2019-07-02 - À la recherce du temps perdu
 -----------------------------------------
 
 Been a little  while since I posted. Just keep  feeling like I have
 so many things I  want to say, but when it comes  to saying them, I
 feel like I make no sense.
 
 I  watched  the  Democratic  Primary Debates,  saw  nothing  that's
 changed  my mind  one iota.  Elizabeth  Warren should  be the  next
 President of  the United  States, anyone else  is a  compromise too
 far.
 
 The server  I've been  playing Minecraft on  upgraded to  1.14, and
 I've spent a little time playing that this week. Not a huge amount,
 but enough to have  me seeing squares when I try  to sleep. Such is
 life.
 
 I had a few  idle moments over the weekend, and  decided to write a
 little bot  on the Fediverse. messidor@botsin.space  just posts the
 day according  to the  French Republican Calendar,  its been  a fun
 exercise.
 
 For  those  who  don't  know  the  history,  following  the  French
 Revolution, in the days of the Directory, sincere efforts were made
 to implement  the values of  he Enlightenment across all  fields of
 tendeavour in France. Some of  these, such as metrification and the
 decimalisation of  currency were succesful,  and are still  with us
 today. Others were less succesful, like the Calendar.
 
 There's a fantastic  book on this topic by Dr.  Sanja Perovic, "The
 Calendar in Revolutionary France:Perceptions of Time in Literature,
 Culture, Politics".  In the  book, Dr. Perovic  argues persuasively
 that the effort of the Calendar was not simply to mark time, but it
 was an  heroic effort which  defied the simple dualisms  which have
 been attached  to it: religion  from history; history  from nature;
 linear from cyclical time.
 
 The Republican Calendar, moreover, was a deliberate and fundamental
 breach with  the calendar  of Constantine, that  christian calendar
 imposed  by the  dying Roman  Empire and  adopted wholesale  by the
 catholic  church which  grabbed the  imperial power  structures for
 itself, for  its own ends.  The calendar  was an attempt  to remove
 that chokehold  over the very  idea of  time itself which  had been
 appropriated by  the catholic christians,  to replace a  concept of
 time based on  the lives  of saints and  various sacrifices  with a
 reckoning  of time  based on  the lived  experience of  people then
 living.
 
 It is hard to conceive of any act in the 1,500 years which separate
 us from the  Romans which has been more  audacious, more ambitious,
 more revolutionary.
 
 There are many, many problems with the calendar (not least of which
 was  the loss  of  rest days  for  the average  worker),  but as  a
 testament of an act of human  intelligence and reason it is hard to
 object to it. I *love* the  calendar, I love what it represents and
 what it could have been.
 
 Anyway, please  feel free  to follow messidor@botsin.space  if you,
 like me,  yearn for  a time when  the shackles of  the past  can be
 thrown off.