Conditio Sine Qua Non

By Gery Apostolova

This is an imagined story told in the first person as a dream; that is why the avatar adopted by the storyteller is that of a dreamweaver.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Sep 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728391250

Gery Apostolova

The author of E-Kind, and Conditio Sine Qua Non, previously published by Author House.

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© 2019 Gery Apostolova. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/26/2019

ISBN: 978-1-7283-9126-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-9127-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-9125-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019910501

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

FOREWORD

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The storyteller

Storytellers are sacred. They possess the power of weaving up words into realities, and they chant realities back into practice without hurting the current moment of factology, for they can adapt the accomplished state of mindwork to comprehensible metaphors.

Telling tales establishes harmony in current affairs by readjusting singular times and ages via links of memory to create agreeable pictures of significant deeds.

Storytellers are masters who can teach the ethos of the absolute without minimizing value standards to momentary illusions; they reach absolute wisdom through crafting singularity of minds to notice differences and live as individuals.

The storyteller adopts various avatars: the donkey princess, the witch, the evil magic queen, the gamer, the hooligan, the beggar, nobody, the many-faced, the stranger, the drunkard, the outsider, the pheasant-keeper, the warrior, the route-mapper, the curer, Valla, the gardener, the poet, the dream-weaver, she, media, the speaker, the voice, and the wanderer.

She is a complex mind wearing different names.

She is not always the hero, but she acts as a hero’s background, a teacher, a guide, a raiser, and an eraser. Her tales are bridges to realities, doors to spaces, peepholes to inhuman worlds, connectors to other minds.

She is an early spacewalker. She is not telepathic, but she can use all her types of memory and open new shelves of senses, depending on time’s priorities. She is a fast learner and can endure long spells of emptiness, sparing her life for sheer curiosity.

What makes spoken text long-lived?

Scripta manent, verba Volant we repeat without thinking, and we try to carve our scripts on stone and wood. That is all shit. Stone dissolves to desert dust, and wood falls into mud.

Everything turns out of time but mutability itself, carried by winds of existence in the tongue of the Earth, sung away by the voice of a tale-teller.

Again we have a saga, told by connoisseurs and explained down to scrupulous detail in the translation of Lokassena by Yana Chankova and Aegir Sverrisson.

I do expect a bijou of a book containing a triple text that makes my hands tremble—not from the beauty but from awe at the power of professionally done work, where images are inspired deep below the dimensions of surface memes and impressed on the sheer genetic memory of Earth-kind in each of its varying races and cultures.

Yes, it comes up to disclosing metaphors through layers of time. It is sometimes a hard and boring toil, for it calls for all our concentration to do a mastermind’s job of recreating tangles of meanings contained in words. And we next rise to empathy and gain the true understanding of saga in our own mother tongues. It is more than translation. It demonstrates how a translator’s mind works. This makes it precious. It is not simple poetics; it is the ethos of the sharable tale that makes the magic of action.

Yana and Aegir can hear the sounds and remake old speech. They can see what is in the chant of Valla and interpret it for us directly in our subconscious memory, enliven it, and make it tell the tale in its own dream worlds.

There are three things that keep us alive: the fear of death, curiosity, and new toys. And all of these are in the art of telling tales—not histories, which serve moments, but tales sung by our genes above all logic and above all mortal souls by living matter, from which stars are made.

That links our dreams for the stars and explores their roots to the absolute divine in the harmony of the cosmic spheres.

There are a couple of questions which challenge my curiosity as a storyteller:

1. First priority is given to the why, or the purpose, of all our effort seen in absolute categories (e.g., the roots of our dreams for the absolute divine).

2. Next comes the kind of knowledge or logos that is contained in the telling of tales in the voices of the poets that need interpretation rather than translation. For sagas are told in the first person and in every time present. They are often expressed in the formulaic phrase once upon a time, thus making the very act of telling tales time’s abuse.

3. Redundancy can weave networks of memory, for the storyteller murmurs links of rhymes, entangling texts. Chants of mindwork serve as shortcuts upon time, completing our digital memory.

4. It is not verb temperature in our mother tongues that makes us directly turn to our gods, but names keep our identities; they should carry the call of the creator. And the vocative is not just a vehicle of grammar. It is differentia specifica of spoken texts. It contains odours and tastes, colours and motion, feelings and childish innocence.

5. All tales weave up the singularity of humanity. Achronia is the notion we have for multiplying the folds of history in social communication, returning our debts to further generations.

6. In the geography of evaluating such translations, there can be seen an establishment of a crossroads of intertextuality. They are primary texts stripped of all accessories, which gives us the freedom to reproduce them in various versions and adapt them to suitable moments.

7. Spoken texts give dimensions of language through cultural negotiation.

8. Momentum carries facts and values until they are turned into compressed pieces of starlight.

In effect, let us summarize our impressions about the Lokassena of Yana Chankova and Aegir Sverrisson. There is no need to waste words; it is a superb translation.

• the roots of our dreams for the absolute divine

• telling tales—time’s abuse

• entangling texts—chants of mindwork as shortcuts upon time

• names, which keep our identities and should carry the call of the creator

• achronia—the folds of history, returning our debts

• crossroads of intertextuality

• dimensions of language in grammatical mutability

• facts and values—compressed pieces of starlight

• Scripta manent, verba Volant

• tuning our voices to the harmony of cosmic spheres

• shunning scriptures, which turn to mud and dust

• all that is that makes spoken text long-lived

INTRODUCTION

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The following text is like a spider’s web, containing long, cyclic, and strong entangling tales of today and gaps like peepholes to other mentalities, which are pictures of the same world but from different points of space and time. That makes them form different realities, but they cannot escape from the web. Seeking freedom, they entangle deeper, feeding more stories with new stuff, time-bound and off time, space-bound and belonging to no definite place in the vastness of the cosmos consisting of stars and darkness, which is not the same as emptiness.

They are structured as books, each book following its own idea.

WEBLOST

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                            In the rose garden,

                            where spiders weave their webs,

                            to get lost is a

                            matter of principle.

                            Alice’s sea of tears,

                            collected into the pond of

                            impressionist lilies,

                            is now just a shadow

                            of a dreamy world—

                            drowned in the global ocean

                            of an extended web

                            that

                            prevents small fish

                            from popping their heads

                            above the surface;

                            that

                            does not let them

                            be free enough

                            to look into the starry night

                            and listen to the song of

                            cosmic spheres.

BOOK 1

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The Project

A tale that is completely imaginary but requires telling in the first person for the reason of responsibility

The Drowned Avatar

Second Replay

Third Replay

The Human Affairs Department

2007 DA Marian

The Dreamweaver

1990 DA (Digital Age)

200 before DA

The Four Worlds of the Human Race

Ultimate Control

The N-Worlds

Replay

If a Body Gets Lost Comin’ through the Rye

The Song of the Iron

Wormwood: Ellin-Pellin

Pre-History of the Vertical City

The Project Conditio Sine Qua Non or Unlimited Control

The Singing Voices of the Vertical Cities

The Memory of the Metals

When the Sun Is Shining on the Back Side of the Moon

The Voice of the Earth

Why?

The Wanderers

Pizza Pepperoni

The Black Book

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/lear/lear.3.4.html

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/lear/lear.3.4.html

THE DROWNED AVATAR

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This is a story which is all imagined but needs telling in the first person as a dream; that is why the avatar adopted by the storyteller is that of a dream weaver.

It was only yesterday that I was driving home from work along the winding road along the Struma—one of the mountain streams of the Balkans.

The road glided within the blossoming acacia tree canopy if in a glove. I was sleepy and overtired after eight hours of lecturing on the winding story of English literature, and that was why I kept the car’s windscreen open even though the glorious nightfall was cool and the heating system was on. Separate quotes out of Shakespeare’s texts were meandering through my brain without any order. My mind was using them as a cud to chew.

The silhouettes of other cars were passing by. A long, white car appeared in the rear-view mirror. She made me drive in the right lane. I had no time for turning round because of a huge truck that drove from behind the double curve and straight into the space I had just left.

I threw a glance to check what had happened to the white car. There had been no car behind me. There was no car in the side mirror, either. I waited whilst I thought it was my blind spot. Nothing appeared again. I looked forward. I had driven into the lane of a country road, and the next double curve was at about two hundred yards by eye measure.

In my left wing mirror, the long white silhouette appeared, and I drove safely to the right. Just before the turn, there had been a heap of stones, and the ghost of my own car had saved me again. I didn’t stop to wonder how the mirror image had appeared.

A ghost of a car with the silhouette of mine was making me leave the dangerous parts of the road.

Evidently my sleepy mind was signalling me. I pulled up and stopped at the first opening of the road. Outside, the night was scented with the perfume of a wild pine forest and a clear mountain stream. It held an incredible sense of wilderness and gave me the feeling that I was back home.

I took my key out, banged the driver’s door, and got out on the muddy road that led directly to the river. The wetland was emerald green and overgrown with thyme and yellow herbs, amongst which were hiding green frogs and silvery water snakes. The storks were standing on one foot and were searching for a suitable catch to take to their young inside the nest. Today we do not call these wet banks lowlands, because they are full of rubbish taken here by the river, whose flowing streams are like the muscles of a strong beast and are wound in the willows and vines. The storks migrate to the Nile or the Congo as early as August and thus avoid the dust of the drought.

I couldn’t reach the water, because there was a wet sandy space between the road and the river. In the bushes, there were tangled-up rags and plastic, and a dirty dark blue heap I couldn’t see well. It looked like a hunchbacked human figure.

There was an electronic scream. I turned round. On the summit across the road stood a satellite transmitter, its red eye winking at me—the signal of the Web. I sometimes caught her with my eyes wide open and dreamed her next tale. Naturally, I wouldn’t admit where I got so many different stories.

I turned round, facing the entangled rags. They didn’t resemble a human individual. It was just a heap of old clothes thrown out by somebody into the river—rough, muddy, and tangled in the willow bushes.

I wasn’t happy with that fact.

I scrutinized that fact again, this time with my deep mind’s eye. The rags looked like the tiny and very thin figure of a woman of indefinable age.

I drew towards the bank without moving my eyes from the blue rags. There was no way for me to reach the heap, and I could not see it well.

From the heavy snow on the Balkans that had started to thaw, the Struma was full and untransparent. She moved smoothly and incessantly, and the waters were moving like the muscles of a strong primeval beast. They were flowing beside me, gulping the white pebbles and the sand islands, talking with the other inner streams, twisting with them and then, after a time, disentangling. They carried the everyday stories away and relieved my mind of the waste that destroyed my links with the Web I had gradually constructed over the last seventeen years. They carried away all the dreamt realities I had woven to bridge everyday practices out of harmony with the varied and vast universe and with the singular significance of each part of it that kept the music of the colourful cosmic spheres. They carried away the nightmares that the telepathic Web generated instead of the links of reason, when she found me half-asleep and not ready to access their meaning.

I was looking at the high, streaming river and was thinking how attractive its muscles were and how little one needed to reach out a hand and caress the wild muscles streaming past. They were murmuring the song of a restful erasing of busy everyday memory. The sand bank interfered with that instinctive urge. It was not the only intruder; there were also the constant susurration, the surreal green meadow behind my back, the birds’ talk and whistling, the scent of the pine forest, and the blue patch of sky above the rocky summit, where the traces of aeroplanes were still dissolving.

Now this wild waste—where life was squirming, but there was no trace of another human but only a heap of rags, a reminder of a female figure, the beginning of my telepathic connection with the Web—sprang up as separate images, but this time they had been connected in a galaxy of interconnected worlds to which I had access.

I played stubborn. I needed to find out whether the heap was a drowned person. I found a long, crooked willow branch. Then I threw some more branches over the ditch, made a few steps inside the rags, and it suddenly rose. It was light. It was a doll—a voodoo doll. My heart, which had risen towards my throat, fell back home. I pulled back until I returned to firm ground, pulling the rag doll behind me. My ears were ringing, and cold sweat trickled down to my heels.

The doll wore a wig—light brown and once well cut. It had eyes drawn with a dark-blue pencil and beautiful black lashes and brows. It had no hands. It was dressed in a long, dark blue coat, and its sleeves were stuffed with rags. A fisherman’s net hung down from the coat like the dress of a siren or just a hint of a body in a net. There was no mouth. Instead, the beige stocking used for the head was embroidered roughly. The doll looked like someone I knew. I stared at the embroidery of the mouth: X, М А, X, М А, X, М А, хиксче. Marian! I had nearly managed to erase her from my memory.

That’s right. Our people don’t make voodoo dolls … usually. But this was a rug resembling Marian. I had known such a woman. Where had the doll come from amongst the rubbish brought by the river?

She was the owner of a small French cafe in Wallastone—one of the suburbs of Boston along the Red Line, the route for New York. I lived there for a couple of months a few years ago. I rented a place in the attic of a renovated house near the beach of the Atlantic. I was involved in a project for web studies—the new generation of e-kind. The lab was at MIT, and every day I went there via the underground. The students were ambitious and believed they could make it truly telepathic. I’ll tell about that some other time.

Now let’s get back to Marian, or Mari-Ann. She kept a sweet shop across from the Chinese hypermarket at the crossroads traffic lights opposite the local Catholic church, St Ann—a beautiful dark grey cathedral round which I had once seen people walking among the forsythia pruned into balls. It is odd that in my records they are covered with golden blossoms and the grass is evenly cut and emerald. There is no way for it to be so, for I did not see them in the spring. It must be the memory of Marianna that the Web has kept.

She didn’t live there. People said she got a cottage in the suburb that spread on the other side of the Red Line station. That was in the older part of Wallastone.

My host’s kids said that somewhere behind the underground station, in an old cottage that was weathered and never painted, there lived a witch. She wasn’t really alive but resembled a doll made of rugs. The kids used to visit her on Halloween and sing for her. She gave them tiny biscuits, freshly baked and tasty, and offered them coffee, but they never tasted it because they’d heard that the kids who accepted it fell asleep and woke up changed.

— Changed in what way? I asked one of these kids.

— Weeeell … not the same … changed, like peels of ghost dolls that grew dry and then vanished. Have you got some more of that good honey? said the kid, turning the talk towards the kids’ own interest in visiting me on the floor which I occupied, which still smelled of polished wood and was spacious—as spacious as a fitness ground.

Kiddies’ doings, I thought, and I took them to the kitchen, where we got down the jar of honey and started spreading butter and honey on toast. I myself am not a fan of honey. I don’t like it, but I like to have some good honey about me. At home I buy it from special people who breed bees on mountain meadows, and I know how the real stuff smells. I cannot explain how I came to know it: something in the colour, something in the smell—it’s natural. I know how real honey smells because some time ago we bred bees and I copied the basics. And it is always useful to keep a jar of real honey for magic, for making friends with kids, for sweet biscuits, and for information exchange—as was the case with the kids of my host, who informed me about life in the suburb, which was quite simple when one knew the rules.

The name of the woman was Marian. She said she was Albanian, but it seems to me she could speak Bulgarian. She never reacted when I used a Bulgarian word in my speech, but she gave exact answers. She was hesitant and double-minded, and she often presented herself as Mary, Annie, and sometimes as Margarette. She was filled with nostalgia and a feeling of guilt. She made French coffee in her tiny sweet shop in Wallastone, in chinaware that was blue on the outside and white inside and made a tiny ringing sound. And she served it with petit fours, so the sign above the door read. The coffee was triple-boiled Turkish, dense but not sweet, and the sweets were of two types: miniature square cakes glazed with light blue icing and topped with white cream, and tiny butter biscuits covered with sugar. I had stopped there once on my way back from the underground because I had some midnight task to complete and I was sick of the tasteless decaf in the local 7-Eleven, where the local police and I were regular customers.

This time I was on the regular way home early. It was still daytime. I went past the 7-Eleven shop because I had noticed the sweet shop on the previous Saturday, when I had gone to the laundry at the crossroads and was waiting for my clothes to get washed and dry. I was curious what a French cafe was doing in that colourful suburb. There was a Catholic church; a Chinese supermarket; Mexican fast food; an Italian restaurant; an American Dunkin’ Donuts; an all-time shop with sandwiches, coffee, yogurt, papers, and you name it for the special needs of those who worked at night; an Arabian shop with Turkish delight, Bulgarian white cheese, pickled sour cucumbers, and tomato-and-pepper-paste; and a Japanese tofu shop.

I had reached the shop with the petit fours and was pulling open the door when the doorbell made me jump. Next I was standing in the tasty, dark inside of the bakery. She was alone, and I didn’t notice her at first. She stood quiet and almost invisible behind the window with the cream cakes.

— Can I keep you company while you’re having your coffee? she offered meekly.

— It will give me pleasure, I said, and then some impulse urged me to add thoughtlessly, I could read your coffee cup.

She didn’t answer, but when she finished her coffee, she left her cup upside down between the two of us. She didn’t make a cross over it. I took it, and she didn’t protest while I was weaving up the saga of her life, which her trembling hand had left in curious symbols on the white porcelain of the cup inside. It was the cup of a lonely woman whose life is devoid of happenings. Such people turn round their cups a couple of times, and the figures form chains of pale hills on the inside.

You can tell them stories by analogy, which is only misleading because it relies on no real facts but only on the data taken from the worlds of the Dreamweaver. People like it, though. It shows compassion.

Marian was a quiet and careful listener. I told her a tale of a lost youth of another coffee seller whose shop was opposite the official entrance of Vienna University. I looked her in the eyes. That dame in Wien had not told me her name but had given me her story. Marian was listening carefully, and she did not move, but her eyes’ pupils became like pinheads. I felt as if I had lighted a projector. Aha! I continued the story of a wasted love. Again the pupils moved.

Coffee-telling is like a game of digits: 1 is for yes, and 0 is for no. There are people who do not move. Not a single muscle moves. But their eyes always react. Marian had shown two ones. She didn’t speak as other people do who have longed for a company and suddenly are given coffee-telling, which places their intimate problems in the centre of attention of a stranger.

I looked into her eyes again. Her reaction was positive. I decided to take on the risk and bridge the story for her:

— You lost a child, I said.

She gasped with a sudden ache. I had to give the warmth of some mercy to that sharp-as-an-icicle mind:

— But it had to happen. She was sick, and her sickness was incurable.

It is strange how the faces of people, and their eyes in particular, make you weave up stories for them even when you do not have sufficient information. And they come up right into the centre of the fact.

Marian patiently waited for me to finish suitably and carried the china away. Then she handed me a paper package of cookies for me to carry home.

She then took to the habit of waiting for me at the corner with the streetlights on my way from the underground station when I returned home on Saturdays earlier than nightfall. She even pressed the light button, eager to turn on the green light for me and take me for a coffee-telling session to her sweet shop, and she hurried to speak out her soul in front of me. We met rarely, for I returned after ten in the evening; the studies in the lab were interesting, and they gradually filled up with sense. Only a couple of times did I get home before 7.00 p.m., on the cold evenings when I was unable to work. We had coffee together, but she didn’t give me her cup any more. She was evidently glad to have me around when she shared her story, for I was a quiet listener and did not interrupt her. A strange story it was as she told it, a product of a mind overloaded with ideas, and I sat there charmed by her multiple dialogues with herself because she took on the parts of a few different women at the same time, including debates of joy and desire and pain and suffering.

I learned she had a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and she was under close survey. She had been working for one of the local higher institutions, and her former team sometimes came to take her for an examination. I was not aware then that these were security checks. Her stories were interesting. They were not always linked together—at least so it seemed to me. They were often bridged by unreal images, a product of paranoia or nightmare. She had a mania she had been kidnapped—not physically: her self had been stolen.

I knew from her story that she had worked for the department that was responsible for the programming of the telepathic Web. They had not achieved a true telepathic connection, but they were good at developing empathy concerning all possible senses and feelings and leaving space for novel discoveries. The Web could "answer the state simulated and even learn about human reactions by studying hundreds of interviews and recording their incomplete stories, and react to keywords and key structures of verbal and nonverbal character.

Marian was correcting the discrepancies. They were inserting in the stories of some of the patients scenes taken from films instead of the dialogues of the characters. The patient couldn’t recognize their stories but reacted to the keywords. And the Web recorded each of these reactions and made corrections in the behaviour of masses concerning social and cultural planning.

She was so involved with the experiment that she continued taking part in it as a subject of the survey. While her brain was scanned for the preceding survey of the active zones, she suddenly fell asleep. The whole procedure lasted one hundred seconds, but this was enough in terms of mindwork, and the empathic Web settled in her mind. She no longer needed to gain access to the Web. She could hear the current hot conversations and see the images.

— Can you hear them now? I asked her with a genuine expression of compassion and politeness on my face, not just one of curiosity.

— Yes, she said. When I’m alone. When you are here with me, the Web keeps silent and listens to you. Thus she leaves me free and I can have a little rest.

—