Out Time

"The bleeding to death of time." How much of my life, I wonder, is spilled as I sit staring through this seductive screen, waiting for a summoned web page to come to heel?

One could, perhaps,

Pen poems in the gaps.

Such web-wait verse would no doubt need to be of the personal, rather than the publishable, variety, but no less valuable for that.

Connect: Host www.somewhereincyberspace.com contacted. Waiting for reply...

Odd that we have chosen to use the word valuable where valued would seem better to fit the intended meaning. Maybe the choice means something about the meaning; maybe language is telling us that we need to take note of the fact that value is something we are free to bestow, rather than a fixed measure assigned by the market. Perhaps one could measure web delays in verse forms: That was just a haiku hiatus. Yesterday I had a two-sonnet wait connecting to dub-dub-dub dee-dee-jay dot com. That's nothing, this morning trying to get to dub-dub-dub linux dot org, I wrote an ancient Finnish epic. UNIX has been around so long that there is a rumor that Linus Torvalds didn't write Linux, he just translated it from the original runes. That's a myth, of course; everyone knows how Linux got started (but only Linus knows the Finnish).

In the 1578 Peter Borne Missza edition, Rune XX of the Finnish epic the Kalevala speaks of time and of another fascination of Linux users:

Time had gone but a little distance,

Scarce a moment had passed over,

Ere the heroes came in numbers,

To the foaming beer of northland...

Writer G. K. Chesterton claimed that poets do not go mad. "Mathematicians go mad...but creative artists very seldom." The source I am quoting from drops Chesterton at this point like an AOL connection, and I am left unenlightened as to whether Chesterton meant to imply that poetry kept one sane, or that poets are all crazy to begin with. From the poet's point of view, perhaps it's a distinction without a difference. Writer Stephen Harrod Buhner claims that in the craziness of alcoholic inebriation is the historic origin of poetry, so maybe that shines some light in the Chesterton haziness. Personally, I think any scholar whose definition of creative artist excludes mathematicians is a little crazy.

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The window of my office overlooks the lawn of the restaurant of which I am part owner. As I wait for my web page to download, I watch the scene below. A customer fidgets, tugging at garments seen and unseen, as she sits in a chair under an umbrella while an apron-wearing employee bustles about in the sun filling orders. I, like the customer, sit waiting for my order to be filled. Of the three of us, the only one clearly not waiting for anything is the one called a waiter. The waiter, I muse, is really a server, and the waiting customer a browser. Or will be when she quits waiting because she has been served something to browse on. I sit at my desk fidgeting like a kid in a doctor's waiting room, musing that "patient" is an amazingly inappropriate word for such sufferers.

Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

-- Ambrose Bierce.

If you're a writer, you can only muse so long before the muse grabs you by the typing fingers; so I soon find myself versifying:

There was an old man who wrote COBOL

And gave the cold shoulder to SNOBOL,

But about Y2K

He had just this to say:

In my day Running Light was thought noble.

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Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mswaine@swaine.com