Fragments from Chronos
By J.J. Loe

Consider all time occurring simultaneously. This is what the Fragments from Chronos takes as its subject: Time reoccurring over and over ad infinitum. The collection found herein are the visions of this congruo universum Combining examples of poetry, short fiction, and essay, they comprise concepts culled from a treasury of many diverse sources coming down through the ages. They hope to retain some part of their vital essence in a new and current setting that is always the present. Their techniques, and inspiration, can be found in the works of Rimbaud, Borges and Novalis; however, the ideas found within are as much the author's own as they are any others. They are re-invented ideas, found eternally expressed by thinkers and artists from the earliest of days and, hopefully, even into the future. Thought and dream here conspire together. Religious metaphors are re-worked into vario...
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Consider all time occurring simultaneously. This is what the Fragments from Chronos takes as its subject: Time reoccurring over and over ad infinitum. The collection found herein are the visions of this congruo universum Combining examples of poetry, short fiction, and essay, they comprise concepts culled from a treasury of many diverse sources coming down through the ages. They hope to retain some part of their vital essence in a new and current setting that is always the present. Their techniques, and inspiration, can be found in the works of Rimbaud, Borges and Novalis; however, the ideas found within are as much the author's own as they are any others. They are re-invented ideas, found eternally expressed by thinkers and artists from the earliest of days and, hopefully, even into the future. Thought and dream here conspire together. Religious metaphors are re-worked into various fictions; science is made into poetry; philosophy devolves into psychology, which is perhaps what it was all along. Their style is experimental, an unbroken habit acquired from the Modernists, which is, considering written thought goes back four millennia, the unbroken desire to find an original voice.

Excerpt:

The aim of writing a work like Fragments from Chronos is simply to creatively represent the mysterious qualities of Time in the pages of a book. It is a rare and unusual invention of some originality which hopes to find appreciation in the, even rarer, lover of unique things.
 
The fiction, poetry and apothegm that constitute this collection endeavor to portray a sort of literary Oroboros, a tautological adumbration of the Eternal Return. On initial inspection, the exercises simply depict a reader’s eclectic travels through history and thought, with their hypotheses, however, built upon the curious and ancient cosmologies of Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and Parmenides. These qualities imbue the scenes with a very peculiar contrivance. Given a patient chance to play upon ones imagination, their feeble narrative should, nonetheless, accum-ulatively affect to resemble a photo-mosaic, wherein a collection of several individual images are arranged in such a manner as to represent another in the whole when viewed from a distance.  Regarding the individual episodes, very little will be noted here except that in the story ‘The Avatar’ it should be revealed that Stanley Kubrick’s sentient HAL9000 computer makes a cameo appearance. ‘The Kingdom’ reiterates a folk tale reiterated by Walter Benjamin, an author whose last days are briefly incorporated in the fragment which follows. Also, the sketch entitled ‘Chronos’ refashions an old Lord Dunsany story.
 
The brevity of the fiction owes a considerable debt to Paul Bowles and to Jorge Luis Borges who pioneered the mode of literary craftsmanship which the collection aspires toward. The poetry is very Imagist in its nature. And the short, abstract nature of the apothegms owes a stylistic debt to the influence of Novalis. – Artifice imbues them all with the fancy of literature, a simple characterization which I hope the reader will kindly grant them.