Before there were clocks, there was simply dawn, mid-morning, midday, afternoon and evening.
One bright morning, a surly farmhand counts his teeth, and sees that they are no lesser or greater in number or fitness than the teeth of each fellow man working the field beside him. And yet, he rises earlier, digs harder, and sweats more than his fellow man, so that his wife at home who is happy in this life, but lays tired in his bed each night, must wash his shirt with more soap and fervor than the next fellow’s wife. Looking to his left and right, he has determined that he reaps more, sows more, and indeed the Earth returns more fruit to his hand than to any other man serving his employer.
He works the field this long morning, digging trenches with a spade too short, back arched into his navel, turned away from the heat of day beating down oppressively on his shoulders. He freckles from the radiation because they have not yet invented sunscreen.
How hotly I suffer! He spits, and resolves to demand recompense!
The owner of the farm, a fair and prudent man, considers this and determines that this sweaty laborer with thirty-two fair teeth shall be compensated a greater due in proportion to the expanse of daylight he cedes to the farmwork – the sunlight after all, being the only real keeper in all this. Through this need, the sundial is born, and one is not surprised to hear that wage was invented before time was described. Thusly is all magnificent human invention a flesh anchored to the fundamental bones of commerce. Nietzsche writes that moral guilt is born from debt, and scholars of ancient Cuneiform know well that the first written languages were created to count taxes.
One day my beloved friend remarks that in the Middle Ages, peasants marked time backward or forward from the nearest harvest festival or royal birthday or religious celebration, because there was not yet such a thing as “August”. If you research the origin of clocks, you’ll find that strict time by hours is mostly irrelevant to all humankind until God and work are worshipped strictly.
Some of the earliest sundials exist in churches and monasteries where monks performed dutifully scheduled prayers, and to this day churchbells still announce the hours to nearby villages even though these days every common peasant has his own clock. Early calendars were invented for perspicacious Chinese emperors to breed their luckiest possible heir by decree of the position of the stars. All these nascent methods of timekeeping direct our eyes up toward heavenly bodies, which humbly relate to one another in regular intervals, now called “years” and “days”.
How lovingly we worshipped The Great Sun to sing the song of time by the tempo of our revolution about it. I mourn Galileo’s epiphany as the greatest waste against the innocence of the human creature since Eve’s apple, for indeed, what else is a God but the fire burning in the sky, which is the source of all discrete fundaments of energy, time, and light on Earth? What truer God exists than one so gloriously burning (dying) to give us life?
A brief interlude now to provide an incomplete proof that all things in this human universe can be composed of units of energy, time, and light (all gifts of the Sun).
Example 1:
grass = energy + time
cows = grass + energy + time
cows = (energy + time) + energy + time
dragons = cows + energy + time
dragons = ((energy + time) + energy + time) + energy + time
All remaining living creatures of earth are derived in a similar fashion et al.
Bonus: cow farts = cows – energy
All living things on Earth derive their fundamental energy from photonic energy from the sun. This isn’t some woowoo stuff, this is actual science.
Example 2:
beauty = light * energy
Here I have chosen a multiplicative relation because these two factors amplify one another more explosively than simple addition. I did not choose an exponential relation because then I am forced to choose either light or energy as the base of the exponential, and the other as the power, forcing a hierarchy into their relationship. In the practice of appreciating or creating beauty, I’m not confident claiming which of light or energy is the base and which the power.
Following from the above equation, I suggest the following:
art = beauty + time
art = (light * energy) + time
You may continue this proof in your own time. See if, beginning with cows and art, you can derive your way to the equation for New York City, sexual freedom, and cerebral thrombosis by only using basic factors of energy, time and light. Hint: the path contains Georgia O’ Keefe.
We return to the surly farmhand. I’ve just learned his name which I decline to provide you, as he and his wife kindly ask you to respect their privacy at this time…
He returns home, triumphant to report that soon, he will be able to afford a new shirt for the next week, and that his wife might rest this one night from washing. Her fingers have cracked in all this, spied with dry webs of flaked lye, and relief washes over her, a sweeping beam like cool dawn arriving on the dark country field. He takes her hands in his, kissing them sweetly.
She then promptly returns to all the remaining work to be done. It never ends of course, but “solace” shares no etymological root with “solar”, and what rest the farmhand has earned for her through the invention of solar-clocks has no relation to the warmth blushing through his wife now.
That night, once more returning to hobbies of pleasure, the man and the woman lie intersected at the heart and groin, and each considers the new world of the sundial.
They do not know how we will use the clock to invent labor, capital, slavery and emancipation from slavery, electricity, grocery stores, slavery again, iced lattes, torture, tribes of nations and all manner of other gods that we can’t even see burning, living, or dying as the Sun does so nudely each day. They do not know that one day we will invent all these smaller, tamer suns we can turn on and off at whim, so that we can stay in elaborate caves we call buildings. They do not know that we will begin waking later and later, using our false suns to rule the night when the True Sun’s kingdom sleeps.
Does the Sun miss us now? Does it wonder where we’ve gone? Now in modern America, where this story does not take place, we resent the systems of commerce and find all the rational ways to trace the genealogy of our misery to labor, money, debt, work and time, but these are not the crimes of modern commerce. Commerce is the language we have invented to describe what we owe to each other. What we really grate against, the true betrayal of such systems, is that they have polluted the original means of human relation to perpetrate violence, oppression, and carelessness. We do not hate capitalism. We hate what it has done to the way we love each other.
I believe we still look for the Sun. We search for it inside, and out, inventing things to remind us of its warmth and light. We turn to our candles and calendars, to money, to cruelty, and all our other small gods of limited destruction. But none of this is known to the farmhand and his wife.
They lie in their bed, hand in hand. They fade to sleep imagining the future, to the sound of one another’s breath, and they do not wish each other goodnight. They have between them something unspoken that has also burned since the beginning of time. Who is to say which came first between love and the Sun? No matter, as we cannot resist the truth of either. We live our lives dozing halfway between all such truths, trusting devotedly in the return of every dawn until we die.