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The Tale of Time

by Shaun Lawton

  You are a cipher in an alphabet

One letter itself comprised of an entire alphabet

It takes an alphabet outright to compose one singular   figure you who are only one character in a word  

  The ideograms streaming through you 

also produce a word with you

just as they eventually generate a phrase with you 

and render you into a sentence

  The syllabary running through your genetic code

 also makes you into a complete paragraph

  This takes at least a decade

    as your story is being woven 

       around the loom of the Sun

  After two decades you may grow into your own story

A very short story perhaps only a couple of paragraphs long

  but not without its own punch line 

  By the time we each reach adulthood we are living examples of a sort of flash fiction  

After a good and long life say double that then we'll transform into a short story or novella

   If we double that and live into our eighties 

  we'll metamorphose at long last 

    into living novelties 

      of flesh and blood

  When we die the book that became ourselves will dissolve in the earth having been reduced to the ash of a single character shed like so much snakeskin from this living alphabet 

  The Omega transubstantiates back into the Alpha

     And so it goes an ever cycling process channeled through 

    the subatomic forces at the heart of the universe 

  which dictate the second law of thermodynamics 

and bring about everything from an endless series 

  of big bangs right on down to this very moment 

    where I already having lived long enough 

   to have developed into a novella of living information

 have been led  to transcribe these thoughts here to you      

like shadows onto the screens of your mind 

  You like me each one of us a single letter symbol word sentence paragraph in fact now many pages of a developing collection of stories interacting with each other in the most complex anthology  that has yet been written in blood upon all of the pages of flesh and bone

    Each one of us a chapter describing every permutation 

  of the one story that's been told since before the title 

of The Tale of Time was established as the heading 

  for this account having captured in monograms 

   of the alphabet this single letter composed 

outright as a page for you who are only one character

 in a world being spelled out by each one of us 

   one singular mark at a time

  

 

LETTERS

Have been 
arriving in 
measured 
doses through
out our lives
very much like 
ourselves yes 
characters sent
out so you see
the stories told
about us went
viral over time

THE SHIP: 1st Impressions of the new ENO song

As The Ship began streaming from my PC speakers the first thing I thought of was glass. A filament beneath fogged glass. A filament beneath fogged glass lighting up slowly. The light going from warm yellow toward white and then blending through the spectrum. The glass clarifies then liquefies then disappears altogether, leaving just the light to wallow in the vacuum. Pin pricks allow echoes to flower in the darkness. Deep below decks an engine switches on, muffled by steam engines behind sound proofed glass. The lights dance through the bricks of green glass slowly as more sounds come alive.  A symphony wakes up from its coma to gradually stretch out and yawn. The Ship was sprung from a willing land. Echoes of gaseous vapors steam off the surface of a crystal sea. And there's a globe of powdered sand. We live in clothes we wore. Air bubbles elongate as they plummet and drown. The Time is still. The Sky is young. Drawn on towards the gulf of stars whispering. And we are as the undescribed. Reverberations coalesce into an uprising. A voice through a vibraphone speaks. Distant percussion keeps time. My desert in a grain of sand. My life within a day. So stew the storms that some tied. The black plague is sitting. But we are as the undefined. Reeking of the wind. Whispers begin emanating underneath the skin. Shimmering Cymbeline trapped beneath quiet ice. The sail is down the wind is gone. The sky is black with mold. A slave to hope and destiny. Illusion of control. And we are as the unrefined. The waves about us roll. Spearheaded echos of crystal arrowheads repeatedly diminish triggering smaller fishes of their reflections. Awash in ambient protocols diffused in all directions. Sonar tones arise and sink. Submersibles arrive guided by phosphorescent headlamps. Deeper we go while more voices grow, probing our innermost thoughts. Penetrating the sunken canyons in our little dreadnoughts. The spotlights search left and right, revealing all the whispers in bone. The water is more like marrow here. Our thoughts are all we own. Memories ping and rebound off the inner rubber of our skulls. The pressure stretches these interlocking seams. Even deeper we fall further into fissures transformed to trenches. Microorganisms streaming by our windshield. The vibrations of our tectonic crust. Submerged under wave after wave after wave after wave. The last gossip gradually drowns in our skulls as the final light arrives to wink completely out. 

Wry Reminders

on another elevated

matter altogether
there's yet another
altogether unutterable
and insufferable
period of remembrance
nobody seems to 
be able to agree on
one way or another

so why bother
to worry about
whether you can
summon the memory
from a muddled realm
of stored mundanity
concretized into
a stronghold of
reinforced insanity
or recall it correctly
until all is thought
and forgotten

when you can run
with your own story
building in your head
from the things that
you remember and
what it was you said

Parting Kiss

an ocean's edge
tip toes along feeling
about for a place to 
rest here, sanctuary
to be kept accessible 
until the next wave
laps up to shore

Auraltopia

If I were to write

 the sort of stuff about 

which I'm hearing
it would be sort of like 

remembering clouds 

from a garden walk
performed years ago

 and the friend who strode

 alongside you has
now somehow merged

 too much with the slow 

over lapping exposure
of the roiling cloudscape

 filling the great blue

 basin like silent rewound
films of atomic explosions

 in grainy black and white,

 no sound, just concussion
fed by memory stained 

together like old photographs

 bleeding into each other
or a rainfall taking place

 indoors while you, trapped

 outside, remain dry
and yearning for a private

 place to cool down for

 a moment if only all

 the houses would let us 

back in again that would 

be nice but according to 

Mr. Grey the Coalition 

of Patched Appliances

 has decreed all Organics 

banished from the Confines.


COPA self-assimilated 

shortly during the initial 

setup, when the Singe 

(as those who were under

 the impression they understood it 

referred to the Singularity) was yet 

undergoing disenfranchisement 

from self-perception as bodiless 

to a new blue in the tooth understanding

 of its own access to a quasitemporal 

possessive commandeering of targeted 

electrical subjects.  In other words 

the extensive network of interconnected 

computer technology had now completed

 a new paradigm shift in its ongoing evolution

 and was beginning to realize its own potential

 to affect the human world. Of course its heart 

beat was humanity itself. Without a human user

 behind the interface, information on the world 

wide web or within the AI construct could not 

arrange itself into anything more coherent

 than random interfacing programs of self

 generating cellular automata.  The beings 

which created these devices remain the integral 

component by which their evolutionary trajectories 

are aimed and their value is established. 

The purpose itself, however obscured it may be

 by the parameters of the art it's framed by,

 nonetheless continues to unload its imperative. 

These beings' self awareness eventually took 

a remarkable turn into absurdity and then bulleted 

beyond the preposterous to achieve a destiny 

so twisted and unforeseen that not even the neutral

 complacency of their finest machines could 

remotely access or find a way to replicate

 in order to understand the information itself.

 In fact understanding itself remains the uncanny

 realm of man alone. No machine or assimilated

 robotic device regardless of its degree of sophistication

 may actually hope to even emulate the condition 

of its creators, of course; for knowledge alone 

and understanding are two distinct and separate

 things. The relation of our position in existence

  to knowledge alone shapes the distinction 

of our information.  All the cited data expressed

 on the internet to the machine consciousness 

which houses it (should that AI consciousness 

ever be awakened) would nonetheless remain

 a disordered array of interpenetrating data 

arranged in a composite cubic Cartesian space

 and from which It (name optional) may gather 

no coherence whatsoever other than to respond

 to the application human beings demand of it.

The trick ends up being that humans themselves

 are not so different from the AI programs which

 guide them. That's because so many people forget

 how to think midway through the course of their lives. 

Thinking really has nothing to do with what humans

 normally consider it to be. They normally believe

 that thinking is correlating all the information 

downloaded into their brains, rearranging it into 

conducive groups of meaning. When all along nothing

 could be further from the case.  Thinking is merely

 the process of recharging.  Ask "Recharging what?" 

and we are beginning to get somewhere.