The initial “Assembly Required” team sits around a hotel conference table: Ariel, industrial designer; Ariel’s friend from college, Vandorn Hinnant, a spiritual geometer and artist; Bob Jr., architect; and Ajun, computer science/electrical engineering graduate student.
It seems like Bob’s “The Architect,” says Vandorn, referring to his mentor, Robert L. Powell Sr.
The others nod in agreement. They were introducing Arjun to the Assembly Required story and still determining which characters had real avatars and which did not. It seems like “The Architect” character in the story represents Powell Sr., a very perceptive physicist, and not Powell’s son Bob, who actually is an architect and also very perceptive. Ariel (who goes by the plural personal pronoun, “they”) had selected “The Architect” name for the guiding character in the game because they, not Vandorn and Bob Jr.. had been into computer games during the DVD era and knew about the convention of an omniscient kind of narrator and referee character in the mythic kinds of stories.
Ariel turns their laptop screen around so that Arjun can see the prototypes for this big box game revival.
poetic noetics in the unconfined worlds we write
On taking your time
On February 4, 2024, Ecollective poetry editor Hermine Pinson sent an email to Eco editor Toni Wynn. For some good reason not stated in the message, Hermine wrote “On taking your time” in the subject line of the email. We indeed need to take time out of mind to get back on time in the mind-made world.
The message developed into an email poem which, after Juliette Harris’ response, turned into an exquisite corpse (a serial collaboration in which each writer begins a verse with the ending word of the previous verse).
From: hermine pinson
Date: Sun, Feb 4, 2024 at 10:56 PM
Subject: On taking your time
To: T, Jacqui, me, Margaret, Kendra
Toni,
An old favorite that remains true.
Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.
Sent from my iPhone
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From: juliette harris
Date: Mon. Feb 5, 2024 at 7:06 pm
To: Hermine, T, Jacqui, Margaret, Kendra
but gold does stay … and stay!
robert frost contrives to rhyme because nature’s “first green” do be green (pale green shoots), not gold
and gold remains, defying the transient dawn
true gold is veins of ore within the earth headlined by sunlight rings around the world
it’s steadfast metal staying until the earth implodes or is engulfed by the sun or is swallowed or ejected
and even then gold or its glittering kin (like silver’s platinum) will percolate from energies
on another planet cooked in the gasses of a system like the one revolving around our sun
Third poem here from Toni
Additional poems here from other members of the group
