An artificial darkness

In this episode we explore the difference between clock-time and world-time, and suchlike attempts to control the world…

It’s Sunday morning. I get up at the usual time. Except that it isn’t.

Yesterday it was well into the dawn by this time; but this morning it’s pitch-black out there:

It’s still the same world: clear sky, bright stars - the constellation of Orion almost straight overhead - and the trees of the mini-forest beyond the garden as darker shadows in the darkness. (If you look closely at the image you might just about be able to see the dark outlines of the trees, but I’ll admit that they’re barely visible at all.) There’s a kookaburra yelling its head off somewhere in the far distance, but they’ll do that anyway at any time of day or night, just for the heck of it. Otherwise, nothing. So what’s going…?

Ah. Right. Okay. Yeah. It’s just the clocks. The switch to Daylight Saving Time.

Which, by the look of it, isn’t saving any daylight at all. Right now, it’s just giving me an artificial darkness instead.

Which also means that, later on, it’ll give me an artificial lightness too that I also don’t need. It may still be light now by the time I go to bed, which means I probably won’t be able to get to sleep either.

Oh joy.

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We go through this same old mess twice every year: “spring forward; fall back” - that’s the phrase, isn’t it? A quick way to drop an entire nation into instant jet-lag. Somehow the folks who run the trains and planes do still manage to make things run on time, but the rest of us are left confused as heck for the whole day, and probably more. I’m supposedly awake, sitting at my small desk facing the wall, but I keep falling asleep over the keyboard, thinking that I’m facing the outside in a bright daylight that isn’t there. And then there’s that tedious business of going round the house, and the car too, changing all the clocks and timers forward or back by an hour or so each time to adjust to the new imposed reality.

Yet nature doesn’t care about our artificial artifices: it runs on world-time, not clock-time. The birds are waking just now, an hour later, with the arrival of the real-world dawn. Up the road a bit, the cows still need to be milked at the same time - even though for the farmer it isn’t the same time any more. And down at the coast, the tide still arrives and leaves in its own way, rolling around the world at its own ever-changing time, ignoring any claims we humans might make about the time.

We call it ‘Daylight Saving Time’, but by definition it doesn’t save any daylight at all. Not in the real-world, anyway.

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There’ve been so many attempts of this kind to force the world to fit our needs, rather than adapt to the world like everything else does. Look at those millennia-long struggles trying to make the year make sense, for example: the blunt fact the duration of the year doesn’t fit easily into comfortable certainties has been another artificial challenge with artificial fixes that never quite work the way that we might hope. The Julian calendar tried to fix everything way back in Roman times, but it was already a full eleven days out of sync with reality by the 1600s: there were huge riots when governments tried to fix up that mess with a shift to the Gregorian calendar. (Admittedly the riots weren’t much about the calendar-change itself, but far more about price-gouging by landlords who still demanded full rents based on the old calendar whilst their tenants lost eleven days of pay on the new. Yeah, there’s always another scam for the rich in any possession-based economy…) And even the Gregorian calendar that replaced the old Roman one still isn’t quite right either: these days the adjustments may be more in leap-seconds than in literal leap-years, but those misalignments with reality are still as real as ever.

How about the time of day, perhaps? Up until the 1850s or so, every town in Britain had its own local time, with the midday set by a sun-dial - well, at least on those few days when the sun could break through the drizzerable grey, anyway. But then the railways came, imposing their own time, demanding a single time across the whole country so that the trains could run on railway-time. All that’s left of local-time now are larger-scale time-zones, which likewise often seem to make little sense. For example, South Australia has its own half-hour-offset timezone, and then there’s a weird three-quarter-hour timezone halfway along the Nullabor to bring everything back into line again by the time we get to the far edge of the west at Perth.

Timezone boundaries are often crazy anyway, right around the world, zigzagging all over the place for political reasons rather than any rational sense. Take a look at the International Dateline sometime, taking its drunkard’s-walk all the way from north to south, twisting around all manner of isolated island-groups to line up with long-outdated colonial ideals.

And daylight saving time? - we even had a full two-hour double-daylight-saving-time at one point. I’ve heard various stories about why it all started: enabling more productivity during a war, perhaps; or supposedly making it safer for children so they don’t go to school in the dark; various other excuses as well. Whatever the reason might have been, it’s only relevant to those of us who live well beyond the tropics in any case. Here in Australia, Queensland doesn’t do it anyway, so we get a new geographical-horizontal time-zone boundary across the eastern side of the continent that only exists for half the year, and vanishes again in the fall.

Madness. Maddening, too.

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So many ways like this by which we try to override the reality of the world. But most of the time, it just doesn’t work - not really. Not well. Often not even at all. Seems to me we’d be a whole lot better off if we tried working with the world as it is.

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