Insets

It is a prolonged meditation and puzzling over the relation of insets and calendars that has led me to lay down the following tracks.

Third stanza of "In The Country Where They Have No Maps" by Sandra Kasturi in The Day I Ate Jupiter (and other poems) Kelp Queen Press, 2002.

in a stone room scattered with crumpled parchment
the king strives to know his land
he tries to map the transmogrifying coastline
while telling me of tourist attractions of note
and landmarks that must be visited
his directions are always found to be wrong

And for some reason this excerpt from Sandra Kasturi resonates with a passage in Charles Bernstein's essay "Optimism and Critical Excess" in A Poetics

Maps — these schema so many of us love to create — have their primary value as imaginary constructions. Since art is not a fixed subject, it does not have a fixed group or series of objects, such as land masses, to chart. Our critical maps make various possible configurations seem real; it's almost as if the dynamic, shifting field of the works is frozen by our icy projections unto them. Potentiality is taken for actuality.

And so I taken back to try and understand what used to appear in a signature block. (E.g. see this posting to the Humanist discussion list.

A calendar is like a map. And just as maps have insets, calendars in the 21st century might have 'moments' expressed in flat local time fanning out into "great circles" expressed in earth revolution time.

"Calendars" and "insets" are not terms that mesh well. The Great Circles reference hints at time zone and one can well imagine an "insert" or pop-up window that provides information about conversions. The revolutions in time can also follow lunar tracking. Some calendars have useful insets showing the phases of the moon. And there is the trusty legend: a calendar marked up for the city's schedule of recycling, compost and garbage pick up — similar to pay day calendars. Still the notion of inset seems static for a rendering of the passage of time. And it seems to easy to confuse inset with legend. Yet there is a potential of different scales sitting side by side in the view that appeals to certain aspects of calendrical practice: "time fanning out" equivalent to an ecological concern where all directions transmute into preoccupations, and insets are always in step.

And so for day 964
03.08.2009