How "The Clock" Helps Renew Our Vision

 It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

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 20^th. 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.