Temporal Cuntroll

The famous psychic fraud Uri Geller used to have a great trick. On his TV show, in between masturbatory pirouettes for the camera, he would instruct people with old watches to go and pick them up while he 'activated them with his mind woooooooo spooky'.

Many people would ring in the show, breathlessly reporting that their old stopped watch had started working again. Not just a handful, but too many for it to be a coincidence.

Of all his tricks, this one is so obvious it defies belief. Spoon bending requires a deft touch of sleight, so does psychic/cold reading, most other stunts require preparation or chicanery. But this one is just too easy - the heat of the hand, the movement of the watch itself as the rube brings it up into vision, even the fact that the watch might not have stopped at all, and suddenly it moves again.

(Any decent horologist can tell you that this is a perfectly normal phenomenon, and it would be a much more surreal experience if he could psychically stop a working model.)

But back in our trickery, the rube looks over the watch at the technicolour picture of Geller concentrating on the psychic emanations of the multiverse and is stunned from cakehole to loafers. More than their normal pastiche of circumstance and failure that masquerades as a life usually would allow.

This dodge has everything it should - the involvement of the audience, the illusion of non-interference, no apparent misdirection, and a result that lands like a bucket of cold water on a sunbather. Added to that, Geller does not claim to be a magician, but rather a genuine psychic so it fits with his repertoire rather well.

He substantially pisses off professional magicians with stuff like this, who think his schtick is mainly cheap parlour tricks grown beyond their station, the acts of a low-rent magician who should pull rabbits out of hats, flowers out of wands and pennies out of ears in the name of showmanship.

'Magic' is of course not magic at all - we are well aware that it is all sly tweaks, and it drives us mad that our senses are so easily fooled. There the rabbit sits, twitching its nose and looking rather diffident to the fact that he could not have been constructed out of component molecules of the atmosphere.

This is why the watch trick has stuck in my head - because it is a nasty little microcosm of the illusion of control and the futility of much. There are many people in this life who will take credit for circumstance. Economists who predict economic downturns and are right for the wrong reasons become geniuses. Religious figures who convert you and give you a reason to change your life will thank the Holy Spirit for your own series of hard decisions. Teachers will strut like John Keating if you make up your own mind to, God forbid, learn something.

While there are any number of poetic metaphors for the impossibility of the control of circumstance, controlling the tides, damming the Nile, stopping an avalanche etc., nothing has the same plodding certainty as Time's Arrow.

(This is to entirely discount Zeno, crackpot theories in ignorance of Einstein, Tralfamadorians, and masturbatory thought experiments, of course. Fuck those things.)

I remember watching a clock as a very small child and coming up very hard against the idea that I was watching seconds go past that I would never, ever see again and that every one of these moments was the death of infinite possibilities. I thought out the idea of mourning the seconds lost, and then the futility of wasting seconds doing that, and then how this led to infinite regression and infinite loss and presented them to my parents.

They went fucking spastic.

... But probably for good reason. I must have sounded like a retarded infant hybrid of Nietzsche and a LiveJournal, a tone which must have stuck with them as later in life they specifically forbade me from doing an arts degree. That path might have led to me delving too professionally into philosophy which could well finish me off and sent me certifiably mad instead of the whisky-and-screaming kind which involves less adult diapers.

The idea never really went away. Sometimes I still find myself acutely aware than I have wasted a second that could be better spent, and I remember the feeling of solid, rolling loss that sits at the base of it all. But as the seconds go past, however, I have increasingly more control over what I put into them.

Still, not quite Uri Geller. Yet. Give me time.