Maintenance and Repair

Compression lines
fold and crease,
weariness comes of age
as sleep will, in the end,
inside these machines
where our ghosts
barely survive:
hardly a wisp of being,
a glisten of lubrication,
a mist of droplets
around the cogs.

Rusted flakes,
screws and bolts
seized in their threads
fused to the immaculate beginning
when metal was tied to metal
by intention and design

But time has creaked round
a thousand clock faces now.

Everything decays,
corroded, disintegrated,
with the half-life of atoms
degrading substance
from within;
and no-one still alive
to rub away its patination
or expose the sheen
beneath the stain of time,
after weather and wind,
and cold rain’s
torrential scouring.

I see it for what it is,
our history of mechanism:
our hands, kind and unkind,
coiling tomorrow in the windings,
cleaning spring and pinion
before we eventually neglect them;
freeing dust and oil until one day
we forget.

We have resisted
time’s advances until nothing,
no balance wheel, no pendulum,
can regulate the hours, the minutes,
every solitary passing second,
and keep them
from dying.

© BH, 2018

---

Time and the ghost in the machine? Ryle and the Cartesian separation of mind from the physical? No. All I’d been doing was trying to fix a very old paraffin lamp. These things are so outdated now they are mostly kitsch ornaments. But to us, they are a source of light when out in the far West and without electricity.

There's something about the beauty of these old, still-functioning, devices and about how we take the arcana of inward workings to be a mystical thing now - beyond any hope of human intervention.

I wondered if there's a process here (both mechanical and digital) with an origin in our good intentions. We mean to to be diligent and follow the maintenance instructions, do our techie duty. But, it fades with time, until we procrastinate and the dust solidifies, mechanics seize just as, digitally, we find our old algorithms struggling, seized up and outmoded.

Nothing stands still. That’s the lesson… and our litany for the whole world, a world broken ultimately by our wilful lack of attention.

The illustration is a combination  of cogs and wheels and a ghostly figure from the internet plus a rendering of paraffin lamp glasses - in an image by Jean Duncan, neighbour and artist - glasses of the same kind and vintage as the lamp I'd been trying to mend…