There are no Sundials in Silicon Valley
Time told with two to three thin arms and handcrafted flaws is different than digital time, which floats in from the ether. Pocket watches can be cupped and stowed, hidden in flannel, near skin. Angry Pacific Great Whites swallow them and become pacified. Twenty leagues down the soft drone soothes and lets sharks outlive dinosaurs.
Digital time is drones in the gloaming. No body, just: one, zero, one, zero, one, one, one. Scrawl one million zeroes vertically down a page, draw a line, scratch in a plus sign, what do get? You get dead trees. It takes more paper than you’d think to write one million nothings, sweet or otherwise.
How many ones would you need to stack a pile to the moon? One one would be enough, if it was Neptune-sized. But it won’t work if ones are just ideas. Ideas don’t have atoms. There have been ideas about atoms, but they tended to be downward looking. Those ideas tended to dig craters in the earth.
Now they say time isn’t rotation. Now they say time isn’t a nanosecond of a millisecond of a second of a minute of an hour of a breakneck spin towards the sun. Now they say time is the vibration of Cesium atoms, down there, reliably in harmony. More constant than our wobbly earthen sphere made of many different atoms, some of which don’t get along.
None of that is true though. Ask me. I’ll tell you it isn’t. Time does have a body, it can be owned. It can be lost too. I left mine at home once, under a cushion. Kelly found it there and wore it until she saw me the next summer. She didn’t wear it to be on time. She wore it because she knows what it is to wear something that belongs to someone else.
Time told in ticks hums and grinds gears in that teardrop brass shell balled near the nook of your thumb, clasp shut palm open.
Digital time is drones in the gloaming. No body, just: one, zero, one, zero, one, one, one. Scrawl one million zeroes vertically down a page, draw a line, scratch in a plus sign, what do get? You get dead trees. It takes more paper than you’d think to write one million nothings, sweet or otherwise.
How many ones would you need to stack a pile to the moon? One one would be enough, if it was Neptune-sized. But it won’t work if ones are just ideas. Ideas don’t have atoms. There have been ideas about atoms, but they tended to be downward looking. Those ideas tended to dig craters in the earth.
Now they say time isn’t rotation. Now they say time isn’t a nanosecond of a millisecond of a second of a minute of an hour of a breakneck spin towards the sun. Now they say time is the vibration of Cesium atoms, down there, reliably in harmony. More constant than our wobbly earthen sphere made of many different atoms, some of which don’t get along.
None of that is true though. Ask me. I’ll tell you it isn’t. Time does have a body, it can be owned. It can be lost too. I left mine at home once, under a cushion. Kelly found it there and wore it until she saw me the next summer. She didn’t wear it to be on time. She wore it because she knows what it is to wear something that belongs to someone else.
Time told in ticks hums and grinds gears in that teardrop brass shell balled near the nook of your thumb, clasp shut palm open.
posted by DJH at 5:34 PM
4 Comments:
It was green and swiss. I did wear it. I do know what it is to wear something that belongs to someones else. It means that everytime you wear it, if only for several harmonious vibrations of cesium atoms, you think of the person who belongs to it. And you smile.
kelly
i like this. i'm obsessed with time. i think about it all the time. but i prefer to pass my time reading what other people think about time ... like how it drones in the gloaming. i might have to read this again (some time).
Dude! I never knew you were so poetic!
-rae
BEAUTIFUL
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