Seizing History

How we’ve trapped ourselves in time.

While browsing through the wikipedia entry on history, I was surprised that there was no mention of calendars. History, in one sense, is the fixing of past events, for which there is documented evidence in time – the founding of Rome 753 BC, for example. While oral histories are considered less reliable by western thinkers, some have proven themselves time and again.

Chronological history is often defined by the development of written records, but also on a calendrical framework. Unfortunately, the global calendar is currently the godawful Gregorian, which seizes history in a rigid linear chronological framework.

The problem isn’t the linear framework in and of itself, but rather the general absence of alternatives. Studying the history of Persia, for example, should rely more on the Zoroastrian and Islamic calendars, as Iran does not use the Gregorian. However, events in Persia/Iran are presented to Westerners with Gregorian dates, which distorts the shape of events.

Psychology of Time

What do you think of clocks, weekdays, months, years, seasons, moons?\

Or, more precisely, how do you think of time?

time space synaesthesia

Examples of time-space synaesthesia

Time-space synaesthesia describes a visual mental image people have of the year. I’ve long considered synaesthesia to be a product of how our imagination works to interrelate our knowledge. The more knowledge you develop, the more it informs our mental image of the world, and time.

Here’s the time-space image I’ve had in my head since I was a wee child:

theAbysmal Calendar as time-space synaesthesia