Walpurgisnacht: The Other Halloween

You don't likely know this, but there were traditionally two nights of the year when evil powers held sway and rose up to torment the living. One is still observed, though it is now basically a Capitalist holiday for buying candy and wearing sexy wizard costumes. People of all ages use that night to have fancy dress parties and behave in an uncouth manner. Children go about their neighborhoods or to special candy dispersal events and fill bags and pillowcases with tooth-rotting goodies that will last until the man in the red suit comes down the chimney. 

We’re used to this, now, because in late August or in early September, Halloween decorations begin to pop up all over the retail-verse and huge displays with 350-piece bags of candy are made available to buy for the low low price of 25% more than what they cost last year. The kids have to have candy and they enjoy dressing up like their favorite pop culture creatures and the adults need an excuse to start the darker half of the year with too-tight outfits and bad decisions.

The other monster holiday is St. Walpurgis Night, or as it is called in Germany Walpurgisnacht, which falls on April 30th. On this night, too, all the powers of dread are out in their fullest potency, and similar rituals of self-preservation and banishing dark spirits are observed, especially in the older parts of the country. New England, especially, had an awareness of this bleak and spooky night in Spring, but we have all but forgotten it now. 

The Spring version of an evil night has its roots in the depths of European tradition sweeping back in huge arcs of history to a time when the world was still a terrifying place to live. Well before Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm terrorized children with tales of candy houses and grandma-devouring wolves, dark things wandered in the forests. Great swaths of unexplored woodlands and mountains hunkered like black fog across the land. Within those halls of primordial forests, bears, wolves and other large fauna dwelled that could (and sometimes did) prey on humans. There were other things in the shadows, too and it was a time when no one was educated and everyone was susceptible to the frayed ends of half-mad superstitions that still exist in such places today—out on the fringes of society—where myths grew in the minds of our ancestors and preyed on them in their dreams.

Enter St. Walpurga. She was a missionary to Frankia (now France) in the 9th Century, and whose feast day is in February, but whose canonization occurred to coincide with May Day (May 1st). Her history is fairly straightforward for that period, though not a great deal is known about her. However, just like November first is All Saints Day, and Halloween (All Hallow’s Eve) is the celebration of the evening before, Walpurgisnacht—St. Walpurga’s holiday—is the evening celebration prior to, and the day. Because of its coincidence with older pagan rites and holidays (a habit that has left no original Christian holiday celebration in its right season) the pagan and the religious holidays blended and became solidified in time. The same has happened with many such holidays. Walpurgisnacht was likely still observed, at least in tradition, by the original European settlers that came to the New World in the early 17th Century and so lived on in the hearts and minds of the New Englanders until early in the last century, but has now gone almost fully silent. 

During her feast, ancient celebrants would playact moving the reliquaries containing her sacred remains from Frankia to their final resting place in Eichstatt as had been done in the 800s. In later years, pilgrims hiked to her tomb which was said to produce an oil that repelled or defeated witches, thus lending depth and credence to the eve of her celebration being a time when evil was in full tilt.

In fact, in England and Ireland, the halfway point between the Spring equinox and Midsummer (The June solstice) was known as Beltane in pre-Christian celebrations. Pagans would burn fires and lay sheaves of grain on the blaze to thank the goddesses of growth for their help in providing a harvest the year previous and as a propitiation for the coming growing season. St. Walpurga’s iconography is almost always shown with a bishop’s crook and a sheaf of wheat, symbolizing (perhaps unconsciously) the pagan influences her canonization date may have sought to repress or absorb. Nevertheless, the Christian influence of St. Walpurga was that of an anti-evil power; those powers were often the scapegoat for bad harvests and poor growing seasons, blights, famine and pestilence. The celebration of her holy days, once melded to the older traditions, became an apotropaic, especially during the medieval period and later, of an increasingly hysterical fear of witches, evil spirits, sprites, demons, wights, banshees, haunted features of the land (evil standing rocks or cursed bridges) and anything else the religious powers could conjure to frighten the superstitious and credulous population’s children and scare the yokels into piety.

However, unlike its Autumn cousin, Walpugisnacht did not hold the (also) pagan origins of dressing up as the scary monsters in order to frighten them away, at least not initially. Rather, some traditions involved bonfires and draping one’s hovel with Spring-sprouting wheat, berries and other warding magic. The fresh smell of some of these herbal protections scared off the evil spirits and other demonic influences that sometimes prowled around seeking to devour the unwary. All across Europe, people will have bonfires, make loud noises, dress in funny costumes (less common, now) and play gentle pranks on their friends and family in celebration. 

In his less well known short story, “Dracula’s Guest”, Bran Stoker writes about an Englishman caught in a Spring snowstorm on Walpurgisnacht in the forested hills of the Carpathian mountains. The unwitting traveler insists on touring the landscape despite warnings from his innkeeper about the date and once free of his carriage, hastens for cover as hail pelts him and drives him into the cemetery of an “unholy village” and then into a tomb for shelter. Inside, a beautiful woman with rosy cheeks and full lips is spiked to the marble slab within by a huge iron rod piercing the entire building. The woman is apparently asleep. Lightning hits the rod and blows the tomb to marble shreds and the Englishman is flung among the surrounding gravestones. While unconscious, he is attended by a huge black wolf until soldiers dispatched by the man’s innkeeper rescue him. He is informed later that the maitre d received a wire from none other than Count Dracula to inform him of his guest’s travails.  

In Finland, where the holiday (called Vappu) is one of the four big religious celebrations (along with Christmas, New Years and Midsummer Night) many different odd traditions are observed, specifically by engineering students. Among them is drinking a lot of low-alcohol sparkling wine overnight from April 30th to May 1 and consuming a sweet deep fried batter sprinkled with sugar (we call this funnel cake). 

Like all things that reside still in our modern traditions, though we have lost the main thrust of their original value either by the comingling of religious feast days with pagan rites, there are some things that it is better not to forget. Next week on Tuesday, after the sun goes down and while you set out tomorrow’s clothes and drink a restoring cup of herbal tea, under the eaves of the small knot of trees by your house or in the shadow of the huddling thicket of magnolia or juniper trees in the midst of your neighborhood, something will stir. The birds will stop singing. The crickets will cease to stridulate. No sound will emanate from nature. The unspeakable things that dwell in the shadows and thrive on this night will have free reign for just a few hours between sunset and dawn. Will we see the signs?

Your friend who believes her neighbor is part of a coven of witches will see strange red lights in the second floor window of that woman’s house. You may hear the howling of wolves though there are no wolves near where you live. Did you see a shape scurry quickly through the Spring mists of the local cemetery? Do you feel that sensation of being watched that makes your blood run cold and turns your skin into gooseflesh? Is the air suddenly filled with sweet scents and the gentle murmuring of a song that mesmerizes you? That one coworker who always wears black will appear even more furtive and shifty as the sun nears the horizon that day. If you read the newspapers for April 30th, the law log may have some interesting details that you’ve never before noticed. A young woman who shows up at the local emergency department with a strange neck wound and a bad case of mysterious anemia.

 

High up in the hollers between the wooded arms of the mountains where such nights are darker and quieter than in our small, well-lit Southern burg, even stranger things may happen. Perhaps some sheep have been “stolen” from a barn. Bizarre prints appear in the ground as if from some huge invisible alien foot tread near a highland farm; ancient and mysterious books once sought for burning by the church go missing from the small library’s special collections. Tomes like The Necronomicon, De Vermis Mysteriis, The Eltdown Shards, all gone and no one knows where. 

This is the season to listen to the oldtimers and follow their doings. It’s not safe in the woods on Walpurgisnacht. The unseen barriers between parallel worlds are thinnest. It is then, as Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith tell us, when those who seek to summon the dark powers rub their clawed hands in glee and dance around a red fire with glinting knives and nefarious intent.

We don’t celebrate Walpurgisnacht anymore or even know much about it, but just like at Halloween when, all pageantry aside, we hurry home as the shadows lengthen in quiet fear of some eldritch nightmare that may be following us, the night of April 30th is no less perilous to those who walk unheeding after dark. Perhaps we ought to remember that, of all times of the year except its Autumnal cousin, May Eve, Walpurgisnacht, is when it is deadly in the wilds to stray.

Answers in the Time Before

 Answers In the Time Before

The big stone house that I grew up in in rural Pennsylvania was built sometime around 1755. Because it took so long to construct such a house in those days, we only know that it was either begun then or finished around then but no details remain in my memory about how long the construction took. What I remember is that it was very old and its age fueled images of the German family that dwelt there, living on what was then very nearly the westernmost frontier of the colonies.

As they eked out a homesteading existence against the cold and unforgiving backdrop of primordial oaks, pines and chestnuts in not quite yet the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, that family no doubt felt very small and vulnerable and were grateful for the bareboned comfort afforded them by the limestone ramparts that they built up around them for defense and shelter. The house they built became an artifact; evidence that they had been there. Well before they arrived, though, people lived where that house would be built and I wonder now if the newcomers ever thought about those they displaced. That family couldn’t have known that, roughly 220 years later, a young boy’s imagination would be fired by the rugged lives that this lone group endured, any more than that lad could have fathomed the truly difficult and trying agony of their lives in the New World.

Ever since then–and no doubt because of how much being raised in that house influenced me–I have thought and reflected on what some places must have been like for previous generations; how they have changed and what they must have looked like before our people lived here. This fascination with historical views of the world was further inflamed when I started working with librarians who have done a great deal of reconstructive work to provide significant portraitures of the early history of the part of the world where we live now. 

During a walking tour with two of these engaging and learned colleagues, we passed across streets and sidewalks that I have rambled over for nearly fifteen years and yet they drew us back in time filling my mind with tales and characters from generations ago. It made me a little more reflective and meditative on my walks to and from work after that.

It takes a truly gifted eye to see the artifacts of history in the modern world. Many of us aren’t looking. We’re deceived and distracted by traffic lights and the abysmal architecture of modernity. We don’t stop to look at houses or streets or other landmarks that are the red pins in a map of years and decades and centuries. 

On another of these walks I learned that a few feet from the entrance of one of the places where my wife used to get her hair cut in the early years of our residence here, was the site of the original town square and courthouse. Here a gallows platform was set where criminals were hanged. It’s an intersection, now, as boring and unappealing as any in our town and yet, just below its surface was a crossroad at which many poor blighters met their fate. All evidence of that period is sagging under the weight of years and life stories, hidden in plain sight.

It’s like this in every town, on every street, in every square inch of this land. Just behind the facades of modern life and shops and ball fields and schools and fire stations and train tracks and highways and farms is a land filled to bursting with history that occurred well before any of those modern accouterments were there. Each of these places has a touchstone or totem to those eras that can only be discovered by the wizards that can draw back the scrim of mystery and plumb the depths of the lore in that place. Sometimes that lore is in spells of official language: deeds, obituaries, census lists. Other times it is in a far more primitive oral sorcery woven by family traditions and shared down the dark alleys of family stories from parent to child and grandchild. Navigating between these many labyrinthian tales, a historian can place on a piece of ground or building or other artifact of our heritage a tiny jewel of knowledge that will, if the light of modernity hits it just right, catch the eye of the rest of us and can tell us those stories.

We have one such touchstone in our front yard. Huge and leaning to the southeast, a great pin oak raises its massive thews over our house and much of our part of the street like an ancient sentinel. Indeed it is an ancient sentinel, because it has stood there for an incredibly long time. Several years ago, when I called a well-known and well-established tree man out to ask about the health and safety of this great oak, I learned a bit of its history.

The tree man inherited his business from his father who spent much of his life saving or taking down the old trees in our town. He said that his father was up in our tree (well before it was “ours”) and trimming it back a bit from the house on the day when Kennedy was shot. Even in those days, he said, it was a big tree and that it had probably been there seventy-five to eighty years at that point. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Eighty years before that is 1883. Our house was built in 1937, so this tree was there and growing tall fifty-four years before the property was marked out and sold as a plot.

Ever since learning this, I’ve cast my eye up to our great, massive tree and wondered what it looked like before our house was built, before there was any hint of our street (or more than an old rutted lane). Now, like the nimble child I used to be, I scale up into that massive oak (in my imagination) which surges over the roofs of the houses around us and I look out and down, watching as the years peel away as we go backward into that history, seeing all of this in reverse like a hyperlapse film. Gone are the lawns and paths and cabins and stables. Gone too are the fields and farms. Soon enough, our oak is but a sapling and I have to leap down as it shrinks in this backward plunge. Trees as great or greater than the one in our yard rise up and fall in storms that flash before the sun like the shadows of great birds sailing on stiff winds. Forests grow and fall and grow again. Dense smokes rise, hailing fires set by lightning that cleanse and bring bright green growth rising again. I see ships departing back across the sea in the east and people filling back into these very lands. The time wheel continues to spin back.

What families lived here before our ancestors came across the ocean? What traditions and histories were shared by each of those generations? How many of the children who walked on the land where our house now dwells, once lay in a sun-dappled clearing gazing up at this sky and wondered what would come next for them? They could not know what the future held for them as a people anymore than we can. They were no more able to divine the vicissitudes of the world than we are. Despite the depths of time between us, though, far more time stretches back from then into the fogs and mists of prehistory. At one point so far back that it makes me dizzy to consider, this area–our piedmont–was under water and the hills and small mountains in and around Asheboro were volcanic islands in those shallow, warm seas, very much like Hawaii is today. What people lived and fished on those shores or used carefully hewn boats to row between those islands to hunt and plant new homes?

We cannot know. 

In my library there is a collection of stone tools and arrowheads and knapped spear points that date back into the tens of thousands of years. We have almost no idea who used these ancient tools or what they believed or feared or cared about, unless we assume that they, like us, had families they loved and homes they wished to protect and fierce loyalties to deities and battles between one another. I wonder about those people often. 

As I climb back down into the modern era, I feel that same slight disappointment that all historians feel as they close their books, shut off their research computers and close the library doors for the evening. Stepping back into the real, current world, there is sadness that we don’t know more despite the unworthy hubris we have that makes us think we’re masters of our own age. We’re newcomers here and the artifacts of those ancient ones aren’t as clearly marked as they are in other places, but we know that they were here. That is enough for me to feel as if it is worth spending a little time to nod back at them and acknowledge them and hope they left us something to learn that we have yet to discover. 

We could use their lessons and their wisdom. We could apply their mythologies and legends to our modern era; our own being nothing more than fairy tales to argue about or for excuses to kill and steal land—the heirloom behaviors of those sandy scrolls and tablets dug up in other lands, the title deeds for other peoples. Perhaps the one who dwelled here before us understood better their place in the web of nature and had no such illusions that they were in charge of anything. They likely had no ultimate or final solutions, no haughty belief that one way of seeing the world was the only right way. 

There is nothing wrong with modernity–not really–but it does feel slightly paltry sometimes, as if we’ve lost the plot as a species. It sometimes seems that we are doubling down on ideas of our own construction, falsely attributing to these faiths and ideologies power and gravity that they do not possess of themselves in order to keep us from facing the stark truth of our ineptitude. Some cultures revere their ancestors. My ancestors are worth remembering and learning more about. Their stories, hopes, dreams, frailties, failures and successes led to my generation. Much is true of the ancestors of our species; the peoples that walked here well before our ancestors left their homelands have something to teach us. The desire for that knowledge may lead us back into mysterious times but perhaps it is worth the mental effort to find something we have in common. Perhaps within their worldview is the secret for our own modern-day concerns.

History may reveal the key to these mysteries yet and while I do not support a “golden age fallacy” worldview (this fallacy is the mistaken belief that a past era was problem-free and idyllic, where we tend to romanticize the past, forgetting its challenges and inequalities) I nevertheless feel strongly that the ancients knew things that we have forgotten, both about how to live peacefully with our brethren and how to understand our own place in the web of nature. We walk the same ground they did, we see much the same world that they did. It seems a shame to me that we haven’t listened more carefully to the wisdom they left for us hidden right under our feet.

A Year In (Almost)

On the first day of April, last year, I began writing a weekly essay. A year later, I can honestly say I am pretty happy with the output. I missed a few weeks for holidays or family events, but I wrote 46 total blogs or posts or articles or essays during that time. 

When I picked this work back up, I set out to write about things that interested me: observations, opinions, concerns and a few hopefully upbeat holiday histories. I have accomplished that. I have also written about family, values, philosophy, history, culture, books, walking, music, politics and religion. I have no doubt that I have sometimes been pedantic, preachy, even pushy about some topics. Others I could have sourced more clearly or been less editorial or at least found a better way to convey my thoughts.

When I wrote a regular piece in our local paper on all things library, I was held to high standards both by the paper's editor and the library director who had the final say on content. In all that time he only ever told me to “can” an article twice. I have no such controls now. The only standards I have to meet are those that govern my own feelings about style or appropriate tone. I have no word limit, no overarching theme or genre and there is no one tapping their foot with folded arms scowling at me for rude or inconsiderate opinions. 

I wrote that short library column every two weeks for almost five years; to date it is the only experience I have as a “professional” writer or columnist. In that time, I racked up a large catalog of articles, too, far more columns than this blog and yet I am prouder of this work, perhaps because it feels less work-related. I gained some experience during that period of writing for work and developed whatever the equivalent of muscle memory is for a writer. I think it was enough practical application to feel comfortable getting back into the process again without having to relearn the skill completely.

For all that, as a “blogger” it feels weird for me to have churned out 46 essays and it is surreal to know that some of my readers are actually engaged in what I write even though it isn't printed in a newspaper. At least one of my current readers also read my library column, so I can quietly boast that I brought a reader along to this more open format. 

As far as quality, though, I will admit that each of these essays could be better. I am my own worst critic, of course, but there is room to improve. Genetic aspects of my writing are continually obvious and they push me to work harder to rectify them. I am setting more pronounced goals since regular writing doesn't resolve the pesky bad habits. One of the areas where I need to improve is difficulty choosing topics. This is a problem that happens before the essay is ever read and is mainly a compositional challenge. Another issue I have is being somewhat redundant when attempting to be emphatic.

With regard to subject matter, surprisingly, I don't always know what I'm going to write about until it clicks while I am freeform drafting. I start a handful of lines on something and I can usually tell early on if it is a topic that won't make the cut. In other cases I have drafted entire essays that simply get displaced by another topic that arises in the meantime. There's no science behind it. I am always on the lookout for a subject that I want to write and that you hopefully will wish to read.

For every essay I write and share, there are five or so false starts or partially completed drafts that are, for whatever reason, not what I choose to write about that week. Sometimes I go back to them for a future post but mostly I don't. I'm afraid that means that there are reams of ‘proto’ thesis statements in my documents folder that may never be seen.

I also have pet topics that are too in-depth or that I cannot find a good approach for within my current essay format. Some are too long for an essay, others maybe ought to be multi-part essays with a few “to be continueds” between them. I haven't yet invested the mental energy to decide if this is a once-a-year series or if I want to write them somewhere else  and in some other format. Among these is an essay about my great-grandfather's sad tale and another about the disproportionality between miscarriages of justice like wrongful convictions when compared to how often wealthy (and obviously criminal) celebrities or politicians get off free or are able to afford to appeal and delay or defer their legal consequences.

I desperately want to write a scathing critique of homeopathy and of other businesses that prey on the credulous and desperate. I have a drafted essay about baseball, one about Stephen King's most important novel and another that is an exploration of crime and abuse within old order Amish settlements. All of these or some of these and more will be forthcoming at some point once I have hammered them into shape a bit more.

Whatever my topics, there are some technical things in my format that I wish to address in the coming year. It's time to pare down my average essay length; they do drag on a bit. One might say they ramble. It would be helpful, too, if I could clear up the cliched phrases. These things take time and I appreciate you hanging in there with me while I keep adjusting.

When I have written and posted an essay, I am very nearly already working on the next. As I told my father recently, whatever I wrote about previously has long since vacated my brain when I post and email the current one. By then, I had read it many times both hoping to mold it into some kind of readable shape and combed through it tirelessly looking for typos and other errors. Ironically, no matter how many times I scan one of my pieces, I never can seem to find all the mess ups and so each essay likely has technical idiosyncrasies. I am working on that too.

For this particular essay, writing about writing is actually a bit of a cheat, especially as it tends to inadvertently vent the steam I have built up in other posts by showing the proverbial man behind the curtain. It also has the great misfortune of making my writing feel egotistical, as in, “let's talk about me, my writing and my squalid attempts to get more attention”. Nothing of the sort. I write because I need the outlet and because I enjoy the process immensely. I write about my writing to share where I am in the process with my readers. If that's egotistical, then I cannot avoid the title. 

However it comes across—wordy, repetitive, opinionated or hamfisted—I am writing hoping that I become a better writer. The regular exercise of the writer's mental muscles makes me think and write better in much the same way that the regular and sustained practice of a musical instrument can build skill and proficiency onto raw talent.

I intend to keep on working and churning out content. It may not always be very good and maybe not always what you want to read and I might not get one out every week, though that is the structure that I feel most comfortable within, it will, I hope, continue to challenge both of us.

If I had one guiding code for why I write perhaps it is because I want to challenge myself and also my readers. My hope is, together, we begin to think of the world in new ways by breaking down the barriers to our closed minds whether it is about religion, politics, superstition or any other kind of ideology that prevents us from enjoying the freedom to think for ourselves. It won't be every essay, but I would say that this idea of freeing ourselves from the poisonous ideas and affiliations in our modern life is the most central topic I want to address. My own insatiable curiosity about the world does come through in my work and I want to ask those questions with you. The fetters to free thinking can only be taken down by sharing stories from the past or explaining ideas that are complex or forgotten or by digging more deeply into the crust of why we think and believe the way we do. Challenging the stories we hold strongly but without thinking about them is the only way we can be truly free.

For now, though, I really want to  thank you sincerely for reading. Even if you don't read every week, thanks for subscribing. Your eyes and brains are the canvas on which I paint my topics, so you are an essential part of this conversation. 

If there's a topic you want me to try to tackle, shoot me an email and I will work on it. More in the coming weeks for sure! Thank you again!

Double Cousins

The first time I ever remember experiencing a doppelganger was my Freshman year of high school. Like most public school children, I had grown up with a group of peers from primary school on and like all such kids from a small town, you get to know them pretty well by their unique appearances. This familiarity isn't as strong as family, but when you spend every day in a classroom with the same batch of children for a decade, you get to know them. One girl among this group happened to live only a few blocks away from me and we had played at the playground together many times as well as sharing the same class and teacher. We weren't best friends but I knew her well enough.

As I walked down the hallway of our high school, going to my locker that first fraught week of my new secondary school career, I saw this same girl from the side and I waved and spoke to her, happy to see a familiar person. She turned and looked at me with the blank expression that only a complete stranger can give. As my brain scanned this girl's features I began to see that something wasn't right. Her hair, her skin tone, her height and even her stature all closely resembled the person I knew. The features were slightly different, but the part of my brain that recognizes people was hung up on a few startling differences. Had I maybe remembered her wrong? After all, we weren't little kids anymore and people change between age five and age 15. One of the smaller kids from my childhood grew to six feet and one-hundred seventy pounds the day after his thirteenth birthday. 

Her reaction wasn't that of someone I had known since kindergarten. This person was wearing glasses and unusual clothes and her voice was most certainly not that of my school friend. This disrupted my thoughts enough to prevent me from realizing that I was supposed to be embarrassed and so I quickly blushed and mumbled “wrong person” and went to my locker.

Under other circumstances, especially as an adult, I might have taken time and waited to be sure. However, this unfamiliar girl had such a pronounced similarity to my childhood classmate that for much of my high school career I had to be careful so I didn't embarrass myself again. My brain kept seeing the girl I knew in a girl I didn't really know at all. 

I felt a bit better when, after a particularly spirited performance (my former school chum was a gifted singer and actor) the local newspaper used the other girl's school photo in a writeup about a musical my elementary friend had been in. This proved that I wasn't the only one who found the similarities uncanny.

Years later, as I scooted my chair into position in a chemistry class at the local community college, I looked up to see my maternal uncle rifling through his papers by the front desk. My uncle was in his late seventies at the time, fully grey-headed (with what hair remained to him) and living in Pennsylvania. The professor was my uncle as he had been when I was a boy; mid-forties, greying at the temples and bespectacled. It was uncanny. So much so that I actually considered dropping the class. This was my mother's brother as he had been. His name, his clothing preferences were not the same, but it was so like him that it made me uncomfortable. It seemed to fill my mind with memories of my youth and cast me as a young boy rather than the young husband, father and homeowner I actually was.

This wasn't just seeing someone who looked familiar, either. This person's features, gestures, mannerisms set off all the facial recognition functions in my brain which are incredibly powerful. It was intensely unsettling. I needed the class so I kept attending and eventually became inured to the similarities but I had to eventually tell this man how much he reminded me of my uncle. To which, of course, he replied with the same reaction everyone who is told they are a doppelganger has; a blank stare.

We've all been there. Someone approaches us, asks us if we went to this or that high school or if we know “so-and-so” and then we are told that we look just like someone they know. Invariably they say the resemblance is astounding. It's uncomfortable. Especially because regardless of how similar we appear to this person, we know very well that we are not the person to whom they refer. It can be flustering, even frustrating. It seems to take away our agency. We know who we are and aren't, so why does this happen?

Human facial recognition is an incredible trick. We are visual primates and we use our eyes for many things we don't stop to think about regularly. We are given to memorizing the facial features, hands and physical shapes of the people we are related to or know well. We begin this almost as soon as we are able to see clearly as babies. When a baby stares at you and frowns a bit, she is memorizing your face. Those memories go into a very deep part of her brain that allows her to know fundamentally—in this case, with as much certainty as our senses can muster—her mommy, daddy, grandparents, pets, older siblings, babysitter, everyone close and of importance in her tiny life. And it isn't just facial features. She will memorize our voices, our scents, our tendencies and mannerisms. Her little mind catalogs all of these differences and quantifies them as evidence for a conceptual “person” that they then associate with a name. This is how a small child can so master her family's members and why we melt when she first says “Mama”. She will go on to create a kind of mental Rolodex, keeping a list of hundreds of people based on their physical appearances and names. When she has an experience with that person, she will associate that memory as part of the information already gathered.

We internalize those memories and they become part of how our relationships with family and friends develop, weaving a web of facial memories and stories and events into a massive skein of interconnected experiences. Part of her identity will form by the things she learns and the emotions she feels as she grows; the rest will be formed by facial impressions and memories of the people most important to her in her little life. They will eventually bind together to define who she is as a person.

To explain just how important these mental functions are, we have to look at the story of a man who could no longer remember faces. Injured in a terrible work accident, this man's brain was damaged so that no one was familiar to him anymore—even himself. Called acquired prosopagnosia, the man retained no ability to remember the specifics about the faces of his family, friends or coworkers. Horrifying as that sounds, some people have developmental prosopagnosia, which just happens and grows worse with very little explanation. Either variant is crippling and, like the man mentioned above, sufferers have to learn to depend on a host of aids to help them. 

Imagine not recognizing the person in the mirror or your spouse or children. That's fodder for a good horror story. Sometimes called face blindness, prosopagnosia is fairly rare. Nevertheless, it can shatter a person's sense of security, and people with the disability often feel as though they are being followed or that their families have been replaced by strangers.

The possible inability to recognize the faces of loved ones puts into stark relief just how important our senses are for helping us to see and know people who matter to us. Because they are such sensitive mechanisms, those same senses may contribute to us seeing doppelgangers, especially when we connect enough facial or physical markers to make our brains believe that we are seeing someone we know in someone we don't.

In my very public-facing job, I see countless people every day. I know many of them because they use the library every day. Unfamiliar people are people I have never seen before or do not remember seeing. After a week of work, I may see a thousand or more people and my cognitive mechanisms can become overburdened with all the different faces. We separate faces into categories based on importance and create a backlog of people we may remember and some who look familiar to us, but that may be only because they resemble someone and not because they actually are that person.

When I am approached and told I look exactly like someone's cousin, it can help to remember that there are thousands of people in my community, hundreds of thousands in my county. This mistake is expected. Our brains can get overwhelmed with all the many people around us. 

In one awkward situation in which I was the mistaken person, a man told me I looked just like his ex-wife's dead brother. He showed me a church directory photo on his phone. The man in that picture had no beard, was bald, obese, apparently had an affinity for pastel shirts and had blue eyes. But otherwise he bore not even a slight resemblance. Photos don't represent the full person, of course but as I gazed at the long lost Cecil “Bubba” Maness or whomever, I did not see me. Maybe Alfred Hitchcock or Winston Churchill or Henry VIII, but not me. It was very uncomfortable, especially as the man tried unsuccessfully to convince me that I was the “spitting image” of this person.

There are a few likely reasons for seeing doppelgangers. First, despite how many people there are in the world, there are a limited number of genetic variations and some family features are strong. Ultimately, if we go back far enough, we're all related. That means that there are strange and wonderful genetic permutations across all the possible variables wherein a long lost ancestor of mine may have crossed a genetic path with another ancestor and strongish genes that passed to me also showed up in some other distant cousin.

Cousin is a keyword, too. In a study done in the mid-1980s, genealogists and anthropologists got together and examined family histories going back quite a ways and they discovered that just about everyone around you can be anything from a 15th cousin to a 50th cousin. Usually, but not always, people are on average our 16th or eighteenth cousins. That's everyone within our community. That means that even 500 miles from where I was born, there are people in my town, county and state who may share with me a common ancestor.

According to one blogger on the topic, “If you consider [that] a generation is

usually 30 years,10 generations

back will take you back 300

years and give you 2,046

ancestors. If you take it back to

20 generations—or 600 years—you'd have 2,097,150 ancestors.” The Bares have been in America for about 300 years (that we know) which is more than two-thousand possible ancestors, all or most of whom produced heirs. That's just my father's father's side of the family. When we factor in my mother's family and all the different branches, this is an almost incomprehensible conglomeration of genetic traits in a vast sea of offspring.

Under the burden of arresting figures like this, it is fairly easy to assume that the girl I thought was my childhood classmate was actually a closer cousin with real genetic similarities to my actual friend. What I experienced, minus the blush-inducing embarrassment, may have been a strain of DNA that produced features that my brain recognized as being essentially the same.

Another possibility is that our face-recognition is so tuned to see familiar traits, to keep us in close-knit units where we can see who is our kin and stay with them, our brains see these markers and we don't fully understand the significance. This powerful wetware in our skulls can see family likenesses even when it is far distant.

My wife recently met her second cousin on her mother's side and this man has all the facial features we associate with her mother and late uncle's family. We spend more than a few minutes discussing these traits.

The church directory photo of the  bald-headed, blue-eyed fat man that “looked like me” may have been a cousin—even quite a close cousin. My grandmother's younger sister's grandchildren are my second cousins. Although we are related, we bear no physical similarities. They are raven-headed and olive-skinned; their mother's Native American heritage shows forth in their features quite strongly. However, all of us share ancestry with my grandmother's grandfather, a man who, like me, was tall, thinner with long legs and a peculiar cowlick. With his handlebar mustache and squinted, almost beady eyes, I very much look like him as an old man in a sepia picture taken in the 1930s.

Even more astounding is a blown up picture of my grandfather's father, Milton, that my good aunt sent me. She says—and I certainly see it—this man with a broom mustache is me in a straw hat. It is so startling that I have caught myself staring at his photo wondering what else we had in common. These men are direct ancestors, much like my good aunt, with whom I share musical and cerebral similarities; even our sharp-tongues. 

Inside the family this is to be expected and not wondered at. Just a few generations ago, though, one of my great-grandfather's great grandfathers may have sired a family tree that gave birth, eventually, to a man who, despite outward dissimilarities, nevertheless caught the observant family-finding machinery’s notice. Perhaps that man and I are 16th cousins.

Whatever the actual connection, the lesson I take from this is two-fold. First, there is no accounting for blood. There are Bares out there stalking around that I have never met who have my heart condition or my affinity for puns. We may even have similar widow's peaks or scoliosis that makes our feet turn out or a penchant for being slightly pedantic when it comes to literature or philosophy. That fills me with some hope that our small branch of the tree is not the only one.

More importantly, though, I think of the case I have often made before: we're not only all in this together, but we are all family. I'm not thrilled about being related to some of the people out there, but it does give me pause when I reflect that they, like me, are actual people with feelings, dreams, thoughts and fears; people who love and are loved despite their flaws or foibles, just like me.

Humanity is one big family. And as a family, we are part of the overarching web of nature; not separate from it or superior to it. That's a very heartening thought. So the next time I see someone who is, as they say where I grew up, the spitting image of someone else, I'll try to remember that we may be distant cousins, meaning family and family is precious. 

April Fool’s Day: The Meaning of the Season

Few Holidays have undergone such transformational changes as what we now call April Fool’s Day. The change reflects our cynicism toward all things humorous and betrays our loss of faith in comedy. Our materialism and love of money have forced this once noble and meaningful holiday into the back row where we barely notice it behind Easter, Christmas and Mother's Day.

The history of April Fool’s Day is actually fascinating and worth a closer look as it may give us limited inspiration come the day. The story starts, as so many funny stories do, in tragedy. During the fourteenth century, at the rise of the first waves of the Black Death, a girl was born into a peasant family in the north of England, near modern day York. Her father died a few weeks after her birth, not of the plague, but rather from a Saracen arrow in the Holy Land. Her mother, forced into extremity by debilitating poverty was unable to feed the girl and sent her with traveling friars to the abbey inside the walls of York. There she was raised as an orphan at St. Mary’s Abbey where she was expected to eventually take orders and join a convent. In this case, our young heroine joined the monastery at Harrowthorpe, where she was expected to be demure, obedient to the hierarchy (at the top of which sat Christ) and to live a life of solemn prayer and reflection. This she was unable to do.

The annals of history are full of records of nuns who rebelled against their orders and departed or were punished (sometimes severely) for their behavior. It is important to remember that our heroine was not a willing supplicant. Although records are fuzzy at best, it is clear that on several occasions she was threatened with expulsion, though it isn’t obvious at what age she began to show her disobedient side. All we know is that she eventually took all she could and began an annual tradition in her own honor.

The Abbot of St. Mary’s Abbey in 1336 was Thomas de Walton. He is one of the only Abbots on record to have resigned his position as it was common for abbots to die in their role having served for their entire life. However, de Walton was about to experience the savage revenge of a sense of humor gone amok.

The nun in question has only the name of her religious order, but we will call her Sister April. Throughout her novitiate she had regularly been punished for her lack of obedience. In one preserved parchment, her superior had a scribe write in Latin, “ Unus non habet sensum, ut obediat”; this one has no sense to obey. Punishments were severe and cruel. We can assume that she was forced to self-flagellate (to whip herself with barbed lashes in imitation of the cat-of-nine-tails used on Christ before the crucifixion), or was otherwise tortured. A favorite was to dunk the offending person into first scalding water and then ice-cold water and then back again. Many were given prison sentences (there were always dungeons beneath the Abbey) and some were tortured to death. Sister April, bruised, bloody and in deep agony for her shenanigans may have been strong-willed enough to mentally endure, but at some point her patience and tolerance of the power structure which abused her broke.

As she was nursed and tended by one of her order in her tiny prayer closet, the embers of pent up rage were kindled against her superior and the entire enterprise. Although there is no evidential anchor to when the idea came to her, history shares with us the consequences of her decision. 

This same year, a delegation from Rome was set to arrive to “inspect” the Abbey of St. Marys and all surrounding monasteries and convents. The survey was actually a prolonged process of grilling (sometimes literally) of the members of the orders to look for examples of heresy and of apostasy. News of the imminent arrival of the emissaries from Rome had reached every corner and the Abbot was hopeful that their visit would be short and sweet. Sister April began to make her plans in anticipation. In an apparent turn of helpful obedience, Sister April offered to help a small group bring supplies to the monastery. This was a regular weekly event, but her new helpfulness surprised and pleased her superiors, so she joined the small band of carts and horses. One of their stops was a mill that ground flour. Before the monk who baked the bread could make his order, Sister April had gone in and requested double the normal amount. The miller agreed and several strong young lads carried sacks of flour to a cart. Once their provisions had been gathered, the group turned back, singing hymns and enjoying the brief excuse to be outside the monastery walls.

Back at Harrowthorpe convent, Sister April took charge and ordered that only half of the flour be taken to the sculleries. The rest, she said, must be taken to the belfry. No one argued. Each week, the same band of provision seekers went out to get food and supplies. Each week, Sister April ordered double the provision of flour and ordered that half be taken to the belfry. Eventually, there was an entire pile of flour, carefully stacked against the walls of the bell housing. Each day, between her requirements for prayer and study, which she dutifully attended, she would sneak away to the belfry to begin her final stage of the plan. 

Harrowthorpe’s belfry stood over the main entrance to the walled convent. The ancient stone structure was solid and had become part of the recognized skyline. Although the bell was used to signal holidays, other times of prayer were signaled through a lesser belfry on the north side that had been built much more recently. The arrival of the emissaries of Rome would be heralded by the ringing of the main bell, though, Sister April knew, so she finalized her plans. Through an intricate series of pulleys and rope, a member of her order could step inside a small vestibule within the main archway and, drawing down the bell rope, cause the bell to ring. Sister April had, through the cunning appearance of newly found piety, weaseled her way into being the one who would ring the bell. Pleased with her change of demeanor, her superior allowed this.

On the day the emissaries arrived in York, they sent a small boy ahead to signal their coming. On the first day of the visit, of course, the delegation would stay at St. Mary’s Abbey, but within a week, the boy would alert them of their coming to Harrowthorpe. It was later March and winter had yet to withdraw its frozen mantle of ice and mud. News came that the delegation were to be welcomed in the morning on the first of April. Sister April made her final preparations. 

Among the thirty or so inquisitors, scribes, delegates, Abbot de Walton and his own entourage, there were a handful of Italian and Spanish priests who were the vanguard of the procession. Their leader and the head inquisitor was Ezzelino Spietato, a bishop who was known far and wide for his ruthlessness and tyrannical nature. The dour Italian rode up on a white palfrey and smiled at the superior of Harrowthorpe. His smile did not reach his eyes. They stood just below the belfry tower. Rain lashed down as they exchanged the pleasantries of their respective orders and the scribe of Spietato handed over the papal orders surmounted by a heavy red wax seal imprinted with the papal signet. Sister April saw the Abbot nod and she reached—with devilish glee—for the bell rope and pulled in order to solemnize the moment.

The wind howled through the ancient stone edifices. Iron-grey clouds lowered over the city, pelting the godly, the noble and the peasant alike with icy rain. The strong hempen rope engaged the complex series of pulleys and finally began the swinging of the iron bell. Suddenly, like a blizzard, huge clouds of white powder smashed down from on high. Thomas de Walton, the superior of Harrowthorpe monastery, the delegates, the scribes, the porters and every sundry person in the train who were already soaked to their bones with cold rain were covered with clouds of flour which coated them and blinded them and choked them and bowled them over into the mud at the gate.

Sister April, safe inside her vestibule, removed her habit (under which she had put on the clothes of a peasant lad) and grabbing a torch from a sconce on the wall, stepped out into the archway, where chaos held sway, and set her habit on fire. She may have, had she been schooled in anything but her orders, understood that an open flame in contact with the flammable flour cloud would cause an explosion of incredible proportions. However, this orphaned and exiled child only knew that she wished to send a message. Nevertheless, the flour that clouded the air ignited in a huge explosion that propelled anyone yet standing in all directions. Perhaps only the pelting rain saved all but a few that day from incineration.

Sister April, it is told, narrowly escaped the flames and ran down into the town to hide in the inns and brothels until she could make a journey far away. Whatever became of her is not truly known. If she was killed by her practical joke, her legend lived far beyond a nine-days wonder. The flames kindled with the flour that had not been hurled into the crowd and caught the wood beams and structures of Harrowthorpe Monastery which promptly burned. The Abbot was forced to resign by papal order when tales of the joke eventually reached Rome. Ezzelino Spietato was killed by the blast, which likely saved many lives since he had racked up quite a number of ‘confessions’ in his time as inquisitor.

Two hundred years later, Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and abbeys all across England and had them largely destroyed. St. Mary’s Abbey lies in ruins which can be seen today. Of the convent at Harrowthorpe nothing remains except the legend of The Fool. Sister April’s deeds spread across the nation island and grew in the telling. Some (but not all) chose to honor her in the same way that some honored the saints by playing small jokes on their family and friends on the anniversary of the fire. By the decade and the century the nun’s deed became a kind of myth of tradition. Mischievous boys would tug on their sweethearts on the ear and shout “April’s Fool” in her honor. Brothers would put salt in the inkpot of their younger siblings. Someone would put vinegar in the wine, while another would place a small rodent in the privy to hector a mother or an aunt. Tales of the fire and of the sacking of the Abbot faded with time, but not of the joy of the joke on the first day of April. 

Today, nearly seven centuries later, we still tell jokes or play pranks on our friends and family, but with no understanding of the history of a disobedient nun and her deadly prank one rainy day in York in the year 1336.

Sleep Talking

A little more than a year ago, several interminable weeks passed where I struggled to get a complete night's sleep. I either couldn't get to sleep or I would wake up with a handful of hours to go before the alarm sounded and I lay there arguing with myself about why I couldn't get back into the healing dreamless. It was more than a little upsetting but it wasn't my first bout with intermittent sleeplessness. I knew that, sooner or later, I would get back to regular slumber patterns but like all such disruptions, it was agonizing in the moment. It was like the voice that Macbeth thought he heard which said: 

“Sleep no more!

Macbeth does murder sleep: the innocent sleep,

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,

The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,

Chief nourisher in life's feast.”

Insomnia can be caused by a number of things: too much sugar or caffeine in one's beverage intake or an unhealthy diet. It can also occur because of psychological problems; too much stress at work or with the bills. Insomnia may be a side effect of a lifestyle or medication. A significant disruption of the body's sense of where it is within time can cause serious damage to slumber. However, although any of these might have been the motivating factor for my inability to get forty winks, it was most likely idiopathic insomnia, which is a fancy term for “who the heck knows why this is happening?” Anyway, although in the middle of the night while I tried to understand my stupid brain's refusal to let me plummet into golden slumbers, whatever instigated the problem seemed moot. I couldn't get my beauty rest and that was obvious and horrible.

The family was gathered around the breakfast table one Sunday during this time when I was unable to get rest and the subject of insomnia arose when our youngest mentioned that I looked like deep fried hell. His description was apt. I felt like it too. I was beyond haggard, beyond even the borders of exhaustion. The world felt like clear jello and I was moving through it numb and dumb and staringly, as though I was semi-catatonic. He told me that he used melatonin for his sleep issues and that it really helped. It was not my first exposure to melatonin, of course, since it had become a commonly available supplement on display in the aisle at the market where St. John’s Wort and ground Wolfbane could be purchased. I had previously avoided it mainly because I was loath to develop a dependence to any substance. 

Other aids, whether available over-the-counter or by prescription, had developed notorious reputations for causing the people who used them to rise from their beds like vampires and paint the nursery or plant rows of tulips in a recently excavated hole in the basement floor and yet retain no memories of their nocturnal actions the next day. One drug—Ambien—had become infamous for its side effects. So much so that some celebrities or notable personalities used the pill as a scapegoat when they inevitably said something racist on air or displayed their genitals to an unsuspecting assistant. I wanted none of it. I had spent enough time in my life with consciousness-altering substances.

Although melatonin is not a drug in that sense, he reassured me, I still had trepidations. Despite its apparent efficacy, any sleep aid had to survive a gamut of questions and requirements in order for me to try it, no matter how desperately I needed to fall into the arms of Morpheus. Fortunately our kids are avid researchers and why should they not be? Their parents are a teacher and a reference librarian respectively and they understand the importance of well-cited, verifiable sources when they look things up. The boy had done his homework on the topic. It still took a lot of convincing, but I eventually conceded that it was the best option for what ailed me. It was not habit forming, didn't require a prescription, is a naturally occurring substance within the body and was relatively inexpensive. I still held off for a while, perhaps out of sheer stubborn determination to get through my insomnia unaided but I had no more reservations about melatonin.

Meanwhile, true restfulness continued to evade me, so on one particularly dragging, droopy day he offered me a chewable tablet to take before bedtime. I cannot remember much except that it obviously worked. I slept like a rock, if rocks sleep. Pardoning the obvious cliche, I felt like a man in the desert who finds an oasis. My body and brain had been ravaged night after night by seemingly unending wakefulness and then finally, I rolled off the edge of insomnia’s beetling cliffs and into sweet oblivion. After that, I purchased a bottle of sugar free melatonin gummies to keep on the nightstand and began using it nightly. 

As long as it was working, I kept using it, fearing to return to that place of unrest high on the rocks of the island of insomnia. I was motivated by the idea of lapsing back into the fitful, flailing restlessness that would eventually become a flat inability to catch even a nap overnight. That was a forbidding possibility to face especially now that I had decent restfulness back in the daily routine. If sleeplessness returned, I knew that I would again become that half-awake, shambling creature that yawned and gibbered and snarled all day like an old dog. The long term consequences of not sleeping were plain. During the day, when I ought to be spry and sharp, I would be unfocused and blinking stupidly, dozing at stop lights and in my office and being more than usually ill-mannered. Following those symptoms come the deeper issues; loss of memory, confusion, unhealthy eating habits and soon enough, serious health problems not to mention hallucinations, paranoia, delusions, hearing voices, cosmic dread and finally, a full-on psychotic break. 

No thank you.

So I kept taking the melatonin gummies before bed. Perhaps it is ironic to note that the plaguey things had begun to be less efficacious than when I first got them. I would fall asleep hard then wake up a few hours later and need to roam the halls like a Victorian ghost, yawning and moaning until I felt tired enough to get back in bed. I more than once startled our youngest and his partner, when they would wander over into our kitchen to borrow an onion or hot sauce and there I was, like Jacob Marley, half awake and staring sightlessly.

I was unhappy with these new proceedings. So I upped my dose. I was exercising regularly during this period too and I felt that the combination of a strenuous workout and the melatonin would help me find a good night's rest. I refused to go back to straight up insomnia. Even so, I became worried that my issues with being unable to kip were developing an immunity to both. Regardless of how tired I was or when I had my last cup of strengthening Irish Breakfast Tea, around midnight, I would pop awake, fired out of dreamland and into wakefulness like a man from a cannon in the circus show.

It was around this same time that our son—he who introduced me to melatonin—began to make plans for a cross-country journey to take a new job. He would move from Asheboro to Portland, Oregon in the early Fall. The scheme was still fairly unsettled, but while we were all playing in the pool one roasty June day, he lightly discussed possible strategies to make the whole thing workable. From then until August, he solidified his itinerary for the trip and during that time it was decided that I would go with him, acting as a copilot and helping to drive. I will not write more about the trip (because the events of that amazing experience are recorded in more detail elsewhere and will be available in due time) except to say that I decided to use the opportunity to stop chewing the melatonin gummies and to get back to regular, unaided ZZZs. In August he spent a week in Oregon to hunt for an apartment and get familiar with the city. When he returned, the three hour time difference shattered him. Instead of giving in to temptations to take a midday siesta, however, he went back to his regular east coast bedtime schedule. This seemed to force a reset in his circadian rhythms and he admitted that he was consistently snoozing like a baby.

When we finally departed in October the many time zone crossings, the unpacking of his furniture and the long haul driving exhausted me. All of this coupled with a red eye flight home (in which I went a total of 36 hours without closing my eyes) seemed to reboot my circadian rhythms. Two weeks after our adventure, we turned the clocks back to standard time and coupled with regular exercise, my inability to drift into Snoreland vanished like a nightmare on the wings of dawn. 

As of this writing, insomnia in its fullest sense has departed. I have not yet needed to dip into my melatonin stores, either. The Spring time change has not yet disrupted my sleep (anymore than usual) either, despite the longer days and darker mornings. I still exercise regularly (though not at the YMCA) and I feel in mid-season form. I go to bed most nights quite tired and wake up refreshed, if groggy. My nighttime dreams are less psychedelic but that's an agreeable alternative to the swirling, brightly colored flower explosions that melatonin-induced fantasies caused. Sleep truly has knit up the ravelled sleeve of care.

I know that I will again have battles with sleeplessness but if they begin to drag out into weeks-long campaigns, I can reach for the gummies. It is pretty certain that a period of insomnia will return again, but in the meantime, hopefully I can avoid it via diet and exercise and careful adherence to a nightly routine. 

Break(ing) Time

In just a few days, we will all participate in a required behavior that calls into doubt all of our strongly-held beliefs about time. We will set the clocks forward just one hour, contributing to near universal temporal dysphoria which will last until just before it is time to adjust them back again, in the Fall. Although I have no real preference except that the government keeps its hands off our clocks, I dread the time changes mainly because of what it reveals: time is a ruse.

There have been a lot of bills introduced to stop yearly time changes. Actually there has been one bill introduced over and over by the same person. This somewhat oafish Florida representative hit on a rare insight when he suggested that the double clock changes each year limited daylight in a way that prevented the vacationers that fill his state’s coffers from enjoying the hot and balmy weather, there. The latest iteration of the so-called “Sunshine Protection Act'' has stalled yet again, however. Because Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a federal law, individual states are prohibited from adopting their own time, which makes for some unhappy constituents. However, a stalled bill at the federal level implies that no end to DST will be forthcoming. Standard time, which is what we are enjoying now, will revert to whatever it is when the sun rises at 5 and sets at 9 in mid June.

The great sci-fi author Douglas Adams once said “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.” I have always heartily agreed with Adams and so did Kant. According to the dour German idealist philosopher, time is a construct that we apply to the world in order to understand the tiny changes that occur at any given (ahem!) time. Our brains see the world in a very specific way. In order for our perceptive mechanism to parse reality into digestible bits, we developed the ability to understand that time passes and the world we see shifts as it does. Little did we know that the construct of time would become a debilitating chain around our ankles fostering a rise in the deep and unhealthy addiction to measuring and keeping track of what “time” it happens to be. Kant is not rolling in his grave. This great thinker apparently had a severe daily schedule which he followed to the second thanks to several clocks around his rooms.

We have become thralls to time in a way that marks us not as prime cousins of our great ape relatives (who don't need clocks) but as groveling supplicants to circular lords whose faces convey magical measurements and dictate our days. We may feel this gives us mastery over time, but the reverse is actually true.

It's not hard to look back to when our ancestors first began to show promise in rising from their grassland bowers to start using tools and giving names to one another and note that primordial man did not have a wristwatch on. For thousands of years we marched along with the natural clockworks provided to us by the sun, the moon, the tides, the stars and our internal biological imperatives. Humans are by and large diurnal creatures, functioning in the daylight, so we instinctively know when the sun is up and we tire and retire when the day is waning. There is no doubt that for a very long period in our fraught and stressful first millennia, humans were fairly good at knowing what part of the day they were in without needing a watch or clock. They were probably happier.

One of those ancestors had a brain wave as he watched a full moon rising over the veldt on the way back from a hunt and decided to count how many “brights” came and went before the moon was full again. This was probably the same titan of thought who decided that a small L-shaped cluster of stars “looked like a bull”. The counting of days slowly merged into a sectioning and sub-sectioning of the duration of days and nights. A likely scion of the family who created the genius above made notches on a tree as the sun's light rose or sank, and divided those final numbers into evenly counted bits. Soon enough he would have discovered that the sun's light moved both laterally, diagonally, cast shadows around standing rocks or trees at different parts of a day and shed light later and later or earlier and earlier. At some point after that, a willing convert to the blossoming time religion went a mile down the path and did the same thing on another tree. Thus horology was born. Soon enough, they would discover many other phenomena of the apparent passage of time and the many changes each day could show on the face of the planet.

Though these two stellar members of our race could have no idea, their observations and curiosity were the first steps toward the tyranny of ‘Big Chrono’. Today, we all mark each minute, each second, each hour, each day like good supplicants. Most of us, if not all, have countless clocks all over our homes. Our communication devices, our devices, our ovens, microwaves, televisions, our computers and smartphones, all have clocks prominently displayed. We hang clocks on our walls despite this proliferation and wear clocks on our arms. 

Even before the spread of technology like personal computers and smartphones, clocks were everywhere. Our quaint downtown has a clock by the railroad tracks that splits east and west on the main drag. There used to be a big flashing clock made of light bulbs on the highest bank building in town that flashed between the time and the temperature. As if this wasn't enough, you could dial a specific telephone number for the time and temperature at any point in your day if so inclined. This was regardless of the fact that we have clocks built into our vehicle dashboards.  Before that, church bells would ring out the quarter hours, so that everyone within hearing distance could know what time it was. In the small town I grew up in, there were several churches that did this, providing little excuse for those of us who were out past when the street lights came on. In the town we live in now, the steam whistle used to mark the breaks for mill workers downtown would blow at seven, at noon and at five. The churches don’t ring their bells and the steam whistle is gone, but our dependence on clocks has become so ubiquitous that we don't even notice it anymore. 

Our insistence on knowing what time it is is based entirely upon an underpinning of time being important for every aspect of our lives. We have to do things and those things have specific start and end times. Doctor’s appointments, jury duty, and job schedules make it hard to argue that time is meaningless especially when I have to be at work promptly by 9. I could explain to my bosses that my circadian rhythms didn't wake me in time for the department meeting, but as covered by chronographs as my home, car and limbs are, I have no excuse. Even if I sleep through the alarm, it’s pretty hard to claim ignorance of the time. That doesn't stop people from being “late” to work or appointments, of course. In fact, there has been a rash of people disregarding time, but that’s a topic for another essay.

The gods of time have, like their religious counterparts, undergone a rather significant growth in power and with such expansions come schisms. Early chronography was primitive at best. At a recent work outing, the presenter remarked that we should take a moment to admire the seventy year-old sundial adorning a dias in the midst of their arboretum. She then quipped dryly that they are often asked by visitors if it still works, to gales of derisive laughter from the audience of mostly librarians. Not being able to read or understand a sundial is one thing. Not being able to tell time is another.

Horology, the study and measurement of time, has undergone several changes, the most recent of which was the move from analog to digital clock. The analog style (round or square face  encompassing twelve numbers with hands swinging around a central pivot indicating hour and minute) has gone out of style, at least for younger generations. The digital clock, where the hour is represented by the leftmost number and the minutes by the right numbers past a colon are easier to read and understand. The analog clocks in our library's central pillar have always been incomprehensible to anyone younger than twenty. I know full-grown adults who still cannot read an analog clock.

My own denomination is military time which indicates numbers not usually associated with run-of-the-mill time tellers. Most analog and digital clocks begin their first half of the day with 12 and begin again when the clock hands cycle the face and twelve noon is indicated. Not so my old Timex Army Recon watch. Beneath each hour number was another number, from thirteen to twenty-three, so that instead of using 12 as the final hour of the day, you began at zero at midnight and then preceded from twelve to thirteen, the hour after noon and so on to fourteen and onward until zero again showing the full 24 hours in one day. Devotees of this style of time-telling are usually active duty military or veterans, nurses, EMS and me and my brother. 

Aside from being infuriating for regular folks, this slightly more logical application of numbers to time is nearly completely feigned. I don't care what time it is. I have long ago given up worrying about the day or the hour. Lost in the woods without a watch and my smartphone battery having died, one day will soon blend into another until indistinguishable. My body's internal clock may help me to figure out when to sleep or when to rise, when to eat or evacuate my bowels, but the need to know every minute of every day will slip quietly into blank obscurity. Since I do not intend to get lost in the woods any time soon, though, the despotic rule of the time-centric life will continue.

My only challenge as we proceed to spring the clocks ahead one hour will be to make sure that—like my father before me—each damned clock in our house has the exact same time, so that I don't time travel between rooms, like crossing the international dateline backwards. Until the double time change is finally expelled from our nation’s time-centered culture, we will have look forward with dread as the days get longer in the evening, and anything like a regular relationship with time continues to evade us.