In an earlier post I remarked on the primness of the year 2017—and as I was setting up this post I had to go back and check to see when the last prime year was. Turns out it’s 2011.
I thought about the year 2011—thought about what I was up to then, what I was trying to accomplish, and if I ended up getting anywhere with it all. The answer: not really. And as I added up the years and years since then, the answer to the question of how things are going is consistent: not really.
Take today for example—March 1st, or as I like to think of it a year after a leap year, Feburary 28.25. I mean, we can’t call it that, well we could, but it would wreck a few heads, but the point stands—from now until 2020 each year will be accumulating just under an extra quarter of a day until we arrive at the magical and slightly silly day of February 29th. We do this because even though a year is exactly a year long and a day is exactly a day long the number of days occurring in our year don’t divide neatly into our year, so when you express a year as a number of days that number is 365.2422 days. And I wouldn’t even get into how the length of our day is actually 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds—but it seems I already just did.
The only reason I’m thinking of any of this is because I was cleaning out old emails from last year, and I saw I’d sent in my applications for school on February 29th of last year. The phrase this time last year started rattling around in my head, and I realized that’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, and it gets less and less accurate as you scale it up. This time yesterday is an easy time to dial back to. This time last week—fine. This time last month, well some months have 31, 30, 29, or 28 days. Are we talking a numerical date? Usually. On the 12th of this month, this time last month would be the 12th of the previous month. It’s not actually a month’s time that’s past, since an actual month is a variable and imaginary unit of time, but convention dictates we usually understand this fudging of accuracy for the sake of understanding.
This time last year though—already there are problems. It’s March 1st now, but this time last year, if we’re being true to fact, it was February 29th, because that’s the day after February 28th. If we want to say this time last year and be correct, we’d have to wait until it was March 2nd. But what sort of sense would that make? Likely as much sense as they thought spring starting in April did about 500 years ago when they realized the calendar had drifted by several days over hundreds of years—that’s when they figured out the need for leap years.
So now I’m thinking of all those news items and trivia posts—the this time last year ones—and realizing they’re all wrong because it wasn’t this time last year, not actually. Figuratively, yes. Again, for all intents and purposes we sort of get away with referring back to what we all kind of think happened around a particular time. But then it gets even sillier when you dive into the worlds of this time five years ago, this time 100 years ago, or this time 1000 years ago. I sometimes see articles on Wikipedia starting with On this day in 752 BC… and I immediately think—Nupe. No way that March 1st is anywhere near this March 1st.
This chaos in time is why I enjoy graffiti. Much like the passage of time—a curious illusion of gravity—graffiti cannot be reconciled into something defined and tidy, and I think that’s why some people don’t like it, but it’s exactly the reason I love it. Graffiti is the slightly less than a quarter day your perfectly created—or so you thought—calendar cannot reconcile. It sits there reminding you life’s clockwork isn’t always well‐fitted gears and springs ticking away the same perfect intervals. Sometimes the gears grind. Sometimes the motion is erratic. Tell me you’ve never felt a little over‐wound before and let’s see if I believe you…
The graffiti for this post is from a section of the Berlin Wall running through Mauerpark (Wall Park) and contains one of the larger sections of the still intact wall—the park itself is made up of land previously used as part of the infamous death strip between East and West Berlin. The day I visited the park I could smell and hear the paint as artists continued to spray away at the remains of a wall built by clockmakers gone mad. The sun was out, and the dogs were running and barking in the hunde area. It was a beautiful day.
Eisenstein called the distinction between past, present, and future a stubbornly persistent illusion. And it is through this idea I start to see despite our precise atomic clocks tracking each second accurate to millions of years, all we are actually tracking are moments relative to other moments—all we are tracking with any certainty is what’s happening now, a baseline to carry this moment into the next. This time last year as a concept is a symptom of this persistent illusion of time. It’s our own language alerting us to the strangeness that is our perception of time, a consequence created by the Earth’s motion through space.
Happy February 28.25th.