Elegy for my Watch
When I put my watch on, it watches everything I do. Every hour, every minute, every second of it. Every millisecond, every microsecond, every period of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Caesium 133 atom. Every yoctosecond. But time, is the ultimate dimension. Time expands beyond our lowly existence.
When I put my watch on, I occasionally watch it to tell the time. Yet it's my watch that watches me nonstop. My watch lies there next to the door to my apartment. It watches my every going out and coming in. It has watched everyone who ever entered my apartment, everyone who ever slept over. If I could peek into the collective memories of my watches I could see a perfect mirror of my life, recited with perfect precision. Every single second of it, defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Caesium 133 atom.
Yet time is speechless. Time flows. Time stands still, like single frames of a paused movie. If I was a watch, I could wake up once a second, do my thing, and go to sleep again, but not for too long. No one likes a watch that sleeps for too long. But watches don't apologize. Time doesn't apologize. Time heals, but time is helpless. Doomed to repeat itself, with perfect precision, again and again. Time predates the original sin. Time predates Jesus Christ. Time predates Sisyphus. Time is the original sin.
But when I put my watch on, time is a mere side issue. Something that's always there but never the focus of what I do. Like my shadow. Time is the shadow of my life over me living it. When my time comes up, time stops in me, but time never stops in itself. I sleep in time, leaving nothing but a dent in time's limitless memory. But time is mute. Time heals. But if I could go back in time... Well I can't. Time is the all powerful dimension.
When I don't put my watch on, time doesn't stop. When I sleep, time doesn't stop. When I think time stops. When I think of that time I told myself I won't do that again, time goes back. I go back in time and time goes back in me. But time, the all powerful dimension, drags me back forward to remind me that I did it again. Time pulls my hands and flies me forward, looking into what's to come to show me that I will do it again. Time is not doomed to repeat itself. No. It's me who is doomed to repeat itself, time and again. Time is the heavy ball chained to me's ankles as me goes about repeating me's self. And so is you: doomed to be chained to me's ankle as me goes about repeating me's self. But the time comes that time stops, that me's watch stops ticking, or me's understanding of me's watch stops ticking. Time never stops.
When me's time comes up, me's life flashes in front of me's eyes. Except if me uses an iPhone that is.
2 June 2013
Toronto
[CC BY]
“How do you change the battery?”