clocks and their longings

At 20 years, thrilled with the prospect of finding meaning; at 30, giddy with the suspicion that there is none to be found.

A sky like the side of a cliff coining the fossil of an old moment's sun.

He aims his desire for immortality like an arrow at the clock-face as at a bull's-eye.
***
He considers the longings of clocks, the suggestion of which he detects in their reaching, radial symmetry and their monotonous ticking.
***
Or does he detect this sense of longing from clocks because they are solitary creatures, and logically so, there being no reason to have two or more in proximity?

When I enter the timepiece repair shop I have a sudden recollection of many clocks similarly cluttering the walls and shelves of another repair shop I had entered many years before. My grandfather had asked me to deliver his stopped wristwatch for repair; so as not to forget, I had strapped his watch to my wrist, beside my own working watch. While I waited as the watchmaker worked I noticed that the clocks covering the walls all offered a different time. In the present shop as in that other I calculate the possibility of there being enough clocks present and set differently to reflect each minute of the day, then each second, until my calculations are interrupted by the watchmaker, who tells me that it was only the battery that needed replacing.
***
Walking home I consider the workings of memory and how my grandfather's stopped watch being strapped to my wrist beside my own working watch might adequately reflect this memory process: Just as it is inevitable that my own watch twice daily had reflected the same time as my grandfather's stopped watch, it is unavoidable that the living mind turn back on and coincide with the past, the deceased, the suddenly or slowly stopped.

"Time heals all wounds," someone says to the man whose wife has recently died. Over time, the man, once hysterical with grief, begins to feel his grief dissipate, grief with which he feels the need to measure his love for his deceased wife, and so he clings to it, his grief, less out of love for his wife than to spite time.

The piercing beep of an alarm clock causes us to imagine an emergency, a malfunction in the system of time, a problem with its flow-- a kinked hose, perhaps. Alarming? It signals the adjustment of the flow of time from a sleeping to waking state.

Yes, time heals all wounds. It eases the anguish to which I cling by slowly extinguishing me.

The traffic light turns green. I turn left onto Mains Street, and within 300 yards my car breaks down. I am amazed that, while sitting at the red light, I had no idea my car was about to break down. I am equally amazed that I am now able to think back to that red light and foresee my breakdown.

To aid memory-- photographs, then video with its movement and sound, and in the future an apparatus enabling us to save with the aid of computer memory the uninterrupted stream of the sensations, thoughts, and emotions we have for the duration of our lives, our lives which we will be able to relive and let others live, just as we could live theirs . . . But what of the resultant jumble of lives? What of Dick living as Jane living as Spot?

The past feels more beneath than behind. Not so for the moving man, who feels the flow of air on his face, who inhales the future. But the man standing still, the only flow he feels is that of gravity.

There's something satisfying about having not only a century but a milleneum fall in the middle of one's life.

Back when the shortest and longest increment of time was the day. . . .

Fuel guage, speedometer, wrist watch.

There're only so many times you can hit the snooze button on a woman's biological clock.

I have just quit my job, and I'm taking extreme pleasure in calculating how long I can survive on my savings, which I will let diminish for a while, as if it were my time alive-- time-- and there was nothing I could do to stop or replenish it.

Very much what I imagine the feeling of immortality to be: the feeling of those days I skipped school to go to a public library, and either sit and read before an enormous window overlooking the rainy street, or check out a book to read on a sunny park bench.
***
There were many of those days; they multiplied like time gained rather than taken.

I see myself at 90, savings dwindling, but with enough faculties, tranquilizers and red wine to stop my clock. It will be math to the last, last month's rent, my last moment. I'll gather my 50 favorite books, my CV, and the little bits I've written, which I'll keep on the web for a few years after I'm dead; after that, I'll sleep the sleep of delete.

The heiring of time pieces as a curiously informal family tradition.

In Paris France, Gertrude Stein likens centuries to men, to the stages of an individual life: hopeful childhood, senseless adolescence, civilized maturity, settled elderliness.
***
The twentieth century was almost septuagenarian when I was born; when the twenty-first century was born, I was in my early thirties; as it rises, I'll decline.
***
How would life be different for one, like my grandfather, whose life paralleled the life of a century?

The places of my past are underwater, Atlanti. . . . I thought I was going to follow the previous sentence with a description of the dreamlike quality of returning to a place as perceived through fluid memory, dismantle the metaphorical water underwhich the past is submerged. . . . But that was before I encountered the octopi.

Age 33. To have a past since childhood on which to look back.

The past and the present that was its future. The present. That will become the past of the future. The future. That will become the present. That will become the past. The vertigo induced by looking at old photos . . .

An obsolete phone number of an old friend. With what clarity you remember dashing it off onto a scrap at your desk while it is dictated to you over the phone. And now, seven years later, it appears in your hand, delivered from the gritty bottom of an old box.
***
Or is it the set of directions written in the hand of an ex-lover, directions to the house in which she used to live, a path you followed countless times years ago?

To the places of his past he returned to sit on a bench and contemplate the passage of time.

Streets I haven’t seen in ten years seen again, in twilight, when I arrive. Anticipation as when in dream activity. Doors which look familiar, people I think I recognize, but as they were then, those years ago (and the transporting shock of eventually recognizing one who in fact does look as he did then). Twilight then transformed into streetlights in the night which, their contrast averaged together, amount to twilight, thus extending the waking dream.

After ten years, that frightening, monsterous hybrid of the familiar and unrecognizable.

When revisiting a place after years, to venture off the memory trail into areas within that place one never originally explored or frequented, to move back and forth between the remembered past and the unknown future.

I return to my old university, to the library where I spent an infinity of hours, to one of the books I read with such passion, to its cover, pages and typeface with which I became so intimate, and I wonder how many other hands it has past through these ten years.

The revelation that I am one of many generations, and within that generation, one of millions. But there is some consolation in that the human race inevitable will become extinct, that I will be one of a finite number.

Linear time like a train, and to each boxcar its generation. Yet not only to be able to think back to a place, but to be able to return physically to the place to stimulate the memory.

And what if memory exists merely for its practical value, to enable us to remember how to perform the simple tasks that help us survive the day? How silly then we should hope to use it to achieve immortality.

This unique freedom offered in the United States, the freedom to begin a new life within your lifetime, to move from one place to another, from one stratum of society to another. And the American who becomes addicted to such freedom, to liquidating employment, possessions, friends for elsewhere every few years, and between such major moves, minor "vacations"; for example, in jeans, sneakers, sweater, backpack, he spends a day walking around a university campus, walking with students as though to class, now standing at a pedestrian streetlight on a corner with a cluster of others who look across the street toward their destinations. His addiction to beginnings, to playing hide-and-seek with death.

How freely those lives within our lifetime, those periods of our lives intermingle. From my bed in X, I dream of a woman I loved in Y walking hand-in-hand with me in a wood located in Z.

It amazes him how afer ten years a place can even be remotely recognizable.

One's life-- periods, places, people-- series of skins shed.

I can remember things once only; from then, I remember memories.
***
As with revisiting places, my recent visits obscure the pervious.

Trying to follow, reconstruct the continuum of one’s life, to remember from beginning to present without gaps gives me a feeling of futility similar to that of trying to write a complete, total, properly modernist work. Each period of my life, each memory rises to a different height within my consciousness, some of which rise above, break the plane of recollection and appear as islands in a sea, and any attempt to bridge these islands rings false, bridges being artificial.

His point of reference is the dark nail that he, himself, hammered into the broad white wall on which his clock once hung, which from his distance begins to look more and more like a fly capable of disappearing during a blink of his eyes.
***
He rises and approaches the nail to better secure it in his mind; he discovers a hairline crack extending downwards along the wall from the nail. He follows the crack with his fingertip, the way one who is unsure of his way consults a road map. The thought that this road-map crack is representational of directed distance through space, its very existence a consequence of time, momentarily fascinates him.
***
He concludes that his planting the nail like a seed in the wall caused this road-root, this locomotive-sessile paradox to grow unnoticed behind his clock's back, the clock he removed like a mask from the nail hammered deeply into the broad white wall.
***
The nail-head is a mask pared down to its essentials. Only from this essential mask can the essential function of the mask be understood.

Only cuckoo clocks can he consider somehow human.