Had the notion of carnival time top of mind whilst viewing the eclipse today. Easy to grok how such a moment sits outside of normal experience.

Bakhtin’s crucial insight is that carnival did not threaten the official order from the outside. It maintained it from within. Carnival was how a society handled what could not be absorbed by decorum, hierarchy, or doctrine. It staged excess—bodily, linguistic, social—so that excess did not accumulate silently until it ruptured the system.

Carnival Time, Hardness, and the Machines That Process Excess ↗