Come Into My Life
What do you have to do to earn yourself a week? Obviously, get through seven days. But whose days are those, and whose week—or extending further, whose months, or whose year? Common wisdom would have it that all such units of time ultimately derive from the celestial bodies. The Earth, in its rotations and revolutions and relations with the Sun and Moon, passively funnels time into our hands like a rig for mining cryptocurrency. A birthday is commonly called "one more trip around the Sun," another year plucked from the Heavens and placed into your pocket. We piggyback off the music of the spheres.
My sleep schedule has conventionally been much too awful to believe in this narrative. Having stayed up all night, having woken up at some inscrutable time, with one day lasting only eight hours and another lasting forty, the rotations of the Earth have had an obvious disconnect from the actual progression of days. People mostly earn days in sync with dusk and dawn, but only by virtue of a certain effort on their part, albeit one which is usually beneath their notice. The effort is to actually go to sleep, and then get up, and by this agremeent of their will with the Heavens earn themselves a day. To this original concord are then added a host of other cycles which build on that primary beat: to eat, bathe, work, brush their teeth, etc. at the appropriate hours, in a continuous cycle, mirroring the vicissitudes of the day. Through these measures, one participates in the celestial day—and on a larger scale, the same happens in the celestial year, which is full of very similar patterns. Cyclic time is not actually natural, it is a contract, and you must fulfill your end of the bargain or maroon yourself somewhere other than nature. And ever since all my cycles collapsed in early adolescence, this is where I have frequently ended up. Though I have succeeded in establishing some daily habits, such as bathing and brushing my teeth, and have (narrowly) survived various more-or-less daily obligations, I am still habitually derelict in the eyes of the Earth.
I have mixed feelings about all of this. I love absolutely every hour of the day, and always miss whichever I am not experiencing. I often feel a bit like a voyeur, however, because while I experience every solar hour often enough, I have a settled relationship with none of them. They are beautiful creatures I look at from a distance, which to truly have I would have to court, by befriending them and weaving them into the cycles of how I live. But I have no cycles, no engagement rings to offer, and so I do not really know them. I catcall them while they pass me by, and justifiably, they look at me disgusted. I look at myself and am disgusted too, a leering creepy temporal chauvinist. But what can I say? What can I do? How can I overcome my abominable lusts, reform myself, and make a proper go of it, have a proper day with respectable hours? I have found that, by my own power, I have no hope at all. "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us."
But as lovely as the day may be, what I really desire is the week. Among all units of time, the week is a special one, arising from a Heaven higher than the Heavens. There are various celestial theories for the origin of the seven-day week—that each week corresponds to a classical planet, or approximately to a phase of the moon—but of all the units of time, the length of the week is the most culturally variable and the most apparently arbitrary. The only other contender, the month, is I think much more clearly related to the moon cross-culturally, and even the word "month" is a cognate of "moon." What has guaranteed the seven-day week is most obviously worship, in that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam require it. In turn, what has guaranteed a weekly worship schedule is the account of Creation as occurring in seven days. Sometimes these days are taken to literally correspond to the abstract length of seven Earthly days, but it is commonly supposed, and to my mind much more compelling, that these seven days are not to be judged by the standards of Earth, but by the standards of God. While the grandeur of the celestial bodies provides us a sufficient vision of cosmic action to frame our lives by, the appearance of the superior grandeur of God suspends their time in favour of a higher week. Even in the structure of the Gregorian calendar, the week continues to have this exceptional form. Knowing that a certain number of days have passed in a year, we can easily say in what month that date happens to be—but its position in the week is far more obscure, because weeks are not based on the calendar's celestial order. The existence of the ISO week date calendar, which subtly facilitiates the lives of institutions behind the more obvious Gregorican calendar, reveals the schism with the celestial which lurks at the heart of the week. There is a whole other order of time in the week, put to use in structuring human labour, but ultimately rooted in the labour of God.
Yet while the week may operate independently of Gregorian months or years, it is still reliant on the day, though this day may not be the day of the planet. In the absence of God's words by which to judge the passing of days, we have fallen back on celestial action as our rubric, though we may not need to. I have wondered before whether a "week" might be treated as a ritual in which the constitutive motion is not one of the Earth. A year or so back I as the physical body of a carrier wrote a theoryfiction post about that concept, using the seven arms of the temple menorah and the tests of long numogrammatic paths as a basis for the days of the week. As I've learnt since, the Anglican rosary beat me to that idea in the 1980's through its division into "weeks" of seven beads. There's something profoundly satisfying to me about this division, given that on each bead one would recite "a word of God"—as in a word referring to God, but also, if one accepts the concept of divine inspiration, something also spoken by God's inspiration. This "week," to me, is truer to what a week essentially is than calendric weeks as we use them today, whose primary function has ceased to be religious and come to be commercial. I don't imagine this change could ever come about for the Anglican rosary, though I can imagine it: consider an Anglican rosary app where on five of the seven beads you get an ad instead of a prayer.
A week or a day might be divinized in this manner, by replacing the celestial component with something holy. But it might also be done in the opposite way, leaving the celestial be and changing the relevant human action. The presence of fixed prayer times in certain religious traditions serves as one way of defining what the day is. For Christian monks, this definition was historically, and to some extent still is, determined by the Liturgy of the Hours, the eight standard offices of the day, each with a cute little name: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline. All beautiful names for a girl, by the way. In keeping with Jewish tradition, the day would begin with Vespers in the evening, through the sleep of Compline and the midnight vigil of Matins, into Lauds at daybreak and Prime at rising, then Terce, Sext, and None throughout the working day. All this prayer was far too much for an average person to do, but it was possible for anyone to know that, in a nearby monastery, someone was calling in each hour of the day for you, and sanctifying the time in which you lived. That can still technically be said, as many people continue to pray various forms of the Divine Office, but the practice is obviously far less close, physically and behaviourally, to most people alive today.
Because the Divine Office harmonizes the Earthly day less with patterns of sleep or rising which in fact are made quite difficult by the midnight hours than with rhythms of godly prayer, it offers some hope of proper access to the week. Indeed, because the Psalter was scheduled for weekly recital, the classical Breviary of Western Christianity seamlessly brings together my two favourite units of time. For this reason, I sometimes fantasize about being a medieval sworn religious, my whole life structured around ready access to all eight hours of the day and to the week of creation—and behind them, to the heavenly Beloved. Unfortunately, I am truly awful at following routines, and the Breviary is both demanding and confusing. I have no doubt that I could just follow a website which puts together the Office for me, but praying a specific version of the Liturgy of the Hours entails participation in a specific community of prayer. I would prefer that the rule of my life not be determined by, for example, the Roman Catholic Church; I doubt they'd appreciate my frociaggine. Plus, the act of putting together a rite all by yourself is half the fun of individual structured prayer. And in the end, eight daily offices of prayer is a lot.
But I do need something, something substantial, and I can't get it on my own. Spinoza we're onto five consecutive posts which mention him defines the essence of what something is as its conatus, which is defined not by the sum of its parts but by the stable ratio they have to each other. Every existing thing, for Spinoza, is a complex of related cycles which mutually influence each other to maintain a steady order; his thinking is quite proto-cybernetic in that respect. A unique essence is fundamentally a pattern, playing out on assorted materials. Suffering and loss of power occurs when this pattern wavers, such as when a lust for some specific pleasure such as the peace of 3 AM, perhaps becomes unbalanced with other true desires. No wonder, then, that I have often been miserable and useless. But it is not in my nature to frame my existence by the agreement of domestic life with celestial cycles. I simply have no power to do so. So I am forced to rely on the Comforter, that which is for Spinoza an inexhaustible source of joy and of existential power, the divine intuition. Even though it might do me good if they were, I have failed to define my days from evening to evening, sleep to sleep. But it might be possible to define them from Vespers to Vespers, Evensong to Evensong.
So here is my plan. I hereby vow to God, something I cannot and must not do lightly, that I will pray the two hours of the Book of Common Prayer each and every day, at least until the end of the liturgical year. That includes the confession, the psalms, the readings, and the prayers, as ordained by the ACC (the Anglican Church of Canada; not to be confused with acc, for accelerationism). If I fail on a given day, I will have to repent of that, but failure does not cancel the obligation. Given that this Office was revised by the Anglican Reformers specifically so as to be viable for lay use, and is literally called the Daily Office, I am convinced that this must be possible. Matins and Evensong, every day. No exceptions.
What's the point? The point is a prayer, and a request. I cannot regulate myself on my own, so I am asking to be regulated. I have discovered, by ample experiment, that I am nothing for myself, so let me receive myself from another. I have no power to pattern myself, but I know that my patterns are conceived in You, are plotted within Your breast. Everything else has failed. I have no days unless they are uttered from the mouth of the Eternal One, and my weeks can neither start nor end except by the grace of the Lord of the Sabbath. Make me acquainted with time well spent. Come into my life.
In conclusion, a couple verses come to mind. The first is by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the first poem I memorized as an adult. I was taken by its beauty at a friend's B'nai Mitzvah and committed it to memory by the time I put away the siddur. The second is by the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, which my friend showed me as part of his favourite hymn—ironically, since Quakers worship in silence.
A thought has blown away the marketplace.
There is a song on the wind and joy in the trees.
Shabbat arrives in the world,
scattering a song in the silence of the night.
Eternity utters a day.
O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
Where Jesus knelt to share with thee
The silence of eternity
Interpreted by love!
I would like my days to be just so. Song scattered in silence. Eternity, interpreted. Something shared. A thought amid the wind, the hills, and the trees. Something arriving, something kneeling, something uttered. Love. If it be Thy will.