The ordering of time at the museum was inevitably the work of its curators, and one in particular. Augustus Wollaston Franks was appointed to the Department of Antiquities in 1851, and he swiftly enhanced his reputation as one of the leading antiquarian scholars by establishing new departments in porcelain, glass and other areas. His own experience as a collector, which he regarded as a pleasurable if incurable hereditary affliction, enabled him to obtain important collections of British antiquities before they were split up at auctions. (His dedication to his cause was confirmed when he purchased for the museum the ornate Royal Gold Cup with £5,000 of his own money; acknowledging the coup a few years later, the museum paid him back.)
But Franks’s greatest achievement was his friendship with the collector Henry Christy, from whom the museum acquired more than 20,000 objects. Christy made his money in banking and industry, but his passions lay in anthropology, palaeontology and human evolution. Two journeys in particular, to museums in Stockholm and Copenhagen in the early 1850s, revealed something both obvious and striking – a new way that isolated objects could be brought together to tell the story of how cultures varied and grew over time. The British Museum remains grateful to both men, and has dedicated a corner of a room on the ground floor to their legacy. Most other museums are also indebted to them. One of the museum’s information panels states that under Franks’s guidance, Christy’s collection was not only classified and arranged systematically, but also originally: ‘Objects from remote cultures around the world [were placed] alongside those of more familiar civilisations.’ Narrow chronology itself was the equivalent of rote learning; true knowledge was to be gained from association.
Time has changed the museum itself. One of its recent biographers, Edward John Miller, who worked there for many years as an archivist and keeper, suggests that too many museums are a product of artistically sterile ages: unable to create masterpieces of their own, they must make do with dusty rooms of antiquities from more virile times. Another biographer, W.H. Boulton, writing The Romance of the British Museum in 1931, observed that ‘there was a time when a visit . . . would have been regarded as the driest of all dry ways of passing the time on a wet day . . . to the great bulk of the population of London, the whole thing was as dry as the mummies themselves.’
But one thing hasn’t changed. The current British Museum is still one of the world’s great protectors and promoters of old and heavy objects. In common with so many other museums and art galleries, its displays mark the distinct end of something – an artistic period, a distant civilisation, the deadening thud of institutional approval. Objects in amber are concealed and protected behind heavy glass. But the place is accessible and commercial where once it was constipated and haughty, and it is no longer afraid of the mob. Beyond the porticos and grey columns and heavy grandeur of the Greek Revival facade, and beyond the undevout schoolchildren enjoying their lunch in the Great Hall, the museum has managed to achieve something that goes far beyond the gathering, classification and preservation of treasures: it has maintained the traditions of Franks and Christy by tracking the passing of human time in physical form.
The museum even offers study guides as to how this may best be achieved. There is the conventional display of clocks and watches in Rooms 38 and 39, tracking early turret clocks and domestic mechanical pendulums right through to an Ingersoll Dan Dare novelty watch from the 1950s and a Bulova Accutron vibrating electronic model from the 1970s; the Apple Watch may soon take its place alongside them. Other chambers display time-telling objects from less predictable vantage points. Object one: a carving on a mammoth tusk from about 13,500 years ago. It is one of the tenets of the British Museum that ‘at the root of all cultures is a need to organize the immediate and more distant future in order to survive’, and one of the earliest demonstrations of this takes the form of the seasonal migrations of animals. Found in a rock shelter at Montastruc, France, the carved tusk shows two swimming reindeer, the leading animal with the markings of a deep autumnal coat. For a hunter this is a good seasonal sign: the reindeer are at their fattest, and their journey through water makes them easier to hunt. The carving, 12.4cm long, would have formed the tip of a wooden spear, and the spear would have killed the reindeer midstream.
Object two: the 3ft 2in intricately carved wooden and nephrite genealogical or ‘Whakapapa’ stick from New Zealand with 18 notches. Each notch depicted a Maori ancestor of its owner, and as each stick stretched back and back with more and more notches, it established a ceremonial link to the very beginning of time and ultimately a connection with the gods. It was also a tactile symbol of mortality. And then our own colonial timeline obliterated the Maori timeline: these sticks were prized souvenirs of nineteenth-century European naturalists; the very thing that made them desirable was instantly curtailed.
Object three: a tribal and spiritual artwork produced over decades – the museum’s carved double-headed wooden dog Kozo. This is a traditional nkisi figure, the property of a shaman from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The shaman would listen to a request for healing or the correction of a wrongdoing from a tribe member, and drive a nail or other object into the nkisi’s body to unleash its powers. It would take a generation for the sculpture to dispense all its energy and become entirely covered with spikes: part brutal hedgehog, part voodoo grenade.
Object four: the Bedford Book of Hours. One of the most ornate manuscripts to arrive at the museum (now at the British Library), the book is a daily calendar of Christian worship, with illustrated prayers each in their anointed timeslot. Made in Paris between 1410 and 1430, and once owned by a young Henry VI before he took the throne, its 38 biblical images lean heavily upon the travails of the Virgin Mary and the infant Christ (the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, etc. etc.). The eight liturgical hours mark time in their inescapable way, a literary form of clockwork from dawn to dusk: matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers and compline. The lush volume, clasped between velvet, was at one time the property of John, the Duke of Bedford, and to mark his wedding to Anne of Burgundy it was amended to include their vows and heraldic arms. Books of Hours were revered fixtures in wealthy and devout Europe – a preordained guide to the day and a companion for a lifetime.
And objects five and six: a vision of the end of time on two fifteenth-century alabaster panels. The carvings show two signs of the Apocalypse, one in which men emerge from their dwellings senseless and unable to speak, and the other in which all living things die. The Last Judgement and the death of us all would seem a good place to close our tour. Newer apocalyptic prophecies hold sway in the most brutal of terrorist regimes, and their destruction of antiquities as they rampage through ancient cities speaks to the destruction of time itself. The future evolution of the museum has its own challenges, not least the repositioning of curiosity in the digital age, but to judge by the record number of people through the portico in Bloomsbury each year the basic attraction shows no sign of waning. We yearn for our past on an ordered timeline. The glass cabinet with amber inside: it’s the past and the future combined, as romantic and resonant as a fairy tale.
ii) Doomed and Marooned
Once upon a time, the terrible thing that happened at midnight was that your coach turned into a pumpkin. These days we would regard such a thing as humiliating but not so bad. These days the worst that can happen at midnight is that the world comes to an end.
In June 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a monthly newsletter, found that it had become a victim of its own success. Its central debate on the responsible control of atomic power had become essential reading for everyone involved in policy making in the post-war years. The bulletin was supported by Albert Einstein, who was then chairman of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, and its editorial board included those who had worked on the Manhattan Project and other atomic research during the war. As one member put it, ‘Never foregoing hope, the scientists who built the bomb sought to secure the world from itself.’
But nuclear annihilation wasn’t the only dilemma facing the editorial board: there was also the problem of what to put on the cover. The Bulletin had begun as a simple 6-page publication in Chicago in December 1945, and 18 months later it had expanded into a 36-page magazine with contributions from Bertrand Russell and advertisements for devices to measure radioactivity. (‘In Science’s newest phase . . . it is of paramount importance that the instrumentation be of utmost precision and dependability.’) For the first time, the issue of June 1947 was to carry a professionally designed front page (previously there had only been text), and there was some discussion over what the image should be. Someone suggested using a big letter U, the chemical symbol for uranium, but artist Martyl Langsdorf, who was married to the physicist Alexander Langsdorf, came up with something more powerfully persuasive. The contents of each issue would henceforth be printed on a backdrop of a giant clock, so giant that one would only see the top quarter of the face. But this was where the action was: the black hour hand was pointed straight up at midnight, and the white second hand occupied the key region to its left. It was an ominous and abiding image, an image for all time, not least because the first time the clock appeared it read seven minutes to destruction. Indeed it was such a powerful symbol that the message never needed explaining: something awful would happen when the two hands met, and the articles in that issue discussed ways to avoid it. In the first issue in which the clock featured, there were pieces such as ‘War Department Thinking on the Atomic Bomb’ and ‘With the Atomic Bomb Casualty Committee in Hiroshima’. The first editorial began: ‘If there is something we cannot afford in dealing with atomic energy, it is muddled thinking, policy based on ignorance, hearsay, prejudice, partisan expediency or wishful thinking.’ The rhetoric was as sharp as the graphics.
Who set the clock and how did they decide on the time? The first time the decision was arbitrary and aesthetic. Martyl Langsdorf picked seven minutes to midnight because ‘it looked good to my eye’ (it was the artist’s answer to the marketing departments of watch brands setting faces at 10 to 10 because it showed off the design nicely and seemed to make the watch ‘smile’). But subsequently the editor Eugene Rabinowitch took charge. In 1949, after the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, he moved the time to three minutes to midnight.
When Rabinowitch died in 1973 the responsibility for timekeeping transferred to the magazine’s Science and Security Board. According to Kennette Benedict, a senior advisor to the Bulletin, the board meets to consider the state of the world twice a year, consulting widely with their colleagues across a range of disciplines ‘and also seek the views of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, which includes 16 Nobel Laureates’. Collectively the great minds have made some important adjustments: in 1953, the minute hand moved to two minutes to midnight in response to the US and Soviet Union both testing thermonuclear weapons within six months of each other. By 1972 we had some breathing time: the SALT and ABM treaties established parity between the nations and agreements on future limitations – the clock was at 12 minutes to. In 1998 the hands stood at nine minutes to midnight, following India and Pakistan staging weapons tests three weeks apart, and it was calculated that Russia and the US together maintained 7,000 warheads ready to fire at each other within 15 minutes.
‘The Bulletin is a bit like a doctor making a diagnosis,’ Benedict says. ‘We look at data as physicians look at lab tests and X-rays . . . we consider as many symptoms, measurements and circumstances as we can. Then we come to a judgement that sums up what could happen if leaders and citizens don’t take action to treat the conditions.’
As of 2016 the clock has changed time on 21 occasions. Global nuclear destruction is now only one consideration, although still crucial: when North Korea tested atomic weapons in 2015 the Bulletin board got itchy fingers, as did everyone else who heard the news. But equally significant are considerations of relations between the superpowers, the threat of terrorism and religious extremism, and the general well-being of the planet in terms of famine, drought and rising sea levels. (In the first issue of 2016, the Bulletin carried an article about the sale of nuclear power reactors in the Middle East, and two stories on the relationship between climate change and technology in India and Bangladesh.)
Reacting to the accusation that the Doomsday Clock was a scaremongering device employed for political purposes, Kennette Benedict argued that the minute hand has moved away from midnight almost as often as it has moved towards it, ‘and as often during Republican administrations in the United States as during Democratic ones’. The hand was moved furthest away from midnight in 1991, a full 17 minutes, when George Bush signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviet Union. It has never been quite clear what anyone is supposed to actually do with the time on the Doomsday Clock. Should we hide when it moves towards midnight and rejoice when it moves back? Is it just a publicity jolly to help serious-minded people take the air once in a while? Will significant policymaking ever be influenced by the clock? At its best, the clock is a reason to debate life-or-death issues that might otherwise be deemed too worthy or too heavy to handle.
Benedict says she is frequently asked ‘Where can I visit the Doomsday Clock?’, although one hopes not by Bulletin writers or its board. She tells people that it is not a real clock, and that no one winds it and the mechanics have not been updated to quartz. But it is easy to see how people may get confused. In January 2016, midway through an hour-long press conference to announce the new time at the National Press Club in Washington DC, a clock was indeed ceremoniously unveiled. And not by no one: by four eminent scientists and two former US secretaries of state. Before the unveiling, Rachel Bronson, the Bulletin’s executive director and publisher, announced that the timing on the clock would be revealed in DC and ‘simultaneously’ at Stanford University in California, a feat that involved the learned men removing a blue cloth drape from the front of a large piece of cardboard on an easel. ‘Go ahead, please!’ Bronson said as the time for doom approached, and photographers gathered as they might at the launch of a new figure at Madame Tussauds. The men did what they were asked. The sign beneath the cloth showed that the clock hadn’t moved. Beneath the graphic hands were the words ‘IT IS 3 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT’. The sound of camera shutters filled the room. The luminaries with cloth in their hands tried not to smile.
Real or not and stopped or not, has there ever been a more useful metaphor for doom? The Doomsday Clock comes with all the inbuilt clichés of disaster – the notion that ‘the clock is ticking’, the warning alarm bell that threatens to wake us from our slumber – and if it only assumes a striking physical form for the purposes of marketing and news reporting then that is enough. There’s something to see where there’s really nothing to see. When the Bulletin’s press conference announced on 26 January 2016 that the period of time between our present somnambulant state and total oblivion was less than the time it took to properly boil an egg, the clock started trending on Twitter. That’s modern doom for you: you have three minutes left to live, and you spend at least some of it tweeting.
Beyond all this, a simple symbol of destruction tells us something about how we regard the clock and fear it. Nothing functions without it: all our communications and navigation systems depend on it, as do all financial transactions and almost all our motivation. The alternative is to sit in a cave and wait for the sun to come up.
Our own personal doomsday scenario is a lot closer than the closest weapons silo. This is the doom of us cowed and diminished by time, of time controlling our lives to such a degree that we feel it is almost impossible to keep up. Or perhaps even worse: we keep up, but other things suffer. We are forever making sacrifices and compromises. There isn’t enough time for family, but there isn’t enough time for work either, or the things we deem increasingly important, like the dreamy prospect of doing nothing.
And we know this makes no sense, and we don’t like what has become of our lives. We crave punctuality, but we loathe deadlines.
We count down precisely on New Year’s Eve so we may obliterate the hours that follow. We pay for ‘priority boarding’ so that we may sit on a plane and wait for everyone else to join us, and then when we land we pay to get off early. We used to have time to think, but now instant communication barely gives us time to react. Paradise is a beach and the eternal waves and a good book, but then there’s email. Why use Oyster when you can go contactless? Why go contactless when you can Apple Pay? If you don’t come in on Christmas Day don’t bother coming in on Boxing Day. Order within 1 hour and 27 minutes for next-day delivery. You will meet 15 speed dates in a glamorous setting in a two-hour evening. A search for ‘time management’ produces ‘about’ 38,300,000 results in 0.47 seconds. Experience ultrafast speed up to 200Mbps with Vivid 200 fibre broadband. You need 7 hours and 43 minutes to complete this book on your Kindle.
The suffocating notion of iTime has replaced the factory clock, and we have reached the point where it is no longer possible to experience time independently of technology. The phrase to describe the feeling of hopelessness in the face of time is ‘frenetic standstill’. I first came across it, and also a version of the parable of the Egyptian fisherman in the introduction, in an influential book by the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa called Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung de Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne (2005). The main title translates as Social Acceleration, and it is Rosa’s contention that we may be in a period of catastrophic stasis caused by a collision of rapid technological expansion and the widespread feeling that we will never achieve the goals we crave. The more we try to ‘get ahead’, the more impossible becomes the likelihood. The more apps and computer programmes we download to streamline and order our lives, the more we feel like screaming. The Egyptian fisherman had it right, as, astonishingly, did Bono: we are ‘running to stand still’.
Timekeepers Page 28
