00:12 Monday the 23 of May 2021 was a day-off in the Netherlands. Like most of the people studying and working white-collar jobs here, I was involuntarily awarded a day free of commuting, labor and small talks. Monday the 23 of May was the Tweede Pinksterdag. So, it is Monday, 23rd of May, around 11 am and I am having a pancake breakfast with my family when my daughter, seven years old at the time, asks what is about to turn into a loaded question,

00:50 Mommy, what are we celebrating?

00:53 It's just a day off, we shrug with my partner, collectively load the dishwasher, and leave for an extended dog walk. The echo of her innocent yet critical question stays with me for the rest of the day while catching up on laundry and whatever Netflix series we were into at the time. The next day I go to the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague and I ask around: Does anyone know why are we granted this legitimised time of procrastination?

01:27 Amazing- the eloquence of silence…

01:29 Worry not, I consulted the oracle of a search engine- here is the answer: Tweede Pinksterdag also known as Whit Monday or Pentecost Monday and Monday of the Holy Spirit, is the holiday celebrated the day after Pentecost. It is a moveable feast in the Christian liturgical calendar, determined by the date of Easter. Pentecost from Greek pentecostē means “50th day”, Therefore it is always honoured on the Sunday that falls on the 50th day of Easter. The origin of the name "Whit Sunday" is generally attributed to the white garments formerly worn by those newly baptized on this occasion. The former pagan "barbarians" were given free white shirts- a great luxury in pre-industrial times- after briefly submerging themselves in holy water. Surely everybody likes a good instant gratification; if this preview of monotheistic perks does not convince one to believe in the fields of gold in the afterlife, nothing will.

02:36 Before the advent of Christianity, the Netherlands were populated by Celtic tribes in the South, which adhered to Celtic polytheism, and Germanic tribes in the North, which adhered to Germanic paganism. After the Roman Empire occupied the southern Netherlands, Roman mythology became important here, as well as religions from the Middle East, and eventually Christianity. Up until recently the later was reigning unquestioned, dictating the rules and pace of life for followers and non- believers alike, in the Netherlands, most of Europe and where ever else the missions spreading true faith, diseases and death took it. The conquerors have implied their order upon whoever they have vanquished and here we are in this moment in time, in our white collars, booking our vacation days around holidays of religion, barely 24% of us in The Netherlands are associating ourselves with, for the sake of societal order and planning. A truly divine plan, soaked into our individual and communal lives so deeply, it seems like it is the only possible system of operation- Gregorian calendar. Western calendar.

00:07 Here, I would like to make a small interruption in the narrative. To position myself and to make myself visible as the heroines of cultural studies and other writers alike bell hooks have done. My name is Ieva Gailiusaite, I am a white student from Lithuania graduating from The Royal Academy of Art the Hague in Holland. I was brought up in a catholic environment yet (or maybe therefore) I have always felt a certain fascination for ancient cultures and pagan practices.

00:39 One of the main aims of my currently theoretical research is to contextualize the assumed superiority of the Gregorian calendar over indigenous time keeping and ritual practices and the resulting communal time crisis that is unfolding in the past decades. I will draw out the historical and societal conditions which surrounded pivotal moments of development in our overarching “global” calendar. Which members of the society are predominantly represented by Christianity and where does it leave nature’s hierarchy?

01:11 Moreover, I am especially invested in the cultural, spiritual knowledge appropriation element in the Western time tracking tradition. Therefore I will fractionate the events within the calendar- compartmentalization, celebrations, public religious holidays and commemorations - to highlight the colonialist appropriative nature of such time tracking. My writing and research is featuring intellectual works of David Graebber and David Wengrow, T.J.Demos, Helga Schmid, Italo Calvino, Gloria Wekker and other critical thinkers, artists and designers. Equally in regards of influence to this work I would like to share a statement by Mane Tatulyan, a contemporary designer and writer whose humanitarian thinking was ever so inspirational to think outside the preexisting conditions:

02:00 To design means to reinvent oneself and, thus, the social body, becoming an active participant of its transformation. It also means to understand that we can reconstruct the world, like our modern predecessors, and shape a new, organized and human-centered reality. <…> We do not need the future to design humans, we need to design a more human future." ——— / 1 / https://manetatoulian.com / ———

02:32 The conquerors, whether they are warlords or human satellites of the Lord himself, do not only write history, they as well get to set the pace for the present, and squeeze the future into their grid too. In any imperial, colonialist practice, of religious kind especially, the conditioning of the new subjects is not up for a discussion. ——— / 2 / Harari, Yuval N.O.A.H " Sapiens a brief history of humankind". London: Vintage, 2011. Print. P.220-231 / ——— However, while this position is the one of power, annihilating cultures is a prosaic task. The villainous “architects” of the supposed Terra Incognitas, are required to cunningly replicate, not creatively concoct, the signs, the houses of worship, the candles, the somber incents of their predecessors for their “bettered” world to start to exist. Whatever was impossible to achieve with an initial iron fist, must be altered through (un)subtle fabrication. And even if the fabrication is very plain and legible to the contemporaries of this transformation, ultimately, the visions of indigenous worship, healing and their whole way of interacting with time and space is either assimilated, given a new name or forgotten altogether. The language (both verbal and non-verbal) is stripped of capacity of self-referencing and therefore the people who speak it are robbed of of auto-narration, self-guidance and governance.This language oppression is produced through practices of erasure: the ways in which certain populations and their languages are systematically rendered discursively invisible. ——— / 3 /Gerald Roche (2019) Articulating language oppression: colonialism, coloniality and the erasure of Tibet’s minority languages, Patterns of Prejudice, 53:5, 487-514, DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2019.1662074 / ——— The better new ideas that are going to be used to come up with the future and brave new words make up the brave new narratives, new myths of creation and therefore the future direction.

04:24 By breaking down colonial histories and narratives it is possible to challenge the knowledge production conspiracy and the epistemology of forgetfulness. ——— / 4 / Demos, T. J. “Enter: The Ghosts.” Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2013, p. 13. / ———

04:33 Fabricated memory is a powerful tool in the trade of causing calamities. Imagine looking back and not being able to see one’s own genesis because every symbol is that of the Establishment, the stories, the heroes and the heroines, the colors in one’s handicrafts, the calendars, the hymns.

04:57 Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious. ——— / 5 / Orwell, George (2021-09-06). (Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)). Chapter 7) / ——— Afterwhile there is no reason to resist, it is all the same. Heard already, mentioned before, continuous déjà vu of useful fictions.

05:17 There is an illustrative fragment in the book Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. The whole novel in part is about memory and places, as real as they are conceptual. This idle little story is of the city of Zirma where everything is redundant, people and places vary very little, and always fit the same descriptions; after visiting this place, the memory of the travelers is reducing the seen into single items- one tattoo parlour, one girl with a trained puma, one obese woman suffering in the humidity of the train platform. Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist. ——— / 6 / Calvino, Italo " Invisible cities ". Boston new york: Mariner books, 2021. Print. p19 / ———

06:02 In our visible city- state- civilization realm as well, the clusters of rules and rituals are coming from multiple belief systems of the past, echoing, mirroring and mocking each other; in our collective perception they have long time blurred into one hermetic story, with hefty influence of Christian clergy. Story making sense of the rituals, prejudices, symbols, our whole myth of why we are together, what is our goal as a culture and how to navigate our existence future-wards.

00:11 I mentioned my catholic background before - my grandparents on both sides were devoted believers, in curiously different ways. My paternal grandmother had a particularly fatuous perspective on religion, she was a very devote woman, yet to what?

00:29 <…> until very recently, the European continent was still littered with folk practices that echoed these ancient rhythmic oscillations of social structure. Folklorists have long puzzled over all the little brigades of people disguised as plants and animals, the Straw Bears and Green Men, who marched dutifully out each spring and autumn into village squares, everywhere from rural England to the Rhodope Mountains of southern Bulgaria: were they genuine traces of ancient practices, or recent revivals and reinventions? Or revivals of traces? Or traces of revivals? It’s often impossible to tell? ——— / 7 / David grabber, David wengrow " The dawn of everything ". Uk: Penguin books ltd, 2021. epub. P.232 / ———

01:22 Like many households in North Lithuania, ours too had a small wooden sauna built on the edge of the homestead. It was used every other Saturday; on remaining Saturdays we used the neighbor’s sauna. These buildings stood aside from the houses and

barns usually by the edges of the orchards and small grass meadows and, whenever possible, by the bodies of water. Our sauna was made of thick wooden poles, untreated by paint, the seams perfectly interlaced without any additional insulation. No nails, nor screws. Two tiny square windows, maybe 20cm wide. Straw roof, untreated wooden floorboards, one could see the ground through the gaps between them, no foundation underneath.

02:09 The first room one enters through the lock-free door, was a skinny corridor- like room with a bench and a shelf for clothes; next- The Cold Room with two benches and a big tub of fresh cold water and a drinking mug, implying it was safe for consumption. We mostly used this room for little wimps like myself who could not stand the full hour and a half ritual of arthritis relief talks, temperature of about 60- 70 degrees Celsius, insane humidity, and steamed birch broom whiskings. And whisked and steamed to the oblivion one would get!

02:50 In Baltic paganism tradition (dating 2500 BC to 1413 AD when the last Baltic tribe was baptised7) deities called Laumės [‘ləʊmEs] ——— / 8 “Pagonybė Lietuvoje - Lietuviuzodynas.lt.” mokslai.lietuviuzodynas.lt, June 17, 2015. https://mokslai.lietuviuzodynas.lt/religija/pagonybe-lietuvoje-3./ ——— were believed to live in saunas ——— / 9 / Prane Dunduliene “Pagonybe Lietuvoje”. Vilnius; Mintis, 1989. p.15 ——— / just like this one. Theses Neolithic deities originally enjoyed dwelling by rocks, swamps, rivers, and lakes. Thus, saunas with massive hot stones and tubs of water and clouds of steam were their perfect habitats. They were anthropomorphic female beings who could, for instance, make one weave faster and straighter, multiply grains and hey, help one get pregnant, gift a poor girl with a never-ending roll of silk as long as she never measures it, cure the ill, sing soul soothing lullabies… they might as well rip men’s guts out, trick one into never finding way home or eat up unattended children if previously wronged. ——— / 10 / Prane Dunduliene “Pagonybe Lietuvoje”. Vilnius; Mintis, 1989. p.24 ——— /

03:48 These superstitions made people treat Laumės with utmost respect: the saunas were only saunas on Saturdays, the rest of the time they were Laumės’ homes as much as they were their humble wooden temples. After cleaning themselves people would leave clean towels out, make sure there is still some warm water left for the deities to bathe with and a wide bowl to soak their long hair in, fresh water for them to drink after; they did not dare to shout, swear nor otherwise act offensively or in a threatening manner in these Saturday gatherings. (My grandpa was forbidden to bring beer into the sauna and smoke while heating the furnace up throughout the whole day!) Except maybe for winter saunas. In the winter it gets completely dark by late noon there. After the men, who spent a whole day bringing in the water and heating it, were done bathing, it was the ladies turn. The sauna was at its highest temperature at that point, and every woman of ‘full health’ would whisk each other with steamed birch brooms then run outside completely naked and roll in the snow and laugh and cackle and cuss and scream like the true Laumės, like they really could multiply any kindness tenfold or rip anyone’s guts out if wronged.

05:08 One Saturday evening while bathing there with my grandmother I may or may not have passed gas. And I remember to this day my grandmother looking sternly at me and saying,

05:21 you cannot do this again here, the sauna is a sacred place- you will upset Jesus.

05:37 We truly do not know which incarnation of our culture we live in anymore. Until oh so recently our lives were woven around liturgical- agricultural frameworks, and each misfit actor from parallel narratives, had to find its own crack in the floorboards to survive, disfigured, grotesque but like a rock in a shoe, capably insistent.

06:10 On a silly pragmatic side note, as much as it is desirable to be squeaky clean for the Sundays mass, one is definitely cleaner a day of not day post- the bath.

00:03 Saturnalia was the liveliest festival of the year in the Roman Empire for centuries before Christianity took over and changed the “reason for the season” for the upcoming centuries, all the way to now, when these lines are being laid down on a page.

All work and business were suspended. Slaves were given temporary freedom to say and do what they liked, and certain moral restrictions were eased. The streets were infected with a Mardi Gras madness; a mock king was chosen (Saturnalicius princeps); the seasonal greeting ‘io Saturnalia!’ was heard everywhere. ——— / 11 / “Saturnalia.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/topic/Saturnalia-Roman-festival. / ———

In the early days of this tradition it was most likely celebrated on December 17 and eventually turned into a seven-day festival of elevated spirits, dances around evergreen trees, gifts to children and the poor and disregard of social norms, to the point of slaves being served by their masters with elaborate dinners and… a right to recline. ——— / 12 / Melitta Weiss Adamson, Francine Segan Entertaining from Ancient Rome to the Super Bowl: An Encyclopedia. “London’: Greenwood Press, 2008, print, p.21./ ———

01:08 Such strong, even if rare, experiences create a cohesive imprint in the public memory. With the transition to Christian way of conducting public life, the traditions of this magnitude could not have been left unattended and expected to just die off. They were too important and attempts of making people to part with it most likely would have created more troubles than gains. Therefore, like many other Christian festivals and rituals, Saturnalia had to experience a metamorphosis into... well, something more appropriate to the new monotheistic religion of the agricultural society. ——— / 13 / Harari, Yuval N., et al. “The Law of Religion.” Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Vintage, London, 2015, pp. 233–272./ ——— What’s really important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a hole, since it was always possible to fantasize about <…> the new reality. ——— / 14 / David Grabber, David wengrow " The dawn of everything ". Uk: Penguin books ltd, 2021. epub. P.227 / ———

02:11 In general, the segment of reversed merits is prominent in The New Testament: from the rich being pre-mortem doomed to not get to the heavens, 25 Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. Luke 18:25, to God’s alleged sympathy to the poor (instead of long-lived assumption that only the elites had the special access to the supernatural), 20 Looking at his disciples, he said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Luke 6:20 to Christ’s service to his apostilles in washing their feet, 5 After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him. John 13:5 This humbling reversal is an extremely attractive feature of the new religion, trying to attract the masses. It implies the previously scares moments of retaliation to be integral part of everyday practice. The reprisal is not less than canonic. At least in theory and promises that being poor, humble, subordinate and turn-another-cheek-like is the way to eternal blessed life after death (when it really matters).

03:29 The gesture of re-imagined orders from the celebration of the pagan Saturnalia is in the foreground of the new Christmas/commemoration of the God’s son’s birth myth as well. 7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them. 8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. Luke 2:7-13

04:23 The Son of God was born in the stables, prince, a real change maker with such a modest cradle! For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Isaiah 9:6

04:48 It is from this moment that the underprivileged are awarded the symbolic role of leading, more importantly a voice that is heard in this new sacred domain. And even though strictly supervised by the spiritual elites, they are evoked of themselves being civic entities of dignified nature. The first kings may well have been play kings. Then they became real kings. ——— / 15/ David Grabber, David Wengrow " The dawn of everything ". Uk: Penguin books ltd, 2021. epub. P.228 / ———

05:13 Christmas is celebrated on the 25th December with many churches marking the end of previous advent (roughly four-week phase of preparation for the divine birth) with midnight church services on Christmas Eve 24th December. Curiously, the 25th of December in Roman times was already reserved for a different birthday- the Birthday of the unconquered sun (dies solis invicti nati) ——— / 16 / “Saturnalia.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. Accessed January 19, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Saturnalia-Roman-festival. / ——— which occurred a day past Saturnalia. But that is a mere awkward technicality.

05:50 Either of the preceding celebrations have seasonality in common: winter sowing season (which varies in Southern Europe from October to January) and undeniably the winter solstice. In addition to the historical material pointing out that there was no census performed in the winter around the time Jesus Christ, was supposedly born, the theory of convenient rebrand is not simply dismissible as a malicious anti-religion provocation.

06:20 Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation – but, for the last few thousand years of human history at least, they appear to have played much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness, and as laboratories of social possibility. The first kings may well have been play kings. Then they became real kings. Now most (but not all) existing kings have been reduced once again to play kings – as least insofar as they mainly perform ceremonial functions and no longer wield real power. ——— / 17 / David grabber, David Wengrow " The dawn of everything ". Uk: Penguin books ltd, 2021. epub. P.228——— This fear of loss of power, or a risk of never even getting in the true position of power, could as well be one of the greatest triggers to want to change the rules of time tracking. Especially the supposed reasons behind distinguished ritualistic behaviors.

07:13 Farmers had to learn when to plant how to save enough seed for the next planting. Two kinds of religious rituals, managed by experts, made this possible. Careful observation of heavenly bodies <…> allowed priests to determine the proper planting seasons. Other ritualsfasts, sacrifices and harvest festivals- effectively rationed consumption throughout the year. ——— / 18 / Mcneill, J.r. and H William Mcneill, " The human web: a birds eye view of world history ". New York: W w Norton & company, 2003. Print.p.114 ———

07:41 By the time BC turned into AD the agricultural methods were well proven in the Roman territories therefore it was not the peoples’ activities that had to necessarily change or be guided, it is the motivation and reasoning behind them. That had to be reestablished and ever since, the Saturn’s peculiar glow was shunned by the Star of Bethlehem…

08:08 Is the star of Bethlehem still visible though? Through the light pollution escalating around the end of each year, is Jesus still the reason for the season or a mere pragmatic remnant we use out of historical inertia? Who dictates the rhythm of time at the time? Dare I ask why do we gaze at the skies nowadays at all? There are no harvests to sow, no trouble preserving our food stocks all year round, we have our mockery kings and queens, heck, we are free to claim we are them ourselves, we hate Mondays and we thank God for Fridays…

00:09 In a pursuit of a better calendar, we may turn ourselves towards the old days. What values and schemes were they based on? How did it work?

There is an abundance of ancient calendars from all over the globe going thousands of years back, some of the oldest physical evidence of this tool is dating 25000 to 20000 BCE, like tally sticks found in the territory of Congo . ——— / 20 / “The Ishango Bone, Possibly One of the Oldest Calendars.” The Ishango Bone, Possibly One of the Oldest Calendars : History of Information, Jeremy M Norman, https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2. / ——— They must have been products of generations-long observations, knowledge, and dedication. Due to the differences in world vision, communal values, natural differences in climate and geographical coordinates, and the stages of civilization development in which they were constructed, these systems vary in details and complexity yet always have a deep sensibility within themselves.

One of the most famous and complex examples would be the Mayan calendar which in fact consists of three separate corresponding calendars: the Long Count, the Tzolkin (divine calendar), and the Haab (civil calendar). Each of them is cyclical, meaning that a certain number of days must occur before a new cycle can begin. The three calendars are used simultaneously. ——— / 20 / Bikos, Konstantin. “The Mayan Calendar.” Timeanddate.com, https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/mayan.html.19 / ———

I find it refreshing to observe that centuries ago civil life could have been seen as a disjoined affair from spiritual life. And the calendar we have now? It is not a universal default commandment we have to unquestionably abide “or else…”, but perhaps a temporary stagnation which is a subject to change with the right mindset and political and civic will. Efforts to implement this separation model sounds like Sisyphean task but it is up to the contemporaries to try to execute it. By refusing to enter the conspiracy, one remains innocent of than conspiracy. But to remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant. ——— / 21 / Berger, John. “1.” Ways of Seeing, British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, London, 2008, p. 32. / ——— In the case of this Mesoamerican calendar, the complexity is a liberating feature as much as a functional one. This kind of mathematical notation is so precise, that they can now be translated into days and years of our own calendar ——— / 22 / Mcneill, J.r. and H William Mcneill, " The human web: a birdseye view of world history ". New york: W w norton & company, 2003. Print.p.44, / ——— could the values be translated too?

In pagan Baltic Sea region tribes used ethnic calendar which was a collage of Lunar and phenological events. The starting point of the year most likely was the beginning of the deer and elk mating season (September/ October) after which the buck's antlers begin to shed to re-grow bigger antlers. From this moment forwards people would start counting New Moons. Counting from there, the end of third moon cycle coincides with the winter solstice, next three end with the signs of spring; three New Moons after that is the summer solstice before which the last little deer cubs are born. The 3 - 6 - 9 algorithm emerges from such calendar. It is also preserved in archaeological remains of jewelry and intangible heritage, e.g. Christmas songs about a deer with nine antlers, burial geometry traditions of positioning the remains according to the position of celestial objects, practices of harvesting medicinal herbs and structuring other activities of sowing and reaping. The Baltic Pagan calendar overall was significantly related to the specific phenological characteristics of the area: the variations in climate, biological cycles, migration of different fauna and seasonality of certain flora. In harsh climate conditions of ancient Baltic region (and further up North) people were inclined to consider and keep track of all the cyclical natural factors as the only insurance policy, the sole peace treaty with the surrounding ecosystem.

Coming back “home” to the Ancient Rome (and leaving the intricate Mayan calendar to only be remembered and appreciated for its impeccable accuracy on the next doomsday craze and the Baltic one for cool amber trinkets aesthetic Pinterest board titled boho chic festival looks), we can observe a long line of changes in the logic behind calendars before the centuries long reign of the Gregorian one. (You know, the one based on 365-days divided into 12 months, 11 of them having 30 and 31 days and poor February- only 28 days during the common year, the one with 7-day weeks, numbered 1 to 52 or 53, always starting with the case of Mondays. The one which compared to the tropical year, is off by a whole day every 3236 years? (not to even mention the 10 days that were tossed away in October 1582 during the switch to the new system) Yes, that one.)

Before the Georgian calendar and its' reform of the leap year formula the Roman Republic used Julian calendar which, even if long lived (45 BCE- 1582AD ——— / 23 / Schuller, Gerlinde. Designing Universal Knowledge, Lars Müller, Baden, 2008, p. 26. / ——— , -1900 in some orthodox countries, nowadays Orthodox Church in Russia), was very flawed from the get-go. Eventually the Julian calendar and important religious holidays, were several days out of sync with the fixed dates for astronomical events, such as vernal equinox and winter solstice.

Why was this faulty system instigated in the first place? The former Roman calendar was a very complicated lunar calendar, based on the moon phases, requiring a group of people to decide when days should be added or removed in order to keep the calendar in sync with the astronomical seasons, marked by equinoxes and solstices ——— / 24 / Bikos, Konstantin, and Vigdis Hocken. “The Roman Calendar.” Timeanddate.com, Timeanddate, https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/roman-calendar.html. / ——— A lunar month is the time it takes the Moon to pass through all of the Moon phases, starting at the invisible New Moon and lasting through all the Moon phases until the next New Moon. ——— / 25 / Hocken, Vigdis. “The Lunar Month.” Timeanddate.com, https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/moon/lunar-month.html. / ——— A lunar month is about 29.5 days. Back in Roman times there were only 10 months, hence September, October November and December were accordingly seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months; the whole year only lasted 304 days (the current months September, October, November, and December are still named after their original place in the “Republican calendar”). The remaining 61 days were just “winter” until eventually January and February were added to the beginning of the year. I presume, many can sympathize with just calling it “winter” though, the 61 days of waiting, reminiscing on the mysterium of the past rites in the cold serenity of an elevator music.

Besides all the possible variations of calendars yet when we think calendar, it is most likely a square table with numbers that enters the eyes mind. Tidy pages with series of rows and columns, clusters of blocks, tables with matrixes on the screen. Seven days in one line, on top of each other- weeks piled into spreads of months and booklets of years. So simple, available in any color, shape, style, typeface, paper and formatting. So universal and so omnipresent, like it was always there, helping us navigate, reach our goals, plan our work and play time, telling us when to rest and when to preserve our energy and grind because it’s only September and there is no time for recess until, well, same old Christmas. It was already there before us, we tend to shrug, like the air pollution or pesticides in our drinking water; unlike any other rule and legislation, which is a subject to change, calendar just does not need to change. Seems like it does not even have the capacity to change as we are so deeply invested in it, both as civic and spiritual entities.

00:11 Wherever power does not come into view at all, it exists without question, writes in Byung- Chul Han in his book Psychopolitics. ——— / 26 / Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso Books, 2017 / ——— Our system of time mapping is reigning unquestioned, designed to represent the interests and wisdoms of the ruling pontifex maximus. In the age of immediate availability of most services (and disposability of people) the contemporary plebeian worker must always stay on the conveyor belt cycle of the fiscal year. If centuries ago, the most suppressing power was in the hands of the church, now the law is capitalism itself, skillfully using the same template. The Organizational Age led to further ordering and intensification of time and also helped promote the idea that a steady chronological climb up the corporate and status ladder was the normal life course. ——— / 27 / Florida, Richard L. “Time Warp” The Rise of the Creative Class, Basic Books, New York, 2019, pp. 155. / ——— This Jacob’s ladder- escalator contraption creates a constant feeling of being already behind, an experience of a “time famine”, which accelerates economy but drains the bodily and mental batteries of the humans themselves.

01:23 A good bit of time stress comes from trying to meet someone else’s schedule: the meeting is at 4:00 PM, the soccer game is at 6:00, the plane leaves without you if you’re not on it, Richard Florida writes in his book The Rise of the Creative Class and exposes the modern-day economical need of certain kind of workers as well as the effects of this sort of employment on their bodies and minds. The permanent time crisis tends to make people alternate between work and their actual life, simultaneously selling this routine as some sort of life hack. The folks sitting in the coffee shop with their laptops- are they working or are they socializing? ——— / 28 / Florida, Richard L. “Time Warp” The Rise of the Creative Class, Basic Books, New York, 2019, pp. 157. / ——— Both. We do not feel like we can afford to only do one at the time. Work does not leave our brain, there is no off mode, we are doomed to be always generating solutions, collecting information but only bill for the time we spent producing something of tangible substance.

02:29 The “burnout society” is just one description of our relationship with time in sociological theory. The perception of the “scarcity of time” is common in contemporary society. ——— / 29 / Schmid, Helga. “Introduction.” Uchronia: Designing Time, Birkhauser, Basel, 2020, pp.10-11 / ——— With non-stopping technological and time management “advancements” supposedly saving us all lightyears, how do we still feel like we are about to run out of time? What sort of time are we afraid to run out of? Is this what productivity supposed to feel like?

02:56 If we were ever to as much as dream of a better equitable future, can the calendar structure remain uncontested or can we agree that people’s lives should count as more than 24 fragmented bits of 60 minutes intervals, stretched into weeks, months and years of constant added value production? Could we dare I propose, structure any kind of labour and leisure time with inclusivity and fair representation as the first political priority?

03:28 The twisted freedoms and duties of freelancers, the rigidity of nine-to-five scheme, the allegedly unavoidable extortion of essential workers, the free time women still spend folding laundry and cooking dinners, time for worshiping of Other Gods, time in non-places, time in between...

03:50 We need to start thinking of a larger we, we that is inclusive of all of us and that cannot be based on the same gender, the same skin color, sexuality or beliefs. Change will come from the daily things that we do for each other, as if the other were us which he is ——— / 30 Never Be Indifferent: 400 Years of Dutch Colonialism | Gloria Wekker. YouTube. TEDx Talk, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMwgzK9LGeM / ——— - Gloria Wekker.

04:12 With this elegant greater “we” awareness, why not dive into the unknown of time, time unaccounted for yet. Designer and educator Helga Schmid in her book Uchronia: Designing Time describes it as way of questioning, speculating on and designing new kinds of temporal systems that are more about being in tune than on time. What if we change the rules? What if the system can be designed according to the peoples’ needs and not the systems’ preferences? A mesh instead of a grid, with networks- smaller groups, where elements are not constrained to straight lines but able to find connections, meanings and work/pray/play- flows of their own.