Out of Time

Creative Forums Creative Writing
1

Jackson blinked. What happened?

He’d been thinking a stream when suddenly thought stopped. Fingers twitched, icons appearing in his eyes. The impulse was automatic, unthinking. Images came, flickered fast then gone, then more images. An outage. War footing? Jackson sighed, feeling nothing.

Paused, he sat. No thoughts occurred, no movement was required. A luminous icon hovered in both eyes, a sunny meadow with a lake. Jackson submerged, passive and calm, in that meadow and lake. Comforting, relaxing. A stray word floated up from somewhere, “time”. Briefly he wondered, but couldn’t remember.

Suddenly, thought reappeared. Jackson sat up straight, remembered what he had been doing. This data realign needed drop by 15 0. Fingers twitched. A timer enlarged at the edge of his vision. 14 46. No time.

Fingers blurred as icons merged and separated. Seamless rivers of light flowed across the surfaces of his retinas, although such a description would never have occurred to him. Thoughts raced now, forming ideas and the text to put to those ideas. He felt parts of his mind being grabbed, pulled almost painfully as they were subsumed and used for external process-ramping the source and contents of which he couldn’t fathom. The effect was nearly schizophrenic, although Jackson lacked such a word or concept and therefore the comparison never surfaced into his awareness.

Slag. Load weight. Impulsively Jackson triggered i-Boost and his thoughts raced even faster. Source poured through him. Exciting and immense knowledge. He felt alive! Jackson felt a brief feeling, like an appreciation for… something? He couldn’t remember.

Boosted, Jackson finished thinking just in time to meet drop at 14 58. He sat back. Thoughts slowed and his mind gently occluded. An image of the moon, hanging beautifully over dark mountains and trees. Jackson relaxed and stared into that moon. Massive… no more thoughts. A vague feeling of unease coincided with his relaxation. This feeling registered somewhere just below awareness and it did not occur to Jackson to wonder about it.

He couldn’t have said how much time passed if someone asked him. His eyes lit up. New task: process, data stream, reconfig spec with drop 17 for bonus per T-54 regulations: 80U. Jackson sat up straighter. Thought now: 80U wasn’t bad! Impulsively he made a mental gesture and the lower range of his vision expanded. Glowing numbers came into focus. A thought appeared, “80U puts you over quota with additional time guarantee.” An subtle feeling of stress entered Jackson’s mind but he hardly noticed, nor did it occur to him to wonder about it. New thoughts were already flowing.

As Jackson worked, he realized this assignment had something to do with wartime planning. Immediately warnings began to appear in his mind, blazing and loud icons. Sweating, Jackson gestured a hard divert and immediately was thinking instead about coordination aspects, cost per unit reductions and new logistical setups; reallocation, cross-ordering in complex rhythms and preformed heuristics according to Sver’s Principles. Jackson knew he was good at this kind of work yet it didn’t occur to him to wonder why. Thoughts streamed as his mind was bent into contortions inconceivable to himself. Time passed.

Sweating and tired, Jackson made the drop. New calculations scrolled indicating performance metrics. High efficiency score. 80U transferred to his body. This triggered a subreaction and caused him to begin thinking about time, now feeling an appreciation. The U-warmth gently relaxed and reassured him. Additional thoughts were already appearing in his mind and swept away all other thinking. Jackson saw pleasurable and enticing icons, new Scenarios available for purchase! Wonderful! Jackson reclined in eagerness. It never occurred to him to question these feelings or to wonder what he’d previously been doing.

Time passed and Jackson had no recollection. He felt calm. Thought ceased. The lingering after-feeling of pleasant sensations was a slight tickle at the edges of his mind, but he didn’t notice. The image of a baby sheep sleeping on a bed of soft straw transcended his vision. Jackson sighed, reclining back. Eyes closed, the image remained. The inner warmth of extra U still exerted a comforting influence upon him.

Time ceased when thought ceased. Jackson slept. When he might wake he couldn’t have said, nor would it have occurred to him to wonder.

2

Interesting. A drugged, augmented nerd owned by the military industrial complex.

3

Ok, but then such proprietorship produces a poem Quohiotic poesy as this:

()()()(

image
image1170×2532 311 KB

(a mere whisp.err) through limitless azure)

4

It turns-out that Clellon and John are both John’s, in fact the above cited Clellon Holmes has the same first name, John.

I met one of the two, heard of the other by sheer ‘coincidence…’

)()

Another meet with Delmore Schwartz shared a differing identity but an opportune , yet similar experience.

Ashbery noted that, “the circumstances of Delmore’s childhood and later life would be continually recalled in his writing, which is, in a sense, one vast mythification of himself and his family.” Schwartz’s dense, even nightmarish, idioms and topographies drew comparisons to Rimbaud and Baudelaire; Ashbery described how the poem “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day” contained Schwartz’s “constant themes: the life of the city, names of friends he knew (“Many great dears are taken away”), and above all an apprehension of the whirling universe in the mundane décor of a municipal park.” Schwartz influenced a number of younger poets, writers, and at least one musician: Ashbery and Lou Reed but also Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman. The protagonist of Saul Bellow’s novel, Humboldt’s Gift (1975), is thought to be based on Schwartz.

Schwartz struggled with mental illness and his later years were marked by episodes of institutionalization, poverty, alcoholism and addiction. He held teaching positions at a number of universities, including Bennington College, Kenyon College, Princeton University, and Syracuse University, where he taught Lou Reed, but never received tenure. His final years were spent in New York. After the death of Dylan Thomas he inherited the role of house poet at the White Horse Tavern. Schwartz died of a heart attack in the Columbia Hotel. For three days no one came to claim his body. His friends, who reported that Schwartz had dropped out of sight for a year prior to his death, learned of his death by reading the obituaries.

Schwartz was “concerned with fundamentals, with the problem of identity, of knowledge and belief, haunted by the noise time makes, able to write wittily and movingly,” according to Babette Deutsch. He chose as his theme “the wound of consciousness,” he once said, and he wanted to show the miraculous character of daily existence. M. L. Rosenthal said that Schwartz “has many moments of pure music to offer, and some moments in which he speaks in the accents of greatness, and he holds us even in his failures with the honesty and contemporaneity of his voice.”

Craig Tapping summarized the writer’s life and work in the Dictionary of Literary Biography: “The clashes which Schwartz believed his name embodied—between social aspirations and cultural values, old world civility and new world philistinism, and generational differences between immigrants and their American-born offspring—are the subject of much of his prose fiction and poetry. All of Schwartz’s writing attempt[ed] to evoke, analyze, and at times transcend what he saw as the inevitable disappointments and profound disillusionment which life forces on people.”

))((

ache, had he found Buddhism in Jesus ‘ s romancing Keats’ the Greeknes of’Romancing the Urn’

)((((((())

He did : no doubt!

()

Or he must have through reference or mystical evocation

5

https://youtu.be/QYEC4TZsy-Y?si=OJwrIRZ03_0lPlFq

6

Now after a few drops of jaeger, feeling a lot less del(more?)use)o(m)alll.

() )( ()

https://youtube.com/shorts/WfsivaydppU?si=dj--k47nQ2YBbLsg

7

Well not quite my friends, this is to inform You of my resourceful announcement for party(I)Ng, from You for the next month or so, due to an inerrant bottshivatic call fro over sees.

()()()

leaving you with this cut ;

https://youtu.be/HIWY8UyW9bw?si=txPAhGXEMhcomxkO

8

.
Farewell? :sleepy_face:

..for now.

9

Yes MagsJ, for about a month, will be back in July. Still looking forward to our game together.

Take care and be well.

meno

2 Likes
10

Oh, excellent.. I’ll start the new game soon.

11

Thanks just let me know

1 Like
12

Just let me know

1 Like