The Blue Watch Tells the Cliffside Time, by Norbert Kovacs

The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dali (Spain) 1931

The Blue Watch Tells the Cliffside Time

When young, he had loved to study the rugged cliffside of his native country by the coast. His eye traced the broken, crumbled top of each cliff down the jagged fissures through their walls right to the water's edge. Sitting still and quiet, he took in the bright light crowning them and the tawny hue descending their sides; then the rocky, olive hills beyond the cliffs running to the shore and the small, gray outcrop of stone at their base; he noted the strong shadows that set one gold cliff off from another and gold cliff off from olive hill. The scene impressed him in every sense. It appeared full of original beauty and brilliant in detail. Amid its grandeur, his attention often turned to the water that lapped the border of the scene. He saw there the reflections of the hills and the cliffs undulate quietly on the fluid surface. The broken hilltops appeared smoother and rounder there, the crooked fissures in the cliffs, thinner and softer. The perspective was a modest change, but the water clearly had worked the edges off the terrain in reflecting it. Strange to say (and he did feel very strange at times), the effect was not unlike when he had found ants all over his father's pocket watch in the family kitchen. Sugar had gotten on the outside cover, and the ants had run in from all sides, eager to taste of it. He watched them nibble as they crawled everywhere on the watch cover. While they were there for the sugar, he felt sure in a way they were eating away at the watch itself. Its gold had appeared a permanent certainty in his father's hand, but those ants, lapping at the sweet cover, like the water at the cliffs before him, convinced him they could wear down the watch's burnish, however fine it looked.

He carried the idea of the cliffside within him now and meant to keep visiting the scene in person even when older. But life did not give him the opportunity: his family moved and he had to leave that country. The end of any chance to be amid the brilliant cliffside felt like a shadow falling over him. He did not want the memory of the place to be left behind him, though; he returned to the idea of the locale often in mind. He would reflect, iterating how he had been formed as a person knowing the cliffs and the hills. He had taken firmness in body stepping amid the terrain and in mind seeing their strong, hard rock. His eye had gained brightness and quickness in looking on the brilliant light streaming along the clifftops. His perspective had expanded in studying the wide extent of the olive hills. All of these effects were imprinted in him over time and had given him shape, he considered. He cherished the idea greatly in his sense of dislocation from the rugged place.

While reflecting in this line, he had some strange incidents occur with his pocket watch. He had used it daily since getting it as a graduation present from his father years ago, but recently the watch had stopped. He put the timepiece out of the way on the mantle in his living room. He was not sure if it were the sun that fell on it in the afternoon that did the job, but the half of the timepiece on the mantle's edge melted the longer it sat there; it got to where the watch hung down toward the floor, its hands bent now in perpendicular planes that no longer could lay flat. All this while, a fly had developed the habit of visiting the watch's face. The fly went to tasting the glass on each of these visits, much like the ants he'd observed on his father's timepiece. As the fly kept returning, its shadow morphed on the watch glass from that of an insect to a grown man standing upright in a wing-like cape. He couldn't explain the event except to suppose that somehow the fly's interest had brought about the difference in his shadow. But even more remarkable was the blue tint he saw the watch take. The color spread all over its face, if more lightly on the sun side, the longer the watch lay on the mantle. Pocket watches do not turn blue, reflect flies as grown men, nor melt in the sun, he knew very well, which suggested that there was more at play here.

He came to figure that the timepiece was undergoing a physically grounded but basically metaphoric change before his very eyes. This change pointed, as he felt, to the extraordinary significance the watch held for him. The watch was an object he'd long cherished, his father's gift, his watch of daily use. He had considered its time at different instants as fast, accurate, slow. He had remarked the item as handsome, tarnished, or in need of repair. He had thought it unnoteworthy one moment, valuable another. These thoughts over the watch made it different from any other item of his, gave the thing a personal bent, set it in a uniquely tinged light. He realized the fly's shadow had grown, taking a man's form, as he himself had grown, reflecting mentally on the watch and his life. His fondness had colored the watch as much as an oil paint might. He could see how in these ways that the sense of consciousness may have rippled the timepiece's hard, cold form and left it an ethereal blue.

A similar metamorphosis was working on him, he knew. He could admit, aged past youth, apart from his grand, native country, living under a shadow by the day, that he had changed. His body had lost its firm contours, its tone fading through his extremities, since he moved less than formerly. His dominant eye, great at seeing far and picking out detail, closed often now in tiredness, dozing, picturing cliffs he could not visit anymore. Long, soft eyelashes crossed his face and grew as he dreamed, replacing the hard fissure-like angles of his cheeks and jaw. Regret over a past beyond reach thinned his bright, blonde hair. He had softened like paste if still he lived within the shell of his remembered experience, itself a kind of exoskeleton like that on a fly.

The habit of memory kept acting on him too, he found. Like a tongue, it went lapping and licking his interior, sampling and re-knowing the past. And in its wet pressing and searching, that tongue cleaned out the ephemeral, passing, and transient and left him the essential. He had the cliffs in idea though not every fissure marked in mind as he'd observed in youth. He knew the gold and tawny rock in memory, but it had not the brightness his eyes had seen in the country. He had the outlines of the place, the heart of their form captured within. The rest, the small details, had gone. In his perception of his cliffside past, he had become like a barren tree, a skeletal scaffold, supporting the memory of youth. He held the precious form on the long branch of his attention, where it drooped like his pocket watch, its edges softened by familiarity. He trusted he was supposed to preserve this heart of memory, the wisdom he had retained from experience. He knew this precious object had meaning whenever he thought of the blue now on his pocket watch, the special feelings and ideas it conveyed, grounded in memory. From the colour, he read out the value of his formative years. He saw in it the shaping power of consciousness that had melted the watch. So, he clung to this meaning that came from memory, holding it in a high place within him.

Then he thought to set the wisdom he had distilled from memory out before the world. By the blue sea, he built a platform painted in blue, the colour of the pocket watch tinged by memory. In its ethereal colour, he hinted at the fineness memory created in its summary of experience. He believed that blue painted platform gave the world a sense of the fantastic changes that can come by reflecting on the past. The blue itself signaled for him a higher plane where wisdom dwelled while grounded in the everyday and the concrete. The platform still stands to the present day, not unlike a shorter, simpler version of the cliffside he had cherished in his native country.

Norbert Kovacs

Norbert Kovacs lives and writes in Hartford, Connecticut. He loves visiting art museums, especially the Met in New York. He has published stories recently in The Ekphrastic Review and Timada's Diary. His website: http://www.norbertkovacs.net.