Time's Mechanics

Brian Eno.

Times shown are British Standard Time; Calculations are made on the assumption that the Gregorian Calendar will remain in use. The Gregorian Calendar errs by one day in two thousand years, thus posing a dilemma for performers of the distant future.

from "Untitled (British Standard Time), 1968" reproduced in Visual Music p. 86. The dates for the performance of the work range from 1968 to 2512. Reminds me of the Halberstadt performance of Cage's long work Organ²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible). Eno's remarks about the Gregorian calendar bring to mind a section from Garry Thomas Morse's The Untitled (13) where the poetic voice muses about the recalibration of the calendar in idiosyncratic terms.

Today (being Monday)
is my Friday and the
start of my weekend!

& I am wishing
myself a happy
weekend that's
schizophrenic -

I do not do justice here to the elegant typesetting by Glen Lowry. You have to imagine the text set off from a cascade of lines and occupying a block aligned close to the right margin - like a voice intruding.

Garry Thomas Morse is also the source for this next passage inviting mediation on the marking of time. It is from Transversals for Orpheus.

May the mystical
arrange existence
in the calendrical
dead to impromptu

Time passing. Time captured. The pressure on "impromptu" is to be alive to the prepared in readiness, the planned for an eventuality. If the calendrical is dead to impromptu, then can existence sabotage the mystical, defeating all attempts at arrangement? Time captured in passing. In the modes of a matrix. Impromptu resurfacing as cell-hopping... at play with the prepared for however long.

So pushing some parsing, one is able to read the mystical arranging existence in the space between the calendrical dead and the impromptu: as in the road from one to the other. You really have to go slow or you miss the place. There's some algebra magic in the mechanics: arrange Y in the A to C. Diagramming. Take as long as you like.

And so for day 1167
22.02.2010