MUSEUM
OF TIME
A
museum of time. That's what this place should be, should become. A
space as vast and rambling as this needs to be filled with the
mechanisms of time. Have you not noticed that there are no clocks
here? None of the walls have any variety of time-keeping instruments.
It is designed to suspend you in a sense of timelessness, mired in a
fragile feeling that time is not of the essence. Who needs to be told
the time when you are busy spending money? Here money is
disconnected, independent of time.
Time
is not money here as the old adage would have you believe. Time is of
no consequence. In this ambience of constant bright fluorescent light
where the dark is kept at bay but always seems to be there on the
fringes, threatening to engulf, you don't need the time. You need the
aimless purpose of wondering where to spend money next. To be made
conscious of what the time is is to deter you from playing your
contributive part in trade, an unnecessary distraction that might
stop you from being the selfless person you become as you wander
these glass-walled corridors in search of adding to someone else's
profit margins. To spend your money, hard-earned or ill-gained, on
things to which you have added your own estimation of value over and
above its asking price, is a feeling that you often find
indescribable. It is at once a sense of fulfilment, satisfaction and
ennui. Not easy feelings to come by when you live in the life, the
spaces, where time is of the essence. Where the devices of
chronometry dictate what action you will take in the next minute and
the one after that, and after that.
You
traverse these marbled floors which wind about themselves in
soft-soled, sure-footed steps. You look at the wares on display as if
you have never seen such things before. Perhaps you never have.
Perhaps you have imagined it, something like it. You notice nothing
else, no one else as you stare through the sparkling clean glass
wall. Your eyes gradually become conscious then of someone else on
the other side of the wall. Someone peering with the same
concentration as you at the item you may potentially expend your
money upon. You look up at that someone else on the other side and
you stare into your own eyes. At first you are slightly startled, and
then a smile spans your face, a short giggle to yourself. You look
back at the enticing thing there, imprisoned in glass, spotlighted in
LED brightness. It seems to rise up to you on a cushion of air. You
look at it and you imagine yourself using it, wearing it, eating it,
cuddling it. You are pleased. You enter the shop, pushing open large
glass doors that heavily slide apart to give you entrance.
Welcome.
Welcome to a world where you are exactly who they want should enter
their shop. If you are not too avid about the reason why you entered
the shop, you might look about you and notice there are no timepieces
on display. Nothing to remind you of the faster,
chronologically-bound life which awaits you once you leave these
climate-controlled, shiny metal and glass halls of static commerce.
What use is time if avarice has been well and truly established in
its role to increase your hunger to possess? Possession is 3/4ths of
the law. Isn't that what they say? That you cannot be dispossessed of
your ownership or your tenancy without recourse to law? That by
virtue of the fact that you have purchased a thing from within this
splendiferous architectural structure and will continue to do so as
long as you have money to spend, can you not lay claim as a tenant?
By virtue of having spent hours in this place? Hours? Countless
hours! Ah, there's the rub. Countless. See? Time does not exist here.
You can never prove the number of hours you have spent here mainly
because you willingly entered a zone where time does not exist.
In
the museum of time the many instruments devised by humans to
calculate and tell the course of the sun and the moon in our life, in
the universal scheme of things, and in its repetitive form, will be
in direct confrontation with each other. No one device will ever tell
the same time as the ones near it. You will be immersed in an ocean
of visual, auditory and physical time of every hour, minute and
second of the day. And night. Every tick, every tock, every click and
every clang, every whispering moment will resound in a silence that
surrounds it. Clocks, watches, hourglasses, sundials, metronomes, egg-timers,
large almanacs of fluttering pages, calendars which measure human
time till infinity perceived will be on display, for you to see and
experience every hour of every day, of every month and every year
until you no longer wish to. Or can. The museum of time is never
closed.
In
the museum will there be two atriums, atria. One will be exposed to
the natural passage of the day and night, while the other will, in
multi-dimensional technological marvellousness, show the exact
opposite of the natural passage. As you amble along the circular
corridors of time on display, the atria in the centre of these
corridors will simultaneously present real or artificial time as the
gradual transformation of day to night to day to night...
Any
time at once is what the museum of time will have on exhibit. Time as
told in devices of wood, stone, earth, water, metal and synthetic
substances. Many of rare and long heritage, carefully preserved to
contest the ravages of time. Many of recent vintage, of recent
invention. Analogue, digital, binary, shadows of the sun. Differently
told, never the same.
Your
hands grip bags made of environment-friendly, recycled waste
containing items in polluting plastic which you will never dispose of
carefully, but you are particular in trashing the polystyrene cup
which had a coffee in one of the stainless-steel bins primly situated
next to a pillar, one of many which hold these balconies, these
circular corridors showcasing wondrous artifice clothed in colour and
texture, behind thick clear glass and shiny polished metal, painted
wood and textured polymer. And you stand for a timeless moment, put
the bags down near your feet, rest your hands on the smooth gloss of
the steel balustrades and look down into the atrium. Down in to the
depths of this building where time is absent. And you notice the
other light. Not the fluorescent, neon, LED kind. You look up. Up to
the clear domed glass roof sectioned by curving support beams. And
you see it is day. Sunlight shines brightly outside. Clouds gently
waft across beyond the glass. A sense of true satisfaction grips you.
It is still day. Lots can be done. Be bought. Be spent upon. Time can
be spent on what money can buy without being aware of the time
itself.
Picking
up your socially-conscious packed goods, you turn back to the
corridors to look at the next direction you may want to go. To the
left and down seems like a good choice. Away from the atrium, away
from the natural light, into the mild-yellow fluorescence that
renders the visual of time entirely useless. Something makes you
glance back to the atrium. You see, no you only register, somewhere
in a corner of your mind that the light in the atrium now seems to be
that of night as you nimbly patter off on the marble path paved with
good intentions to ride the escalator to hell.
The
radio ballet for listeners which LIGNA of Hamburg-Berlin broadcast in
Calcutta's South City Mall between 11th and 18th
December 2012 as part of 'Parallel Cities' - an alternative art and
media project in six simultaneous venues presented by Goethe-Institut
Max Mueller Bhavan, gave me food for thought to write the piece
above.
