AT ONE WITH THE ST6 AUTOMATIC WRISTWATCH

So yesterday I wrote some song lyrics about clocks and now I'm 
basically writing this as a pretext for sharing them. Still, since 
I wrote 2022-11-06Reviewing_the_Casio_CA-53W.txt I have been 
meaning to write something about my other watch, an old Seagull ST6 
movement in a plastic case and fabric band that I inherited from my 
grandfather.

The Seagull ST6 movement is Chinese and an early example of a cheap 
Chinese export product introduced in the 1970s or 80s and still 
made today. Modern examples, and indeed pretty much all examples I 
see online are trying to look like more expensive watches, or at 
least someone's idea of classy. I guess this is what people want 
today because a mechanical watch now fits the role of a showpiece, 
somehow a statement of sophistication while being technologically 
backwards compared to the quartz, digital, or smart, watches that 
everyone else wears. My watch obviously comes from an era before 
those alternatives were so widespread, when it was just nothing 
more than a cheap watch. I know this because this is what it looks 
like:
gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/ST6_wristwatch.jpg

Admittedly I'm responsible for the messy wires securing one half of 
the band - I wanted to expost the transparant back in order to see 
more of the movement - but otherwise I think that's how it's always 
been. Yellow and clear plastic, big clear dial marking and 
numbering, altogether with about as much elegance as its cheap 
movement really deserves. It could even be that it was bought in 
China, when my grandparents holidayed there in the late 1980s, very 
shortly before the Tiananmen Square protest. That might explain why 
its nothing like any old mechanical wristwatches on Ebay.

Anyway I like it. I don't care so much to look dignified, least of 
all brushed stainless steel dignified, and I don't really have the 
opportunities to show off like that anyway. It keeps close enough 
time for a day or two, which is all I need because as noted in the 
earlier post it's reserved for my recreation time. Particularly my 
day trips away in the Jag, destined to be carried around along with 
an old film camera of similar vintage as I seek out whatever 
distant feature has taken my fancy. As it has a manual winder as 
well as automatic, I can basically wind it, set it, then forget it 
until whenever the real world catches back up to me. Since I get so 
used to digital time representations, it's also a bit of a 
challenge to keep my analogue clock reading ability ticking over 
(ha!).

But as for the mechanical aspect, I like this in part for the sheer 
novelty of how it all works. While I'm sort-of alone in 
appreciating the invisible complexity of manufacturing integrated 
circuits and electronics in general, I think most people can 
vaguely understand a reverence for the precision of design that 
condenses such a machine as a mechanical clock down to a size that 
can be strapped barely-noticably on one's wrist. If somehow quartz 
clock movements had come in before wristwatches became popular, one 
could believe such a mechanical wristwatch being considered some 
incredible excess of craftsmanship, a very rare technical 
curiosity. Where else, after all, do you see such miniscule gears 
or such a rapid continuous spring movement? It's a technology all 
of its own which only became accessible through the extreme effort 
of industry to fulfill the once universal demand for personal 
timekeeping. Still this movement not even being in the league of 
the miniscule women's watch movements in high quality pieces of 
yester-year.

The automatic aspect also facinates me. Sure I've never had to 
change that battery in the over ten years I've had my Casio CA-53W, 
but the idea that without even noticing it, I'm the power source 
for the watch, it really appeals to me. In a way one straps it on 
and it becomes a part of one's self. You power it, while in turn it 
guides your decision-making - an extra bit of intelligence on your 
wrist to satisfy a modern need for precision that's unmet by the 
human brain. There's a 1960s episode of Doctor Who, known now 
mainly to the sorts like myself with a glass-doored cabinet in 
their house dedicated to Dr Who VHS tapes, where the doctor enters 
a futuristic space ship where the crew is unresponsive and observes 
that their automatic wristwatches have stopped, so revealing that 
they've been incapacitated for some time. Today it seems quite 
absurd that in a time with space travel to distant planets, 
astronauts would be relying on mechanical watches. But you can see 
how at the time, even as the first electronic watches were just on 
the horizon, the perfection of mechanical clockwork into a reliable 
lightweight device that is powered by its user could be wrongly 
imagined as the pinacle of development, incapable of being 
surpassed.

Indeed there have been electronic automatic watches, where the 
user's movement powers a miniature electrical generator instead of 
tensioning a spring. But the long lifetime of batteries has 
obviously made the desire for those even more obscure than for 
mechanical watch movements. This documentary actually shows them 
being made:
https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=How_Do_They_Do_It%3F_%28Series_1%29#Recycling.2C_Self_Winding_Watches.2C_Flat_Pack_Tanker

So there we are, a whole lot of babble just to justify posting the 
few lyrical lines that follow. In fact I haven't even been wearing 
a watch today since I haven't been wearing clothes and I like to 
feel completely naked without even my wrist bearing its usual 
technological load. I often try to carry my calculator watch around 
with me though, and prop it up on a table, where I inevitably leave 
it behind at the next opportunity.

TURNS OF A CLOCKWORK GEAR
(sung in a deep, slightly monotonous voice)

For a thousand days and a thousand years
and a billion turns of a clockwork gear.

Hear its call come from your wall,
so meaningful without meaning at all.

It ticks through you as it spins so true,
the rhythum for whatever you should do.

For a thousand days and a thousand years
and a billion turns of a clockwork gear.

In a clockwork world, as it is unfurled,
you find yourself in the time you've heard.

Time to be quick and time to be slow,
and time for which you cannot know.

For a thousand days and a thousand years
and a billion turns of a clockwork gear.

The impassionate hands of time that stand,
against your heart or the mind's great plans.

But be eager still for that strike to,
which carries you on to your destiny due.

For a thousand days and a thousand years
and a billion turns of a clockwork gear.

The hour so near, the minute so dear,
the second to go 'till it all becomes clear.

With a sound of a bell, barely a thought how,
it sets you off like your master's yell.

For a thousand days and a thousand years
and a billion turns of a clockwork gear.

For the clock as it turns, could it ever learn,
what a power it has over the past we yearn?


Well I did have a somewhat bigger clock in mind than a wristwatch 
when I wrote that, but close enough.

 - The Free Thinker