Fifty years ago, on Christmas eve 1968, the Apollo 8
spacecraft sent back to earth a photograph of the planet which should have
changed forever how we see ourselves. That wondrous blue-and-white half-globe
suspended in blackness, poised above the lifeless surface of the moon, could
have helped us see the planet’s living fragility: our world, a lonely, miraculous
presence within the vast emptiness of the universe. Hovering on the rim of our
consciousness ever since, this picture of ourselves from ‘out there’ –
Earthrise - could have helped humanity recognise that this is all we have; and
that all differences of nation and creed, of belief systems and social
arrangements, are transcended by a simple and complex truth: we are all fellow
travellers destined to share this insignificant and yet precious planet - and
try to make sense of our being here - until the end of time.
But time passed, and that momentary revelation went into
eclipse.
Twenty years later, when the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall
came down, and the Soviet empire crumbled, there was another momentary sense of
visionary optimism. Perhaps that old story of humanity’s progression towards
greater freedom, equality and justice was not just a fantasy tale: the threat
of nuclear war was lessening; democracy was in the ascendance, even if
patchily; and the birth of the internet age offered hope for interconnectivity
and creativity on a potentially global scale.
A more hubristic version of this eschatological optimism
came from the American scholar Francis Fukuyama, who suggested that ‘history’ had in one sense ‘come to an end’: all countries would
henceforward progress towards liberal democracies
and even bind themselves together in transnational arrangements (not unlike the
European Union) dedicated to producing and consuming the good things in life.
Happy days.
Three decades on, and we know where we are. Our blessed, vulnerable
planet is struggling to survive; across the Americas, Asia and Europe, democracies
are under siege; and lies and pseudo-facts threaten to engulf societies with a
tide of misinformation that threatens us with a collective psychotic breakdown,
swallowing up our fragile capacity to think and breathe. The novelist Saul
Bellow’s inimitable phrase, now forty years old, about living in a ‘moronic
inferno’ becomes closer and closer to describing our daily reality.
In such fraught times , keeping hope alive becomes a
spiritual and psychological challenge. Where do we gain the resources, what do
we need to sustain us, for the daunting mission of remaining fully human –
creative, loving, generous, compassionate - in these perilous times?
I want to share with you one experience that has recently helped
nurture me in these toxic times - that reminded me of our essential inter-connectedness,
and our fragility, and our creative human potentialities. I recently spent some time watching Christian Marclay’s
extraordinary art-installation film The
Clock. And I have no hesitation in saying that it is a work of genius.
The Clock is 24
hours long, with no beginning and no end: it is a montage of literally
thousands of sequences (around 12,000, I gather) from films that depict clocks
and watches (analogue and digital), or reference the passing of time, brilliantly
edited together to create an epic transpersonal, transnational drama of humour
and pathos, excitement, tension and curiosity. Each of the 1440 minutes of the
day is illustrated – sometimes with more than one clip – and the dialogue,
music or soundtrack carry you inexorably on until you are immersed within an
experience that is simultaneously (and paradoxically) that of losing track of
time and yet having a heightened awareness of time and what can take place (and
change) in a life from moment to moment.
Amazingly, you watch it in all in ‘real’ time – I arrived
around ten to four in the afternoon and left around five pm, so that’s the
section of the film installation that I saw. The time you arrive and the time
you leave dictate the part of the film you see. Of course it’s fun for lovers
of films, modern and classic, to spot the actors – oh, that’s Orson Welles, and
there’s a young Dustin Hoffman, and a younger Maggie Smith, and magnificent Bette
Davis, and now an older Dustin Hoffman…and, and, and – but that’s an almost
incidental pleasure. (And frustration: oh, there’s…what’s his name? and that’s a clip from – erm, it’s on the tip of my
tongue…too late).
At a deeper level this video installation is a timeless art
work (it was assembled in 2010) because it is a profound meditation on the nature
of time itself: the passage of time, minute by minute, defines our mortality.
There are moments in the film that don’t need a visual reference to a timepiece
to make us reflect on the transience of time - Laurence Olivier contemplating a
skull, for example: there are ways in
which we become aware both of the slowness of time (waiting for a bomb to
explode, or the murderer to strike) and of the poignant speed with which time
flashes past, decades at a time: there’s a young Robin Williams, and there he is
again (minutes - which are decades - later) just before his suicide; there’s
Big Ben in all its old grainy Hitchcockian black-and-whiteness, and here it is in
the 1960s shining in the sunlight in glorious (and artificial) Technicolour.
Immersing yourself in The
Clock will change your perspective on the passing of time, and quite
possibly change how you look at movies – and everyday life – in the future. You
become aware just how often you register, inquire, need to know, hate to know,
what time it is. How early it is. How late it is. You become alert to all the clocks
and watches and phones and screens that cross your path, alert to how you fill your
time, or how time fills you. How do we use our time? How does time use us?
Watching The Clock
is the nearest experience you might ever have of living inside T.S.Eliot’s poem
Four Quartets, where
“to apprehend/ The
point of intersection of the timeless/With time, is an occupation for the saint
-/No occupation either, but something given/And taken, in a lifetime’s death in
love,/Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.”
Where can you see – and surrender to - The Clock? In the UK it is at the Tate Modern, with free entry, until
January 20th. It has toured around the world since 2010, and probably
will continue to do so for as long and time (and humanity) endures. If you are
outside the UK, find out when/if it is on. Seeing it – like seeing our fragile
planet from outside ourselves – has the potential to transform your perception,
to alter your consciousness (for the better).
One can wait a long time –- perhaps a lifetime - for such a
moment to occur. And it can happen in the twinkling of an eye.
