By Mansor Pooyan

I shall argue throughout this critique that as the poem “The Clock” implies, we need to abandon our mechanistic views of self-interests to create a new paradigm for our private/ social relations based on quantum reality. This new model can extend to a new vision of social order that celebrates every aspect of our existence-our sexual relationships included.

To meet today’s social needs, we need to go beyond the fashioned mechanistic physics and create holistic pictures for our ideas, goals and actions. Before I begin my analysis, let’s read the poem itself once more together:

The Clock

Poet: Ali Abdolrezaei
Translated from Persian into English: Roxana Riaz

The lonesomeness evaluating the face of the clock
Is infinite
Life always picks fresh from a new moment;
That which we assume lost
Always binds our wrist.

…humble.!

The poem “clock” does not philosophize but questions the conceptual foundations upon which the image of Self, the Other and Society are rooted. The poem illustrates a society that its dynamism propagates loneliness and alienation. Many of us give our minds to working out ways to keep going. We never find the will to break the pattern into which we have crystallized our behaviour. The protagonist compares the movements of the clock-hands to those of despaired individuals longing to reach each other within the existing systemic principles and requirements.

The clock itself is used as a medium linking the human perceptions to the physical reality. The clock is a physical vehicle via which a better understanding of mind and conscious life can be explored. The constituent parts of the clock might most usefully be likened to utilitarian individuals in a society in which the fundamental values that inspire behaviour/ interaction are personal achievement and self-satisfaction.

Nevertheless, the poem is critical to the existing notion of society as the domain in which we dwell together and compete with one another for scarce resources. This domain extends from the most private/ personal relationships to the increasingly public/ global world of exchanged power. Thus, the market values form a powerful basis for personal and social advances. In this model, individual players do not resemble those of ballet dancers responding to a musical score as to move together in an disciplined and orderly manner.

Following in Isaac Newton’s wake, a mechanical reductionist vision of social life was since created. Human beings have been portrayed as living machines reflecting the precise, law-abiding mechanism of clockwork. The universe resembling a clock consists of fixed working parts with their interactions strictly determined. The hands of a clock have no scope for flexibility. Emblemise social beings act on the face of the clock not as if life is a shared reality fulfilling their potential. In contrary, they continue their steadfast march around the clock; acting each blindly as to pursue their own self-interests.

In the poem, metaphorical expressions like ‘Face of the Clock’, ‘Wrist’ and “Pendulum” demonstrate the general assumptions that we are ‘mind machines’ and are ‘programmed’ for love and sex whenever time and place advocate. Apart from what the poet seeks to tell us about what he regards as aesthetic/ erotic in human relations, there exist an elevated ‘poetic’ thought for us to take away. Poetry like the myths and legends of a culture is shared, yet each poem can be multi-faceted, accommodating a diversity of probable meanings and subject to varied interpretations. Ambiguous of double meanings in the construction of sentences allows shared meanings to form.

Throughout the poem, “Clock” makes itself felt as a social landscape whose features symbolizes the challenges and possibilities of modern life. Discreet to a sensuous response to this landscape, we find evoked reflections for meanings in life.

The lonesomeness evaluating the face of the clock
Is infinite
Life always picks fresh from a new moment;
That which we assume lost
Always binds our wrist.

It is the conceptual schemata of the individual role players that gives the societal systems their assumed causal properties i.e. abilities to determine/ restrict human behaviour. The opening line of the poem reiterates the common sense view that loneliness is an inevitable feature of life in general.

The poet’s imagination travels beyond what Time appears to animate on the surface of the clock. A more structural strain appears to relegate Time to human effort in order to subdue misery. Instead of offering pompous generalisations about Life and Beauty, the poet begins to express his own ways of seeing and feeling.

Across the poem, there exists a strong sense of nostalgia linked to the concerns of both social needs and distinctive self-interests. The protagonist looks like to hark back to a more rural, pre-industrial model for the fulfilment of his sexual/ social needs, just as some New Age thinkers seek a rediscovery of the tribal society. But to bridge the gap between self and society, regression to the past is not the way forward. The poem although does not contemplate on this issue, it implies that a new philosophy of life is needed.

The poem demonstrates the failure of the existing mechanistic pattern of sexuality and gender roles. The embedded eroticism of the poem acts as a building block bouncing around seeking collision with the beloved like tiny clock hands. The only actors in the time-space-bound drama are such isolated selves subject to the attractive or repulsive forces functional between them. These colliding; or rather, encountering separate individuals, interact socially in an orderly manner as they pursue their own self-interests.

Tall-stalk and fast in orbit, was you
Dials, working on the table, were we
Twirling.
I, heavily carrying my undeniable lesser-ness.

A clock is a very specific machine, works harmoniously in all circumstances. Within this coherent whole, the performance of its constituent parts does not change as to become something else altogether. On the face of a clock, hands have fixed identities and predictable patterns of behaviour. They meet up at certain times and wave goodbye as moving on to function set tasks. One movement is followed by another in a strictly determined manner and with entirely foreseeable result.

In the above stanza, the protagonist admires the beloved as the tall one and sees himself as the smaller i.e. the less significant party in the relationship. Despite this humble assertion and the fact that they both have got into synchrony functioning their duties properly, there exists something detrimental reiterated in other parts of the poem. If not constrained by rules and procedures, why should they feel deprived of happiness?

Within the periphery of the plaque, the hands of isolated individual experts play a part though in maintaining the whole system. However, the parts are alienated from one another and from the fragmentary whole. The individual atomised expert is thus alienated from the situation or community in which they conduct their labour. As an objectified unit in the work process, personal/ social needs are isolated from the wholly automated world of work.

Within this format, individuals as fixed working parts have no scope for spontaneity and flexibility. Thus, the importance of consciousness and relationship is denied at least at workplace. Human mind works like a machine functioning by social institutes. There is set an itinerary that is to be rolled out across the plaque of the clock. In the light of Max Weber’s prediction, tight bureaucratic rules and regulations is being led to enslavish behaviour of people in advanced technological societies. Lack of dynamism and pre-determined ways of behaviour have taken life out of excitement.

Ultimately, when the pendulum on the wall hanged us
I was the Hallaj; openly seeking you
Once more!

Mansūr Hallāj was born around 858 in Fars province of Persia and later on settled down in the Abbasid capital of Baghdad. In a controversial statement, he claimed “There is nothing wrapped in my turban but God. Hallaj did mean the idea that God is from within the self or God is within us.”

These utterances led to a long trial, and his subsequent imprisonment and eventual execution.

He believed one had to go beyond the forms of religious dualities to reach the divine reality. To say “I am God” is an expression of great humility and self-abasement i.e. there is no being but God’s.

Hallaj believed that love means to stand next to the Beloved, renouncing oneself and transforming himself to the point that there is no difference between him and the beloved. By this allusion, the protagonist wants to implicate his loving strength into the agonised conditions of life.

The beleaguered narrator was desperately hanging on to the beloved after he had tailed her for sometime. He kept encountering her regularly and on certain occasions as she was running around to accomplish her line of duties. His sense of loneliness is a contributing factor to his depression and stressed out state of mind.

Every hour, when I and we fell on You
I’d pray for the batteries to cease
So together we expire;
You above me, me in you, within.

In the above stanza, the narrator refers to “I” as to contain within itself several sub-selves, several other zones of identity. Bewildering boundaries of identity: at personal, cultural, national, sexual and gender levels, are all overlapped and form the emergent reality of the individuality.

The poem illustrates mechanistic satisfaction of self-erotic needs as the touchstone for the existing paradigm of the modern worldview. The culture of narcissism has nourished us so much that no commune movement in modern times has ever led to full fruition. A community is not held together if individual actors see themselves as isolated islands with their emphasis on “id” and “ego” qualities. The protagonist is wishful that: “the batteries to cease”. This pathetic subversive view is in itself an outcome of the determinate characteristics of market-based economic imperatives depriving the protagonist to discover himself and realities his properties.

The pursuit of self-interest constitutes the basis of both Western individualism and liberal democracy. This mechanistic self-interest paradigm has had consequences; we are now facing the collapse of the financial world.

You are every thou in my world
In my hour, thirty minutes before you.

In the vast clock-like machine that is our world, material gain or pleasure-seeking interactions act as a bridge connecting atomized separate individuals to one another. Herein atomism refers to a model of relationship based on conflict and the pursuit of instant gratification. The individuals are alienated from each other and from the whole.

How many hours plus ‘me’ minutes
Must I overtake the ‘I’
Until in a few quarters to Woman
I can sojourn in you!?

Here the protagonist is expressing his frustration in following set itineraries/ procedures in order to reach the resting places meant for ecstatic ends. One might argue that there is a local correlation between the two partners in a clockwise relationship in the sense that their arm movements are synchronised. The negative correlationship though is based on satisfaction of parties’ mutual love needs. Within this alienated mechanical framework, law-abiding human beings are to role-play in a predictable fashion. In a large corporate organisation, similarly the individual employee becomes a ‘factor of production’ and being treated as an objectified unit in the bureaucratised process of work. Faceless individuals are treated mechanistically with impersonal rules.

We live like gypsies on the boundary of an alien physical/ social world. Upon this perspective, nature is perceived as external ‘other’ than ourselves, a force to be conquered and exploited. The dichotomised ‘mind vs. body’ encourages a division between us and the world of nature.

I have been with you ahead of your past
And even before you, still I am with you.

Contextually, clock represents Physical reality on the one hand and mirrors our mindset on the other. The poem indicates that not only the formation of self but the realisation of experience in having intimate relationships are all subjugated to and moulded by systemic societal forces such as institutions, corporations and regulations.

In my hour, women minutes left behind you,
Why did you pick me to fall on?
Conceding me….

…humble.!

The poem provokes some questions rather than resolutions:
How our separate ‘identities’ can arise from conflicting self-interests to overlap and combine in such a way that we share common objectives?
What is it that constitutes two complementary genders for us resembling the two clock hands?
Is this self-image subjectivity fragmentary or unitary?

The poet can’t help but stand back somewhat in order to contemplate on the ‘alien’ relations to his own self and the ‘other’. Until the human latent relational needs are fulfilled, they have only a phantom reality. He wonders whether both opposing sexes are real and independent realities in their own right, or whether both with fictitious identities are constituent parts of a larger ticking entity. These philosophical questions touch each of us as we go about our daily lives. How we answer them has an impact on both our image of ourselves as human individuals and the binding constructions we create together.