It's About Time

When I was in college sculpture class at SUNY Plattsburgh under Professor Don Osbourne, I built a large broken steel clock. The concept was based on Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Most Incredible Thing” where a clockmaker builds a clock that tells biblical stories when the hours strike to win a competition. Then another guy comes along and smashes the beautifully constructed timepiece. The man who smashed it was deemed the individual who accomplished the most incredible thing. I don’t want to spoil the next part, but we’ll just say that the parable is true to its roots in morality. 

My broken clock is now mounted to a concrete slab on display at my home. It appeared in the documentary “Pottytown,”  by Morgan Elliott/Ridge44 Productions. A photo of it by Christopher Lenney appeared on the front page of the Daily Courier Observer. 

 

While researching parables about broken clocks coinciding with the installation of my sculpture, I found several of the following stories. I thought I might tell these stories to people who stop to view the clock when they ask me about it.

There was a very large clock mounted high up on the tallest building in the town for all to see. The residents would glance up at it and check their own timepieces for inconsistencies on their way to and from work, as it was the easiest measure of when they were going to be late. Occasionally, they would adjust their watches to match the clock. Perhaps they all had Seiko 5 automatic watches that look really sensible but arbitrarily drop or gain minutes. After some time, the townspeople, tired of craning their necks to look up at the clock, began to complain about its height. Being that change doesn’t happen quickly, they probably protested the clock’s placement by forming a committee that meant monthly at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesdays. Each meeting would likely inspire a flurry of new activity, which would be chronicled by the local media in screaming headlines on the front page of Thursday’s newspaper. The town’s leadership, who were the only people to pay attention to the local media, acquiesced. It was decided the clock would be relocated to a more approachable height. The decision possibly generated many press releases accompanied by photos of elected officials shaking hands with community members. When the project was complete, the townspeople could reach the clock and move the hands themselves. They stopped correcting their timepieces in favor of tweaking the clock. Within no time, the clock broke from being constantly altered. Both the committee and the elected officials agreed that it was not worth fixing the clock, which was torn out of the building and discarded. 

 

It was a rather non-descript town, and the clock wasn’t very notable in the retelling of a Jewish parable, The Clock on the Tower, by Chaya Sarah Silberberg. The metals used in the clock would be worth between $0.05 and $3.55 per pound by today’s market prices.

 

Clockmaker Hassid was an undisputed heavyweight champion of clockmaking in Baghdad. The huge man with delicate hands started his life as a thief and a cheat until an older clockmaker took him and beat him until he was no longer a criminal and abused him more until he could build beautiful and delicate timepieces. He became so skilled at his craft that kings and sultans sought out his handcrafted creations. Under the guise of seeking a new timepiece, death visited the renowned horologist and told him his time was near. Hassid didn’t want his obese and prideful existence to end and sought the secretive services of the occult to unnaturally extend his life. Through magic, he imbued his entire being into a young slave boy, Hussein, and fled. After dallying about and carousing like a student at a private college in his new body, Hassid apprenticed himself to a clockmaker and began his trade once again. Death found him despite his disguise. In ways only known to the eternal being, he sucked Hassid’s soul out of the slave boy’s body and set the timeline straight. The boy retained his prowess and propensity for making clocks and went on to a successful career and a long and productive life. 

 

There was no mention of what happened to Hassid after he died in Chaz Brenchley’s Every Day a Little Death or The Clockmaker’s Apprentice. Undoubtedly, his soul was confined to an ugly, rusted, unrepairable clock to provide adequate torture for being fat and trying to live a lie. 

 

An elderly clockmaker loved his clocks like children. They were painstakingly constructed from
the finest possible materials and expertly assembled with precise with sealed movements. The clocks also loved the clockmaker because he had given them life. Sometimes one clock would notice that another clock told a slightly different time than the others. Collectively, the clocks decided that they would only hang out with clocks that told the same time as they did and shun those who did not. By limiting association to those who displayed similar times down to each second or chime, each timepiece was inherently confident that it was accurate. Occasionally, a clock would reject the time kept by all of the clocks, causing the second hands to sound out tock-tick rather than tick-tock instead of out of time and chimes to go off asynchronously. When this happened, the other clocks would set aside their differences in favor of a mutual disdain for their rogue siblings. They all agreed even though they largely told different times and the majority of them were incorrect, they were far more accurate than those who relied on their own internal mechanisms. One day the clockmaker left the clocks to their own devices. Upon his return at 9:30 p.m., he gathered up all of the clocks and brought them outside to a large bonfire. Every clock that did not display the correct time was incinerated. 

 

The Parable of the Broken Clock Maker allegorically questions God’s relationship with man. The blog post author, former Mormon S. Richard Bellrock, concludes that the clocks could be forgiven for believing that the clockmaker had never loved his clocks at all.