Porter is a reoccurring character of mine, a concierge of sorts, who seems as at home in the obscure and maniacal environment of his dreams as he does in the mundane purview of the cognizant. As a vanguard of the unawake, Porter introduces me to the bizarre and provides a window into how dreams make jest of reality, how they reflect experiences and alternative iterations of the world from which at night some of us escape. Sometimes, for Porter, the grass is greener in a dream, the coffee a little less bitter. But not always.
With Porter for a Cup is an experiment of the affordances and limitations
of Javascript timing events. More, it is a commentary on inevitability, on perspective, and on escape. The poem itself is cryptic, its broader themes and meanings buried quite deeply. Yet, the ever-moving, always changing, irreversible text evokes the anxious, fleeting nature of experience. Reality becomes abstracted by dreaming, dreaming grows contingent upon the contexts of reality. At a certain point, one wonders which is which. The poem, like our experiences, cannot be interrupted without implications, and those implications are unpredictable and often concatenating; we can pause for a moment, for an hour, but we only cease briefly to drift in a stream that flows resolute despite our abeyance, and, when we resume, we may be lost in the tide of changes we created by resisting them. Hence, what we think is control might, at best, be more akin to navigation, something of a managed descent.Click to continue. Or wait a momentTo experience this work, simply experience it. The poem will begin moving in 35 seconds, a longer head start than most of us ever received, and will never cease moving as long as the page is loaded. It runs through 11 chapters before cycling back to the first, so, you may have a second chance. For a brief, 3 second period, during each revolution and while the poem is in full view, you may pause by simply hovering over it. There is no indication of when this becomes possible, but, when it is, the poem may be paused indefinitely, with the caveat that, should you hover a bit too long, the text will reverse through all of its iterations to the very beginning. Move the cursor away from the poem, and text will resume where it left off. However, you can never really pause the clock, so beware that any attempt to do so will have enduring effects throughout the remainder of your experience. They may be imperceptible. They may not.
Please enjoy With Porter for a Cup
By William Erickson (best viewed in Chrome)
Click to continue. Or wait a moment.