Bird On The Wire
an online column by Carmel Bird
No. 2
2 April 1998
The future of the book
hand-written sign in the deli. It reads: What time is it? Should you be deep cleaning the slicer?If you visit the Death Clock and type in your name and date of birth it will tell you when you are going to die. It will also calculate the number of seconds you have still to live, and these will begin to diminish before your eyes. Go back to the beginning and type in your date again, and you will get a different answer, a different number of seconds to go. Type in the birthdate of a friend who is already dead and you will discover that they have, according to the Death Clock, many thousands of seconds to go.Time is so whimsical according to the Death Clock, so elastic, so unreliable, so jealous of its information that in the end it doesn't really submit anything you can put your finger on. Although it seems to ominous, its unstable answers render it foolish -- or perhaps they make it truly ominous. Maybe it is speaking a deeper truth than it seems to know. Maybe it's demonstrating some facts of the random universe.All the clocks in my house tell a different, apparently random time, partly because they all run on different kinds of mechanisms, but mainly because I don't seem to care very much what they say. I think the one on the VCR is about right. But somewhere along the line I lost interest in the specifics of the hours.But I am still very fascinated by time and clocks.During a recent visit to Sydney I saw for the first time the model of the Strasburg clock in the Powerhouse Museum. Like a section of some strange gothic church (eight metres tall), the clock stands alone before several rows of chairs. You step out of the glass lift, and there is the clock, holding court to the chairs.At five minutes to the hour the clock begins its performance during which there is an emphasis on the fleeting quality of time, and on the relationship between time and death. The first quarter is struck by a child with a hammer, the half hour is struck by a young man with an arrow, and the third quarter is struck by a soldier. An old man strikes four quarters, while Death strikes the hour. During the night, all have a rest except Death, who still strikes the hours. At midday a cock crows three times and flaps its wings and the twelve apostles move along in front of the figure of Christ. You need to spend a few hours with the clock in order to observe all the actions it performs.There are the planets, the fates, the signs of the zodiac. There's a spiral staircase to one side, leading, dare I say, nowhere.The real staircase in the original clock in Strasbourg cathedral leads to another part of the building. I have never seen the clock in Strasbourg, but the day after my visit to the Powerhouse I happened to buy an old French textbook in a secondhand shop in the country. I got the book only because I thought it was charming, but when I opened it at home I found a section on the clock in Strasbourg cathedral, with a black and white plate so that I could compare the picture postcard I had of the model in Sydney.It's only a little coincidence, but I relish those. They are tricky to include in fiction, but they tickle my imagination.Time marches on; I probably should be deep cleaning the slicer.HOME