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If you choose to believe me I will tell you about a city surrounded by thousands of giant clocks. Monumental sundials, ceaselessly sculpted, not by the hands of humans but by the voices of wind.

Pasts, presents and futures are distributed evenly here. For the inhabitants of this city, technological evolution never sublimates the ideas or tools which came before, but rather reemphasizes them. Progress paradoxically slips into both memory of the past and anticipation of the future. The result is that the presence of what has always been present becomes amplified, yet irreversibly changed, charged with something ineffable––thickening the now. “Time is the sprinkling of flour into a bowl of water”, one inhabitant told me.

Freshly paved asphalt roads are inlaid with shards of 1500-year-old pottery. New homes are built upon crumbling ruins, which every year are rebuilt just enough so that they remain continually crumbling. 

Behind the KFC parking lot is a library of ancient footpaths; where every step from the day before is re-traced and kept visible by shepherds ––who, at dusk can be seen moving their flocks in spiraling dances ascending the face of the mesa.

And, in the very center of the city resides the heartbeat for these peculiar cosmologies and time-keeping practices. A single clock ––yes, but one kept hidden from view. Entombed in stone and surrounded by barbed-wire fencing embellished with strange glyphs, is an underground chamber, about the size of a small closet. 

Within the room, placed on the dirt floor, is believed to be an ever-burning lamp whose flame is fueled by ‘a solar substance’ ––the regenerative oils of a collapsed star. No one, not even the eldest of the city have ever seen the perpetual flame, for, if the tomb be re-opened to confirm the lamp still burns, the flame will be forever extinguished ––and that time itself would be reset to some unbearable beginning before difference.