months and then shook it off like a bad dream. It remains an anachronism of history, although one to which obsessives will occasionally return, like those who want to put Australia at the top of the globe.1

  Ewan told me that she wanted to make the clocks because she wanted to see how they would look; she knew of only one working example in a museum in Switzerland and a handful in France. But when she approached clockmakers with her idea ‘I just got laughed at’. After phoning round six or seven clockmakers she found a keen firm called the Cumbria Clock Company (its website announced a specialism in ‘turret clock horology’, and claimed the staff were as happy oiling cogs in the smallest church as they were fixing bigger problems, which recently included work at Salisbury Cathedral and Big Ben). The company also offered services such as ‘night silencing’. The company had never made a 10-hour clock mechanism before, let alone 10 of them.

  Ewan’s disruptive show at Folkestone had a brilliant name: We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted To Be. The title came from a song in the film Bugsy Malone, and Ewan particularly liked the second line: ‘And it’s not too late to change.’ The clocks were ‘an old item, but they also seemed to talk of a possible future,’ Ewan says, putting her finger on the nature of time itself. ‘I wanted to allude to the fact that we had rejected this clock once, but it may come up again.’

  Once the clocks are mounted in a public space, they are ridiculously hard to read. ‘A lot of people look at it and go, “all right, I get it”, but they realize they haven’t fully understood it: they read it as being a 20-hour clock and not a true 10-hour clock. In the course of a day, the hour hand rotates only once, not twice.’

  When we spoke, Ruth Ewan’s energetic obsession with time showed no sign of slacking. She had just started her stint as an artist in residence at Cambridge, where, alongside plant scientists, she was analysing Carl Linnaeus’s great flower clock of 1751. Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, had proposed an intricately arranged display of plants, designed as a circular dial, that would open and close at naturally appointed times of the day to enable accurate (or at least approximate) timekeeping. Influenced by light, temperature, rain and humidity, Linnaeus’s list of responsive plants in Uppsala (60º north) did not, however, all flower in the same season, so the clock – as many attempts at practical demonstration in the nineteenth century showed – remained largely theoretical. But it was time reborn and reimagined, and the names of its components struck a similarly mellifluous air as those seen in France 40 years later. Jack-Go-To-Bed-At-Noon (open at 3 a.m.); Rough Hawkbit (open by 4 a.m.); Wild Succory (4–5 a.m.); Spotted Cat’s Ear (6 a.m.); Marsh Sow Thistle (by 7 a.m.) and Pot Marigold (3 p.m.).

  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 Decemb
er (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, Latrember, Faunus, Rogibus, Neptember, Stonk . . .’ He soon decides to end the year earlier than planned, and he receives huge acclaim from friends. But there is disquiet around Christmas: ‘December 25th – Why do I feel so lonely today?’ and ‘December 26th – Why am I so fat?’

  By the time of the Second French Revolution in 1830, no one dared suggest new calendars or clock dials.5 Instead, another obsession seemed to engulf early nineteenth-century France, or at least its psychoanalytical casebooks: the act of looking back became a certifiable disease. Medical studies of the 1820s and 1830s were fascinated with what appeared to be an outbreak of nostalgia.

  One of the earliest cases concerned an elderly occupant of a lodging in rue de la Harpe, in the Latin Quarter. This man took great pride in his apartment and was devastated when he heard the news that it was to be demolished to make way for street improvements. So devastated that he took to his bed and, despite his landlord’s assurances that his new home would be better and brighter, refused to budge. ‘It will no longer be my lodging,’ he complained, ‘the one I loved so much, that I embellished with my own hands.’6 He was found dead in his bed just before the demolition, having apparently ‘suffocated of despair’.

  Another example, also from Paris, featured a two-year-old boy named Eugéne who couldn’t bear to be separated from his wet nurse. Returned to his parents, Eugéne became limp and pale, with eyes fixed on the door from where his nurse exited. When returned to his nurse, all joy broke loose. Such cases rendered French citizens useless to the state. The cultural historian Michael Roth has classified nostalgia as ‘an affliction that doctors regarded as potentially fatal, contagious, and somehow deeply connected to French life in the middle of the nineteenth century.’ The common cause was an over-fondness for one’s earliest memories, and in a century of intended modernity, nostalgia cast the patient as an outcast, destined for the madhouse or the jail. The affliction was first classified in 1688 by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who aligned the Greek words nostos (or homecoming) with algos (pain). Earlier in the century the affliction mal de corazón had seen a group of soldiers sent home during the Thirty Years War, and it did seem to be a disease that particularly afflicted the army. Swiss soldiers could apparently be left in puddles of tears if they heard cowbells, reminding them of their native pastures, not least the milking song ‘Khue-Reyen’. This was such a weakener that anyone who played it – or consciously hummed it – was liable for the firing squad. Today we might just be homesick or unhappy. But nostalgia was the first disease associated with time, its victims longing for days gone by.7

  But nostalgia is not a disease of the past. Nowadays we are nostalgic for all sorts of things, even if the analyst’s couch has been vacated for more critical concerns. We like retro and vintage and distressed and heritage, and we adore history (history as a subject worthy of academia and literature barely existed before the French Revolution). The Internet thrives on the desire of the middle-aged (mostly men, it must be said) to buy back a lost youth, be it auctionable toys or salvageable cars (time has not withered these things, only increased their resale value). Nostalgia is increasingly viewed not as a punishable disease but as a consumerist one, and its connotations are no longer entirely negative. As we shall see i
n a later chapter, a desire to turn back the clock pervades an increasingly popular way of living: the slow life (incorporating slow food, mindfulness, a back-to-the-lathe ‘maker’ mentality) has long since transformed itself from a dilettante’s diversion into a monetisable movement.

  The French tradition of redirecting the traditional flow of time continues today, with similarly ineffective results. But the objections are now more extreme, and more self-parodic, and are based not just upon reformatting the calendar but cancelling it altogether. On New Year’s Eve 2005, a protest group calling itself Fonacon gathered in a small coastal town near Nantes to try to halt 2006. There were a few hundred people in all, and their reasoning was simple: 2005 had not been a great year, and 2006 had all the potential to be worse, and so they would symbolically try to stop time by singing some songs and smashing up a few grandfather clocks. Astonishingly, it didn’t work. They tried again the year after, and a few more innocent clocks lost their lives, but globally things just kept ticking.

  Next year they tried again, but still no joy. It was playful anarchy, and proof, if it was needed, that the French will protest about anything, but it brought to mind a more serious incident from more than a century before. On 15 February 1894, a French anarchist called Martial Bourdin met an unfortunate fate in the grounds of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, the traditional home of empirical timekeeping. Bourdin was carrying a bomb, and when it exploded accidentally it blew off one of his hands and ripped a hole in his stomach.