Yesterday at the gym I was looking at the clock to see what time it was (a bit over 3pm) and the clock was dead as usual. Jumped a second. Dead. Jump. Dead. Jump. Dead.

This jarring movement, this lack of aknowledging there is any gray area between this or that second, this complete lack of emotion, suddenly made mi realise just how empy our lives have become now that everything is digital. Looking at that clock I realised that all my life I have accepted that jarring motion to be time itself. The digital motion of clocks has throughout my life conditioned me to accept that time moved in increments. That it sort of jumped from this state to that.

Perhaps this is why I’ve been so fascinated with my new pocket watch ever since having bought it. For her, time is analog. It doesn’t jump to and fro, but moves forward in a linear fashion. My first reaction to seeing that thing run was one of “WOW! A second is THAT short!?” because it was the first time in my life that I actually felt the passing of a second through seeing how quickly the second hand rushes around the numbers. No matter how much you may feel seconds can be counted, see a proper clock and you’ll see they cannot be. It’s just rush rush rush.

But perhaps the absolutely sad part in our digital lives isn’t one of clocks and seconds. It is one of emotion in the machine. Remember the days when you could still feel the machine? When you opened a bonnet of some sort and a mechanical marvel looked up at you with its sad heroic eyes and went “Hello there ol’ chap? Got some oil?” … no, probably not. Few of us do, perhaps we can remember a bright moment or two, but you’d have to be beyond sixty years of age to have seen an emotable machine outside a museum.

These days … these days the situation is quite sad. You open a cover and are greeted with cold and quiet circuit-boards, surgical plastic covering every bit of mechanics. Even an engine from before the age of plastic covers looked all clean and smooth on the outside. No motion. No cogs. No nitty-gritty. Nothing. Just metal and some tubing here and there.

Sad.

But nowhere is this more noticable, dare I say, than in clocks. They used to be these beautiful poems of gears and pendulums and this and that and now they’re … well it’s a black plastic box with hands on one side and a battery on the other. What the fuck?

Luckily we still have technical museums keeping old machinery in store for us, enabling us to go there and enjoy the poem of the machine at least a little bit, even if we cannot see her singing her song to us. We can stand there and hope, hope for the steampunk movement to go large enough to bring the poetry back into our everyday lives.

Tags: Clock, food for thought, Steampunk