The Giant Clockwork

When I was a student, in my final year of Art College, I created a piece entitled The Giant Clockwork. It was a screen-printed poster, depicting a large crowd of people, pointing upwards as they were dragged and crushed between two gargantuan cogs. It had great meaning to me, this poster. It represented my determination never to allow my life to be reduced to a mundane routine, subject to the limited trappings which I believed society would seek to impose on it. I was going to be different. I was going to light up the sky. I was going to resist the norms, reject the grind, and be exceptional.

That was twenty years ago. I was nineteen, looking down the barrel of my twenties, about to be released from the ease of higher education and out into the wild. I was a burning ball of pure potential. I considered The Giant Clockwork to be a profound piece of work; my testament, my statement of intent. Needless to say, looking back, it pretty much sucked. It was derivative, amateurish, and obvious. But I didn’t think so then, and probably wouldn’t have cared anyway, because it made the statement I wanted it to make. And like a lot of art, that’s all it was ever supposed to do.

Twenty years have left that student behind. I’m now thirty-nine, and staring down the barrel of my forties. As I approach that milestone, I’m surprised to find myself experiencing an awakening. Returning to consciousness to find that time really is the slyest of creatures. Time slips out of the back door while your head is turned. Time leaves you feeling like the victim of some awful sleight of hand; hit with the sudden, sinking, realisation that you were watching the left hand while the right swiftly pinched five, ten, twenty years from you. If only you'd been paying attention, you might have seen it coming and called it out.

But you didn’t. You were suckered. I was suckered.

Until recently, I was a very nostalgic man. I would look back on the good times I had left behind me with affection and longing, sometimes at the expense of the present. No, that’s not quite true. It was often at the expense of the present, and by default, at the expense of the future too. Not anymore, though. Something happened. My perception changed, and now I find myself looking back with a very different tint to my glasses. It seems rose is out this year.

I look back these days and see, not the things I did, but the many things I didn’t do. I see twenty years, not spent, but given away. I see a dead person. John Lennon once said that life is what happens while you’re making other plans. Well, John, life is also what happens while you’re not making them.

In my mind, I stand before that student, proudly hanging The Giant Clockwork on his wall, and confess to him that I failed to light up the sky. I have not been exceptional. I allowed my life to be reduced to a mundane routine, and the worst part is it had nothing to do with society at all. I was not crushed by gargantuan cogs. The Giant Clockwork was not out there, it was in here all along.

The student doesn’t understand, of course. And you know what? I don’t need him to. Not now. The student knows what I need. He just smiles his crooked smile, gently turns my head forward, and says, ‘you may be seeing more clearly now, old man, but you’re still looking in the wrong direction’. I smile my crooked smile because I know he’s right.

In twenty years I didn’t change a thing. This simply means that nothing has changed. I’m a burning ball of pure potential. I’m going to be different. I’m going to resist the norms, reject the grind, and be exceptional.