You may remember from an earlier post that "Sheneal is the time keeper, not like a watch keeps time but like a dam keeps a river". She is trying to teach me to see time the way that faes view time.***
I have to admit that it is beyond me. It seems that the future is more like a different place than it is a different time as we see it. In our view there is only Now. But because the faerie realm spans much of our time and they can travel back and forth, our past and future are places they can pop into and experience for a while.
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Much of what we consider faerie magic is simply their ability to travel in time. But I digress. The main reason for this entry is to discuss something that Sheneal is trying to enlighten me on which may come in handy if we use it in our dimension.
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It seems that the faes can be in 2 times "at once" but they can only be in one place in one time. Once they enter in one of our Nows they may not return to it in a different place - they may return in the same place and relive the same moment in that place - but they may not return to the same time in a different place.
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What does this have to do with us? The Now that they visit us in - the one that we are trapped in - has a naming convention. It has to do with major events in the timeline, almost like chapters of a huge novel. I am having a fair amount of trouble understanding the system.
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The point is, Sheneal insists, that we have 24 (or 25) different names for the current Now. She says that it is nice to have a sense of where the sun is and all that, but converting from their system and then dividing by the rotation angle of Earth in juxtaposition to our Sun is a little bit of a chore.
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So she was wondering if we could adopt a nice little plan that she came up with so that the faes would not have to do the "Angle of the Sun Conversion." She says that it would greatly benefit us also when we are trying to arrange meetings and gatherings around world.
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She says that our current system puts too much emphasis on the position of the sun. And while she does admit that it is handy to know that it is 2 hours until bed time, or that it is almost time for lunch, or that school is almost over. That is not the whole story. If I am trying to arrange for a world wide event on the net or even to simply call my daughter in Hawaii I need to establish a local time reference point and then everyone has to convert their local time to the anchor local time.
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Even using Greenwich Mean Time only confuses things because it is actually just another local time. And using it you not only have to convert the event to GMT but you have to convert your own local time to GMT! So now you have 3 numbers to juggle!
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So how do you get around not having to convert? Sheneal says that it is very simple and very doable, it would cost next to nothing and the whole world (except a small portion of India) could adopt it over night.
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The Plan
Sheneal suggests that we keep the local time (the one used for meals and bedtime) on the face of an analog clock. We could even decorate the clock to show local sun positioning. But since no one actually needs the numbers of the clock (many watches and clocks simply do not bother putting the numbers on any way), we should simply replace the numbers with letters.
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How does that help? you say. Well, the letters are not in the same place on the clock for everyone. People in New York would have the "A" at the bottom of their clock perhaps and the people in California would have the "A" at the 90 degree position. Such that when the New Yorker and the Californian look at their own clocks (while not being able to agree on anything else) would be able to agree that it is "A-O'Clock" even though the hour hand was saying 6:00 and 3:00 respectively.
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I asked: What about Daylight savings time and 12 hour clocks vs 24 hour time scales and digital clocks and the French? Sheneal frowned and asked me what the French had to do with it. And I explained that if it is an idea that does not come from France, they will never adopt it. She said there are some faeries in Paris that are already convincing some French people and that the only debate will be that the French will claim that they thought of it first. As will just about every other culture.
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She said that the debate will get so intense that Egyptian and Sanskrit writings will be used to show that their culture had already thought of it eons ago. Finally the French will point out that the Cave of Lascaux had drawings of a global time (see graphic above) when other civilizations were still getting squashed by woolly mammoths.
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Sheneal smiles coyly and says that of course it shows up in all those places - the faes have been trying to teach us this simple trick for a very long time. She says that it will now happen because the Internet will make it possible and compelling.
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I will post the plan in the next blog as I will have to put some graphics together....
