Tue 4 Dec 2007
(Chapter 1: The Child)
There was a child who lived in a clock tower. The whole thing was filled with gears and it was very complicated. For years it ran smoothly and quietly and the little guy didn’t know it was there. It did many complicated things he couldn’t even imagine and some of the things it did was deliver little cakes or visitors and show him things and help him to decide what to wear. But as he got older it began to break down. One day it made some noises and the child was astonished to learn that he lived in a clock tower.
(Chapter 2: He begins to take the panels off)
2 Comments Add your own
1. pat | December 4th, 2007 at 3:55 am
I’ve decided to post this little fragment with the view that the experiment exists between us and so mostly happens during the exchange.
Also, this is a step back from your response (in the sense of a broader view) and so a sort of slowing down but its what I was prepared to say. feel free to rush forward or do whatever you would like.
2. pat | December 9th, 2007 at 3:27 am
I liked your clock thing but I guess we can’t talk about that – Rob
It sucks that we can’t – Pat
Well I guess we can or something – Rob
[wildy inaccurate transcript of a phone conversation]
Here is some information we exchanged during that phone conversation. (Rob, if you know more of what we talked about you might want to leave that as a comment as well)
[The following is not really recommended reading for anyone other than Rob]
Dreaming
People always say life could just be a dream or how do you know life is not a dream or how could you tell if you’re dreaming or not or what’s the difference really? It’s one of those conversations I’ve had and overhear like: ‘How do we know we see the same colors – maybe we’ve just learned the same words but what I mean by “red” is what you see as green.’ And how do we know we’re not dreaming?
My answer has been that real life is smarter than us. Something happens in real life and you think about it and it makes more sense upon reflection. We watch balls drop our whole lives and then we figure out some physics and balls drop in a very particular way and all our memories of balls dropping fit that way even though we didn’t know it at the time. This is also how we know there are other people. My dreams are only as smart as me.
And then there are daydreams. And then theres the lord of the flies thing where I start to go insane without people telling me whats real.
And life is like this oracle i plug into my dreams that gives me true answers I don’t understand and allows me to be smarter than myself but not infinitely smart: there’s computer theory for this kind of thing.
Speed of Thought
People think at different speeds and so maybe in your dreams life goes by at the perfect speed and thats why dreams are nice. Dreams are never emotionally neutral but life can be – dreams are better in that way. What does this tell us about how to interact with life? Something important I think. ”life is never dull in your dreams”- Stuart Murdoch(Belle&Sebastian) Also we talked about how this realtes to the conversation we had before about how big brains have to think slower due to physical limitations and big institutional creatures and fast little dangerous viruses.
Cookoo bird
Maybe the clock tower guy is a cookoo bird. who’s he singing for? maybe singing is giving to other people which ties into the speed thing (he sings once an hour depending on how his clock runs) and also your thing about how you have to give stuff to people. and what’s outside the clock? I was thinking he could go outside the clock where he would be blind and deaf. Maybe he’s in a clock shop stuffed full of cookoo clocks and grandfather clocks and watches and maybe even a clock maker guy and all the cookoo birds sing not exactly to each other but just into space. (I really haven’t figured anything out about needs and giving – Rob, figure it all out. Just kidding. Is there an exploratory way to talk about the singing without knowing exactly what its all about? I think so.
Garden of Eden
So far I’ve established that he lives in a clock tower and it used to do good things seamlessly for him and then one day he notices it. Implied is that maybe it won’t be working as well from now on. But I don’t really think thats the case necessarily.
- possibilities include that it would have continued to work fine had he not started to mess with it.
- that includes my garden of eden ideas about self consciousness: you can try to go back or evolve past the problems of self-consciousness – Rob, have i told you about this thing?
- another possibility is that he tries to escape from his failing clock that keeps hurting him and what is outside the clock? maybe nothing, maybe space or something, maybe he finds he is blind and alone and maybe he invents all kinds of instruments for contact with other people to replace his clock: are they better? what is their relationship to his clock? I like the idea of a cookoo bird that escaped his clock maybe. I’ve always liked the idea of mechanical birds ever since I saw ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ as a kid. It’s got this clockwork owl in it if you haven’t seen it.
Do what you like with any of this information.
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