AT ONE WITH THE ST6 AUTOMATIC WRISTWATCH
So yesterday I wrote some song lyrics about clocks and now I'm
basically writing this as a pretext for sharing them. Still, since
I wrote 2022-11-06Reviewing_the_Casio_CA-53W.txt I have been
meaning to write something about my other watch, an old Seagull ST6
movement in a plastic case and fabric band that I inherited from my
grandfather.
The Seagull ST6 movement is Chinese and an early example of a cheap
Chinese export product introduced in the 1970s or 80s and still
made today. Modern examples, and indeed pretty much all examples I
see online are trying to look like more expensive watches, or at
least someone's idea of classy. I guess this is what people want
today because a mechanical watch now fits the role of a showpiece,
somehow a statement of sophistication while being technologically
backwards compared to the quartz, digital, or smart, watches that
everyone else wears. My watch obviously comes from an era before
those alternatives were so widespread, when it was just nothing
more than a cheap watch. I know this because this is what it looks
like:
gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/ST6_wristwatch.jpg
Admittedly I'm responsible for the messy wires securing one half of
the band - I wanted to expost the transparant back in order to see
more of the movement - but otherwise I think that's how it's always
been. Yellow and clear plastic, big clear dial marking and
numbering, altogether with about as much elegance as its cheap
movement really deserves. It could even be that it was bought in
China, when my grandparents holidayed there in the late 1980s, very
shortly before the Tiananmen Square protest. That might explain why
its nothing like any old mechanical wristwatches on Ebay.
Anyway I like it. I don't care so much to look dignified, least of
all brushed stainless steel dignified, and I don't really have the
opportunities to show off like that anyway. It keeps close enough
time for a day or two, which is all I need because as noted in the
earlier post it's reserved for my recreation time. Particularly my
day trips away in the Jag, destined to be carried around along with
an old film camera of similar vintage as I seek out whatever
distant feature has taken my fancy. As it has a manual winder as
well as automatic, I can basically wind it, set it, then forget it
until whenever the real world catches back up to me. Since I get so
used to digital time representations, it's also a bit of a
challenge to keep my analogue clock reading ability ticking over
(ha!).
But as for the mechanical aspect, I like this in part for the sheer
novelty of how it all works. While I'm sort-of alone in
appreciating the invisible complexity of manufacturing integrated
circuits and electronics in general, I think most people can
vaguely understand a reverence for the precision of design that
condenses such a machine as a mechanical clock down to a size that
can be strapped barely-noticably on one's wrist. If somehow quartz
clock movements had come in before wristwatches became popular, one
could believe such a mechanical wristwatch being considered some
incredible excess of craftsmanship, a very rare technical
curiosity. Where else, after all, do you see such miniscule gears
or such a rapid continuous spring movement? It's a technology all
of its own which only became accessible through the extreme effort
of industry to fulfill the once universal demand for personal
timekeeping. Still this movement not even being in the league of
the miniscule women's watch movements in high quality pieces of
yester-year.
The automatic aspect also facinates me. Sure I've never had to
change that battery in the over ten years I've had my Casio CA-53W,
but the idea that without even noticing it, I'm the power source
for the watch, it really appeals to me. In a way one straps it on
and it becomes a part of one's self. You power it, while in turn it
guides your decision-making - an extra bit of intelligence on your
wrist to satisfy a modern need for precision that's unmet by the
human brain. There's a 1960s episode of Doctor Who, known now
mainly to the sorts like myself with a glass-doored cabinet in
their house dedicated to Dr Who VHS tapes, where the doctor enters
a futuristic space ship where the crew is unresponsive and observes
that their automatic wristwatches have stopped, so revealing that
they've been incapacitated for some time. Today it seems quite
absurd that in a time with space travel to distant planets,
astronauts would be relying on mechanical watches. But you can see
how at the time, even as the first electronic watches were just on
the horizon, the perfection of mechanical clockwork into a reliable
lightweight device that is powered by its user could be wrongly
imagined as the pinacle of development, incapable of being
surpassed.
Indeed there have been electronic automatic watches, where the
user's movement powers a miniature electrical generator instead of
tensioning a spring. But the long lifetime of batteries has
obviously made the desire for those even more obscure than for
mechanical watch movements. This documentary actually shows them
being made:
https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=How_Do_They_Do_It%3F_%28Series_1%29#Recycling.2C_Self_Winding_Watches.2C_Flat_Pack_Tanker
So there we are, a whole lot of babble just to justify posting the
few lyrical lines that follow. In fact I haven't even been wearing
a watch today since I haven't been wearing clothes and I like to
feel completely naked without even my wrist bearing its usual
technological load. I often try to carry my calculator watch around
with me though, and prop it up on a table, where I inevitably leave
it behind at the next opportunity.
TURNS OF A CLOCKWORK GEAR
(sung in a deep, slightly monotonous voice)
For a thousand days and a thousand years
and a billion turns of a clockwork gear.
Hear its call come from your wall,
so meaningful without meaning at all.
It ticks through you as it spins so true,
the rhythum for whatever you should do.
For a thousand days and a thousand years
and a billion turns of a clockwork gear.
In a clockwork world, as it is unfurled,
you find yourself in the time you've heard.
Time to be quick and time to be slow,
and time for which you cannot know.
For a thousand days and a thousand years
and a billion turns of a clockwork gear.
The impassionate hands of time that stand,
against your heart or the mind's great plans.
But be eager still for that strike to,
which carries you on to your destiny due.
For a thousand days and a thousand years
and a billion turns of a clockwork gear.
The hour so near, the minute so dear,
the second to go 'till it all becomes clear.
With a sound of a bell, barely a thought how,
it sets you off like your master's yell.
For a thousand days and a thousand years
and a billion turns of a clockwork gear.
For the clock as it turns, could it ever learn,
what a power it has over the past we yearn?
Well I did have a somewhat bigger clock in mind than a wristwatch
when I wrote that, but close enough.
- The Free Thinker
