The problem of the world today lies on both sides of the border
between material production and social control:
on the one side, material production is well organized,
thus many people are engaged in social control,
on the other side, few people are engaged in social control
because there is little of material production.
V.P.Toucheva
I Told You
(a descriptive short story)
The city streets, on the last but one day of August 2007, were brighter and more summer-like in fashion than in the past couple of months when the working and the nowhere-to-go had imposed their styles of representation- from the style of the city broad to the one of the office cleaner.
Now the dresses that had been kept from dust and crust in the wardrobes of the women who had spent their vacations in the countryside clad in the worn and loose attire of the housewife and the vegetable gardener, were fitting tightly on the bodies that had gained some weight, and were revealing the femininity of those whom life denied the chance to flare with attraction the need for top-class elegance. The mixture of subconscious disappointment of the just-returned holiday-makers dressed in the modern tastelessness of colour and cut, and the wearing the neutrality of pragmatism happiness produced by the cooling weather in the hearts of those who had spent the summer in the city, formed the meta image of the female population, which was shortly to fork into stories told about who had not managed to do what during the vacation, accompanied by gossip about who had done what contrary to natural expectations and personal liability, parried by narrations of who had not allowed what step to be taken in business matter development, accompanied by a table tennis set of interrogations about who had changed what in the office and who had had the best of time in their orchards.
The male population, come back from holiday, was dressed in the customary trousers and shirts, and was taking bundles of money from the countryside, out of the limo driver’s seats, and into the exchange offices, to invest it in more reliable currencies, or were- in shorts over whose belts large bellies were bulging, and in bathroom slippers- digging themselves down into the trenches of businesses based on family structures, and the investment of nobody’s money in home repairs. Those who had spent the summer months in the city, cleaning shop windows, or had been staring out of the office window at the comparative freedom outside, content with life gave them, as if engaged in a very important job they were not allowed to think about, let alone speak, were now indiscernible, maybe because they had been sent off to pick the fruit the holiday-makers had left to fully ripen, or were splashing at the beach on a self-treat they had spent a year dreaming of, sharing dreams with nobody, not even with their own plans.
The city was almost ready, created in the atmosphere of overlapping historical periods where the human types common to the period retiring were applying their naturally accumulated skills in an environment vapid and hostile to their assets, which determined their wavering uncertainty about which height would welcome their clinging to it; and the human types of the undeveloped yet potential of the period setting in, were sinking down, as if letting down roots, into the previous historical layer, in search of personal resources and support, which predetermined the collapse of the height to which they might have grown if someone had provided for them a stable lower floor.
The raging fires in different parts of the world, and in the country, were verifying the doctrine of the lazy writers that local characters could be described through what was geographically and culturally uniting, and global characters could be hierarchally ranked through what was specific for one or another universal world level, leaving the lions of the manufacture production of local and global specifics, lie.
The floods had introduced the necessity of reimbursing the importance of a complex collective system and structure of resource, transportation, supply, and taxation. And the new trades and larger scopes of modernity were eliminating their heralds and temporary staff through the creation of an industry for the production of societies and individuals of determined by compulsory schooling parameters. Through the latter, all sorts of businesses were growing up their sprouts, tendered by the education authorities who had come straight from among the co-operative farm administration circles.
The idea of team work had finally reached up, from the teaching methods, to the protagonists of culture, but was still outside the sphere of confined thought inside which the people who were authorized to enforce it were banging their confused personal capacity to find the right direction, in an attempt to introduce, as a criterion, their scorn for scholastic sequence in learning the basics, and much in favour of the openings for realization of what their nature had independently of learning developed through the experience of making the learned work.
In that atmosphere, the political season was about to begin, the school year to start, the prices to get even with the world value standards, and the scandals started before the vacation to develop into a clearance of the elements that had been screening real activity.
V.P.Toucheva 30.08.2007
The man was good by nature, but could not afford to be generous, neither to himself nor to anybody else. Somewhere, someone, some external force, or maybe the combination of his genes, had deprived him of the source of generosity, which, if abundant enough, keeps the balance between the direction to what one wants to have and the direction to whom one wants to give.
The balance of distance to an ‘x-point’, if the distances on both sides are equal, require that the substances on them are equal in the quantity or the quality of their matter, which means that real balance lies on the scales of equality and unity in distance and substance. If, however, the distances to an ‘x-point’ are different, then the substances on them are different too, and the balance does not only depend on distance but also on the two, or more, ‘x-points’ in the two different quantities or qualities of substance. The tree may go down branching forever, or at least until nature gets tired of such variety, and bounces up.
To achieve the balance between resource and control, the man robbed a bank to buy a diamond mine. The idea was brilliant, and if a brilliant idea is not found a place for, it may get lost in the general potential, and one may find one’s own resourcefulness the worst among the angels of memory, and the strongest among oblivion’s devils.
The man was now in control of his generosity to himself and the other people.
I would say that, to keep the balance of control, one must have representatives on both sides of the river: on the one side, to control who is producing what, and to ban the product’s realization but across the flow, and on the other side, to control who is manufacturing what, and to mirror the production on the other bank. For the purposes of control, one must select the people who will determinedly outstand the restricted parameters of their office quarters, and people who will knowledgeably hint at what plans the whole has for which restricted quarters. So the man hired assistants whose only job was to keep their natural assets intact until the time to use them called for action.
The former robber of the bank, and the present owner of the diamond mine was a man who approved of monopolizing and monopoly. There are two approaches to gaining monopoly- one is to prepare the people first, and then build the structure, the other is the other way round. Either way fits if one has the background of other monopoles, and the time to plan and build for as long as it takes.
The man had no intention of preparing his staff, nor did he know where they would come handy. There are two approaches to preparing the people- one is to breed the consumers of what you sell, and he sold nothing; the other is to train the producers of what you manufacture, and he only owned.
He, however, formed a structure to be able to control his staff. There are two kinds of structures- the one that keeps competition out of the way, the other develops whatever idea is profitable.
The man’s life was inconspicuous as there are two kinds of monopolists- the one evades the limelight, the other represents somebody else’s business.
The man disliked competition. There are two ways of keeping competition out of the way- one is to steal its ideas, the other is to block its access to the market.
As to stealing, the man was far over that, he had resorted to robbery, not to theft. There are two ways of stealing- one is through a law forbidding competition in one place, but allowing it between the different places, the other is to buy from a mediator what one does not want to get mixed in the pinching of.
There were, though, a few incidents in which immediate measures had to be taken to block interference. There are two ways of blocking- one is to pay indirectly for what you have stolen from a competitor, and this is where the idea of the ring for the bride and the job for the bridegroom occurred to the man, which would get him even in the public eye; the other is to get a competitor mixed in a jumble of situations and get even on the legal line, where the idea of advertising his generosity to the bride, and the one of getting the bride-groom mixed in something, came.
There are more approaches to getting rid of competition, but the man had none more, and could not place a burden of inefficiency over a competitor’s head, and to eliminate inefficiency’s support so it weighed down to force a competitor to get rid of some excessive for the historical requirements individual growth, nor did he have to ruffle the ground under a competitor’s feet for them to sink down slowly and demand the paying of attention to individual foothold. Either would have brought in profit, but there was no one to apply them on.
The banker’s daughter, and the son of the former diamond mine’s owner, were spared the experiment of separation, but were given a chance to participate in forming a natural unity, all free of charge for them.
The man was now able to exercise generosity, he had source and control.
He had a fine diamond ring made for the banker’s daughter.
Then he sent over two of his staff to practise their unspoilt by any task natures, and organize the wedding, asked to play the best man and the bride’s maid as a gesture of spontaneous generosity.
The wedding was simple but orderly, and the former robber of the bank and the present owner of the diamond mine, was the only bright ray of generosity, giving the bride the fine ring, and hiring the bride groom as his bodyguard.
So any balance gets restored, as if on its own.
V.P.Toucheva 31.08.2007-1.09.2007
Three by Two
(the beginning of a longish novel)
Structures have their people, and can call staff in for briefings, or dispatch staff on errands, at any work time, and at any holiday hour. Fate, however, needs man’s heart and soul, all that man inherited from his lineage in the form of an individual genetic combination, with all the latest developed by the previous generations, vigilant and active, traits, and with the whole of the potential specifics and characteristics lot that the previous generations had not needed, but those man may have to resort to, use, and personally develop voluntarily or on compulsory life plans. The latter are what might be given the name of ‘a social environment, and environmental conditions’, depending on whether it is among the people man has to fit, or it is the surrounding natural, or artificial, conditions man has to adapt to, and develop or change his present individual genetic combination, which in turn, does clear a different, a larger, or a smaller, site for him, and may affect other people or things, and may bounce back and affect the same person, someone of a similar set of features, or any aspect of the natural or the produced, at that present, or in the future. Fate, in the sense of what we possess in tools and what the others have, teaches us to look for personal survival and prosperity, to detect befitting people for our supportive groups, to offer society our participation, or to discover where the weaknesses of our adversaries lie hidden so we can wedge in on the instinctive impulse to destroy other individual combinations. Fate is always ready to come up and to take on itself the responsibility.
The three men were rather interesting.
One had the power to fight, that’s why he was given, by his environment, the role of the prey. Fate was used to pull the strings, from one man’s environment to another, until it got to him and attacked him like a criminal attacks his victim.
The second man was slack at reaction and thought, and fate was chosen to send over the emissaries of power to hand him the credentials for making decisions and fighting crime, which consequently turned him into a prosecutor.
The third man had learned art, but had inherited the power of diplomacy. His artistic performance was perfect, because he had trained hard and was applying enthusiasm and zeal in his work. He was able to subtly integrate diplomatic and unrelenting politeness in his performance, to the benefit of his popularity among his audience, and the artificiality of his characters’ lives in his business connections, which ensured his present and faced the social vultures with the dilemma of ruining him now through a personal inclination, or later, through the inefficiency of his heirs to grow up to his heights.
If the first man was made by Fate to play the victim, which was a necessity or otherwise there would have been no need of the second man, and the second man was playing the law, which was a comparative independence from the burdens and the attempts at control coming from all the other structures, and the third man was playing the mediator between what the world was planning around the fire and what was brewing in the pot, then where did the three women fit.
V.P.Toucheva 3.09.2007
If one sees men as the less vulnerable to mankind’s propelling itself into its next centuries of natural evolution, one may say that it is the men who lead the way to the investigation of the human nature, in which investigation a reaction in the mind and the body system of a person must be first stimulated with an ‘attacking trick’ accompanied by a ‘relevance bearer’. It usually happens that the angle between the strategy of the ‘attack’ and the category of the ‘relevance’ opens wide, like scissors, or closes to almost zero, to show how near the ‘attack’ and the ‘relevance’ may come to each other’s positive, negative, or overlapping, values. If one is lured or instigated by one’s nature to react to the ‘attack’, the angle between one’s reaction and the stimulating his reaction ‘attack’ can be measured and estimated, so can be measured the angle between one’s reaction and the line of ‘relevance’, or the other way round.
The male and female populations in the country were trying to introduce the higher living standards of the countries around, assisted by those individual females and males who were well experienced in supporting structures in the places they had chosen, been led to, or been trusted with. Leaders and assistants were now organizing another imitation of a strike. It was to be in one of the last bastions of the state inside whose strong walls the weakened generations of population had already adapted to the need of spending time in a social community where one was neither taught nor paid, but was controlled by strict people who were poorly educated, and was economically run by businesses which had little future. That last bastion was the education sphere. The protest was against the educationists’ low pay, and it was about time, because the country’s living standards were to be corrected on the basis of the old local ratios of income and prices, but relevantly to the larger-scale and more global ratios of world and regional economy and markets.
At about that time, a new wave of regrouping was stepping on the inner potential of the local population to organize itself, choosing which marked structures to reinforce, and which introduced ready panels to fit in the location.
The ‘old clever’ functionaries, who had flourished as the backbone of the previous regime, but had carried on their backs the need of party opposition during the period of transition, were emphasizing on the poor economic status of the teaching profession, and were introducing the tricks of psychology through the latest in the spectrum of experimentation nonsense ideas: one was about the elimination of the element of festivity in the opening of the school year on September the fifteenth, the other was about teaching material through writing the lesson on the blackboard- a method applied so far most successfully by many teachers, and challenging the strategy the different teachers would produce to tackle the students that would go to the blackboard to write on it a scientific query, or the garrulous havoc that is usually balanced by the teacher’s yells calling for silence.
The ‘new clever’ functionaries of the parallel income strategy of getting a state salary and running a small business, were emotionally and very close to the heartbreaking patriotism of emphasizing on the need of symbols, and professed concern for the multiple individual feelings of the collective social sphere. They, however, were really building the new trade union structures which the economy and large businesses needed for the production of specialists and employees, and which the higher levels needed for the control of the economic and the social spheres. The new structures would eliminate the participation of the ‘old clever’ functionaries, and would face some of the former regime’s block countries with the alternative: to accept a new system in their old structures, or to use their old system and build their new structures.
At about that time, three women were following closely the preparations for the future strike, having lived through the strikes and the protests of the medics, the bus drivers, the taxi-drivers, the ecologists, the refuse depots, the administration workers, the social workers, the crops producers, the bakers, the miners, the police, the…
One of the three women was a retired teacher, and watched all the discussion programs. She changed the television channel right after the minister of education left it to go the studio of another channel, then watched the trade-unionists who were hunching under their social duties, then went to the channel where a trio of parents were trying to introduce the idea of parent representation based on the mass of parents, and the choice of representation boards on the principle of local, structure, economy, or regional quotas, like in parliament where the parties choose whom to send to represent their electorate.
The second woman was a teacher of experience, but of no adequate to the subject she taught, educational qualification, and was half-way between ‘stirring things up riots’ and ‘self-expelling from the guild’s protests’.
The third woman was the mother of a child whose school years of learning about the existence of sciences, about the hardships of the responsibility to work for nothing, and the unfairness in delivering credentials, were about to begin. She, however, was more concerned about the price of the couple of uniforms, which the state promised to refund later, but the school was about to consult the parents’ board about whether someone had good connections among the businesses, and knew who could do the repairs which the state did not pay for. No parent would dare hint at a direct link to an own business or one that could be tapped indirectly, but it was the time of entangled relationships that pooled together the state’s administration, the schools’ administrations, the private businesses, the municipal firms, and the international projects, forming a potful of cooked and brewed approaches most relevant to the tolerance of the location, and mechanisms optimal in challenge and attack charged at the population’s individual capacity to stay intact in body and mind.
The natural texture was tested before the new education system could be let in, having waited at the door for more than three five-year plans. But it is only natural to prepare the foundations before starting on the construction, and education steps on the necessity to learn to compete for a job, and on the need to learn to catch up with what the others already know.
V.P.Toucheva 11.09.2007
The night before the day when the teachers in favour of larger salaries would not teach, though be in the classrooms, was giving in to the daylight like a famished person gives in to exhaustion, obediently and far from sadly, as if along the channel of the knowledge that many people are dying of hunger at that very hour. The teachers’ strike was planned to go on in several stages. First there went the information spread throughout the country before the summer holidays, letting know that the strikes of the medics, the drivers, the dairy producers, and other branches, could be only morally supported because the reserve of accumulated pressure would be used after the summer holidays, at the beginning of the school year, in the teachers’ planned strike, and to stimulate additional social pressure around the spiral of demands for a higher standard. There was the logical sequence of rallies, there were discussions in the media featuring hushed opinions about the adoption of a working model, semi-open opinions that the experiments in the education sphere had led to that critical situation, and open opinions that the social status of the teacher should be raised onto a doubled salary. There were three main teams playing: the teaching bulk, the trade unions, and the education minister. The squabbles between the teaching bulk and the trade unions matched the squabbles between the trade unions and the education minister, and the prime minister interfered to say that he could deduce from the salaries of the bus drivers to add to the salaries of the teachers. The parents took their chance to put forward their claims on better education for their children, touching upon the tender topic of the necessity of taking private lessons, where the minister flourished round the law by which teachers were forbidden to give private lessons to students from the school where they taught, which was beaten by the trade unions with the observation that the teachers worked in teams and sent the students from their schools to take private lessons with other teachers. The economists joined with their analyses and compared the hierarchy in the prices of medical, administration, technical, educational, police, and military labour, and having equalled a salary to a price, went as far as to state the postulate that bad quality had to be refunded and the goods returned, maybe meaning, in the case of education, that the redundant to the needs of knowledge should be sent back home. In one word, all the reflexes and reflections in the tangible social sphere of raising the children who would raise theirs by the implanted now standards, came one after the other, including car marches with banners sticking out of the windows and waving the colours of the opposition, including the decision for the teachers to work in the classrooms silently, without saying a word, with only writing on the blackboard. There were not many white boards in the country’s schools, and the rough surface of the painted in dark green blackboards balanced the expensive quality of the paint that reflected the light.
It was the beginning of the school year, and ever since the first information about the planned strike hit the street, the students lived, even through the pleasantries of having or not what to do during the summer, with the yearning for the teachers’ strike and the show it could offer. Of course, the students, too, formed their teams of material aptitude and emotional profit, like the two tables placed outside two remote from each other small shops, on the wide pavement, channelling the passers-by and judging what they were or who they were. At those two tables, two groups of men spent the nice hours of the warm days.
At one table, an average of four men were drinking cheap drinks, and were getting leaner and fadier, maybe because they were losing their drive to chase and hunt, because one was out of his social job and in retirement, one was helping the stability of a small business through his connections and his presence anywhere specified was not needed, one was living on his relatives, and one was living on odd jobs and on what he could resell without asking where it originally came from or what its final destination was.
At the other table, an average of four men, were eating rolls made of bread and dressed with vegetables meat, holding them in their plump hands as if holding a fly, and were getting ever fatter and stronger in spirit and in body, losing their skills to stand in one place to avoid being chased and hunted.
The general public was divided on the issue of the teachers’ strike: on one side of the division line, they were blushing with the effort to understand the position of the other side, and on the other side, they were glowing with the effort to find a break-through in the strategy of the one side. On one side of the division line, they were reluctant to leave the predictability of their own orderly moves along their own structures, and on the other side, they were applying the strategy of challenging the principles of the one side with the skill to choose from the entangled knot of principles the most irrelevant to any strategy the one side was prepared to tackle.
The material and social aspects of the strike were cleverly used by some heads of schools, who prolonged school repairs and could not open the school year but after the strike, and by some security formations which based on the necessity to have them, now that the street teenage gangs were almost ready to choose their adversaries, having practised on pensioners and solitary parking and block guards.
The general public had a double belief dilemma when it came to order: one belief was that reduced crime rate came as the result of home efforts, the other that somebody had finally told the police what to do. And also, some believed that the check outs were carried on because the country was a potential destination for many suspicious elements, others were sure that the paid part-time voluntary staff of the past instinctively chose to suspect only the type of intellectuals that the gone now regime had taught them to keep in check.
The general student was feeling like a screaming in the morning shower child, persistently taught cleanliness into the development of the habit to get fresh before starting for the office. Or like the unwanted producer who cannot be left to prosper alone, nor left to die of famine, especially if the world is getting the product for free, but is at the bottom of fortune’s funnel through which a large sum is handed down the hierarchy of levels, to reinforce and lubricate administration links on the way down, and gets what the last coin can buy from a humbler producer unnoticed by fortune. Everybody is proud: fortune for giving so much, the funnel for belonging to fortune’s structures, the humble producer for having profited, and the real producer because the future would take just his product, and not the workshop.
On that day of silent teaching, the quiet teacher was doing the job silently and effortlessly as ever, though outside the whirlpool of compulsory remarks passed at the noisy students, and was producing that tiny social sector of the workaholics, which a normal teacher, in an adjacent room, talking shop on the subject of the right of teachers, priests, and doctors, to strikes, was balancing with the sector of consummation.
There exists the risk for a person to use up one’s stability, or right to presence, in a place, a sphere, a treat, an achievement, a market, a relationship, etc., if one intensively consumes one’s share of the specific for that position own and environment, relationships, or correctness, energy, as one is only an element in the global balance. If one focuses one’s endeavour and profitability on a single attempt, occupation, or method, and uses the specific for the activity, interest, capacity of organization, and links of the thought to the relevant, the existent as appropriate environment conditions may get completely consumed, or the potential of the person to cope with challenges and changes may get stale. The potential of a person who will not invest some attention and endeavour to develop the skills for, and ensure a foothold in, a different place may remain sleeping at the stage of a next, historically seen, combination between one’s own life position and the environment and social conditions. When the ‘appetite’ of a person for an activity, or a consummation, gets used up, or when the environment no longer supplies the adequate to one’s needs conditions, one will have to take a plunge into another place, but may land onto someone’s back and get shaken off, or one will have to take a vacancy which, most often, is lower in status than the one where that person spent years in developing one’s own world.
The quiet teacher having used up the natural stock of conceding with what society was, and having realized how egoistic the right of each individual can be in claiming personal rights, had handed out a test, and was writing on the blackboard the rules that would help the students to do the test. There were many who believed in the postulate that there is none human knowledge, untaught to one, that one cannot sense the existence of, in the pool of mankind, and formulate it as if inventing it, in as close a version to the unknown to one original as the time and environment can allow for, adding or baring into modifications. They were walking round to find their leaders who would concentrate on the rules, make the effort to read and the greater effort to understand, would do the test, and would let the clusters round them copy the test and be the first to take their handouts to the teacher’s desk and demand correction and entry of the mark in the school register.
‘What did yours do today?’ A pal asked a pal.
‘An idiot made us do a test, the rest were all right. And at your school?’
‘A sheep spoke about her low salary, the others were okay.’
There are at least two approaches in life.
One is to see things from the viewpoint of the importance of the product (and not that of the people who assist the producer with work indirectly forming his routine life), and to look for a social environment that will find at least one of the product’s specifics positive enough (to the general balance on any relevant scale) so it decides to integrate the product in its structure, assisted by the producer who is looking for at least one other human being that will continue the process of production, or the process of protection of the product.
The other is where the community is important because it specifies where one can feel protected by a doctrine or a social circle, and where an exchange of products can be achieved for the formation of a strict hierarchy. Here it is the people that are of importance as there is no real product in the focus of the routine environment, and because anybody’s product outside the environment can be bought, stolen, or conquered, to be sold, used, or stored. The social search here is for the form in which trade can be integrated in the larger world, and the variety of channels and markets the social group has paid-for or worked-for access to.
The two teachers probably belonged to two different worlds within one education system.
V.P.Toucheva
20.09.2007
How sorry would Jane Brown ( “Dorman” ) have been to have chosen to disintegrate into the expressions of a poet, the poverty of old age, the loss of direction of the various rebels, and the punishment she inflicted on the description of her life, and not on the belief that it takes six, seven, or eight, years for the world to achieve what an individual is feeling must be done: the sacred six, seven, or eight, which are the numbers of the fingers with which we hold the pen to write our plans, or the instrument with which to make our pens.
The Bulgarian education system has finally organized its strike: the warrior teachers, because they believe they can get united to oppose the ministry’s idea for differentiated pay; the trade unions, because a teaching gild must be organized with its pool of a strike fund reserve under trade union control; the school administration, because the ministry is working on a new law which may threaten the complete autonomy of the schools from any but economic links; the parents because, finally, the day has come for them to speak out how dissatisfied they are with the free-of-charge education service; and the humble teachers, because it is one historical moment when the haughtiness and the claims of the business parents, plus the arrogance of their children, spending a teacher’s salary in pocket money, can be tackled with the idea that teachers are humans too.
It is obvious that money turns the world, but where money passes is the world itself. How glad would Jane Brown have been, having individually fought for reintroducing the principle of collective intellectual growth, to see the administrators- who cheated unemployment with becoming teachers, were used to keep the political status quo at the schools, chased the professional teachers from school to school through no income, lagged behind former colleagues whose choice of entrepreneurship proved to be internationally, and not locally guaranteed- now get, themselves, cheated to protest against low pay and help to create the basis of the integration of the Bulgarian education in the world, though not before there ripens the need for the world to sell us one of its working systems.
V.P.Toucheva
24.09.2007
The woman was wise, and straightforward.
Two assets which can be rarely seen together if nature does not take the double trouble to develop an emotionally rich person in a strictly uniform environment, and to give chances to the orderly aptitudes of the same person to grope their logical way through a maze.
When the very maze is made up of the plans of the past, plus the doctrines of the future, plus the organization of the present, it must be full-time engaged in self-rearranging its old patches and blocks into a higher resolution piece picture where if a piece cannot be moved, then the substance, the colour, the shape, the thickness, and other specifics can.
The woman was dressed in a double standard whose two aspects were perfect to the dot.
Her trouser suit was black and stylish, made of warm wool, and showing neither creases nor stuck to the surface littering threads and hairs.
She was standing firmly and quietly, as if in front of an audience, the posture of her body showed no effort in sharing her thoughts and ideas. She was being consulted on the problem of compatibility between two lists of dates: one list carried the dates of the photographs of different places, monuments, and sights of the world, and the other carried newspaper home news of accidents, floods, deficiency, redundancy, and soaring prices.
To add to her manly spirit in appearance, her blonde hair was thinning so well that one could spend minutes concentrating on her head to find out where the yellow belonged to a difference in the whims the dye had allowed itself, and where her skin was showing under the rare hairs.
Her nail varnish was of that very red that looks like blue at a distance, and when she waved her hands aside and a bit down, her nails looked like the tips of a very sick of some blood deficiency person. She did not wear much of make up, but it was because she had a pair of imperceptible spectacles on, out of which her nose looked as round and bulky as if it had been left for a better master to finish and had been neglected due to over-scheduling.
The topic discussed, namely, the coherence between the taking of pictures of the world’s orderliness, and the reporting of the worlds troubles, was an engagement that needed someone with both expertise in matters historical, and with feeling for what would be greeted and what would infuriate some group or other. The usual tendency of such advocates of the necessity to have good and bad in everything, and at every historical moment, for all the institutions and agencies, structures, and flows, to be working or preparing to work, that tendency was now leading the woman to ignore the future and speak of the present, and to ignore the future and speak of the past, while the journalist, who had been asked to carry out the conversation on compatibility of events, was tending to ignore the past and divert the talk to the future, and derive from the present to envisage the future.
There are at least four kinds of reporters and journalists. There is the plump diligent student type, who is best in discussing common issues. There is the nervous motley bird who will say more that will hear said, and will divert the attention to the specifics of the conditions and the weather at the very moment when something important is taking place. There is the surviving in all the unpleasant weathers and circumstances young man who will overdo his bravery and get himself a cold, or a reprimand for escaping from a site a minute before the real event, and that after having spent the previous hours in waiting for it to happen. There is the intelligent, spectacled, young woman who will leave the person interviewed to lead the way with an answer to a question implied in the introduction of his proficiency on some current matter, and will modulate her questions to keep company to each new answer.
The interviewer was a fifth type and a match for the politician who is sure he is getting meddled in messing up the world’s affairs, but is happily smiling at the prospective of celebrating the occasion round a table and face-to-face with the reddish topping his salad. The interviewer was intelligent and young, two features almost all interviewed were getting to lose with time, and was doing her utmost to conceal those two facts. The effort showed in her over-politeness that both tried to please and tried to lead. One could say that a poem written by a poet for himself was written for her really:
I am the diamond of crystal
I fit in luxury or mud
Although I will break a little
or bruise you if I’m dropped or dumped
I’m not afraid of poor setting
I can, in my soul, heart-bruised sleep
I need no make-up for my faces
I mirror life, eternal or short-lived
The poet probably had had in mind the fact that time, though one and the same as a category valid for everybody on earth, is different for all altitudes and longitudes, and latitudes, too, following the law of the static pulling the reins of the dynamic, and the dynamic giving motivation to the static to run for its life or fight.
Or the poet had come to the deduction that the world had become so lazy that it was not looking for people for the operating of its jaws, but was designing its restrictions on the existing people’s ambitions and arrogance.
V.P.Toucheva 19.02.2008
To Give Up Writing Poems
The woman poet was impulsive and emotional.
It was as if she was afraid that someone would come in to claim the position of poet.
The thought that she was blocking the poet’s place, and that she was setting a derogative to the development of intellect example, never entered her mind because she was not chosen for such assets, and was not being paid to develop them.
She was one of those internationalist women who were talented on all sides, were trained for many arts, mainly the art of loyalty to the parameters of their occupation, were good-natured enough to be the hearts of social gatherings, and good-hearted enough to believe any flattery owed them as bonus payment to the fee they charged for public appearance.
The time spent in writing her poems was so close to the natural pace of the compiling moods of life, that the woman poet was quite honest when she said that nature was whispering in her ear what she was to share with the blank sheet and learn by heart to cite.
Her poems were impulsive and emotional.
There was philosophy and imagery in them.
There was rhythm and rhyme.
They were elated and melodic.
And the whole show was supported by the collective image of the woman poet.
She had travelled all round the world to create and be created.
She had chosen one folklore element of each culture she had contributed to with teaching its people her own native language.
And she had combined the collected folklore specifics in such a way that whoever recognized a common piece in the jumble, felt inclined to repay with learning by heart one of her poems.
The poet that made me give up writing poems will forever have one more fan in my face, no matter how aged, distorted, or wrinkled it is.
She pulled the curtain of amateurism down and cleaned the non-professional make-up to let me see that poetry is not only what a poet writes, but what the audience must hear.
The woman poet is lucky to never have to participate in the show that seems to be about to begin, the real show of life’s comedy performances whose halls one enters to hide from life, and at whose geniosities one laughs to drive away the thought about the origin of their inspiration and their true prototypes.
I thank the woman poet who made me give up writing poems.
NB: geniosity is a self-minted noun meaning genius and idiotic
Big Politics And Me
by V.P.Toucheva
Big Politics creates its poetry and is given its philosophy, the first to pay for sins against the manipulated, the second for the difficult part played.
The cycles and the moves of Big Politics can be noticed in the streets where the wind is blowing around the blossoms of the trees, and is raising the litter and dust from the ground, with periods of still during which both settle down, and alienated co-exist.
Big Politics creates its own staff, deriving from the potential of the competition to create their structures, or giving to buffer groups to ensure its presence.
Big Politics is like a blossom petal which the winds are blowing free and loose towards a puddle or a lawn, and like a speck of dust which refuses any alliance to the accumulation of disliked styles.
A petal and a speck of dust keeping each other company in the streets, wondering about what to do with the romanticism of nature’s, and the reality of mankind’s, seasons.
Big Politics is like a woman whose spirit, effusive, frivolous, disengaged, forgetting to look back and see the material bearer that the female was born to be, finds in a man the restful destination to the uncertainty of search, and humbles into serving him.
Big Politics is like a man whose conciseness of material life is violated, but disseminates its existence into the spiritual balance of all the world’s kinds of energy, from which globality the man looks and sees, but can never be touched though forever sought for.
Big Politics is the man who is everywhere to take away the spiritual, and the woman who is in one place to produce the material, the man who is one compactness of hope heard and strength offered, and the woman who is turning away from her own integrity to create the sphere of mysticism which will radiate from her the globe of eternity.
Big Politics is poetry and prose, really. If time will not forget, prose is the better part to take, if life will not forgive, poetry is.
Big Politics is neither secret nor secretive, it is in the streets, and it is easy to see it in the people, in the puddles, or on the lawns.
Big Politics cannot explain the time before its own birth, nor can it explain anything that is outside its own specific capacity to grasp and explore what it is capable of perceiving and seeing.
Big Politics, however, can produce its own armies that will work for the implementation of its dreams and plans, will guard its logistics and organization, and will, each employee or soldier individually, believe and claim that the ‘world’ will collapse if the structure that provides them with the security of a job and belonging suffers a change- meaning by the word ‘world’ the globe of billions of individual interests, and instinctively convinced that any negative change in their own lives will really bring down the ‘world’.
A winter spent in striving asks for the spring to spend its days in slumber.
It seems that
Now the hundreds of parties and formations, which the country developed in a hurry, are forming new parties and new formations.
If one takes the trouble to count the number of the different party members, it may turn out that one and the same people are playing this well-paid political game at different tables, and against different social aspects of the population specifics, supported, at election time, by the different individual aspects of greed and urge to break and crack.
At the very same time, the population as a whole is almost good-heartedly targeted for the creation of self-organization and social-group control, by the same players who have been targeting it for the creation of rules by which each individual greed is validated as dominant, and each crack in the old imposed compactness of system and structure is a brook watering the sprouting of implanted democracy.
More and more of the hushed secrets and the reserve plans get suddenly fished out to create the conditions for a next wave of greed and breaking of the compactness.
New stream beds will form to be flooded by know-how and staff.
The words, however, of a mother whose daughter was attacked and bitten by a pack of city strays will remain a final verdict passed on the transparency of world manipulation:
‘My daughter is looking out of the window at the sunny day, but refuses to go out, and at the same time, the dogs are walking free in the city streets.’
A winter spent in striving asks for the spring to spend its days in slumber.
Big Politics may fish a writer out of each wakeful person, and mess a pot of controversy in each situation it has stirred, to wonder about what amendment to make to its own policy, or what change to introduce in the policy of the less powerful:
‘The wind is blowing in the darkness outside, and somewhere, like me in the cold room, someone even colder is waiting for the rain to stop, the wind to hush down, and the sun to shine and dry the clothing found near the dustbins.
I am writing about a person, one of the many in the streets, people as fearful of the strays as to develop a friendly attitude to them.
But for the feeling of the cold and the atavistic fear of winds and breaking weather, I would not have been feeling the wetness of the rain and the loneliness of the night in my heart, but would have been one of those people who take social injustice for granted, or one of those who create social injustice to hide in the motley crowd their reluctance to be poor.
Who knows, on what night, I might be waiting for the day to come, to be given a charity of coins, and to ask at the drugstore for a bottle of spirits, refused, and never asked if I need the liquid to stay alive or to nurse somebody’s wound.
Who knows whether I will not be damning the same person, blaming the world’s evil, theft, treachery, and debauchery on him.
Who knows what the future will bring.
The future is a garden that continues beyond the fence into a neighbour’s garden where a house similar stands, with people like us probably, only we do not know what they are doing: are they laughing, are they crying, are they telling stories, are they angry at someone, are they afraid of someone’s anger, are they so desperate to repeat the past that they are challenging their present to the point of total aversion from natural reality.
Who knows where I am, inside or outside the house.
But if I myself cannot make the difference, who cares about where I am.
The present is the most uncertain, disloyal to its own future thing, and the most hypocritical to its past partner.
Especially at night when the rain is falling in the darkness, and when instead of writing my night-time themes, I am reading one of daylight’s works:
The southern wind has a million mouths
to kiss each leaf, each branch and bough
The southern wind takes tales around
It wipes off tears and grave frowns
The southern wind turns each green poplar
into a breathing jelly-fish,
and, growing smaller, growing taller,
they sway all ways, all ways can reach
The southern wind is giving back now
my hair its long-lost embrace
And never, ever, my sad frown
will be a burden on my face
V.P.T.
Big Politics is a double player, at one table placing the few stakes it has, at the second introducing the rules of the new game and asking the other players to put out their stakes.
It is a bit horrible to hear a minister say that the citizens of the European Union are losing trust in Bulgaria due to the corruption schemes with Union money in the agriculture sector, but how more distrustful was my father when his family lands were not restituted to him but were given to somebody else. Who got the fields my grandmother and grandfather cultivated to be able to raise their two sons and send them to school in the nearby town, I do not know. What I understand is that the corruption model bases on the farmers getting Union money for the land they own and for that they do not own, having paid up to half the sum in bribing the ministry administration.
It is horrible that
It is horrible that the Bulgaria police are involved in parts of projects presented as whole to one department on the order to be kept secret from the other departments, and that those parts of projects turn out to be elements in the control schemes of the near past, which are no longer valid, but can introduce a bit of scandal and a bit of innovation of the staff. All the documentation gathered by all the former and present staff will probably stay in the world files forever, and no man can hope to live so long as to prove that the fact that he had been investigated for connections with the grey economy, the underground world, and the corruptive schemes, is not a mirror image of the fact that he had been set up or used as a guinea pig in a laboratory where students train and scientists have nothing to do. It is a pity that the police staff who sacrificed their individual lifestyles, families, and image, to get integrated in the underground world, cannot be protected from their own law, which comes to say that the underground world is as well organized now as is the police and the two worlds will stay separated to fight now and then, and when necessary.
It is a pity that the Union cannot think of variants of thin balances between the strict monitoring of who is settling in which countries, the latter now turning from states into geographical areas, and the liberty to allow the splitting up of the national social groups into social administration levels where the lowest are the most isolated in the different settlings, and the ones further up are an amalgam of stiff structures and continuous international flows. An old approach to the creation of an easy to control world, by one person really, but the people have to be taught to obey the silence of the structures and to voice the patterns of the flows.
What a film someone could make on these notes on
Big Politics has its cycles, each cycle going through the same social procedures and economic transformations, but also each cycle stepping on a new level up and leaving many of the so-far classified achievements to develop into businesses.
The transition period is starting all over again in
The wolf and the lamb are satisfied and living, and there is a complex dependence of the lamb’s environment elements on the lamb’s investing its wool in the production of what the wolf will have to buy if the wolf wants the products of its own environment to be naturally channelled to its store.
In a mirror retrospective, there comes the opportunity to have both full and intact, the wolf and the lamb, the lamb and the wolf:
I hurried on outside my present,
and on, inside my coming future
I was so hungry, so very hungry
And took one bread, and took one ray
And had the taste of them
And then went on
In silence
And came to that bread in the future
The ray had taken me ahead
And then I touched, and took the bread
Again, but didn’t taste it
I’d tasted it before, when I was hungry
Very hungry
The ray of light remained hidden
I wasn’t hungry any more
V.P.T.
I’ve eaten so much today
The world is fasting and there’s food for me
The world is hungry, and there’s food for me
The world is here watching me eat
I’ve eaten so much today
My hunger feeling is departing
into the essence of the world
that’s somewhere all around me,
reluctant to sit at my table,
or fasting, hungry, happy watching
me eat, forgetting about yesterday
Tomorrow my hunger feeling will be back,
and I’ll be busy serving it my fear
and won’t have time to ask the world
where it spent yesterday,
and how all the days before
V.P.T.
Big Politics loves intrigues and scandals, the first are real masterpieces kept in secret drawers for the right moment and the due time, the second are the broom with which a staff redecoration and a construction reinforcement is achieved at the expense of a few trustworthy and unscheming employees, and as a worthless show to the public that is paying all the while, even at the time of the free scandal shows, for the existence of Big Politics and for the creation of the intrigue masterpieces.
The country’s internal affairs scandals, though hushed by every instance that wants to ration the news over a longer period and to keep most partners in check in their old positions, are about to burst into complete order in the monopolist structures whose job is to disperse stability, and complete synchronization between the dispersed nests whose job is to co-ordinate everything, from the over-positive concern about someone’s state and future, which creates a double flow of consummation on the side of appearances and ingenuity on the side of care, to the supremely negative concern about the compactness of society, which creates the double stability of fear about what happened somewhere may be happening at home, and suspicion that lots of incidents serving larger aims have been staged on the backs of small people.
The scandals may continue thus for years because much of the past can be connected with the present to prevent the future from allowing repetition.
What I am personally interested in is whether someone would go to those depths where the pool of pictures of me lies naked, and find if there is still someone who built a career or a wealth on following me, taking photos of me, and using them in legal advertising or illegal businesses.
I would never be, nor have been, angry with this sort of predator business, for it bases on the aspects of beauty, admiration, and possibly love.
But I will certainly claim explanation and public apology, and, of course, donation of all the sums acquired through this subtle way of exploiting my very existence, for some cause completely contrary to what that person, or those people, have been living for.
It is not that I am vindictive, on the contrary, I am grateful for this sneering attention which created my freedom to lock myself in writing about it, and unlocked my appetite for predatoring on the human nature.
But my years of seclusion are coming up, oftener now, with the conclusion that nobody can now give the past something which was denied it in its own present because the time gone cannot return to the same place and in the same form, but has to create a cycle.
One can only hope to get rid of one’s remorse by paying tribute to the past’s unrecognized when needed achievement, and hope to be spared by the future such attention, though there is so little of achievement in stock that each future will avariciously grab the importance of priority from each flourishing in enthusiasm present.
Thank everybody for making a fool of me, and giving me the historical opportunity to prove that I am just practically silly.
Big Politics creates amateur investigators, of those who know none of the rules which keep the world going in its different directions, but can guess from experience at the principles that produced the rules, and say:
‘I guess that, while learning English, some very intelligent person invented the special equipment that can grasp the energy points of a covered environment and then give visual interpretation and realistic volume to the picture. This very clever thought of mine started developing backwards in September 1992, and is now reaching its forefront in the speculations about who and how took a picture of three very good public professionals sitting comfortably in armchairs in a lounge of the Internal Ministry. The globality of the problem which all the Bulgarian newspapers carry like a ‘find the nine differences couple of pictures’ will really give many an intellectual task, and the reflections on the tile floor will probably point to the place where the picture was not taken but to which aspect the image was redirected, and the whole swelling vertically halfway will bring in the question whether the photo was not taken from the ceiling.
The Bulgarian-English dictionary has the word ‘ñðåäñòâà’ in lots of subsidiary meanings, some connected with funds, some connected with equipment and devices, some with tools, some with communication, some with contrivance, resources, fair and foul means, means to move heaven and earth, means in terms of medium or subsistence, preventive, preservative, safety, and contraceptive means, means of conveyance, and lots more.
The economic aspect of such translation equivalents may be attributed to the need of an individual to contact a business that sells information and material collected with special intelligence means, or may be attributed to any additional funding of any scientific aspect of human evolution, but will still be violating the strict rule which says that the structures were not created to overlap but to cross, at the same level with flows monitored, or at different levels with constructions undisturbed.
The picture studied may turn out to be the legalizing of a classified invention which proves that there is nowhere a picture was taken, or may ruin a project still being developed, or may turn out to be a simple snap taken from a mobile phone, or may be discussed as a satellite intervention into the whole depth of the residential areas and the social layers, but will be the apple of discord for many public in their special tasks, and special in their public obligations, agencies.
I will have to be following the development of this affair, though not a love one nor a strictly home one, and find out how it came that a picture of me sleeping in bed, or lying on the beach, suddenly appeared on the cover of a translated into Bulgarian famous book. I may have to spend some means on buying newspapers, or spend some time on finding the means to develop my own special intelligence agency to guard me and adore my youth.
Someone would call it pathetic, someone who is sure that writing for an image and writing for a living are the same survival tool, but someone saved with such survival tools might make the mistake to turn back to investigate the principles and means, and deprive oneself of the opportunity an adult has in making unswaying first steps in the right direction.
Well, this is the life synopsis of my great poems and analytical texts, someone used special intelligence means, someone sold the pictures, someone liked them, someone is responsible, someone spent seventeen years in creating a literary image to overlap the insinuated one, and someone is carefully hiding the new inventions from the nosy public, someone is creating the inventions, someone is checking the patents, someone is selling plans, someone is buying ready products, someone is developing the stolen plans, someone is guarding the development, someone is giving tasks to the competition to keep an eye on the inventors and their intelligence lineage, someone is following the investigated for over-intelligence, someone is recording every move they make, someone must pay for the chain of jobs, and the politically useless material is sold to the relevant industries.
What an intelligent person I must have been to dress: an obvious abuse to love in love poems, and an invitation for a duel in the personified pictures of nature.
If only I had the means, I would publish my ‘Dorman’ in hard dark brown cover with golden letters, and not a single thing in the text changed; if those who made the photos of me for their profit had the means, they would be repaying though they have given me more, the means to get to the motivation to use them.
I may turn out to be a rare example of how theft of personality may turn into means of production, and how a writer formulates the historical background for future literary criticism of her works.
But one must bear in mind the fact that I not only wrote,
but also lived, in
Big Politics is really important, like a tall person standing in a queue and seen only as a grave statue whose face is looking well ahead over the other people, and is holding nothing to be judged for intentions, but has deep pockets where money might be placed to stake the loyalty of Big Politics to something which it has not the capacity to grasp and explore.
Big Politics cannot give to the individual, but can create the conditions for an individual to trade time for observation, and paid life fees for memoirs.
A child has one development advantage in playing under the table at which the adults are talking, meeting guests, or quarrelling.
It is that the child learns to hear incomprehensible things which, later in life, to grasp fast and in their full meaning.
The child is elated onto this later comprehension by the feeling registered as existent by one’s own grown-up nature and instinctively fished out of the time when it was sensed in the adults sitting round the table.
Playing under the table, the child learns to stay away from the jerks of the adult feet and develops a premonition control over which direction a kick may come from.
The child also develops a reliance on the existence of somebody caring enough to drop a candy and forget to pick it up; or prompt an invitation administered by the hostess to have the child in full view, and repay with positive comment for this show of full height in stature and manners.
The future has one advantage over the past, and it is that the more people participate in dishevelling the past’s arranged thoughts and events, the easier it is for the past to formulate them as a whole, which means that the future is manipulating the past.
The past has one advantage over the future, and it is that the more certain the past is in the ease and quality of what it is doing, the better insured it is that the future will have to concede and recognize its achievement, which may mean that the past is leading the future by the nose with the creation of what cannot be neglected.
I, myself, am following the moves of the present, and it seems that the tendencies about which I wrote in ‘Dorman’, http://vpt.hit.bg, are maturing into events now, the threats I was admonished by, have already flourished into art themes, and the non-existent love between a man and a woman is nothing new in the world where a happy ending either happens or does not.
I think that what art is doing is calculating the number of people who will drop a tear, unable to leave the love story to its loneliness, and how many will sigh with relief, unable to believe that they have to go home to reality.
In line with the above, I think that I am getting under the table to write the missing lines in my works, to be able to patchwork my winter quilt, now that the early spring winds are generously prompting what will be an admired by the future, and easily achieved by the past, task.
Big Politics has a double lane, one is white and covered with the dust of time and burnt lives, the other is dark and muddy with the techniques of control and manipulation.
Diplomacy is travelling both ways, especially where the dark shadow of the white lane is more profitable to big aims, or where the white ghost of the dark lane is safer to small purposes.
My bartering- probably a latest approach to diplomacy- of a poem written on the spot for one of the workers in return for his sparing the broken chunk outside my garage, in which chunk of concrete a wild plant is promising to turn into a rose, was an effigy of my existence striving to keep people from storing their old cars outside my door.
Bartering the poem was like taking one lane, the other lane was to translate my poem into English, maybe as an opposite approach to diplomacy:
È îãëåäàëîòî ïàê ïðîëåòòà ïîãëåæäà,
íà ìëàäîñòòà ñåçîí ïðåêðàñíî âå÷åí
Íàâúí ìîìè÷åòî íà ìîÿòà íàäåæäà
ìå ÷àêà ñ ïîãëåä áëèçúê è äàëå÷åí
Íå ìîãà àç çà ïðîëåòòà äà ìèñëÿ
Íå èñêàì äà ñå ñúñòåçàâàì ñ âå÷íîñòòà
Ìîìè÷åòî íàâúí å òîëêîç áëèçêî,
÷å îãëåäàëîòî îòáëúñêâà ìîéòà ñóåòà
Äúæäúò è âèõðèòå âíåçàïíî ñèëíè
ðàçíåñîõà öâåòà íà ïðîëåòòà
Äúðâåòàòà ñå ñâèõà â áúäåùàòà åñåí
Êúì îãëåäàëîòî ëèñòåíöå áÿëî äîëåòÿ
È äîêàòî ñå áîðåõ àç ñúñ ñóåòàòà,
ñðàâíÿâàéêè ñå ñ ìëàäîñòòà è ïðîëåòòà,
ìîìè÷åòî íà ìîÿòà íàäåæäà ïëàõà,
ñ êîñè ðàçâåíè, ìîêðè, êúì æèâîòà îòëåòÿ
Â.Ï.Òó÷åâà 31.03.2008
The mirror of the spring, again, is looking
at youth, a season wonderfully lasting
Outside, the girl of my hope wooing
is waiting for me with a look near, passing
I cannot spare thoughts to see the blossoms
I will not be competing with eternal life
The girl outside is so very, so very, close
that this now mirror is rejecting vain sights
The sudden rain and whirlwind strong and brand-new
are taking away the blooms of spring
The trees are shrinking into their autumn ripe, due
A petal white flew to the mirror fine to cling
While I was fighting with the vanity on this earth,
comparing myself to youth, to spring,
the girl of my hope weak, impatient or by time hurled,
just took herself to life, her hair wet and streamed
V.P.Toucheva 31.03.2008
A person may feel a general misfortune as belonging to individuals less lucky than himself, but will shrink in brave fear if an individual of his trade or profession suffers injustice or threat, and will, in the first case, stop to look around for cleared space, and left hindrances, to take it, in the second case will freeze in the resolution about taking revenge on the guilty through the weak, for what they have not prevented, and on the weak through the guilty, for what they have not fought against.
Big Politics works on all levels, on one level, the present internal affairs are engaged in reforming their structures, on another level, the old internal affairs are engaged in tasks assessed on the desks of business and monopolist power, underground deals and strategies for the application of the abused dignity of the redundant staff.
The Door of Big Politics seems open and closed upon the possibility of leaving a place or coming in.
The unknown on both sides of the Door is reluctant to provide freedom to everybody.
Now and then, Big Politics sacrifices its main players who are obliged to accept new roles in what they believe to be a play of domination and control over the audience, and the spectators seem to be paid in their jobs to spend on watching a play where the players are shooting from the stage in order to eliminate or to stir up reaction for another cycle of action.
The poem about the Dorman is a poem about the Door:
On both sides of life’s greatest gate,
there you stand, you wait, you stand, Dorman
To let us pass, to judge, or to refuse to let
There you stand, you wait, you stand, Dorman
On one side, you say ‘Empty space-
they left,’ you say, forgetting to say no one came
And on the other side, you yawn and play
‘I’m here,’ you say, ‘it’s against my wish and you to blame’
I’ll drop a coin by your side
Please pick it up to take my fee
Can’t find- to give it- where you abide
Do let me on my true side be
How well we lived in our past,
through memories now linked to it
No audience for them, if fussed,
on flattery, they stack mischief
How difficult it was to get
the new things, cheap to deprivation
Now they cannot be used or kept,
as deprivation means failed action
We did not want our standard vanished
Nor want to grow- not accustomed
We gave up growth to keep standard
And gave up standard to keep growth
Self-confident, we greet ourselves
Got used to alms, but didn’t store
To charity, we sold pride blessed
Like lame, we froze active core
Like old players, we ate, ransacked,
opposed new ideas, matter
But used, in secret, good and bad,
and left check-out for time later
Like players new, we blast the calm
to drive away the poor in numbers
from places made on wealth well farmed
that man could neither eat nor bundle
The young are now motion-faced
The specialized learned rival strife
The ones mature, in groups, laced
The aged, relaxed and stocked for life
On both sides of life’s greatest gate,
there you stand, you wait, you stand, Dorman
To let us pass, to judge, or to refuse to let
There you stand, you wait, you stand, Dorman
On one side, you say ‘Empty space-
they left,’ you say, forgetting to say no one came
And on the other side, you yawn and play
‘I’m here,’ you say, ‘it’s against my wish and you to blame’
V.P.T. 7.01.2007
Big Politics has its big departments, which work in synchrony but are not aware of it, and get in competition occasionally to keep their status and their independence.
It may seem a wonder why the different state departments, given the task to grab the different social sectors and the national potential differences, to develop economic groups, relevant structures, social layers and depths of dependencies, some introducing the aspect of protest, some introducing the aspect of wealth, of hoarding and theft, loyalty and treason, life and death, prevention and stagnation, start arguments, blaming each other for the methods and connections used in their work.
The Big Politics stepping on their arguments may look with wonder, and register the strange phenomenon of the creation of a heap of guilt out of the individual department heads and principals whose latest role may be to complete the projects commenced by former department heads and principals already retired from the game, or having prepared for themselves minor scandals on whose magic rugs to flee.
The world may wonder about who will be deciding what to discard from the past of Big Politics, and whether the discarded will be items or organization patterns.
As to me, I have discarded myself long ago, for which I blame the human nature which Big Politics used to select its principle players, and I blame the social habits which the structures produced out of the human nature used to create battlefields, alliances, and losers.
Life, like the beauty of nature, is a waterfall which one dreams of jumping down to be able to integrate one’s existence in the majestically wonderful; it is the mountainous landscape over which one must fly like a bird to be able to conquer it; it is the snow on the tops in which one will want to become a flake to become part of the coolness of impassion; it is the sunlight to which one would give one’s own soul in return for feeling greater than the men on earth.
In this aspect, my own discarding myself counts double.
It is obvious that the world is changing, with places where Big Politics is examining its herbarium, and places where it is growing its latest species.
There is one minor competitor Big Politics has, the world in its incessant change and difficult to control evolution.
On each one day, and each one night,
the world is racing against evolution,
creating, in a hurry, its constructive stable views
The moments of day’s diversity are so short
that one must take time and enjoy the preparation
At night, the unused thoughts will wander round,
and look for minds alert and sensitive
to wake up, and to pay attention
Some thoughts are quiet, some are fearsome,
some optional, some are excited,
some are depressed, some are suiciding,
some are concerned, some are elite
In groups too individual, intelligent
for the absurdity of compound lots
Intelligent enough to recognize a kin
and stay all quiet and unrecognized
She was so beautiful, they loved her so much,
that they included her among the beauties
But no, she was also clever
They loved her, and she dreamed so much,
that she included them among her fans
But no, they were also clever
On each one day, and each one night,
the world is racing against time,
creating its constructive views
And so strained is the world’s face,
in an attempt to seem contented
And so restless are world’s nights,
in proud darkness, lonely hidden
The world is racing against time
to set the frames of evolution,
its beds, its days, its nights, its fun
The world is racing against time
V.P.T. 10-12.03.2008
The more experienced the world gets, the more advanced it gets in overtaking the principles of social manipulation.
The longer a small part of the world lives strained under the methods of social manipulation, the easier it is for that part to develop the global thinking of the manipulators, and see the elements of a strategy.
The technique to butterfly-pin people into investigation, classification, and development for specific tasks and roles pars the method of changing the environment for the different minor species to multiply or to shrink into self-extinction.
Both methods, however, seem to have used their manipulation potential in the social spheres where the structures have been watching and modifying the lives of the individuals, and the individuals have been adapting and faring in the different structures, both forming a compactness easy to see as a moulded piece, and easy to break into pieces along the official channels or along the moves and flutters of a free or a pinned life.
What is happening here, or why, I do not know, nor have the strength to understand.
But there is one thing for certain, and it is that the people whom the common Bulgarians feared in their socialist past because of those people’s belonging to the militia and the political structures, are now taking away from their reforming agencies and departments their old natural aptitude to dominate and fare on the power to control, while the common Bulgarians are about to face future threats pinning them down into the stimulated need and the instinctive begging for restrictive structures, and co-operating their indignation and suffering experience to form social group networks which will sink into the location, while the state ones are departing up towards international integration and bigger aims.
This is a world too difficult to be understood by a survivor who is misfortunate enough to spend a long human life during a short historical summer storm, and too transparent not to seen by a thinker who knows that a historical summer season starts before a summer storm and lasts long after it.
In one word, Big Politics is one thing, and I am something else, and the other way round.
It is no wonder for Big Politics, but it is for a common person to understand why the different state departments, which were given the task to grab the different social sectors and the national potential differences and develop economic groups, relevant structures, social layers and depths of dependencies, some introducing the aspect of protest, some introducing the aspect of wealth, of hoarding and theft, loyalty and treason, life and death, prevention and stagnation, are now in argument, blaming each other for the methods and connections used in their work.
The policy that is now stepping on their argument is looking with wonder, and is registering the strange phenomenon of the creation of a heap of guilt out of the individual department heads and principals whose role is now to complete the projects commenced by former department heads and principals who are now retired from this game, or have prepared for themselves minor scandals on whose magic rug to flee.
It is also a wonder why the school psychologists, who were the majestic bearers of the new projects for the production of the human factor, are now finding open competition for the same students’ souls outrageous. The same level of policy passed into the schools through the individual staff members and is now arriving at the front door in its own economically supported vehicle.
Many things are a wonder, the greatest for me is why the time during which I wrote ‘Dorman’, http://www.vpt.hit.bg, is repeating itself, as if the furniture in the country was moved around in the flat for a bit of spring cleaning, and is now being put back in its place, with an item or two discarded towards the garage or the attic.
It is obvious that the world is changing.
The more experienced the world gets, the more advanced it gets in overtaking the principles of social manipulation.
Big Politics has its historically tested methods, and its selected and appointed to do relevant tasks people: the first feel invincible, unreachable, and powerful like the messengers of the gods on the earth, the second are in the guarding structures whose elements do believe they are the gods appointed by the universe to rule the common people’s lives.
The small tricks played on the human nature by clever people, who will create adequate environment for thin sectors of the human personality to develop fast and overwhelm a person’s behaviour and thinking, thus creating a new environment of wonder at the person’s novelty, of imitation, and of establishment of a style exacted as a norm or jeered at the absurdity of, has finally entered the academic spheres where the quotas connecting the importance of the country’s past to the country’s present stability which allows for no material participation of the past, and the promising deeds of the unknown future, are represented by the children of the people who formed, and those who are forming, larger pie-charts, to the effect that where some arguments are weighing down into the conservation of the national specifics, there are other arguments in favour of the fact that universality on the international levels is not an equivalent to blurred dpi scale enlargement.
Big Politics uses the nationalistic aptitudes as tools.
The Bulgarian language is one last stronghold of the nationalism of the pre-socialist business, the socialist civilian liberal constructiveness, and the post-socialist restriction to any international co-operation which does not pass through relevant structures.
I can recall the time when everybody feared two teachers, the Mathematics teacher and the Bulgarian language teacher, and I can very easily go back through the years of my own school teaching experience to gather my bunch of admonitions, intrigues, fake concern about the country and the nation, and everything coming at me from the people who were served confidence at two tables: the state security structures to which many belonged, and the new business opportunities that many a teacher’s husband or wife availed of.
I guess that the time has come for the Bulgarian language to accept a few minor changes in its standards, in the name of the human nature.
I guess it is time for the education system to be sensible enough, in the name of the human nature, to give back the patterns of wasting the students’ time over twelve years of collectivity at school whose closed environment can be the laboratory of the explorers of the human nature, full of interesting material for the supporting, or the alteration, of the group theory, and I am sure that it is high time for the whole process of teaching to adopt the possibility that there are more practical languages for education and training, which does not mean that the Bulgarian language is not a winning competitor.
In one word, it is never to early to prepare for the future, especially if it promises to be a noon after a discernable dawn.
Big Politics has no country, it has all.
There are two main odd things.
One odd thing is that the Ministry of Home Affairs is writing a report on police activity, covering the past eighteen years. Another odd thing is that the unprofessionals, chosen only by their natural aptitude to imitate and practise bombastic behaviour, who were channelled into and flooded the police quarters to break down the system, are about to be lowered in military rank, and that the over twenty thousand of trained policemen, formerly isolated in the coordination of tasks to be able now to scatter in the private sector, chosen for their general ability to self-develop and general inability to form groups, who were sacked so that the structure would break up, are also given a new role.
It is like when a child is asked about his/her attitude to general things and answers with concrete examples of what his/her mom and dad have done or are in the habit of doing, or like training, with expert soap opera plots, the fears of his/her grandma to get her to the point of calling up old acquaintances and asking them to help her son/daughter with matters whose aim and content he/she has been hiding from her need to get hold onto active life through her outdated methods and a historical capacity that will not concede with the belonging of the sunlit terraces and the spit-control over the people underneath to the newly added upper floors of the same construction.
The profitable business of gathering information for the multiple purpose of earning money, gaining power, cornering rivals, preventing crime, ensuring structural stability, helping old acquaintances, selling to admirers of women’s beauty, providing explorers of the different generation alterations in appearance, texture, spirit, and aptitude, is now slipping out of the grasp of the local police headquarters and into the hands of the private detective agencies.
Apart from learning that the state police have been creating the private intelligence sector to cover all the economic and know-how areas, the world is now learning that it was the people of the legal social control structures that assisted the happening of crime and incidents, thus reinforcing the need of strict and secretive structures, and that the people of the illegal social control structures have been paying for the people of the legal social control structures to pass by their mirrored, underground, businesses, and concentrate on more harmless suspects.
I am glad that the Bulgarian school administration did not feel, over the past eighteen years, the necessity to plan for the human factor future of the education system, but would ask me to leave as soon as they had checked me out, giving me a free hand at choosing my route through the cleverly created maze, which experience may turn out to be of help to my writing.
As many schools I went to, and was shortly after made to leave, as many check-outs; the more check-outs, the more schools I was covering, as if a dissident being prepared for a top administration post after a planned political change.
As many parents I faced the demands of , as many check-outs; the more influential the parents, the more detailed the check-outs.
As many lodgers moved in or left the apartments around mine, as many check-outs; the more neighbours worked for firms close to intelligence quarters, the more sophisticated the check-outs.
As many people learned, or were told by me, about my writing in English, as many check-outs; the more people learned, or were told, about my self-publishing, the more economically orientated the check-outs became.
As many new relatives and their relation circles entered the family background, as many of them sought their means of helping me stay in the parametres of the old organization of things, and as many good-will check-outs; the more check-outs, the further from my relations I felt like staying.
As many check-outs as many things I wrote and published; the more check-outs, the further I led the way, and here I am, waiting for the report to be published and discussed before the general public to which I belong.
It now turns out that the number of demands for checking people out equals- like two is equal to two- the number of permissions given for information to be looked up in the files or to be gathered.
What a wonderful muse this hide-and-seek inconvenience has been in these eighteen years, and how well I understand, and did understand, the people who could not stand me or the English language I was teaching.
And how well I understand the people who could neither watch me breed alliances and cohesive dependencies, nor could they lawfully bridle me into any fixed participation but in the play where I have been an aquarium fish competing with the instincts of the ocean shark.
A prolific time it has been, but exhausting and alienating.
Well, things will probably get organized like everywhere
in the European Union, and
With a bit of historical luck, the information- gathered in the name of pooling evidence material, for the purpose of keeping busy the people potentially antagonistic to the introduction of the new policy, under the trick of misleading the human simplicity into a temporary role of general superiority, for the sake of the creation of new structures, and towards other aims- will not get lost, but will be used to make films like the ones about the wars or the ones about personal and social calamities.
Who will be keeping the copyrights of such materials, I wonder.
Big Politics will introduce alterations to keep its balances, which have been historically settled with respect to resources and means, where the subordination of the resources to the means passes through access to power, and the impact of the means upon the resources is achieved through the social and economic weight of the classes. Now and then, there arises the need of reformation and restructuring, creation of reinforcing elements or structures, or substitution of some elements with ones better coordinated with new upper levels or with the new specifics of the levels down.
The Bulgarian Parliament is, again, debating another vote of non-confidence, for the failing of the Ministry of Home Affairs to stay away from organized crime and for giving ‘poachers’ access to classified information.
It is as if a teacher is asking a student, for a fifth time over, to guess at a spelling which the student does not know and the class is not sure about.
Like any cheap manipulation, the situation in the classroom has its ‘bread and show’: ‘bread’ coming from the necessity to have a teacher for the correction of spellings, which necessity the class is supporting with nobody referring to a dictionary to look up the spelling; and ‘show’ provided to those who have eaten their helpings of bread for the wholesome nourishment of which the teacher is not responsible.
The Parliament is discussing the inability of the Ministry to organize the secrecy of classified information, but nobody says who and why decided to gather such information, or whether someone took the trouble to explain why the keepers of such information get twice as much as a food producer or a shoe mender, nor has it been explained to the people outside the law enforcement structures why they have to be controlled on information gathered about them, nor have they been informed about who is looking down at the match played between the supervisors and the supervised.
It seems that the meddling of the state in the quarters of business where the state is introducing all the different standards and norms, is counterbalanced by business with the establishment- through stable structures repressive to the proclaimed freedoms- of information banks for the timely fishing out of appropriate elements of classified information and its appropriate using.
There is then no questioning why my father’s invention was first classified and then stolen, or why pictures made of me through special intelligence means were published without giving me any information about why they were made, where, and by whom.
The criticism addressed at the results of a process which the present opposition themselves started years ago may lead to the formation of two political wings. However, I wonder if anybody who saw the eighteen years of strictly controlled and methodically enforced changes, will confuse the similarity between the people in power and the people in opposition with a difference between the two alternative variants of the same policy.
The greatest threat for the common outsider to controlling politics and classifying structures is the human nature which may play a trick or two on people weak or unaware through the redundant law enforcement staff and through the balancing inner opposition in any place on any level, but that is what intellectuals are for, to be the first to suffer injustice and to be the last to be believed that they had been warning of the high tide.
If something happens to an intellectual, the ‘bread and show’ business continues with the works of the intellectual going to enrich a structure, and the general public given the circumstances and the parameters of a suspect to organize their own shows and to crowd at the doors of the Ministry of Home Affairs with their variant of solved mystery.
There is no need to spend money on gathering information through go-betweens if the people are ready to give it free of charge. All one has to do is select active social excerpts whom to place on a discussion board and challenge to promote their own ability and drown that of the others, and one has a picture of who and how will be leading the way, who and how can be led, who and how is befitting for the level up or the level down, everything that can be measured if one has taken the trouble to work out measurement parameters, or has borrowed a ready table.
The Bulgarian Parliament is, again, debating another vote of non-confidence, for the failing of the Ministry of Home Affairs to stay away from organized crime and for giving ‘poachers’ access to classified information.
The spring outside is inaccessible to those who have nowhere to go, to those working for their living, to those handicapped by age or ability, and to those who are watching the debate in the hope that something will change, or in the fear that something changing will affect them.
Big Politics is big because it has gathered all the information of the world, everything connected with who needs what, buys what, sleeps with whom, has visited what places, is relative to whom, is planning to do what, has done what in the past, is potentially apt to get out of what control, is apt to organize what group, may be included where, is intent on leaving where, is a threat to whom, is endangering what, has assisted what, is befriended to whom, everything which we call ‘order’ and have been so ardently trying to create a variant for, but have failed because of ‘order’ creating its own balances of controlled ‘disorder’, its own guardians to angel over, and its own cleaners to rage and create negative examples.
Big Politics has been a home and a prison to me, has neither spared me nor killed me, has neither been honest nor undignified, and is seemingly a common competitor for the secrets of the world which to pass to its own kin and leave the other people in the vapid opportunity condense of futile attempts to use one’s intelligence as a tool and away from where human arrogance is developing an opposite human breed.
Big Politics is once a Noah Ark carrying the forefathers of the future away from the floods of the present, once it is the flood that eliminates the environment for a new and charged with potential evolution.
Big politics does not care about who will manage to get saved, provided that the flood does not eliminate the achievements befitting the future or the species and specifics that are the basic variety of the earth, as part of which variety Big Politics sees itself.
If one has been very poorly off over many years, which is a simple accompaniment to one’s inability to understand micro-economics, one will certainly develop a feeling for the economic environment and will start to understand the moods and the aims of macro-economics, which is a simple accompaniment to one’s smudging personal enrichment with an overall, swinging towards the global future, analysis of what is happening.
I, myself, have been rather poor in the past eighteen years, and there have been two accompaniments to it.
One was that my profession is connected with teaching a
language prestigious in a socialist
During this political balance between the interests of the West to spread its businesses into the East, and the interests of the East to send its human factors into the West, I took a sequential line of quarrelling with my boss, leaving the teaching of adults, trying to start my own language courses, finding out that, alongside the different freedoms, the minor economic games that were introduced came without their fair play rules, and finally I resorted to becoming a school teacher, having skipped a couple of side lanes, that of becoming a reporter, and that of fighting for moral compensations.
The other accompaniment was my writing which was to fill up my time with the production of something eternally worthless and historically priceless of a quality and measurement ignored by the legal art businesses and controlled by the illegal businesses engaged in blocking things from turning into merchandise and paid for stopping people from claiming room at the stock marketplace.
The news connected with the impending economic crisis, formulated as the result of over-activity on the credit line, are a latest reminder of the simple fact that the Bulgarian lev sells for half a Euro, which means that one Euro can buy two levs.
The impossibility to have a second devaluation of the Bulgarian currency after the one of a decade ago, leads to the conclusion that the lev must be economically weak and financially strong to be able to be substituted in an equal correspondence ratio by the Euro, that is one lev becomes one Euro, and vice versa, within the time terms set for 2009 or shortly after.
It may be interesting to read my ‘Dorman’ speculations on how a penniless person can invest in the turning of a penny into a Euro cent:
‘There was to be a buffer period of a couple of years in which she would have to choose her style of general aptitude to humanism and survival.
“A kilo of beans on the market now costs two coins,” she thought.
She thought of coins when she meant home currency, and of banknotes when she meant the unified regional one.
“Two coins is now one banknote. In a couple of years, a kilo of beans will cost two banknotes, like in the countries around. And one coin will be one banknote to have the currencies unified. Which means one coin is gold, and one coin is trash. Which is where, and what is the difference between the stock market and the value market.”
The TV was showing some news she understood little of for the lack of sound.
“On the other hand, where can the trash coin go. Maybe into the gap of undervalued debts to home economy, or maybe into raising artificially the standard through restricted purchasing power, or maybe into hidden inflation through savings with lost own value, or maybe into covering the seam that will stitch home economy to other home economies, or maybe into an accumulation of a debt that will have been already paid and thus will claim the grounds not the premises that are already someone’s property.”
It was such a confusion to be someone poor, trying- rather than working non-stop to make both ends meet- to understand where poverty got bred and sent over to guard one’s stay in one place. There was a bulk that was as hidden and black on the outside as was a turnip. There was a spark that was somewhere near, like to blast the problem into all the thinkers’ heads. There was a shadow of the spark inside the turnip that was the core of the whole problem and only needed a key to get unlocked and turned into a chariot or a carriage.
“If the trash coin disappears into the gap of undervalued debts to home economy, it will also stimulate other economies to develop, and will send over people needing to be met and served, fed and housed, that is, it will create occupation and jobs, thus it will make money flow pass through the country.’
In one word, I am ready to give up my survival place on Noah’s Ark for Big Politics to take, and flutter over the drowned land formulating a mirror novel to ‘Dorman’ while looking for the reason of looking at the principles from the opposite side, or like finding beauty in the colour opposites of a picture, or while doing something else, maybe inventing another survival tool.
Big Politics will never admit to its interest in what I am doing, writing, or how I am living, as long as I am engaged in something philosophically harmless, writing something easy enough to classify inside censorship guidelines, and living closer to inactivity than to participation in matters temporary or inappropriate for my age and background.
I, myself, have been guessing so many times at what I had better do with my writing, and my practicality has been prompting a writing session of a week at a run to have something complete, while my vanity has been urging an immediate publicity of any written word, in the name of my keeping a hold onto my readers’ interest, taken I have any readers whose interest is strictly literary, and those who read because they are paid to, are not readers.
Now that everybody’s cards are taken out onto the table to see who is playing what game in the name of representing an economic gang as a structure sacrificing itself in the name of mankind, the topics of using special police investigation for the gathering of yellow-paper material and gathering yellow-paper material for the justification of structural reforms, have led the Parliament to a split up into a left wing and an opposition to the left wing.
The opposition to the left wing is promising to turn into a right wing because it is coordinated by the impossibility of the left wing to clear away the economic havoc it itself created for the double purpose of keeping up the state structures and a hurried introduction of some basic capitalist relationships.
The right wing, however, will take some time to form in substance because its generation was started by former colleagues of the left wing, as well trained people like the left wing people though still a couple of generations too young to fully suit their individual interests and capacity to the requirements of the conservative policy.
Forming political wings is like playing golf or walking in a desert.
The track looks like a green desert, the dunes of the desert look like a well-mown golf track.
A pond on the field looks indifferent and pointless, a mirage beyond the dunes looks decisively in the right place and absolutely timely.
The aim on the track is achieved with clasping an estimating dome over the ball’s passage and environment, the aim in the desert is reached along the right approach lane.
In blessed places, the green game is establishing among the public its unpretentious alienation, in destitute places survival is a game much harder to play than any aristocratic game felt by the survivors in the desert to be an unevolved part of their genes.
The people on the track are handsome and reserved, the people in the desert are less refined and more hectic.
Political wings, however close they may come together for a mustering of strength or to bounce off each other, are sole players destined to finally part and stay at a distance, amusing themselves on the reclusive secluded lands of their mansions where the fathers of the game for one player felt safe from contact with people in need of taking and were so lonely that they split up the day into a sequence of reached destinations.
Political wings, however far they go from each other, will have to find a winding parallel through the dunes to get to a mirage or to a horizon.
In line with such thinking, I am making a wild guess at my starting to write in serious, and about love, of course.
I might read in ‘Dorman’, http://www.vpt.hit.bg, about the years of my personal teaching experience, especially those parts connected with trudging books and materials on foot, past barking at me strays, towards schools near places where satellite surveyance of future large building sites develops situations in which the teacher-subject-environment combination turns student behaviour surprisingly over-mature for the learners’ social status, and childishly-dependent on the subversive work of the school administration’s adaptation to new connections with redundant or substituted staff coming from the reformed inner affairs offices or from the job-bleak countryside, down the structure hierarchy or up in the doing favours escalator.
Or I might look through the eyes of a colleague recently attacked in her classroom by a macho teenager for a full flourish show where some students were walking on the desks, some were enjoying themselves, and someone was recording all with a mobile phone. The teacher looks to have found the strength to fight off the attacker for whom the English language is an aggressor and the femininity of the teacher is promising easy victory to his woken up hunting drive that will land him in a well-paid job at a slaughter house where he will kill cornered animals like killing his own instincts.
Or I might write about the production of the education system all through the period of transition from indirect to direct control of money over the people, and from direct to indirect control of politics over the same bulk.
Or I might write about my personal problems.
Or I might write, again, about the necessity to introduce the non-aggressive to the human nature criteria connected with the teaching of foreign languages at school, like for example grouping separately the beginners and the intermediate students, or like introducing the language acquisition certificate tests.
There is one thing I will never be able to write about, and it is what I do not know, and I do not know what life is going to do with all the boys and girls the education system has been preparing for police tasks, subversion acts, maintenance activity, or assistance jobs.
Maybe in some other countries, their education systems have been preparing counterparts for a grand future project of collective achievement, or for a nilling any individual achievement confrontation. Who knows? Who can or will dare tell if everything piece of real information is state security classified and hidden, kept in fractions in the safes and the catacombs of the different institutions.
Or I might just read through my works, and when I get to what I have already written about, say: ‘Time seems to be repeating itself, especially when there is a hand to turn round the sand clock.’
Big Politics depends on separation for stability, and will do the utmost to lead two self-developing parties into a clash.
The world is engaged in a war-game separation of the different blocks’ technology and equipment developments, in a total challenge of intellect and invention for the working out of a compatible and peaceful stability on earth whose establishment will develop a technologically tested, not obtruded by random or subversive actions, advance to outer space and the nearest planets.
The world is discussing the separation of married couples, and is getting used to the idea of co-existence after the split-up of legally formed family and other units, and the formation of working family, and other units, living and working together on the principles of mutual responsibility and profit.
The world is socially evolving, though the political system is still with its task to keep the different social interests inside social formations.
Our entrance of the block is also separating from the next entrance up the hill, probably because of a displacement caused by a slight torque collapse into the underground constructions of the huge block across the separating the two big blocks tiny street.
My neighbour is separating from the need to have a handy only suspect, and will not understand a reason following the torque line along which water may come from a bath innovation on the last floor to the floor next but one down, or that during her own bathroom innovations a plumber may have missed pipe compatibility with the floor above for the reason of some future repairs.
And, as usual, the world is separating its efforts into those that control the material factor through the social factor, and those that control the social factor through material factor.
I, myself, am facing the dilemma of living like the people who are establishing the socially economic classes, or like those living to be the socially driving factors, in the first case, a stable class-appropriate living standard is a stable environment, in the second case, the world is informed of problems seen by an individual on the horizontal but having rather deep roots.
I must get down to serious thinking.
Big Politics will make its organization progress in secret, and will leave the people to invent the already invented, after which Big Politics will steal the new and modify the old with a bit of modification, then sell the products to the inventors as if they had existed all the while on a level unreached by common thought.
When a ministry of home affairs and homeland security is getting restructured, one can use the short break and use for survival or for intellectual gymnastics the awareness about a restructuring being organized when a bulk of staff is needed for the formation of new structures.
A person as aware of this must certainly know that a new structure is formed in two major ways: one way is to introduce a string of burning organization in an already moulded massive group to form a line of passed on orders and passed back information; and the other way is to eliminate the naturally forming, over a long service in the same job, personal intellectual evolution in the understanding of the principles that hold the observer and the observed in parity, thus in one place, while the rest of the world is spinning round or leaving for the moon.
If one sees the world as thought and matter, the people as individual thinking and separate entities of life, and the world as a well-organized mass and a coordinated planning that confines everything into a manipulated sphere, one can hope to understand the four dimensions of social life: production, consummation, price, and worth, in their variants ranging from the production for the purpose of testing advanced ideas to the production for selling to users, from consummation seen as a procedure that creates order to consummation that feeds one form of living with another in a food chain, from the price at which something is made to the price at which it is offered for sale, from the worth of the product to the producer to its worth to the consumer.
If we see these four dimensions of social life, production, consummation, price, and worth, on a sheet of paper, they may cross to form a rectangle, may even have a propeller at each one of the four ends to shorten or elongate the lines between the ends and the crossing point. The four lines may turn round to form a cube or some other stiff form; or may get turned, elongated and shortened, propelled round and round to form different spheres within the larger sphere of engineering thought, like a turnip is carved when one wants to leave the substance inside and in layers.
Now that the world is concerned about the raging famine in some countries, and about ecology in others, about order and security in still others, and about investments in the future somewhere else, I guess that inventing the invented by mankind is more than an intellectual gymnastics, it is survival.
My writing has certainly been one way of trying to get rid of the necessity to survive, which is a tedious enterprise if one sees mankind as a whole and social engineering thought as belonging to the historical experience that organization is either where the people are engaged in confronting each other, or where the overlapping generations of social engineers are preventing the formation of competition for fear that the massive presence inside the controlled sphere will form a thick shell in the engineering crust, or even worse, will form its inner hub of organization which will thin out the crust to the point of transparency and evaporation.
What can one do but reinvent, periodically, the already invented by mankind.
Big Politics has its need of confrontation created underneath it to have a stable foothold and to eliminate the danger of an inferior element growing up over the needed average.
While living with the feeling that I am only temporarily inhabiting my home, and may have to leave on somebody’s urgent incoming need, I have obviously developed a fear much more exquisite than the fear of what a communist party member may say or think about me, or what top police functionary a colleague or a neighbour is married to.
It is the fear that develops the defensive instincts, and leaves in the dark the intelligence drive into the faults and sins of the people pretending to be much more chaste than their job’s or nature’s prey.
In one word, I have been neglecting myself not only in the literal way, but in the moral too, with the adoption of elaborate escape routes prompted as the only possible for me, or with the creation of roundabout paths to avoid the lots of hindrances on my way and be out of the different visions about what is true and what is reasonable for me to be and do.
In still one more word, the neighbour blaming me for the wet spot on her ceiling wall outside her bathroom, must call her own plumber if she finds the one I called too expensive, but ready to cut and patch any pipe though rather uncertain about which pipe is to be mended.
In still a third word, I must turn every judgement’s attention to the ceiling outside my own bathroom where the falling off plaster and the rotting wooden panelling are an indicator that a broader thought might spare a pipe here but include more people in the investigation somewhere else.
It is an interesting feeling, the one to be living like a temporary guest in one’s home, ready to excuse oneself for every inconvenience to the environment, and ready to leave one’s home for a larger unit to use it or inhabit it with tenants, a feeling which many people in Bulgaria may be having, with the means of survival taken away from those who cannot fight for them and serve the creation of classes with the accumulation of material assets.
It is an interesting feeling to be supervised for faults to a system through the judgment of the individuals who are elements of that system’s creation of clashes and wars with one purpose of eliminating the presence of large crowds where the only things order needs are structure stability and production-exchange flows, and a second of building, in the crowded places pyramids of level ground created over a supporting separation and war.
Temporarily living in my home and monitored for faults to the system, how else can I be positively paid for the years of teaching and writing, and for the authenticity of my artistic product, if not with someone, “Dorman” probably, spending much money on providing conditions for my already developed adaptation to be quietly striving, secretly fearing, subtly monitored, and openly controlled.
I have always said that I was brought up by my parents to accept control and monitoring as part of life, though they forgot to mention that the generic similarity between my father and his war-front rival, if not led to adopt different approaches to the same thing and if not confronted, would have merged to form an evolution stem.
Nobody told me, however, that I would be confronting both my father’s participation in a clash and his rival’s intent on establishing superiority, and would be confronting the very idea that order can be established upon the people through a system, and not through the people upon a system.
But maybe I am a bit too advanced in my dreaming about a fast social evolution.
Big Politics is concerned about Nature and Mankind, but will not let them be what they are, nor has the time to leave them to the whims and trends of evolution.
The world is splitting up in a modern opposition: people who support Nature and people who support Mankind.
The first are turning off the lights in their homes to preserve from exhaustion the natural resources, the second are lighting a lamp to show Mankind they are part of it and support anyone of mankind’s wars for peace and protests in favour of independence from one coalition to enter another.
Meanwhile, some clever people are grabbing from Mankind what they can in order to furnish their own homes, unaware of the fact, too global to see in the rush, that the whole block of furnished homes is disintegrating and falling apart and down, and ready to clear their premises of cellar-stored compromising elements which to dump onto Nature or into a neighbour’s area.
Meanwhile, other clever people are exploiting Nature to the full with a careful study and a rearrangement of the preserved areas, stimulating self-denial and subsequent use in the natural flora and fauna habitats, for the purpose of a displacement shift that will clear ways for the global structures and the communication routes.
It is no wonder if someone is heard to say that for some people the melting of the icebergs in the north is a calamity which must be feared, but can also be used to create easy transport connection and communication between the continents.
It is no wonder to hear someone else say that someone is being aggressive to Nature with driving a car instead of cycling to work, a thesis responded to with the argument that cycling is exhausting to calories and a cyclist will consume more food than a driver, the latter thesis responded to with the argument that lots of cultivated areas are producing sunflower to produce eco-fuels instead of giving produce to feed the famished.
The world seems to be exploiting in Nature what Mankind can use, and in Mankind what Nature has established as an own balance.
The world is splitting up in a modern opposition, it is obvious.
And Big Politics and me are obviously going different ways.
I am selling a CD of my poems, but nobody buys it, Big Politics is creating an environment that wants to integrate me in its organization, and my reluctance to get integrated makes me look for break-through ways, and I get to the point of creating behaviour patterns specific for the region and my human type, at which Big Politics starts examining and recording the gathered data of behaviour samples, at which I try to outdo Big Politics with the creation of an overall view upon the world that includes not only me but Big Politics as well, after which Big Politics tries to trifle me out of any game, and I am trying to sell a philosophical idea to the world.
I seem to be challenging a rival too big to be attracted towards me with my idea of my selling the theories which my famished and home-stuck mind produces, now that my CD of poetry didn’t sell, again ‘this time’, and now that I am engaged in brushing my local image of what my neighbour, in a compensation fit to the restructuring of international police, spreads about me during her raids on everybody who will find the opening of the front door for them-purchases-kids-and- dogs worth listening to her looking-for-power-over-at least-one-person complaints of a wet spot outside her bathroom.
Here is the theory which I am ready to sell, stored on my blog and this site so that everybody can refrain from taking the idea and leaving me behind, like what they did with my father’s innovations and invention:
Everybody and everything consists of energy and matter, energy is in a continuous exchange, matter is in a continuous production and destruction. The exchange has at least two aspects: one aspect of exchange is that of direction, and here light is produced on the way from where the need of exchange breaks off a balance to derive on the way a domino effect and reach a place where a new balance is created, and another aspect is the exchange where the self-production of matter as a store of energy is changed or destructed in presence or place for a new balance of presence-absence to be produced in the same place or elsewhere. Exchange is the basics of balance, and balance has always existed on the principles of the need for having it and the reasons for breaking it. The very idea of God compiles all the aspects and directions of the different exchanges into one single view for each religion. There is a universal exchange of energy between every two objects and places, which exchange is sometimes seen as light, sometimes felt as gravitation, sometimes measured as motion, sometimes registered as presence, and so on, with all their opposites of darkness, inappropriate gravitation links, stillness, absence, and so on, in a double-way, multiple, global scale beyond the sacred twelve aspects of perception of the world, which twelve have thirteen as a taboo comprising the impossibility to see the heavenly whole from inside. Taken that everything is in an exchange with everything else, directly or indirectly, any exchange of energy between two unequal in matter or volume objects will lead to an unequal provision and demand: what the larger presence of one body gives will lead to a larger exchange demand than what the smaller body can provide, thus creating an attraction experienced by the smaller body to the body larger in volume or in presence, that is, the body of matter, that is, the store of energy. If gravitation can be explained with exchange, how many more things can be explained with it I wonder. And exchange can be seen as a replacement of one form of presence with another, ensued from or ensued on, or of one stored presence for another, or as one form of change or another form, in all the global aspects of existence. One can say that the theory of everything is the theory of presence and exchange. If someone can work out the formula of my theory, could he/she possibly consult my poems of the early nineties for more details though a bit hazy, the poems that did not sell, again ‘this time’ because Big Politics does not need to buy what can be read for free on Internet, published by me for the future.
The main competition between the West and the East during the period of developing the two wings of common projects, where the common tasks were given and compared in terms of compatible results, is now taking its next stage.
The West used to be kept in fear of the East and vice versa, and neither was politically allowed to accept an own priority to be on a par with the rival’s priority, nor would see an own achievement as one aspect of a common achievement to which the rival has also added.
Bulgaria is now left with a bulk of old staff that can neither be convinced to look back and reason about the artificial role they played while weighing over independent intelligent thought, nor can they be now made to observe all the rules of the inferior jobs they have been given.
Independent intelligent thought is still locked up, this time the cell is not the restriction before enterprise, but the role to serve as corrective of mistakes.
The mistakes are made on purpose out of spite, or instinctively due to their natural lagging behind by the people who were fished out of their tough peasantry environment for administrative roles, and are now losing their social standard though still in jobs that can make a household spend days in proving an obvious truth or in getting rid of a nosy former controller whose new political task is to create social structures through the settling of new problems.
See in the light of behaviorism, my Theory of Global Exchange, already suggested, may be supplemented with one more measurement, that of the Potential that has been developed in a body and the Potential that a body was born with, in the Medusa Effect where discharging Potential either streams into a core and drags in all the accumulation of energy and the logistics of how it can be applied, or expands to grab any appropriate energy environment and gets hold onto what can be dragged in, both ways creating links, and both ways giving out indication of Presence, another measurement.
If we see the Theory of Exchange as the Theory of Creation, not in its religious aspect, we can certainly make up a map of what and where is needed to exist, and where it does exist, and manipulate the very existence of a phenomenon with the creation in it of an antipode.
The following old poem of mine may not be an illustration of the above words, but bases on my Theory of Exchange, which might have a uniform formula, might not, and if it has, it will be a long one to be able to encompass all the dependencies of exchange and connection, like in a society where you have to set the rules of separation to keep natural exchange in check for a local growth to develop inside an enclosure. All you have is pick the fruit on the lower branches, and convince the skies to settle a cloud or two and create a landing for a new idea.
Where my eyes meet
to see for thirst,
where admiration
my breath breathes,
is where you are,
my love first,
is where longing
with lust meets
If my breath speaks
the winning words,
you’ll be the treasure of my heart
If, to the sight,
my eyes get first,
a memory I’ll cast behind
V.P.T.
Back on June 7, 1990, in the dawn of the post-socialist period when everybody could open a firm, I opened BATY-90 and started teaching small groups of four in the apartment of my father-in-law.
The time allowed for using my father-in-law’s premises was one month during which everybody was on holiday, the hours I worked there were about fourteen each day, and the money I earned was three thousand and five hundred levs.
On my way home, past the next camp of people protesting against a next government that had introduced a next problem to lead to a next indignation to result in a next change of the model of social and economic organization, I seemed to embrace more ardently the idea of exchange between me and the sunset sunshine which permeated my very existence with something I had lost, a feeling like when the one I had when I went into a cloth shop to listen to the music coming from their radio set and relax after my six classes with a group of adults learners.
My entrepreneurship was a failure for objective reasons connected with the model developed for Bulgaria, which model introduced two basic things: one was that the socialist structures could not be changed radically because they were connected to international structures on the social levels where the economic levels were suffering a change, and vice versa, and the other was that the parameters of entrepreneurship could be set to form restrictions to, and demands from, the very origination of small business. The ignored breaches of the law created a new dependence, and led to the formation of a middle class of peasant mentality, and the creation of a top business class out of the former communists.
But I would have introduced the same model, wouldn’t I, taken that the pulsation of intellect can be an element in my Theory of Exchange. The average pulsating intellect of one part of the Balkan region is directed at the environment and is a threat to every other intellect that wants to stay independent of contact; and the pulsating intellect of other parts of the Balkan region, directed at the essence of its own presence, is a threat to the every other intellect that is fearing the production of something secret and inaccessible. Thus fear is creating the potential of action.
My Theory of Exchange includes the parameter of Representation, to which the following social-economic example may give some light.
The old businesses were started by individual producers, tradesmen, landowners, etc., and this led to the creation of the share-holders model where a pyramid is created of one representative at the base, whose shadow image is flourished up, and a large coverage of share-holders at the top , with assets they both possess and do not, because they cannot use them as means of production and on selling them, lose their participation in a rental scheme.
The comparatively new imitation of a kingdom that the socialist block has been, employed another way of representation, namely, at the base there were a lot of ordinary workers who believed that they possessed the factory because it was everybody’s, told by nobody that they had nothing but their jobs, and ignorant of the time when the deputy heads of state economy would be appointed to represent private business, with the shadow of their communist past buried deep in the ground.
Well, I closed BATY-90 in 1992 because I had not measured well the adequateness of my business capacity, and willingness to make alliances, for the economic factors, and in 1994, I opened another firm, which I am afraid I will have to close due to the inadequateness of my social position as a self-publisher on the Balkans.
There is one thing for sure, my Theory of Exchange is starting to shred its fears of having been born in the wrong place, or at the wrong time, because the model of competition and opposition, taken from the capitalist project, is giving way to the model of collective schemes, an element taken from the socialist project.
Big Politics has no time to find out how its plans are read as long as they are implemented to the dot on the outside of the membrane they are safe-kept and isolated inside. The reading and the implementation of the ready global plans can be left to the local governments and authorities, with a continuous monitoring inside their reading and implementation carried out with respect to the danger of creating an unwanted potential, or ruining an already created stability.
When one is unaware of a cause whose effect one is unpleasantly surprised with, and suddenly gets involved in a change of Attention Direction- which brings in again the dimension of Direction as part of my Theory of Exchange- one plunges or distracts all attention in an instinctive search for the cause, and the first logical destination of this search is where a ready connection already exists or where one’s capacity of logical and emotional reasoning can lead to.
There is one fact, and it is that a person is only an element of a group or a society, which group or society even if seen as a whole in an overall information and logical view, cannot be globally understood because understanding would mean the seeing of each of its elements as a whole, and deeper to where a particle of matter participates in the making of a person, and a person participates as an element in the making of mankind.
In this line of thinking, my continuing experience in solving the mystery of a wet spot outside my downstairs neighbour’s bathroom, which is elongating in dimension, and the readiness of the maintenance workers to cut and patch the pipes of the central heating passing through the bathrooms, have led to my looking for guilt, leaving the thread-thin crack of the floor slab for a look-back at my own floor’s participation in the creation of a ceiling problem.
It is strange how bravely, for almost two weeks now, I have been defending the central heating pipes and the infrastructure of a monopolist whom I have been paying high fees for the same pipes to pass through my home and the home temperatures of between twelve and seventeen degrees. However, neither the monopolist nor the pipes have any responsibility to my living standard.
But a monopolist can see and control more than one person can, and if I allow to get involved in hiring a plumber whose semi-anonymity is going by his first name and his telephone number, I may be creating another string of Dependency, which Dependency is another dimension in the philosophical formula of my Theory of Exchange.
On the other hand, there is a strange opposition in the direction of thought and activity between the company providing the central heating and the measurement satellite firms that serve as a membrane between the provider and the customers, the first insisting on their specialist emptying the pipe system for the coming up repairs, the second saying that someone in the block has the keys and is authorized to do it, and the plumber saying he can do the draining himself.
It is a confusing situation where a company is spending thousands to have cold water circulating in the pipes out of the heating season, their production of electricity seems to be a less profitable business compensated for by the central heating business which is now too expensive to be a customer of, and the satellite firms are gathered in the well-paid spending of their working hours, waiting for some bigger project to finally call them, now and then leaving for a repair or two under the disguise of impressive personal corpulence, a first name, and a telephone number.
Things are stuck together because there is nowhere to go, and there is nowhere to go because there is much balanced and balancing Presence and Absence, Motion and Stillness, in the Universe, which theory may sound familiar but does not envisage man.
The Compatibility for Presence is a dimension that cannot be ignored, no matter if an object is looking for a link onto what is a ready partner in an exchange, nor if a body is looking for the cause that led a disruption of a created balance in which one has found a temporary place and a compatibility role in the exchange. If all the aspects of the Theory of Exchange are considered, then science could explore the channels of exchange of the energy of Presence, and the potential of the energy of Existence, and many more dimensions, by simply following the routes the different elements of a whole take in search of who is guilty.
In the case of the wet spots outside my bathroom and outside my downstairs neighbor’s bathroom may turn out to be somehow connected with the age of the block and out to be the ‘vampire’ instinct actively searching for a source of consummation and getting there on a real-life pretext or motif, which a philosopher may call a fair game because nobody said that what is accumulated in one place is not violating a balance, though nobody believes that if a balance is create, one or another place will not accumulate one aspect of the global whole to take a better part compared to the rest in the play.
In one word, my Theory of Exchange may not be a well-formulated one, but it may be a source of ideas for many people.
If I stay waiting for a pipe specialist day after day, make a fool of myself with asking a local shop to steer me to their maintenance specialist, or get steered to a local loafer and risk all security with giving her my telephone number and name on a piece of paper which a pipe expert will get and call me up to help, or wander through Internet to find out that the mastodon company is being prepared for privatization and the state is selling its shares in it, or if I call all the advertised services to find them overspecialized and indifferent to complex problems including pipes, floors, or walls, they are not registered as mending, or if I find that there is something totally fishy in the spot downstairs going left instead of down, which might be an indication of a leaking through the wall self-made bath-tub on the floor up but one, I may reach the conclusion that Potential really is part of my Theory of Exchange.
The problem with Potential, similar though opposite in direction to that of Integration, is that potential is under a double strain, one strain coming from the necessity to take one side in a parity like the one when an animal is neither a cattle head nor a predator, and the second strain coming from the attack of both sides upon the non-integrated in the parity animal, like the attack of the predator upon the position taken by the free radical animal, and the aggressive blocking of all good positions by a lot of cattle heads. If the animal chooses one side or the other in this parity, the balance will be restored with the self-creation of more Potential, though what inner parity it may have of volume and density, only statistics can say, and it takes different periods of time to pool the different statistics data.
There is one thing for certain, however, that the world has really grown to form a new global level if the European Parliament has voted a ban on the appointment of relatives for main or subsidiary posts, a practice that has been strengthening a structure of main elements with representatives of other structures where its own representatives were being sent to reinforce the connections between structures.
In one word, the potential for me or my neighbour getting a heart attack, me or my neighbour getting into an unexpected trouble that is a genetic branching of the wet spots problem, me and my downstairs neighbour separating for a larger parity to be created between her and my upstairs neighbour, the potential of a clash between all the pipe specialists I am planning to call in to give me their pieces of a complex picture, everything may have one cause and effect stem: the creation of something still never created, in a place inappropriate for its evolutionary development, and so restrictive to the slowness of the natural adaptation of the genes to the gradually changing environment that it is stimulating evolution on all levels for a fast evolutionary change or temporary reconciliation that will be adopted by the next generations as a model, and by the genes of the future as a necessary amendment of the laws of nature.
Big Politics is stronger than I am, more flexible on the outside and more solid on the inside than me, and has a better future in the lives of those who have made their past and present advance in the promising directions or inside the ancient-old compatibility of the world structures.
While Big politics is acting, I am watching the effects of its activity in my life, while it is learning from its mistakes, I am trying to unravel its schemes. I think that big politics has involved me in a process of getting it involved in my life, and I am involving Big politics in a literary feed-back which it may find a waste of time to consider later, and a change of its plans to react to immediately.
If one makes a map of the topics the different television programs cover on one single morning, one may get scared and concerned because the topics covered are so closely related to life that even the one about teleportation is feasible to happen right after one turns off the TV.
Some of the topics touch upon the control over using guns in school to impress classmates with pointing it at a teacher’s back, some discuss the arrogance of rich and influential parents when they are worried or ignorant of the truth, some topics concern the lots of agencies a former government created which they are now trying to close alongside the repairs made in the present cabinet, some topics are directly questioning the appointment of an uneducated person to the post of minister, some are discussing the high prices and the low income of many people in opposition to the many customers in the few shops left in place of the shops of the socialist period that were few because they had little to sell, some topics are proclaiming the banning of heavy vehicle traffic at weekends and where people get killed in their run over cars, some are waving the international banners of contracted free-of-charge daily passages of a thousand and six hundred heavy vehicles through the country, some topics are on a tornado that swept off a lot of real estate property and is leaving a small town and a village destitute and uninsured, and if one goes back to the specialist talking on teleportation and how one can break up in pieces and get assembled in another place, one may conclude that this map of topics may have led to the Central Heating Company Sofia to close down their site so that I watch what is going on and cannot send them an email to warn them of a repair man my neighbour is bringing in on Saturday before East Orthodox Easter.
What about the Theory of Exchange, anyone watching me type this would say, and anyone reading what I have typed will contribute to the formation of a teleported text in someone’s mind.
Well, the Theory of Exchange is everywhere, for example, it is in the prices and the customers, like when logic waits for the due time to take a firm footstep where the place has been so crowded that logic cannot feel safe from slipping.
The Government has a new Cabinet, the old ministers dispensed of with the words that only those who are doing nothing are faultless in their work.
The home nationalists are in a new campaign against the international nationalists, the first creating a growth accompanied by a digging out of some unpleasant national specifics, the second introducing the reinforcement of belonging to strong policies and baring the sinews of those policies in the arguments they are giving.
The nation is splitting up into the people who support the people in power and the people who struggle to have their people in power, but really into the Balkan type of thinking, action, and business scope, and the European type of organization, planning, and business connections.
Of course, the former socialist restrictive structures are on both sides of the border, and are achieving home and international control as usual.
The new Cabinet will do few immediate changes, but will prepare an economic restructuring which will probably be clad in political organization, and will separate the country into four social layers: those working for the international projects, those introducing connections into the location, those exporting know-how and feed-back, and those developing the home specifics into tourist attractions and local support systems.
The principle of editing a person, a group, a nation, a region, of specifics that may turn out to be dangerously strong, seems to be applied on every level, and the result is that everybody is organized in or by something he/she would have never naturally be engaged in.
Well, the best thing about this now historical period is that everybody has given up the belief that the earth is flat, and everybody has developed the courage to bribe or to fight an authority who has sworn to abide by the law and work in the name of the people, but in doing so, is making mistakes like any person.
The tools with which Bulgaria was made to break off the socialist block in which the country was one specific ratio piece of a large percentage of socialism and a small percentage of capitalism distributed among the ethnic minorities and some specific co-operation formations, these tools are now being put away as no longer useful.
The model of all people belonging to a politically structured society is being substituted by the model of a conglomerate of economically minding their interests societies.
Salt is cheaper in crowded places in times of peace, and if bread is unevenly rationed due to a limited money volume allowed to travel through a territory, what else can a good organization hope for but to create examples for the people to shrink away from, and to involve the population in self-paid clash shows.
Ethnic problems have always existed on the Balkans, and have always been an easy source and target of manipulation.
History remembers when it was not fair competition that created strain, but the creation of subsidiary structures that tried to drag in and conquer the structures essential to human survival, after which to digest their major specifics and pronounce the role as belonging to themselves.
In
Now the new political cabinet of three incompatible interests: the world interests of the monarchs, sheiks, and chieftains, represented by the uncrowned heir to the Bulgarian throne, the world interests of the communist idea about globalization through an army model, represented by Russia and its capacity of man and deposit, and the world interests of the former Turkish empire, represented by a large population of that country’s faith and language, are about to take a political left turn, only it will be taken through the specific right-wing way of reading the world map which the slowly substituted administration staff has intrinsic in their nature.
It is like when the left-wing administration of previous governments took a right turn through a gradually shifting policy trend.
One would say that
Whether this will help
The world is a lovely place to try to be happy in, but people say it only because they are part of the world and the only competition they know is with other people.
If one looks at what mankind is trying to do all the time, one cannot but notice that mankind is trying to survive in all its volumes, scales, forms, and belongings, and is striving hard, paying much, and fearing a failure, in the hope that some day there will be a better place to live in, maybe on the moon from where the moon population will be looking down upon the earth, or maybe on another planet, to which there will be a race of settlers.
Big Politics is almighty really because it is everywhere, and everywhere it is dressed in the appropriate apparel.
Competition with Big politics is choosing the determination to fail by all means, so I would rather live from one day to be happy to see the next.
Plumbers can mend a pipe’s rusty part between floors to hopefully eliminate a wet spot in a flat downstairs, but can create a spurt of scorching leakage if they do not weld the patch well upstairs.
This is the recent past of my downstairs neighbour, and this is the unknown future prepared for me by the drops of water trickling down from the welding.
Specialized labour has one advantage over all-in-one service, and specialized service dominates the efficiency of specialized labour.
No one can make a neighbour understand that wetness is not always the result of a hole near the central heating pipes, but any neighbour can see the hole created by the repairs which is large enough for direct communication and exchange of small articles.
No one can make a person intent on immediate actions that the Saturday before Easter is the worst time for wet spots to be eliminated, though everybody will shrink into indifference when the welded place spurts out scorch when the hot water comes in winter.
Nobody can convince a neighbour that the worst time to scare a block of flats that they will have no water supply for a whole day, though everybody will understand that cold water has nothing to do with the central heating.
No one will believe a couple of neighbours filing round their different stories, though everybody will take the side of the one whose version is more logically unegoistic.
Specialized service will not look for a cause but will jump at mending the effect, creating a new cause, but paid and gone into obscurity, having done a hurried job very slowly.
No observer will fail to notice that if a pipe patch is about four centimeters shorter than to fit, a welding will not be enough, and if a pipe is a few centimeters longer, the hammering in will create a crack elsewhere.
Big Politics that created for many the necessity to find
any job, and the need to find any source of income, is a match to the Theory of
Exchange. And if one says that it was the blue banners welcoming democracy in
The hole that my neighbour believed I had in my flat is now a reality between us, and the leakage that she was told by specialized service to be coming from between the floors is now a trickle down the mended pipe. My neighbour seems to have projected the future into the present.
No one but my neighbour’s lodger who forgot to put away a couple of bottles of detergent will believe that welding in a flat may cause with its fireworks a fire. Of course, the more determined plumber was ready to pay with part of my money for the bottles, following the rules of the Theory of Exchange.
No one will believe that the three men working on a problem like ours can also have their families and are also cold in the corridors and the tiny bathrooms, but can I or my neighbour give them a meal if we have cooked none, and are clutching the money with which to pay them.
No neighbour will stand the noise of cutting, breaking, and welding, even the neighbours whose dog bumps at my door at about two o’clock each night, and every neighbour will believe that Holy Saturday was selected by my neighbour and me for the repairs, and not by the full-scheduled workers.
In one word, everybody is happy and ready to welcome East orthodox Easter tomorrow, especially Big politics and my Theory of Exchange.
And if the hole is filled but a spurt happens, the rumour of my flooding my neighbour will become reality and she will have had it all, her rumors, her hole, and a leakage, but where am I in it all with my conviction that the sorry-looking pipes were not the cause but the effect of an operation carried out without a preliminary diagnosis of all unhealthy suspects.
A friend of mine said an hour ago, ‘Why don’t you start work, you are waiting for your pension only’, and I answered, ‘But I have been working all the time, the problem is nobody buys my product’.
She wants me to be a teacher like herself, and I want her to recognize in me a free-lance writer.
So here is a new product, worked out by me and given you for free.
Of course, the words about logic apply to the models adopted in politics, but in the context of love they sound inspired.
A Pleasure
I waited for my love obscure
to make a masterpiece in parts,
or brush, of years’ dust, old lure
and let the luster tempt my heart
I waited gasping at each story
that love produced, was ready with,
but only now, me old and sorry,
love serves its picture full, complete
Love took away its picture’s logic,
and let me learn its parts’ shape, style
With luck and time, my heart came prompting
the common to each story line
Love drained of essence its parts’ meanings,
connecting all in a logic grid
With luck and time, I matched the feelings,
and gave an essence to each bit
The pleasure of my love obscure
made up its whole, part by part,
but cannot brush off me the years,
can’t let a luster tempt my heart
V.P.T. 28.04.2008
I wonder how it came into the head of a golden renowned Bulgarian sportsman to punch a paparazzo in the face for having spoilt his quiet in a restaurant on Easter, and why didn’t he just take a picture of the paparazzo and put it in his album.
The newspaper the paparazzo works for says he was taking an Easter souvenir from the foreign country with a countryman in the focus.
Maybe the famous footballer did feel like a star in the company of his wife in the environment of other people, and the snapshot shattered the atmosphere to make him feel like an ordinary guinea pig under observation, unaware of the fact that the paparazzo had been following him from the airport, and a newspaper had been creating a policy, through a star cluster, showing how each star celebrated a holy day for the worse-off fans to admire and accept the necessity of customs.
I wonder how it came into the head of the paparazzo to bother a celebrity with taking pictures of his dinner, and why will he say that a punch from the celebrity has shattered a myth if he went to photograph something completely different, is a mystery as big as the mystery of how the souvenirs taken by the thousands of security cameras and the thousands of paparazzi in socialist and post-socialist Bulgaria as to the needs of capitalist and post-capitalist world, and vice versa, got in possession of the mass media and the publishing industry.
Maybe the paparazzo did not know what projects he was supporting with these pictures, there being at least two social projects and two technological one, maybe even more, and his camera is capable of recording more than the presence of people, maybe it can record the presence of security coverage, or even satellite coverage, maybe the paparazzo is not a simple photographer but a good player in a complex game.
What I know is that my premature aging, ever since September 1992 when I saw paparazzo pictures of me published, led to my spontaneous decision to end with my life, though I am not a suicider and would have done it to evade the necessity to enter a real war, but a wedding in the family changed my plans and I decided to get my body altogether hidden in poverty and simple observance of common decency, and my soul bare to the philosophers and the authorities who had paparazzi and cameras everywhere and could follow any of my moves.
However, I could not but retribute myself for my confinement in a set of publicly uninteresting routines, with a bit of intellectual work and some individual enrichment in the perspective in which I see the methods of teaching and social control, the following poem illustrating this:
Will Be Advertising Me
Advertisements protect or kill,
deprive or give with sponsoring hands
Decades are fatal to ads’ mill-
they have to pay for what they’ve spent
Too early it is for applause
Too late it’s for the old show
Time’s nettles grow, so does moss,
below song’s trees, where I go
The river is too small to cross
The past was staged to give time means
It’s time to rest, to plan the plots
which will be advertising me
V.P.T. 17.04.2004
It is strange how many people write about love, instead of about politics, even those who wander their parched wane wrinkled faces in the city streets, but never those who bask in the spring sunlight, leaning at old cars forgotten outside the offices whose working hours are yet to end before sunset.
The following poem is as fresh as the bread I have just bought, though the seller chose the sorriest-looking loaf, misled by my appearance:
A Song Of Love
I song of love I hear in the branches,
in sunshine bounced off by green spring leaves
A song of love I hear in the high planes,
their trails mingling with the clouds in the breeze
A song of love in sea waves beyond vision
A song of love in people on their way
My song of love’s in every springtime image
I won’t sing it, but in my dreams it stays
I’ll give the grass the love of grazing spring deer
I’ll give the deer my love’s hunting heart
I’ll take from them, for plenty love, their fear
I’ll leave to them the joy they’re last to love
The earth, I will embrace with poems
The spring’s birth, I will cheer up
The birds, I’ll awake with songs, stories
The people, I will give my whole love
V.P.T. 29.04.2008
A poem may be with the difficult task to keep up a myth that a poet is not selling a family garage because it is where poetry gets written, or that a poet is no more neighbour-socializing because she is doing business with writing, publishing, and trying to sell her products:
To Turn A Prophecy Into A Plan
‘Go, write,’ dispensed I now am
to do creative poem writing
in places mine, but to world’s plans
a prophecy that I’d have nothing
I’m getting to know my real me,
as if myself an acquaintance
who must be seen as left, right, winged
clad in perception and comparison
It is May Day, a celebration
as old as are springs or threats
Between a prophecy and life established,
we measure nature’s period threads
I have my memories that mention
events that flapped my left-right wings
Between the plans and celebrations,
time, place, are varied in length strings
A left sway old, new, combined,
can give up stable comfy life,
and mass-lead to all promised finds,
to make men build their latest hives
A right sway of the common lads,
from their farms derived and led,
reinforces the constructed lands
new-found, cultivated, fed
Now natural investigators,
don’t grope in the lands dark, strange,
but wedge through soul’s darkest places
and sell the news to each blank page
Now natural defensive factors,
don’t fend off enemy attacks,
but turn into life’s tough attackers
onto the people of all ranks
All is an effort or a product,
the news are paid for with life fate,
the pictures taken are rewarded
with authorship and the fees paid
The walls that were built as division,
demolished stay, in records kept
The plazas that welcomed the pigeons
are free of them, just pictures left
The wars that promised celebrations
of methods, or of grouping means,
are now plans past of times ancient,
each side to gain from its wins
A left sway old, new, combined,
is claiming business leadership
A right sway of the modern finds
is taking root through gifted means
‘Go, write,’ dispensed I now am
to do creative poem writing
in my place which world’s former plans
had prophet-told as their something
V.P.T. 1.05.2008
When things go back to the norms of about thirty years before when possession was state-unidentified but was a potential individual achievement, and when control was police-strict though lawfully unjustified, it means that Big Politics is unchangingly alive.
Now, like it was thirty years ago, the country is controlled by the domestic politicians and is owned by the world businesses, the only difference seen in the hierarchies of control and ownership that are now graded through the objects of possession and control, and were, thirty years ago, in the structures of the subjects of ownership and control.
This is why we see the former political functionary to be managing a plant that was sold by the state for one dollar, and selling a football team that will be bought from the state for no more.
This is why we see foreign businesses to enter the political headquarters to run the state.
A change of strategy is now in advent, likened to a medic experimenting on diseases with electric currents to achieve side influx of distorted in the hurry energy, likened to a stage of physical stimulation following a socially-mental and mentally-social preliminary aptitude treatment, likened to selection procedures related to the preparation of the future inhabitants of the moon and space colonies.
In one word, now that the transition period for Bulgaria is over, having taken the country nowhere, the streets must be cleared of the barriers that stopped the inquisitive from reaching the construction sites, the buildings must be cleared of the unused materials, the national customs must be established and periodically innovated for attractive and stimulating freshness, the secrets that have shown through some of the jumbled actions must be sold out as know-how, the ministers must double-testify that they are ignorant on the little evidence they have but will act determinedly to defeat any evil, and everybody must be happy when passed-by a project or a plan connected with ownership and control, experimentation or settlement, demolition or construction, planned motion or planned rest, expected reaction or stimulated action, in one word everybody must be grateful to be alive in a world of a strict organization of the changed and changing conditions and rules.
Big Politics always has the last word.
To have a word, you must compose the sounds into a compact whole, to arrange the sounds, you must display them apart for selection and arrangement, to display the sounds, you must compose a show pattern, to compose a show pattern, you must produce a compact whole of all the sounds you can produce or hear and add all the notions that need words to carry them.
This strategy of assembling and disassembling can be seen in any natural or artificial organization.
Imagine looking at one of your personality features in a mirror, and imagine half of your feature’s image laughing and half of it frowning at you, like theatre masks carrying the opposite moods of just one character.
Now imagine a generation span looking at itself in a mirror, half of its image supporting, for fifty socialist years, a monopolistic policy while swiftly stretching-up from a low background start, and half of its image, nowadays, striving to cling to the heights of growth while shunning the numerous stumbling policies. Would you think that the person looking at himself in the mirror is seeing, or is planning, reality.
The trade unionists, now with the new task to produce a shadow of a left-wing policy, say that 990 000 households in Bulgaria live below the non-poverty minimum, which makes them the frowning half of the image, the laughing half made up of the rest of the households.
But also, a vast majority among the people of low means possess homes from socialist times, which makes them the laughing half, while the post-socialism generation span is frowning at city rents and is dreaming of finding the same office jobs in their native places.
The social spheres, slowly privatized and changing their policy from social to business are looking in the mirror to find out that there are more people than a laughing half can accommodate, and more people than a frowning half can expand for, in one word, there are redundant people, which may lead the mirror to look back at the person and see who is looking at himself.
I now recall an old poem of mine:
Living In A Dream
Your mirror’s made of different patches
Your gown’s worn out, and is black
There are no bars, there are no latches
Upon your door, there are no plates
You live by books that tell you where
and how things will carry on
You think it ordinary, fair,
to give back things where they come from
Your bed is in the very middle
of floor, of space, of time and life
You’ve given long up solving riddles
of where...when...who...how...why...
V.P.T.
Each year on May the ninth, ever since the end of World
War Two, Big politics celebrates
A date chosen partially because it set the beginning of a new future for the world, but mainly because it set the end of an open confrontation between the developed states.
In the future, the people will know that it was on this date that World War II ended, and will never care about what war it was and who fought whom, because they, the grandchildren of former enemies, will be living side by side.
Like tended flowers planted in a cultivated environment.
Now the people know that there were two main military industries that gathered their armies in a war to test their arms in a clearance of the defected world structures and the establishment of larger and more stable ones.
There existed an impossibility to ignore the call of natural antipathy and that of law’s horn for participation in man slaughter.
A couple of decades ago, the people believed that the obligatory confrontation between the east block and the west countries was due to the wrong way in which the opponent was going in search of development, and everybody seemed ignorant of their participation in an alternative aspect of one and the same road to a singular aim.
The social and economic roads were guarded so that little alien came in to dilute the style of life and work, and little new was produced to spoil the easy implementation of the ready development plans.
Right after the end of the Second World War for Europe, the soldiers who survived the battles were cheered and brushed aside of the new economic and technological development for which they had cleared the ground and tested the equipment in real-life competition.
It was like after each interruption in the smoothness of control, during which interruption the redundant where they naturally belonged were used to destabilize the structures that had to go, and stabilize the ones that had to stay, or get self-blocked in their reluctance to participate in a scheme.
During the war, many were taken from their field work and home life to die or kill on the battlefields, many were lured by the chance to exercise their courage on either side of the front and frontier line, many were joining economic blocks or political alliances, many were staying behind to be bombed, to die, survive, loot, to enrich, many were developing a natural dependence or hatred, many were gathering their life stories to verify participation in an outrageous world experiment on mankind.
Like in any historical social cultivation which gets laundered in the words of justice, freedom, liberties, and many more, whose meanings hurry to depart as soon as the tools of enforcing them get chosen.
The season has, again, taken us into May the ninth.
Nowadays, the personal levels are prompting a new threat that is being developed with the help of restrictive laws: it is that neighbours obliged to live silently and unobtrusively like obedient children seem to be stirred into natural reaction by the wartime shadows, and seem to be feeling the presence of an enemy or a friend around. No one will openly admit to having such antagonistic feelings but many will secretly struggle to defeat a rival’s identity or reputation and will openly form a group with a friend, or will openly attack a weak opponent and secretly form a structure of friend alliances.
A subtle naturally developed recognition of the fact that a rival is living nearby, the psychological result of different periods of methodic mingling and integration, in a process as vital on an individual level as was the choosing which sides were to tackle each other in World War Two.
The war today being elsewhere, May the ninth is only
But who will swear that the people are not carrying in their hearts the germs of confrontation, treachery, and hatred, and who will enforce the laws of co-existence so deeply as to create the boundaries of human separation in a boundary-free social union. And moreover, who can change the human nature to simplify its needs to individual freedom and social dependence, instead of striving to outgrow a social environment and to subordinate the freedom of the other people with devoting one’s own life to the control cause.
It is May the ninth,
Big Politics is now planning its future, hiding what can be reserved as a plan or a territory for its new generations of politicians to get engaged with and keep the old structures working, and offering the world a layout of policies taking advance up and the national specifics down, and applying methods which change with the change of the people’s awareness, fixing and locking political strategies with the appointment of politicians whose natural aptitudes are adverse to the directions in which they are leading the population’s hopes, beliefs, and dependencies.
Big Politics is the world itself, if one is part of it, one cannot see it, if one is outside it, one cannot avail of the security and means its structures provide to their elements or customers.
That is what Big Politics is, but what am I?
It is interesting how easy it is for one to learn from the methods of Big Politics and from the results achieved through such methods, and to practise balancing them with own methods.
On the 26th of April, my neighbour was in a hurry to have her plumbers cut and mend the central heating pipe that had allegedly rotten between floors, but ever since she has been applying a Big Politics strategy with going round to say how reluctant I am to have the hole between floors cemented, while telling me how reluctant the plumbers are to bring over their equipment to mend their own work.
In the meantime, I have been going round saying how much I preferred to have the leakage which the plumber left behind stopped before another master comes over to cement the hole between the floors and do some innovation in my neighbour’s flat, and have been wondering at the cheekishness of such combinations to make me pay half of all costs.
Big Politics has its peripheral men, and they are the best guardians of its policy. These peripheral men both guard the structures that employ them and give them a free hand at making some additional money on people unprotected by any structure, and exercise their natural antipathy for the poor, the powerless, and the ones selected by a former Big Politics line to establish former rules.
Today, May 11th, after waiting in vain for my neighbour’s plumbers to come, I took the liberty to bother her with a question.
‘I have just spoken to them’, she said, ‘They said they came and went back.’
‘Where to, I didn’t see them come.’
‘One said the other one came to him and went home.’
‘From his cottage like you went to yours and left me here to wait for them?’
‘You can’t tell me when to go to my cottage,’ my neighbour said.
‘You seem to be lying to me,’ I said.
‘Are you calling me a liar?’
‘Almost, you are making a monkey of me.’
She said nothing but banged her door.
Some minutes later she rang at my door and said, ‘They will be coming on Sunday.’
‘But it is Sunday today, and last time you said they would be coming on Sunday.’
‘This time they will come.’
Some time later she rang the bell again and said, ‘Please excuse me, they will be coming on Saturday, not Sunday.’
‘All is clear,’ I said, and went out to buy a loaf of bread.
The family that used to work abroad, representing the socialist side of Big Politics, now working for the capitalist side of Big Politics at home, passed by me on their way out, silent and indignant at their failure to drive me out of my flat and introduce, through foreign lodgers or owners, a new line of Big Politics which to screen their past and to support their present.
In the small marketplace, the woman who always went like a shadow from shop to shop, neither begging, nor buying, turned her back on me and my bread. She seemed like an experiment on the endurance of a human type. That is when I saw the other side of Big Politics to tempt me to give her my loaf, or to compare myself with her. Comparison was more killing to Big Politics than charity, and I thought:
Again, again, I’m walking anxious, hungry
Again I’ll have to hold onto my future day
Tomorrow I’ll wake up for new clutching
And every day will take me on my way
Don’t give me anything, I’m living on my future
For it I’ll live until I slowly die
Don’t tell me what I’m missing in life gruesome
As long as my life lasts, I’ll see another day
Big politics has a lot of funny stories and jokes about its great leaders, especially about those who have not been given the pedestal of mankind’s fathers, and will repeat them to establish its ancestry through the ridiculous attempts at forward lineage of the competition it cannot buy cheap or demolish in person or in image, or both, and will look at the following old story of mine with the scorn of a contemporary to events described:
‘It must have been the raw mushrooms that I’d eaten, or that goose Helen that kept on passing peasantries at me, but anyway what it was must have been something as simple and ever-lasting as that, because on the morning after, I felt as new and fresh as if I had been poisoned dead and allowed a second life.
Or as if I made the New Year decision never to eat mushrooms again and to poison Helen to death, and had kept it.
But it was too early for decisions, with meddlers of about seven months between me and the New Year, and it was too early for a weekend, with five days of separation yet to go.
Only Helen was always close by, in all seasons, on all days.
As permanent as time.
And as unwelcome too.
The only thing the raw mushrooms gave me was a strong pain in the stomach and a slight hope that I would get sick, even half-poisoned, and would be taken to hospital where there would be strict visiting hours and strict doctors would accept no advice or instructions from non-professional staff.
This would give me two or three days without Helen.
I concentrated on the pain and thought about how much it hurt, and wondered if another raw mushroom would confirm the pain or kill me.
I felt sleepy, which was something, and I came up with the thought that the best position in which to be found by Helen, was in bed and semi-conscious.
I would have to leave the door open for she was apt not to intrude when she was wanted.
I remembered her saying once that she had taken up smoking the moment her boyfriend, off safe and sound now, had given it up. And it was not, I am sure, due to her goose intention to tease him.
With or without Helen, I had to propound myself.
Making a fool of myself with writing an article about me as a writer, and paying a newspaper reporter to sign it, take it to his newspaper editor and get paid for it, was close to the free professional training which the war veterans were offered to be rewarded with, but chose to wait for a deserved post-war rank promotion at a time when the army was being cleared of pre-war staff.
But it was worth the trouble and the self-pity.
I would be talked about, and my book would probably be bought and read.
There was no hope for anybody to write about me if I myself didn’t, and if I didn’t, my book would be seen as written by a nobody.
It was a good book.
With all the philosophy of my past years, with the temperament of my present, and the nostalgia of the future in it.
A good book, but it needed advertising.
The article I wrote about myself followed the accepted pattern of praise, advice, a hint at something not fully expressed, and a lure taking in the direction of something probably there but completely understood by the reader. I also introduced a pinpoint to take away from the general impression that cliché articles are written by the author’s friends as a favour returned, or by the friends of editors for culture strategist authors. I managed to subtly lead into the feeling that a well-mixing type like the author was not undermining, but was supporting, the work of other authors, and that what the article really was meant to achieve was to imply that it was worth taking it for granted, and a challenge to buy the book to check the incompatibility between the palettes of artistic norms utilized by the author and sensed by the critic.
There was a very personal and very pathetic tinge-and-tingle in my article about myself.
Reading it through to proof it, I somehow liked it much better than my book which sounded like a draft. That was why I kept the article and sent the book, hoping that the two were supplementing so much each other that no one would make the difference.
Anyway, the book being a bit longer than the article about it, the newspaper decided on publishing it in parts, under the name of the reporter whom I had paid to advertise my writing.
I still have the article, and if you want to read it, please contact the reporter.’
Big Politics cares nothing about the world as long as the world keeps turning round at predictable speeds, and grows fast in planned places and to planned heights. Big Politics has no concern about life, death, sickness, or health, because it is always where there is a clear first and a secure second chance.
Big politics is history itself, and has its importance because it organizes the people as to nature, and tries to change the nature of things, of time and space, as to the people, leaving for itself the place from where the successful experiments can be approved, and the unsuccessful can be deleted from the records.
Each one historical event, incident, happening, circumstance, or condition, has its loyal mistress and its lawful wife, the first with the task to keep things in check for the existent competition and delude the public about the reality of things, and the second with the plans to come with time and claim reality as her own products of idea, finance, thought, and connections.
Each one group of people, or nation, or universe mankind, can be used in politics to create that social momentum that can turn the main wheel of history.
Each new social or political theory is created in its economic part for a specific region in the world and is adapted to the social characteristics of the people living there, or the national specifics are derived from and the economic axes are created for an economic development, and each population is made to believe that what every local person is engaged in the establishing of is a social policy created especially for his or her welfare.
In the line of such thinking, I am wondering about the logic of keeping the health care and health insurance reform on the scales of having been started and not having been finished.
Lots of pensioners who are, like me, health insured by the state, are obliged to pay a second health insurance if they do entrepreneur work to add to their pensions, when they have sales of course, and lots of pensioners who let restituted property, or have additional income, not only evade paying this double health insurance, but can avail of all the benefits which a tradesperson is forbidden because of having been classification into business, and business seen as always prosperous.
The blend of socialism and capitalism is most obvious in the sphere of small business in Bulgaria, maybe because the Bulgarians are a hard-working people on the whole, each one with somebody else’s loyal mistress to stop him from making a successful step, and somebody else’s wife to lawfully claim each one of the roads to be the property of her husband.
The government seems to be as pathetically lost about how to proceed with the health reform while taking into account the interests of the east, both north and south, and the interests of the west, both north and south, that one really feels for this class left on their own in the classroom to unravel- in the absence of the teacher and in competition with the class next door- a blackboard of unfamiliar formulae.
The result is raising the health insurance to eight per cent, which gives the health insurance fund my 19,20 levs plus 2 for bank transfer each month, which I have to pay from my monthly pension of 142 levs because I have no sales of my discs of poetry and fiction.
The alternative is for me to stop my self-publishing or for the parliament to pass laws that are connected much more with either socialism or capitalism, and are not socialist for the population that is in small business on a personal level, or capitalist for the state monopolists that are making the poor pay for the existence of the large corporations.
It is a happy circumstance that the law no more obliges the pensioners working as self-tradesmen, like those selling chewing gum and coffee in kiosks, to pay social insurance, but it is unfair even to the socialist model to have one person to pay for all, and all for one, if it is only a few who can use the service of a dentist, for example.
Obligatory health check-ups are not a solution, but obligatory personal health insurance accounts are, the first playing a trick on the wife of medical care, the second playing against its mistress.
Big Politics pays no insurances because it is globally self-insured, and needs no payments because money belongs to its numberless safes, and is obliged to do nothing because everybody is carrying out its tasks, and is selling nothing because it has no own product to sell.
But Big Politics can burn a house, kill a man, leave someone to starve, rob someone else, oblige some people to give what they want to keep, keep others to train in doing what they are reluctant to do, gossip about the abilities of a rebel, and demolish the life work of an inconvenient man.
Big Politics is everything, even what I have become.
Big Politics deserves its honours, its history, and its dues, sometimes brass rather than genuine gold, sometimes distorted rather than sequential, sometimes extorted rather than offered.
If I write a story collection, it will start like this:
Continuous changes, of individuals or of environment, deprive the people concerned of the potential for orientation on the basis of pattern and own co-ordination system.
He was an international activist with the task to change the environment as soon as the target groups showed signs of settlement into routine and style.
The changes were usually introduced through individuals that were put in the lead or through an influx similar to a previous one channelled out of a place, in one direction, to stir the environment, and in an opposite direction to stir the forming, inside and outside the place, settlements.
His historical role was to create a home pattern of a blend of two political systems as a variant appropriate for the country and thus different from the variants already developed in other countries.
It sometimes happened that the people involved in a new direction of policy taken were reluctant to get on the move again, but having been reminded that they had availed of an opportunity once, they were obliged to take any subsequent opportunity, and their children, too, could not hope to escape the given opportunities because they themselves were born in artificially created economic conditions.
He had sent his own daughter away, and had adopted a son that was growing under his care.
One could make a parallel between the development of the girl introduced in a completely new, though settled, environment, and the boy who was native to the place but lived in a changing environment: in one word, one thing was stable in either case, one thing was unstable….
Or my future collection of short stories may have a different from the above beginning:
It was a fine day, one of those early summer days when the freedom of being engaged was not paying the bills and expressing oneself freely was a certainty that no engagement would come to provide means.
The sun was bright and the sky was a bit misty in the morning, but otherwise everything was pointing to the fact that one could either avail of the summer day and wander hungry and pointless outdoors, or could stay in an working place all through the sunlight hours and wish for the freedom to be unemployed, but not moneyless.
It was a day after the church had surprised the world with the recognition of the existence of extraterrestrial life, forgetting that some couple of hundred years before it had been burning people alive for believing that the earth was not the centre of the universe.
But this is how life goes on, there are a lot of assets, positive and negative, which can be used. It is only when an asset is used individually and separated from the rest that its full might and power can be applied as a doctrine, and only later can that doctrine can form a separate fraction that is both particular in functions and carrying the essence of the whole of many assets.
Life is based on the dualism of things. Where there is a system producing its own structure, there must be a structure producing its own system. It is like having bread and salt, salt and pepper, oil and vinegar, and all the balances which the poor apply in diets, and the rich apply in using the particular to influence the whole with representing it for the purpose of adding assets to own interests, and using the whole made-up of particular images easy to dump onto the heads of the gullible.
Science was at that time silently cheering at the recognition of the existence of extra terrestrial life because science was then so far ahead of the world that if it left the status quo to formulate what was feasible and what was impossible, it would have to wait a thousand more years for the people to look up from their chores and see that man was living on the moon, and that the failures in the manipulation of the earth and climate processes were only a temporary nag.
She was a woman who welcomed the new schools of thinking owing to the experience she had in being particularly used by a whole, in whose belief she had been led when looking for help, but was now strong enough to comment on the particular weakness of a whole and influence the life of someone particular.
She had given up active participation in the benefits of life to look for life’s survival means. But times had changed, benefit and survival were on shorter span scales and closer to a centre of stillness. There was someone else who was denied survival means for having formerly participated in the benefits of life.
I am not sure if the following would not be a better beginning for my collection of short stories about Big Politics, taken that Big Politics has already worked out and implemented in my reality a few of its own plots:
The news spread by the media about a rumour spread by some ill-thinkers of the banking system experiencing difficulties came as an expected shock for those who were preparing to create a money flux through the country, like through a coach station, for the development of structures and systems further east on money going in that direction for advertising the changes purposes, and in the opposite direction, that is, going west, for the purpose of creating permanent dependencies.
Two new players were putting heads together to make even in the present for their separation in the past, sure that they would not see the future but their children would.
They were the former party activist who used to bring home the news of foreign achievement and provide the guidelines of industrial imitation during the process of social development, and the former industrialist immigrant whose parents had used to buy know-how from foreign companies, but who had spent almost an entire life abroad and in an environment of social imitation and integration between the structures of the state and the money of the businesses.
People like me, who had little savings, about four hundred and so in the fading dollar currency, were more anxious, after we heard the news about the rumour, than those who had thousands, because we would lose faith in our belonging, and what the richer people would lose was credit in the institution.
There was no fear, however, but for the banks that would have to take an unusual flow through them, but there having been established lots of branches of all the different world banks, the only inconvenience could come from inadequate amounts of cash asked in withdrawals by the depositors.
One more inconvenience would be the new ranks of belonging which the branches, which had got accustomed to homeland business clients, would have to grow up to.
Maybe there was one more inconvenience that was connected with money promised but withheld because there is a permanently limited amount of money in the world, or money given for peripheral waste and then claimed back on a huge interest.
Maybe there were a few more inconveniences, but what mattered in my case was more or less restricted in the four hundred and so in the fading dollar currency that I had at a bank and could get in my purse first thing in the morning, or could leave to ripen to about under five hundred in the same fading currency….
Or maybe the stories about Big Politics might start with:
The world was then engaged in passing permissions that broke the beliefs of the narrow-minded who had swayed into them at about expiry date. It was like becoming a party member before a party gets banned.
One permission was given to people of the same sex to get married and raise children, a move towards liberalization never seen in the centuries when a family was a vital cell in the huge social organism.
The question about how it came that a couple of the same sex came to live together: was it because they were attracted to each other or were playing roles, was it because they were business partners where one was to be kept under continuous monitoring and separation from the other people, or were both interested in staying alienated and engaged in some big project, or a person was escaping a trap with trapping the hunter into a love affair, that question was never discussed like there seldom is discussed the question of love in pre-marital contracts.
Love and attraction was at that time, like at any time before, a tricky social event, quite different from the world of the natural where whole groups fell in love at the same time and gave birth to offspring at about the same time too. But the energy in the world, having been produced by supreme powers in the ratios existent, each group has adapted and fought for one segment of the energy variants to use that variety in the extra charging of the moment of creation of the next generation.
Some would say that love games and dances were carried out to adapt to the bio-field of the partner, some would say that it was a whirlpool of energy which the couple created through adequate moves and gestures, some would say that it was to clear the place and themselves of unhelpful energy types. Whatever the reason, love affairs follow their own rules.
The love affair between him and her, the Queen of the Poor and the King of the Poor, was not a dance or a moonlight emotional life, it was a simple attraction to the world…
One can never say if Big Politics will be grateful for any effort to support the direction it has taken or will feel the publicity as a natural need to change its direction, players, or combinations of classified information and business advertising.
Big Politics has its branches, and the cycle of education politics is taking a round.
This time, the top police structures emissaries to the different school and the education administration are surreptitiously changing their policy in the early formation of social and professional groups with vows that they themselves have no political belonging, thus they must be accepted as everybody’s boss and employee, and that no youth is coloured in the banners of his family’s lineage or business, thus the education system can quite rightfully turn into a structure, or a structure into an education system, depending on the directions already applied in the different places of knowledge and training.
In this very obviously summer light, I wrote the following poem:
I See Myself In My Shadow
I see myself in my huge shadow
So big it is, so small I’ve shrunk
I need an opening, and like an arrow,
I’ll dash for cover and will hide inside
Like in a home I’ll be, in my shadow, living
I’m sorry that I left it for the sunlit world
In it I’ll tame myself and live on, pleasing
my patience skill, away from flights and birds
V.P.T. 19.05.2008
Big Politics may not like the beginning of my collection of short stories, that is why I may try to start it like this:
The greatest and most cynical paradox is in the fact that any modern and civilian way of torture can be detected in its initial or subtle form by only those people who would have applied it on their real enemies, would have suffered through it with the indignation of weak intellectuals, or would have fought it as a soldier fights against an old-fashioned weapon, repellent as is the weapon’s warrior repellant to his opponent’s view onto the justice of leaving an enemy alive.
The modern ways of torture are in the physical and the psychological spectrum, and may range from physical exhaustion and emotional instability of the connections between the individuals and the social groups, from the anxiety of protection to the revenge sought for an insult to physical or integrity survival.
It is like in television where the viewers may experience the fear arising from their identification with the troubles of a main film character or the fear stirred by the danger of getting in situations similar to the ones created for reality show participants. Or one may look for hope and social connections in what the modern businesses are providing as options saturated with participation to the point of getting socially soaked, or in the old customs cleared of their lineage to the point of social sterility.
In one word, only a predator may detect the tricks of another predator to catch a prey.
The time has come for many films to be made, and books to be written, about the transition period in which the oldest capitalist principles were introduced in Bulgaria to stimulate entrepreneurship, and the oldest socialist principles were introduced abroad to introduce diversity, while on both sides of the iron curtain, the big structures were matched and connected to create the certainty of stability and flow.
The author of this collection of short stories is almost happy she wrote all through the transition period, when other people were consecutively keeping their positions, leaving the country for organized places, availing of the bounty of the collapsing system, lost in problems and secret celebration, seeing through the mist of social and economic anarchy, expressing indignation, getting organized by leaders, collecting material and information for future projects, grouping and regrouping in parties, criticizing, fighting against individual enemies, escaping from responsibility, suffering famine and cold, getting born and giving birth, learning the sciences and learning addiction, in one word, all the aspects of living in an environment created out of all the aspects of dying.
The greatest and most cynical paradox is in the fact that any modern and civilian way of torture can be detected in its initial or subtle form by only those people who would have applied it on their real enemies, would have suffered through with the indignation of weak intellectuals, or would have fought it as a soldier fights against an old-fashioned weapon, repellent as is the weapon’s warrior repellant to his opponent’s view onto the justice of leaving an enemy alive.
The author of this collection of short stories is grateful to all the subtle forms of modern torture for having kept themselves as far away from her as possible, and for their choice of places where the author’s warrior spirit has led her to examine the world order’s might, and to sense the presence of the makers of global plans and targets, as well as, to understand the historical torture to have to keep the world structures standing and the world flows channelled.
I am not sure how close my father was, in his thoughts, to the way Big Politics acts, but he always said, ‘Every generation goes through at least one war’, speaking from experience and warning me of the traps set most innocently by the social groups that are given the freedom to practise their skills in their own interests and corner the people of humbler or no belonging, but are taken the privilege to establish their skills as power, cornered by the crowds of shattered or no belonging.
I am sure my father was right to warn me to beware of the interests of Big Politics, like my mother has been teaching me to stay away from where Big Politics steps.
I wonder whose advice I have been following.
Life is getting into its universal channels, leaving the people of no orientation to loom in the open spaces where no student flow, no workers group, no construction vehicles, no service or advertisement, no producers protest, no market tools, no organization, is passing or has taken position.
If one expresses uncertainty, it is usually exploited as the exception reinforcing the rule, and if one dares express doubt or criticism, there are all those structures that may see to that person’s starting a new tune on the strings of fear and complaint.
The capital of Bulgaria is a bit brighter and warmer relation to all the well-organized world administration centres, with everybody getting up in the morning to wash, take the kids to school, drive to an office or a shop where to spend the day before getting the children from school and going back home in the full hope that the water supply has been, after a day of interception, renewed.
The different city businesses, from the doctor to the plumber, are in the city, looking for their customers among the crowds, unable to look for them in the countryside where there are many patients and clients but few specialized service.
It seems that the world is juggling with a few aspects, changing their combinations only, as if trying to find out how much of the naturally developed will adapt to an artificially inappropriate style, and how much a style can influence the inappropriately chosen for it subjects, all the rest being just reasonable advertisement and open impact on the vulnerable public.
I guess that my collection of short stories will have to wait until I cope with my emotional responsibility for my relatives’ unemployment, sicknesses, problems, aging, fears, and all the results of the world’s need to get paid for listening or saying something in the hives it has created for the locked-up city people.
If only I had continued with my research work into the realms of language compatibility, I might have probably come up with an idea about how close mankind is to the time when the different programs rendering speech into text will eliminate the need for an interpreter to overlap the words of the clever table-sitter’s and the charming lady-favourite’s talk on how they see the world in its development.
For the time being, I have to find my route into my own world, leaving the open spaces for important projects taking for granted the fact that people get born all the time but organization is made once and forever.
Big Politics is a structure of pyramids, pyramids standing and upturned, each pyramid in the sphere of a political, economic, technological, social, and what-not environment, each pyramid changing in organization and staff like a living organism changes as to a predominant stimulated in development and multiplication element of a complex environment, that stimulates and supports changes in it, the top of each pyramid representing the structures it is elated over rather than controlling the functions and the connections of the structures below itself.
One can say that the world is almost globally covered with structures whose interests are so well balanced that they are the modern gods, and theirs are the unique decisions that run mankind.
I am just an amateur trying to get myself integrated in one of the world’s structures, but my decision to write placed me outside the teaching profession, my self-publishing placed me outside the writer’s job, my background placed me outside the impartial professionals, my age put me among the non-prospective to development, my development placed me in the group of the socialist system products, and my decision about what to do next must be controlled by reason and not by ambition. In one word, I must plan for myself the way Big Politics plans for mankind, the difference between us in the implementation of the plans that need support in my case, and time in the case of Big Politics.
There are two major aspects to the world: the one from below, from which position a subject sees the deeds of a sovereign, or from above, from which position a sovereign rules and enlarges a realm and an empire.
The changes just announced to be starting in the home affairs office seem to be following a borrowed foreign model which they are modifying to the extent of openly pronouncing the regular policeman to be the sovereign of power, and the sovereign of order to be the subject of the institution of enforcement and control.
The consequences are already seen in advance by many, but it will take some time for the home affairs to recognize them and not only change the modified adopted variant but also contribute to changes in the original model.
The fact that the special intelligence means will be better controlled will not eliminate mistakes connected with survey and monitoring, like confusing which window belongs to a state secretary and which to his neighbour, nor will the public be able to control what information is stored where in the world and used for what purposes.
The teaching of loyalty to the job through giving the freedom to use a job for own interests has been applied in Bulgaria in the past almost twenty years, maybe more if seen in the light of preparing the environment for a transition period, and the selection of appropriate staff for the specifics of a job has followed the pattern of giving the part of a beauty to the aging or untalented wife of the play director in return for concessions connected with the money the producer is ready to invest.
It is almost clear, seen in the shadow of the home and international offices, why my life has been regulated by the silt of the different stages in modern politics, with this now final stage of my getting no classes and paying part of my pension for the years when no school or language course would hire me.
I am not ungrateful for what I have or am given.
Having lived to the age of sixty I know better than complain of life, but I am wondering when the profession of control will be less important than the profession of production, and when the child of a policeman will respect his teacher more than he respects the power of his father to use the gathered information about what the teacher said and did today.
Maybe Big Politics has its criterion about jobs and tasks, secrecy and transparency, subordination and loyalty, staff and specialization, and rather than leave things to take their natural trend, is choosing the peasant of estate to get trained to be an officer, changing its mind and making him the party commissar in a huge state plant, then using his organization skills to have him organize a capitalist-type business, all the while relying on his ignorance of what he is doing or why, and following the interesting ideas this modern trainee is producing in an effort to create something like a new crop yield.
The best way to let the different instances check whom or which window they are monitoring is to get up on a moonlit night and cook beans on night electricity tariff, the only problem being that the neighbour under survey has moved out and the lodgers also light their windows at night.
There are all those amendments to be made in the different approaches to lighted windows and aging or untalented beauties.
And there are all those things I have to still learn from Big Politics about the world, or rather through the world about Big Politics, or maybe the world and Big Politics will learn about me.
Willingly or unwillingly, it is either an everyday hero that makes the records of history or the records of history that make a hero out of an ordinary person.
Big Politics has its approach to every single person, and approach varies with the environment the person is living in. Big Politics has its approach to every social chain, and the chains strongly depend on the natural aptitudes of the people.
No wonder that my neighbours, almost lovingly like when one must be kept away of the main flood, and almost protectively, like when one must not be turned into a derogatory to activity or impassivity example, called me ‘crazy’ and wanted to call a meeting to oust me of my own apartment.
Maybe it was in some way connected with the real estate deals which the military and municipal officials profited by but are now facing as a scandal.
Maybe it was for not allowing them to block my telephone to have my line for a chemist’s chop in one of the garages.
Or for not allowing anyone to park their cars outside my garage.
Or for not allowing them to blame the pigeons’ existence on my balcony plants.
Or for questioning the need to raise money, every now and then, for the same repairs.
Or for blaming my cracked floor slab on the repairs my downstairs neighbour forced on me.
Or for asking them not to store their old electrical appliances on the landings and clear away the cardboard cases and old windows from the common balconies.
Or for asking them not to shake their cloths and blankets over all the floors below theirs.
Or for complaining of their digging up my improvised lawn outside my garage to leave me back with puddles made by their washing of balconies.
Or for entreating them not to throw cigarette butts down onto my head when I pass by the block.
Or for telling them not to keep their flower pots against my wall in winter.
Or for hinting at their sweeping the hairs fallen off their dog outside my door.
Or for my looking up to block their looking down on me from their position to provide assessment and references to third parties.
Or for my going after them to diversify the rumours with a bit of truth, and taking both rumour and truth in a third direction.
Or for allowing them clues for their checking me out through their access to files and specialized means.
Or for my fearlessness stood up against their threatening me with connections in the structures.
Or maybe for the numerous other things that, collectively with my education, background and decision to keep what I could from being taken away, wasted away twenty of my maturity years in struggling for survival.
I have a strong suspicion that I have turned more military than any military job can teach a person to be, but this can be explained with the lineage I got from my father who returned from the front to find himself out of the army and unemployed, but lucky not to be sent to a communist concentration camp like many other tsarist officers were.
And I have a strong suspicion that the old military staff was sacked and sent over to look for new professions because they would have otherwise blocked the tendency of ‘flattening’ a pyramid, or would have learned queer details from the classified top secret deals with property and know-how.
The military authorities are today involved in a scandal which is connected with the selling and buying of real estate, which controversial deals pass through private firms created to privatize state property, through the transformation of property from land to simple apartments, and round problems connected with the human factor or the collective and individual responsibility.
The deals of the Bulgarian military authorities of the past years had two major aims: the first was to get rid of ownership of land which is no more needed for military purposes, and the second was to make the paths of laundering money, which path began at the bargains with the land in favour of the buyer, went through the buying of flats in favour of the seller, and will land in the investment of influence and state money in the building of new housing complexes.
This new scandal is following the one connected with the police and the using of gathered and classified information for the purpose of creating security and stability through homeland organized structures. It is preceding the scandal connected with the using of funds in the education system, especially after the introduction of the maturity examinations which will test the psychological aptitude of the school-leavers to choose correctly from the variety of linguistic questions on a specific set of literary material, and to derive logic from mathematical problems covering an unsettled range of material combinations. The education scandal has one advantage coming with a transition period during which the rendering of points into marks will be adapted to the public opinion and the students’ achievement, and will slowly near the international norms needed for the development of the specifics of the Bulgarian education system and structures.
There is a double universal truth, however, and it is showing through all the scandals: every top official is responsible to his or her individual survival and will prepare an own retreat place among a previously indirectly favoured contingent, and also has a scandal, prepared with the help of a business accomplice or on the back of an innocent administration victim, which to trigger for the clearance of decades of previous adversity and leave the responsibility for the results to just a few people who can depend on the law of collective responsibility, suffer through cross-interest investigations, or blame the municipality for its role of launderette.
The saying goes ‘Everything in due time’, and one can quote the history of support of the saying, and be quoted, everyone will be right if seen by the principle of havoc that creates its confrontations inside a group during a period of stagnation and the principle of havoc that gets created in the integrity of a group through the integration or deduction of one or more key elements.
One of the problems of mankind is that nothing lasts forever, and only continuous changes can keep things in one place, especially if a new hierarchy must be created in the place where an older one existed.
It is like creating a new settlement in the place of a previous one: you take away some of the elements, you keep some, you add some, you keep some in store, you promise some, you make the population create some, you substitute some of the population, you make some of the population change, in one word, you build a sand castle strong enough to last until your new plan steps on it and life starts building its new sand castle all over again.
How crazy I have been in the past twenty years, how crazy I was before that, how crazy I will be, only ‘Dorman’ can say.
Big Politics will leave no free radicals unless they serve the purpose of supporting the structures and the flows, but will clear its premises for innovated or new structures and for changed as to substance or channel flows.
With the ‘warm spring wind’, like the name of the street where the investigation quarters are, there suddenly now comes the scandal with the ‘developments’, that is, the special interest of the special agencies for special people.
I have been one of those very special people for whom the special agencies have been very special, so special that I have developed the need to seek and find where they are hiding and what they are planning to do.
The whole of the development of the socialist countries was controlled by a double factor: the legal structures that kept the system status quo and controlled who was doing and saying what, and the secret structures that controlled who and what was doing and saying what, and worked for a shadow status quo.
The difference was in which side the legal and the secret structures were working for: the legal structures were working for the official system, and the secret structures were working for the opponent system, thus nothing of the potential was wasted, though it was rarely used to the benefit of the producer of a product or an idea.
The legal structures controlled the conformist part of the population, the secret structures controlled the non-conformist part, thus the stability and the flow of information were ensured by the higher level that controlled both.
No new idea went where the stability depended on the strictness of the observance of the established rules, and no new idea was lost either because it was transported through the system of informing towards storage or exploitation in appropriate places, which is how my father’s invention found its way abroad to be exploited without his participation in its development or the material or moral profit from it, but he himself was ‘developed’ and controlled in Bulgaria all the while.
Now the new scandals are turning their attention to the numerous developments of people of importance to either side.
The current issue today is whether the developments were in favour of the connection between the socialist block and the capitalist block, and this is easy to verify with examples of how the different individuals were used or misused, or the developments served the idea of separation of the two blocks.
I have been the object of many developments, but ever since I was taught by my parents to step over the fringes arranged vertically to the carpet whenever I entered the room where my father kept his engineering designs, I have seen the existence of developments as something connected with the control over the people of talent and ingenuity, and have developed my way of escape from development through flaws in the sphere where I am expected to be talented, and through talents in spheres of no interest to the common developer.+
I guess that the very multitude of meanings of the word ‘develop’, especially where it is connected with the making of a film out of a negative, or where in chess one is preparing an attack, or where in mathematics a formula is worked out of a maze of formulae, or where in construction an area is built up, or in reasoning where a thesis is put forward, or where a cold or a habit is accepted as intrinsic, or where a quality is sophisticated and enlarged, or in the many other spheres where the meanings of the word are in control, they all testify to who the developers have been and by what professional principles development is achieved.
Of course, to have different models of development for the different countries, you need to know a few basic languages well enough to find that term which will cover the spheres that can be controlled and the people outside those spheres who will be developed.
It is an interesting game, the one to develop people, especially if you have the means to carry it out in secret, and enjoy the view and the progress of development, like having a pet at the side of your main occupations which might be to control who is not having a pet and why, or whose pet can take the place of yours, along what channels, and through what means.
Big Politics knows better than have a fireworks celebration at noon, but can afford it when an individual has neared the revelation of its tricks as close as to become a sparing partner of Big Politics itself, or of some of its staff, and a sparing partner can be found in any free radical who possesses interesting ideas and the stubbornness to survive individually.
However, everything has its beginning and its end, so does my self-publishing.
I cannot say that self-publishing has not gratified me with a bit of freedom to PR myself, but it has also been a too expensive hobby to be gratified by my low means.
Ever since 1994 when I opened another sole tradesperson business, I have been publishing my works in such an improvised format and quality- with the exception of the first eight pocketbook collections of poems- that only collectors of manuscripts could be interested in them, which is the reason for my giving them away instead of selling them, which with the exception of a few copies sold in a bookstore and one to a friend, I have been doing most successfully for fourteen years now.
Everything has its natural end in the end, and fearing that I may leave behind a self-publishing business that has to be fed rather than feed any swaying exhaustion attributed to malnutrition or to an awareness of some calamity lurking around, I am drawing the line.
Of course, my fear is nothing in comparison with what the contemporary civilization can create, once as a wish to stir fear, and a second time as the impossibility to escape fearing, the first being the product of that ridge of people risen above their natural instincts and their power to administrate, the second being that groove through which the world sewage is flowing to nowhere.
Of course, a poet or a writer may be fearless enough to look for the whole quota of world beauty and confront with the description of it the impressions made by the world’s bulk of uncertainty and misery, both open and secret.
Life seems to be fair only to the people who would turn predator the moment they find out that they cannot head the herd, and is unfair to those who would give up their lives because they do not want to be told when to start fighting for them.
It is interesting how the contemporary civilization is selecting the natural aptitudes of the people and their groups, and is developing such relevant anarchies that the efforts to fight a weakness or to pursue a trait get dispersed into sprays of qualities which turn back on the individuals the moment a secret prepared for the right time of revealing comes out.
Secrets can be created at any level, by the individual who wants to stay in a group, or by a group member who wants to act as an individual.
The best way to create secrets is to break up the procedures and the social patterns of administration. Then any insignificant to the whole machine person can create a mine that will blast the life of a single person at some future moment, and any secret found in somebody’s closet will be attributed to the owner of this hiding place.
It will remain a secret to me, one to think over, why the most powerful, rich, and influential, people look, in one country wane and faded like old silk, and in another they look stout and shiny like on the verge of indignation at their own healthiness. Maybe it has to do with the fear that if you do not administer a place in a direction opposite to its natural development, it may grow far above its attributed level.
And it will forever remain a mystery to me why they made me pay 86.38 levs yesterday, in tax and interest for the year 2004 if they returned me, in 2005, under 40 levs for overpaid income tax, of which act I broadly acclaimed them, having myself spent half of 2004 out of work and thus pay.
Maybe they wanted me to pay ‘Dorman’ for publishing works that did not include him in the title, or for the poem below, who knows, but I paid to have my certificate of no obligations to the state prepared for the closing down of my self-publishing business.
All Time
The autumn is again an artist
who’s mixing the four natural hues:
the one of youth, the one of ripening,
the one of wisdom, and the one of blues
The sky’s again a perfect viewer
who brims in light to see itself
but stays away, unsure and clear,
in hidden ponds its mirrored face
The wind’s again lost to the landscape,
beyond the hills, in other lands
The dry tall grass stems talk to leafless
brown clusters of shrubs solemnly grave
The youth of late-green is enduring
and careless about life
The snow will pass over trimming
with frost its cheers, not its time
The autumn is again an artist
though no time to see its paints
No time to watch it shake its carpets
All time belongs to the spring next
V.P.T. 2.11.2004
Well, here I am, done with my first self-publishing entrepreneurship, and if there is another, it will be a new chapter in my speaking about the world and me inside its kaleidoscope.
Big Politics is like a dream in which one sees a future reality, and like a present reality that looks like a fulfilled dream, either way one has to wake up to a disappointment or the need to confirm the obviously gifted, trying to guess at the importance of the past to the future, and of the future to the past.
I guess that the historical charity of time, which can avoid making a revealing combination only until its policy’s expiry date, will bring to one round table me and all those who thought they could get from me the initial capital for their prosperity: for them to wonder at a brewing new chance to sell me out, and for me to get inspired by their effort and admiration for a greater work than most of my works have been.
At one or another point, they will have to buy instead of selling, and I will have to concede to Big Politics’ right to place demands for communal development controlled by those who can grow and control the people who have reached some heights, and not by those who can outgrow the planned average by adding individual power to their already stable position.
Maybe, at some future moment, Big Politics will find out that I am like the kid who will not accept the situation of being measured how tall he is by an adult who is squatting in front of him, but will reach up to his Granny to hold him up for him to look down ready for a fairer comparison of heights.
Although everybody, all around me, is finding the closing down of my self-publishing quasi-business a relaxing finish of my search for money through literary glory, I guess I will continue writing, and the following extract from a talented new story of mine is coming down to prove my positive, to each new beginning, intention, revealing its own whole plot most obligingly and candidly:
The strategy was to split up the functions and give one person the role ‘to own’, another ‘to manage’, a third ‘to perform’, a fourth ‘to assess’, a fifth ‘to plan’, a sixth ‘to keep records’, and the rest of functions, all done well and as trained by people of whom none was capable of linking, or nearing even, the realm of activity of someone else, thus all were helpless and inefficient but in the keeping of structures where real activity was done by robots.
The general training, which the people had all taken, had passed through exercises followed by selection, followed by another module of exercises and another round of selection, and thus on, where the first module based on ‘the balance of imitation’, the next on ‘the balance of similarity’, the third on ‘the balance of difference’, the next on ‘the balance of independent performance’, the next on ‘the balance of synchronized ideas’, and so on, with all the aims, targets, timing, tools, artistism, co-ordination, in fact all the peripheral needs of ‘balance’, gradually built into a chart tenfold larger than Mendeleev’s table of chemical elements.
The final test was a curiosity in the circles of assessment, and had risen a bit of uprisal of spontaneous opinion. The candidates for the different posts had to pass the double test of learning what they already knew, and of teaching what was supernatural to their very essence……….
Big Politics wants development to be stable, and wants me to be in that swarm of emotions, reason, actions, and thought, that form the never ready and forever produced ball of balancing interests that is balancing as one whole the shell of whatever structural changes a society and a region are locked in the shell of.
The truth is that I would have participated and added to the formation of this ball of balance, this core in the shell of structural reforms, if only Big Politics had not decided to add the revenue of its structural changes to the natural development of things in the core, and had not enhanced some and hindered others of the people, impatient to leave things to their natural development, and fearing any natural development that is against its interests.
Big Politics has a liking for the adverse, and will give lavish freedom to those who will not use it to develop their assets or accumulate wealth, but will use it to steal the potential of development and the accumulated achievement of the people whose freedom has been intensively restricted. Big Politics will give riches to those people who will not use them to build their own societies and industries but will use them to buy what they would have never got through work, and to create their own nests of subordinates and servants.
Big Politics will not confront the reality of opposition, but will restrict and channel through its institutions the freedom of the resourceful regions to manage their own industry, and will restrict and channel through its own social groups the freedom of a population to manage its own social relationships.
Big Politics is like a foster father to any country that has its thumb to seal all the contracts, and will pass through its territory all the huge flows, projects, and problems, instead of sparing its fragility and inexperience, and will tramp it down to the point when the poorest of farmers will concede to have the land ploughed by anybody merciful enough to hire him for the work.
Big Politics is like a foster mother who can have new children born whenever she wants them, and will keep record of how many children other mothers give birth to, so that the world’s population neither exceeds nor diminishes below manageable numbers.
Big Politics will watch for the right moment to introduce the adverse to stop a competitor, speaking of competition protection all the while and meaning the existence of controlled by it adversary that will block the self-generation of real opposition. Big politics will watch for the right moment to take the side of the angrier group or nation, and will channel the fury, which it has stimulated with its previous policy, against its most natural enemies.
In one word, Big Politics and me might or might not be competitors for the way the world is running its business and time, especially where my individuality is concerned, and where the interests of Big Politics are passing, because I have been learning from Big Politics all the while, and have been providing Big Politics with feedback all the while too.
Time and tide will show who, and at what point, we were right or wrong in what we though of each other and the ways we used each other, and science will try to find the reason why everything happened the way it did, and was it Big Politics or me that had a more reasonable- to mankind’s simple tastes- contribution.
Big Politics can inspire one to write or to read.
The story which I recently read was about a coin, a pig, a tramp, a dot, a shop window, and maybe me.
It so happened that the country’s economy collapsed, with only a few small businesses remaining to sell imported good and profit individually from money flows that washed in the outlines of the future local structures, a couple of large businesses that cared nothing about multiple staff but were run automatically and were elements of the international levels.
The tramp was one of those people who was redundant to any but the basement economic levels without which social dissemination of hierarchy and means would flatten into the spontaneous consummation of all the available goods, which would leave the shops empty and the balance of money and goods flows dependent on uncontrolled entrepreneurship in production and self-support.
The tramp’s source of survival was a garbage container outside a bank, and he was as intrinsic to the environment as the posh cars which made a second parking line, some missed, some braced by the trams that were learning their own traffic privileges.
One day, unfortunate to the city balance, the bank got robbed.
The main suspect, and the closest in kin to misery’s outrageous acts, was the tramp who got accused of the theft.
The knot of dependencies went further and the role of the tramp got connected with the collapse of the country’s economy which strongly depended on the now far from immaculate money flow.
On that same day, in a countryside yard, a pig was experiencing the demands of the world standards.
The claim went as far as to oblige the pig to be combed and brushed, clean and shaven, fed and polite, sociable and trustworthy.
The pig had spent its whole life feeding on whatever the household could not eat, and was taken by literal surprise to learn that it had to provide its own comb, its own shower, and its own means of maintaining cleanliness and order, all on the old pot of porridge it daily got.
The pig was desperate, but in a world of exchange, one can ask for part of the daily donation to be paid in cash, which was how the pig could raise the money and buy itself a cheap brush and comb its bristle every morning, presenting a leaner image to the world, but a much more civilized one, and independent of gossip or charity too.
One day, getting its meager portion and a couple of coins, the idea that the yellow coin might have gold in its substance, and the grey might have genuine silver, flashed in the combed pig’s head.
The pig got down to hoarding, and by and by, the hole under its pot got filled with part of the treasure that somebody had wisely stored in all the coins rattling in all the different pockets with the intention of withdrawing them in due time.
The rich pig was just a single item in this world of so many and so different entities, like a dot that the scientists say has no dimensions because it is a dot, but it knew that any dot has all the world’s dimensions of aspect when looked at, and if a dot is seen against the sky, it may turn out to be a spaceship or even a star.
One day the pig left its premises and went round the shops, learning about client control, security measures, and superiority, from the way the underpaid shop assistants looked at the poor people who passed with the utmost respect to the wealth of goods in the shop windows.
It was then that the idea to turn independent came into its ruffled and uncombed bristle, which was the result- the idea not the fact that it had left its brush behind- of some most natural phenomena.
The garbage container was still outside the bank, the tramp was nowhere round, and the pig decided to try its luck at that free treat. The container was a bit too tall, but it was unstable too, and in no time it got overturned and its contents spilled on the street.
A couple of strays appeared from nowhere, but there was enough for all to rummage through.
The people in the street paid no attention to the feast as they had practised overcoming sympathy on the tramp, and thought that it was another change of policy or another staging of the same political play which they would, if they tried hard enough, not only to escape participation in, but even notice and get those old lady’s bone bulging that results from bearing the burden of years of fear for too long.
This is what the story was, but when and where I read it, I really do not remember, and Big Politics will not look back to see me in it and give a hint.
The political retrospective of today is, again, proving the maxim that one cannot have an overall view of one’s social position if one is not well below the standards of one’s natural belonging.
In this line, the scandals around and through such major fields like which structure is connected to which through which, are taking another chance to support with concrete examples the absurdity to support any structures if different individuals and small groups have found a way to form their own nests and inner hierarchy, linked to the benefits which the functions of non-related structures give.
The scandal concerning the world of sociology and psychology is now coming through the world of established socialist writers whom everybody put up and aside as the gods of the pen who lived on capitalist pay and socialist fringe benefits, and through the mysterious social scientists whom everybody looked down, regarded askance, and believed to be more interested in collecting proverbs and sayings than in the providing- with their ability and in their scientific research- of background information which only someone missed by observation and selection could logically decipher.
It is clear that the scandals are now forming a tornado that will clear away the shacks and leave the strong constructions.
We now have the modern diamond of two individual tops, one at the bottom and one at the top, so symmetrical that if it is turned upside down, everything will be the same, so balanced that it can be controlled from above or from below, and so perfect that at one end there is always the man who will live on the earth and the man who will live in space, both either one or the other person depending on which is closer to the land, and both among another ninety-nine percent of crowd, the bottom diamond position indifferent to the upturned pyramid of spreadings weighing overhead, each upper floor possessing the functions of the one below, and each lower possessing the assets of the one above, and the top diamond position indifferent to the earth and its paradise which, in order to develop, the man there will have to have a mate and leave that garden of Eden for the privilege to people the Moon, taking knowledge along of course.
In one word, the Earth is reforming in style and organization, and those who served secretly have to come out and become elements in open structures, and those who were used to justify the existence of the old structures through the free help and individual freedom they were socially blessed with, will have to look around and see which role has not yet been claimed from the very few remaining.
And one more thing, Big Politics will forever be connected with the double idea of largeness and rule, like a colonist country which will quit one way of open colonizing for a more modern and subtler one, willingly or most reluctantly working once for its own regional development, once for the development of a business level, once for the sake of international co-operation, once for the creation of class and group differentiation, once for ordinary life where people get born, live, and die, once for that old tradition and arrangement of mankind which is threatening to become so independent of the people living, and belonging to the people who lived or are maintaining them that they are threatening to turn tradition into a business and life into servicing it.
It is a pity that this latest transition period in Bulgaria, from the period of experimenting with socialism to the period of experimenting with role-play capitalism, did not allow free competition and was in such a great hurry to rush through any natural development but in the details on both the positive and the negative spectra of social and economic life.
Of course, I understand that it might have taken a long time for evolution to develop in one place what can be imported as know-how from another, especially where the people are ready to accept the ready panels of structure organization, or where the structures are ready to format their population, or where the population is ready to stay in their native countries or depart on colonizing missions on the earth or on the moon. Bu I am almost convinced that the time will come when Big politics will play double and turn upon the people to whom it gave the temporary leading parts of the modern plays, and will dump all the quilt on the shoulders of the human nature, keeping for itself the confidence of having achieved the impossible in order and arrangement, in spite of critics, meddlers, amateurs, and people of no belonging to the thesis or the anti-thesis of things.
Maybe it was in opposition to Big Politics that I started writing, or maybe because when an environment is charged with a specific multiple presence, it will send over a representative to look for an individual of the same specifics, and will monitor that individual’s specific development as compared to where the crowds are developing the same specifics, maybe I have also been trying to discover whether it is the person that makes history or the other way round.
Who can say where I and Big Politics will come together, and will I try to understand myself in the world of Big Politics, or will Big Politics try to understand itself in my world: two scales so different that I need to write a masterpiece to compete with the dimensions of Big Politics, and Big Politics needs to learn concentration on the detail to be able to notice someone in a crowd, in a flow, in a structure, or between the lines of a book.
Sooner or later, a failing to sustain itself entrepreneurship must get closed behind the shutters of time’s forgetfulness or get set loose to fare the mercy of predators and weather, which applies to my self-publishing but not to the ability of Big Politics to see, at one glance, both the whole of the crystal ball of the world and every interesting detail inside that crystal ball.
Some home-made businesses are more lucky and get their places in appropriate structures, some are more durable and get themselves the craftsman’s shop and tools, some are important enough to get themselves lots of owners and share-holders, and some, like the business of self-publishing and selling the issue are unique, especially when they are financed by the authors.
Yesterday marked the end of my self-publishing business with my closing of my sole tradesperson firm, and left me as author with the copyrights which the firm gave me the opportunity to gain in return for the charity I gave it in shares from my teacher salary and retirement pension.
I will be forever grateful to the transition period, which took Bulgaria from socialism to globality, that is, from the period of separation during which Bulgaria belonged to the world through her belonging to the Soviet Block, to the period of recombination during which the Soviet Block has been entering the European Union.
Grateful for the opportunity which the transition period gave me to find in art that motivation to hope for the bright end of a dark tunnel which blurs any thought about how dangerous ends of unexpected light and alien energy might be, I expect I might be able to write something more concise than a poem and of a larger scope than the one a novel has.
I hope that my readers, and Big Politics too, will go on visiting my sites, especially http://www.vpt.hit.bg/ and http://www.vpt1.hit.bg/, where I have published many of my works in a free library.
Also I believe that my friends will not be surprised to get a free CD or a free pocketbook-size collection of poems as I have kept the volume and the right to continue giving my art away, whatever ‘to give away’ implies.
My conviction is that Big Politics can do whatever it thinks fit in the four major spheres:
politics, where it can juggle with things and timing, and even make the national budget-financed channel broadcast the interesting films at times appropriate for the Bulgarians living abroad to watch,
economics, where it can distribute and pool or drain any place at any time, and can blame every discrepancy on the foolishness of the population and the corruption of the administration,
science, where it can draw any feasible to development or stagnation idea and haul it from the most suppressed by administration sources to the most classified in their functions banks of ideas,
and the social sphere, which can be cut and slain, sliced and separated in as many as possible uncrumbling pieces for any experimenter to arrange inside the whole of the world’s crystal ball, inspired by little compassion for the individual fates and with much of confidence that it is his contribution to the construction of sand towers that is keeping the crystal ball intact and honestly transparent.
To sum it up, Big Politics is much bigger than me, and I am much smaller than what Big Politics is, which does not make Big Politics more important than I am to myself, nor am I, to Big Politics, more important than what it sees itself to be.
In one word, Big politics and me have never been close enough to be together, nor far away enough to separate, but have been observing each other’s moves with attention and vigilance, which, with a bit of luck for both sides, may continue for some more time until one gets demotivated, tired, or nears expiry date.
Big Politics hates individualism, and will appoint people who hate it too, to keep the people’s ambitions down, and the people’s achievement stolen, misplaced, hidden, or unrecognized if a higher level does not say it needs it as a support for whose maintenance to pay.
It may take some time to convince Big Politics to see a person in the haze of its long-sightedness and right under its nose, and may seem a bit depressing to find out that all of one’s publishing has been in vain, and the information system of Big politics keeps no, or very little, record of one’s publications.
My Theory of Exchange says that if we perceive the whole of time as a whole inside which there exists a balance of motion, and if we see each motion as an ‘element’ for which the periods/elements of time of its preparation, setting, performance, recording, recalling, etc. are in a separate balance inside the whole of time, then we will not wonder at the idea that the whole of time will allow for the terms ‘past’, present’, and ‘future’, to exist as separate entities and rule the thought only of the trained perception of any motion or activity, or their antagonists, and will thoroughly control this ‘element’, giving rationed potential to predominantly one of the three aspects (past, present, future), but the presence of the whole of time in the other two aspects, and its overall control too, may result in the ‘present’ of one ‘element of motion’ getting hints about the ‘present’ activity of another ‘element’, which information cannot be verified until later, when the aspect of ‘present’ of either ‘elements’ will have become the aspect of ‘past’.
Big Politics may turn out, at some very weird moment, to be the muse of inspiration for the creation of its own historical monument.
Here is the beginning of a life’s itinerary which can be continued in any individual way, or may be left to Big Politics to finish at breakfast:
The woman had gone to bed after she had gone shopping and had spent on that day, on a loaf of bread, half a dozen of eggs, a cup of coffee, and a waffle, as much as she deserved to spend.
She had fallen asleep on the reminiscence of how well she had managed her accumulated experience in the buffering of reality.
The haze of sleep cleared the pictures of her lavishly mentioning previous spendings to the saleswoman who asked for no more, no less, but the exact amount of money due- a test given to suspicious buyers who might be disguised inspectors checking out which sellers did, and which did not, give out receipts.
She had lavishly excused herself for hesitating at the door when accused of spoiling the air-conditioned atmosphere in the shop which another saleswoman was guarding from outside while in conversation with other sellers.
She had lavishly thanked a third saleswoman for the reduced price of eggs.
She had humbly waited, unless accused of tempering with the functions and stock, some steps away from the coffee machine which gave out better coffee than elsewhere.
And she had wondered at the idea of the parties and structures that held the world in one place while making every part of it spin in a dizzy balance.
On the next morning, she remembered nothing of the previous day, leaving all to the Future to recall.
When one wakes up from the slept-through establishment of facts, one may find oneself to be no element chip of any ethnic party or any ethnic structure.
It may be a scary revelation to understand that one has no common ground to meet people of one’s historical kin and be supported by the different structures where the others belong, nor access to the common alleys going through the grand world businesses as backbone structures, along which alleys one’s kin is carrying and consuming money, ideas, importance, and goods.
One may wake up to the fact that one is a free radical of no belonging, and that whatever one has or produces may be claimed or stolen, because one has chosen to get born in a place denied the proper for one structures or parties, or because one was not gifted at birth with the means and strategy to move to another place.
The woman left everything to the Future, and spent the next day on producing her own thoughts, one of which was rather radical, but worth stealing and developing in places where the monthly salary of anyone of the staff members equalled the double of her year’s income.
For the lack of money to spend, she spent time on that day.
Time was spent on the production of thoughts and ideas, and on the development of simple philosophical formulas.
One idea concentrated on the characteristics of the peoples who had combined mankind’s natural sounds into the words of the different world languages to match mankind’s natural notions and ideas, and went on to look for examples of how similar sounds formed similar combinations to represent similar notions and ideas in the different languages, and on to where there had to be something that was common in the natures of the different peoples, no matter if they came from the same ancient tribe or not.
This is how the woman set the Future, which was in fact the woman’s Present, to work for her and recall its distant Past and show her the origins of her atavistic and true nature, in the aspect of why she belonged to no party or structure in her home land and why she was unwanted in other lands where there were parties and structures appropriate for her.
Maybe her misplacement was connected with individual growth, which can have an average volume if only there exist its historical ‘up’s and down’s’, maybe there was something which Nature had not cleared up in her, maybe the Future would ….
… The country where the woman lived was a bit depressed by its own organization which excluded the utilization of the majority of the country’s natural assets, and most unwillingly sent its effort in the direction of finding appointment and realization in foreign places and organizations abroad.
The country could have fed itself, its climate was moderate, and with a bit of precaution, allowed for stable yield in crops, vegetables, fruit, and dairy products, but the general picture of the world organization needed the country to be a patch of offices through which the goods flowed from somewhere to somewhere, which organization was well protected by former police people, former sportsmen, and all the generations of home-made or imported intelligence officers.
If the countryside had not been squeezed in the rules and quotas of the new type of monopolistic free market, the countryman’s children would have stayed in their native places and developed their genes, through natural evolution, into trades and skills natural for their background. However, many of the daughters of the countryside were now sitting behind computers in clean offices and were waiting for the fax machines to receive what other girls were sending from other clean offices, and the only real space for individual growth was in the learning of how to operate a coffee machine or when to complain of the cleaning woman that came and went suspected of all the treachery, misery, and double play, the world had for humble jobs.
The woman was not an office girl, though she was also writing her life’s psychology textbook which would be one of the thousands experimented on the population or written by the people themselves.
The story that the woman was slowly getting involved in was one best illustration of the Triangle in the Theory of Exchange which stated that if two individuals were placed in the situation to react to each other and achieve an organic clash, they could be directly charged at each other, or they could be hoaxed into reacting to the environment to start developing their similar learned, or intrinsic, patterns of reaction at approximately the same time, both setting off from their different positions and meeting at a point of clash far from where they had started unaware that the conditions had been artificially created, their channels of movement had been wisely prepared, and the coefficient of the Triangle was being calculated from the length of the direct line between their separate starting points and the height from the clash point to that direct line.
It was Sunday and some people were loyal to the old pleas addressed at the universal balance, begging for security and blessing; some were depending on the new styles and patterns for their belonging through the modern tastes and routines; some were wondering at their inability to find in their natures that instinct which senses where one accessible level of the straight-up pyramid of social hierarchy coincides with a profitable level of a temporarily upturned pyramid of economic benefits, or the other way round; some were able to move, jump, or crawl, to a favourable double step and avail of a duration which, on the scale of a single human life, lasts forever.
The woman was thinking: ‘I must get myself in hand and go on. There is no need to fight what is stronger than I am, no need to complain of what pleases the others, no need to cry about what I cannot change, no need to be the excuse for changes made, no need to retrieve the old values, no need to grow if I have to compete for the sunlight.
The loom of time is weaving its yarn-beam and its cloth-beam, now and then cramming the motley thread.
My old foothold step is descending on the other side of the main road, and the step I refused to move onto when it was level with mine is going past me on my side, ready to take on new crossers and new joy riders.
How can I grab that brief moment when the escalator that bridges the sides stops, and how can I get a brave view of the world’s plans, how can I see where my foothold is taking and which way a nearby step is going.
I wish I knew which stable pyramid bases on the land and which on the sky, which on reality, and which on my wish, which depends on the people of my time, and which on world’s universal balance.’
It was Sunday, and some people were praying for blessing, some were working, some were gathering fruit, some were reaping what they had sown, some were picking down the ladders by which they had risen, and the woman was trying to evade the world, sure that whatever the world did was not what she had planned to participate in, or what she was nimble enough to cling to.
On that day, two people were rather engaged.
The woman was cracking some old nuts in the bathroom sink, applying the invention to soak the nuts in water so they would wash off their years and almost believe in the forgotten idea of growth.
Another woman was sitting at a card table with some friends, playing and thinking how a personality can easily be cracked if it is the product of a different political system, and if that different system will never give in because it has turned from an open adversary into an integrated variety.
At one side, the second woman had almost a friend and associate, who had returned to the country to participate in the formation of a gay opposition of people satisfied personally but producing dissatisfaction to build from its stakes and spears their garden fences.
That man had lived abroad long enough to get permeated with the appropriate jargon, which, by the way, had been introduced in the local language and culture along some international policy of exchange and integration.
The man was of those active politicians who were called in, on one or the other side of the border, to support a cause with the creation of a negative balance, but many used him to rattle, to the point of scattering, in the heads and groups of people insecure and unsettled.
The actors in politics were not chosen by the people but by all the different structures and businesses, and looked common in personality though pinpointed by the PR specifics that adorned and bettered their temporary image.
One could compare them to a film staff where an actress is chosen for a part only if she is a match to a combination of requirements, like a fashionable shawl standing frankly well round her neck, a hairstyle speaking for itself and blah-blahing the situation in which the heroine is, a pair of pants adding the idea of concessions made to overweight or liposuction fees, and lots more.
It seems true what everybody says about the Bulgarians born ready to embark on new starts without ever getting far enough from them towards the completion of projects or the realization of ideas, but it may turn out to be a bigger truth that the Bulgarians live on promised prospective, distracted or hindered from proceeding on their way, sometimes the aim that was a promising objective is shifted just a bit and out of scope, or the funds attributed to endeavour are channelled into the monitoring of that endeavour, or the difficulties overcome on the professional level are shadowed by unsurpassable difficulties on the personal level, or the person who traced the road to success is substituted by a person whose only task is to represent the achievement, and so on.
If we see the country in the light produced by it as a compact pool of energy, like a sun landed on the earth, and if the outskirts of that pool have been so far guarded on the outside and on the inside, for shape and consistency, we can say that every new beginning is crossing out the outskirts boundary and is drawing a hypotenuse developed into the base for individual growth way out of, or way inside, the pool.
Out of the numerous hypotenuses produced by the new beginnings at the outskirts, there grow from the pool the rays of the personal pyramids, and the sun that has been lying flat to adopt its modern image is raised in the sky again, with a few of its rays falling off, but many clinging to it and giving light to ideas about next new beginnings.
If we see the beginnings of my unfinished stories in the light of such a sun, we can blame the sun’s rays for the stories’ incompletion, but we may be grateful to the very sun for the opportunity given to many people besides the author of the beginnings to finish the stories in their own ways, aware of the fact that they can never produce the same ending like the one made by the person who produced the beginning.
I wonder if I have not been assigning this exercise to art, applying the teacher strategy to always walk one step ahead of the students and never leave them lagging behind get to the destination alone.
Big Politics, however, has its right to own tiny mistakes, and when it wants to have a person or a product, it just applies the necessary changes and the environment around the person is different so there is an urgent need of adaptation to it, or it deprives a product of its producer, and the product is bare and unprotected, and gets taken to be kept.
The best time to speculate about how Big Politics has been, is, or will be, cheating a settler out of an environment, or a producer away from a product, is the time of loneliness.
The best time to think, or to sleep, in a block of flats, is the night hour before and after: before the early risers turn on the taps for the cold water to pour out and the warm to flood the pipes, and after the people working night shifts take out their dogs for a jubilant short walk, after the pollution ascends over the city, and before the film of vapours, poisonous to the instincts of survival, produces its blanket from the day’s traffic and the night’s secret manufacturing to let only the top floors of the tall blocks pop out, and only the basements enjoy the gush of fresh air from the city parks, before the continuous din of the roads substitutes the flow of thoughts, and after the cleverest among the birds start singing, wasting little nerve and effort in the comparative quiet.
At about that time, the though about blessing entered my mind in the context of my family name, and partially in the context of the world plotting against me to take as much as possible of what I have, to keep me producing for as long as I endure, to and correct me for as many mistakes as the world itself can make on some strange conspiracy to appoint natural failures to assess the success of natural losers.
The thought of blessing covered the rough beginning of a new story that could keep me wondering about whether it is better for one to be blessed with one’s relatives and friends, or it is better for one to be a blessing to one’s relatives and friends.
There suddenly popped out from among my thoughts the words of a beaten-by-my-diversity-of-tricks applicant for the job which I finally I got, though she was also given a later chance, but no priority.
She had said that she would fight with ‘teeth and nails’ against me.
Her words might be a clue to why my family name got changed in the state registers of publications.
The hour of the night was too free of alien presence for me to decide where the plotting against me hid.
The day was beginning to unfold its light to reveal other blocks of flats whose windows, though still conspicuously dark, were probably closed on people sleeping during that hour of rest.
My thoughts suddenly dozed into the direction of an old poem of mine, written at some prolific hour on the belief that the sea waves are the product of an exchange of energy between the sea’s major pool of water and the space around the earth, an energy exchange between the individuality of the earth and the conglomerate which space is as an environment.
Waves
Why do you chase the shore all round,
or is it something we have done
Why don’t you turn back on that ground
which, in the sea, is hidden down
Why do its depths dispatch you here,
around, all along the shore
Why do you slap the banks of clear
unpeopled islands, not at war
What have we done, why do you chase us,
why don’t you turn back on that spot
which in the very, very centre
of your sea, sends you by the lot
Why does that hole in the sea chest
produce you, maybe it’s the berth
where tired skylight at dusk enters
to rest at night, at dawn emerge
V.P.T.
Big Politics is something very powerful, its structures are stable within their duration time, its flows are continuous and controlled in direction, its resources are never to be exhausted though new levels of application and new types are being created all the time, and its people are to get born, live, and die in synchrony with the beating of Big Politics’ heart.
Big politics is now looking around for a next step to take, but it has only two legs and must be careful because one leg is under the command of the brain that sees more than the whole body, but the other leg is operated by the instincts that are scattered god knows where not.
Now that the job of the restricted funds left in the country to create adequate new structures and the ever intensifying network of global flows has been achieved by the skills and the alliances of the state, the military, the political, the trade union, and the police, systems, Big Politics can afford to open its pocketbooks of wrong construction links and flow trends, and get rid of the constructors and some of the architects, profiting double: once by having drained the resources which were left uncovered at the time of mistakes, once by now getting rid of the seasonal staff, introducing own residents and players and leaving to the generations a double global moral: to the generation that experienced the economic crisis, the idea that a person is nothing in comparison to the stability of order but is much if one is an element in a structure or in a flow, and to the generation that was born during and after the economic stacking of structures and flows, the truth that very few are born with a silver spoon in their mouths, but many are to pay for that silver all through their lives.
I hope that Big Politics has entered my full personality on each one of its pocketbook pages and will have me in focus because I myself will remember Big Politics for as long as I live, especially in the part of our co-operation where Big Politics did nothing for me, but allowed me to work for myself and produce nothing that Big Politics could use on the way of its historical mission over and through the crowds of people.
Big Politics seems to have been my sovereign, but this is the time when courts pay their taxes for living around their sovereigns, and when structures keep sovereign from making any decision without consulting its court.
Bulgaria is now experiencing the furious treachery of its new history, and is faced by the fear that its people will not be able to keep what is a merit acquired during the period of socialism.
Many countries have already forgotten this stage of their development, and are no longer alternating in the choosing of salvation steps to the side where the proud impoverished are accumulating for some future application all the refuse from paid-for goods, or desperate steps to the side where the people try to live unnoticed in their maintained in exposition perfection environment, unless one or another of them proves an item too many in the perfect order which is promising to leave the world to run itself like a perpetuum mobile.
Many authors of fiction are influenced by their environment, and many think that the worst muse they may have hides in the indirect self-censorship derived from their being followed in what they are doing or writing about, but some authors think that an even worse muse hides in the changes administered to their environment with the aim to spur the authors to react to the changes and get guided towards hot themes and plots.
Bulgaria is now facing its fears, many of which have been created to lead the people in one direction, and then in a direction opposite.
The settlement of lots of shifty groups in the big cities and around them created the fear of theft and attack, but also developed in those groups the pleasure to have permanent headquarters surrounded by the country’s administration that turned its back on what they were doing.
Now those temporary settlers are made to clear off their settlement areas, and the cities are confronting the urgent need to find the legal tools and means to keep the scattered groups away from the premises of their real estate, but this also develops in many city people the home-abiding instinct and prompts the idea to sell their city flats and move to their houses in the countryside.
The fact that I have nowhere else to go, has developed in me an adoration for the economic and business levels that usually decide about how, when, and into what kind of monkey to turn a population, and has just prompted the beginning of a new story where everything gets adapted to what the upper level needs.
I have a bit of experience, of some forty years ago, in the failing in a fashion model casting, though no one knows what agency, when, and for what purposes, may have fished the fact out, and I also have some TV experience in a couple of quiz show of about that long ago, and I have been a rather independent teacher ever after, which combination can lead to the creation of a plot no reminiscence has ever expected to be written.
And before someone else writes the story, I have to win over my laziness and produce in text what someone may produce in picture, both of us gambling for the attention of the other and getting inspired to play on hide-and-seek in the making of art from time or money from art.
Big politics is not interested in its present, because it has a complete past, nor in its future, because its present is a logical development of its past, but is interested in time because time is what it is balancing upon.
Authors feed on the process of production of their unique products, the less material means authors have, the more immaterial they consume from their energy environment.
Any educated person knows that the environment in which he, or she, is living, is a balance of consumed, produced, stored, or exchanged, energy.
What an author consumes during the process of production of a piece of writing, sculpture, ingenuity, compilation, etc. is the fuel which can make the process short or long, easy or difficult, spanked by moments of ignorant haziness or illuminated by ideas given most unexpectedly by the author’s inner world.
The author’s intensive consummation of one kind of energy for the production of a specific new product, seen in an environment of ignored other kinds of energy, asks for compensation and at some distance, measured in place or time, other people, usually the users of the author’s product, must produce the same kind of energy to keep the historical balance.
Thus the gap created in one place, at a specific time, taken by the author, the process of creation, and the ready product, is balanced by a concentration, in another place and at some other time, where the motivated to accept it, or fight against it, users of the product are.
Maybe this is the reason why I am, myself, going through my old poems, unable to find myself in the future to produce new ones, and unwilling to use a kind of energy that is connected with things different from writing.
Here is an old poem which illustrates the above thoughts, though it was too early to play clever at the time when it was written:
Unsociable
To integrate, among the others’,
one’s interests through something common:
an origin, a route, job, brothers,
is life’s contemporary problem
A life, like a wheel keeps turning,
in need to touch a similar spot,
the roads’ options come on seeming
to be the needed hauling lot
Discarded options, like a stretch passed,
connections flung back on mudguards,
one life rejects the others’ lives,
and keeps its strength for future parts
Lots of potential parts collected
confirm belief in life reborn,
alas, the energy releases
its strong potential in false forms
The world’s a park, a house, office,
it’s where life-wheels turn and fit,
attracted or repelled by forces,
there roll and fit the old wheels
Life suddenly sees a wide opening,
but, to it, there is no way:
the dump’s around, dogs stay blocking,
the shady trades, like free traps, wait
On a return, is life’s mind, then, set,
but former seats are occupied,
the recognized for their summer hats
old ladies offer faith to life
Life frequents the known places,
but breeds suspicion in the wards,
it passes by the monuments nameless
and hears ads read in a soft voice
Life has results, but none of causes
In ambush, bugs and illness wait
Some kids are happy on the branches,
but shake leaves dusty on its head
Life starts complaining, and all hear
but friends are tired, pals of kin,
a man- to ask for answers- nears,
a group of cleaners call life ‘s.it’
Life gets unsociable, lonely,
confined in own problems small,
no side to touch, life’s wheel is stopping
but others’ lives are growing tall
V.P.T.
In competition with Big politics, or in alliance with it, I guess time and life will continue to look for its beginning and end, finding all the time the aspects of its own existence and evolution.
Now that I am almost sure that Big Politics is playing fair in its double cheating game, I have uploaded, on http://www.vpt.hit.bg and http://www.vpt1.hit.bg, four more of my plays, that is, all seven plays I have written so far.
Bulgaria is enjoying this year’s summer, and there passes, unnoticed, the fact that the country has developed a new diversity in its social levels, adequate to the new alliances with other countries.
Every living nowadays survivor has found a more or less permanent place and a more or less attributive style, and every place or life style is superior to the rest in one aspect, and inferior in an other.
The consolidation of collective attributive features- so long fought against in order to have a scattered environment through which other countries could be connected through relevant spheres to the world blocks- is slowly winning ground, and genetics may be proud to have correctly estimated the amount of relaxation which one individual experiences when in his or her proper group as to the effort another member of the same group applies in action.
I, myself, can easily detect which life style belongs to me by the laws of nature: I just try to find out if one thing- let’s say the clothes in a shop window- matches another thing- let’s say the feeling of independence and comfort provided by summer’s warmth as compared to the freezing winter conditions.
In a comparison like this, I have found out that only my writing is accepted by all the year’s seasons, maybe because it is revealing to its own texture and origin, and only my galoshes can be worn in snow and sunshine, maybe because they are concealed under a fancy cloth decoration.
Big politics has its symbols, two of which are the balances Big Politics is creating between the parameters of its own structures and the capacity of the people to comply with the structure requirements, and between the different individualities of the administrators of those structures and the individualities of the different people who may, or may not, be involved by a clerk in an individual whirlpool of administration procedures.
Bulgaria, too, has given a natural vote for the symbol which will be imprinted on the back of the Bulgarian Euro coin.
The five sites, selected for the final national poll,
Madara Horseman,
Cyrillic Alphabet,
Rila Monastery,
Bulgarian Rose,
Tsarevets Regal Fortress Town,
have been seen by the authorities to represent the stability of Bulgaria all through the country’s different periods of one thousand three hundred and so years of history as a state, and do represent the stable, the educated, the spiritual, the beautiful, and the organized, as well as, the belonging to the distant past, the herald of literacy to some Slavonic tribes, the treasury of culture through the five centuries of Ottoman yoke, the material from which the rose oil is made, and the stake of a determined settlement in these lands.
Maybe the result from the national poll comes to show that no fortress is as safe as the lands roamed by the free tribes, no beauty lasts longer than the image of victory, no religion covers all the aspects of the spirit, no written text can outlive a mother tongue, and that it is the peremptory figure of a horseman represents the country’s atavistic attachment to what many people want to be like or be defended by.
The nation seems to have split in five main historical layers and into five main aspects of its individuality: the stable, the educated, the spiritual, the beautiful, and the organized.
It seems that the easiest way to understand Big Politics is to ask it for permission to have an Inspiration Retrospective and to inspect one’s own performance to see if one is missing to ride the money flows but is forming money’s natural channel banks of fossilized drop-outs, and to calculate ones chances to keep any attained position in any structure- be it the structure a simple flat in a block of flats- with participation in a limited in intensity and scope Browning mobility, which mobility usually keeps a structure from falling apart.
It also seems that I can never hope, like many authors of suppressed for ‘times due’ popularity, to be anyone but the female of intellect that inspires male authors for their historical projects: the role of a Muse who comes to commence and carry through the job, and leaves before the fireworks celebration party.
I have periodically refused the role of the Muse, but like every blossom season has the same plants flourishing, and every plant has its specific time during the blossom season, so we, the people, seem to flock together, over periods of time, for the same alliances and the same needs of exchange.
This Poetry Retrospective has seen me in several different aspects, but hardly in the context of inspiration.
The following poems, published in my CD Book ‘Poetry by Valentina Petrova Toucheva’, cover the topic from the standing points of the different times and seasons, economic moods, and social environment.
Innovation
I plastered
the ceiling
with inspiration
And lay down
on the floor
And watched,
aghast,
the integration
between
an eagle
and
a
boar
V.P.T.
Clever Thoughts
I was amazed by some so clever thoughts
They burned my head like torches burn a juggler
I tried to get rid of them all, and I tossed
them on into a century another
But who can tell what kind of using man
will profit by their sparkling wit
I dashed along the blazing lane
and gulped them back, they - great, me - grit
So I went on in useless work,
a self-produce-consuming shuttle,
up in the future, back on earth-
no rest to cool off and joints to butter
They’re never grateful, their lot,
those future, coming generations
If you toss up a clever thought,
they’ll say it was their inspiration
V.P.T.
Hunting
I was out, hunting for some inspiration,
I could do with just a view or an event
There was a sun, but it was blazing
There were some clouds, they were few
There was a wind, though fresh, refreshing
There was no combination new
But suddenly I heard whiffs hustled,
and felt the broken air’s mood
Then shadows small around fluttered
A birch had joined in the view
V.P.T.
Nothing
There’s no inspiration in my bosom
to write about birches locked
in their drive to touch the sky
No weakness to acquit their stems’
dependence leaned against horizons
No dream to have a cosy place
confronted by the open seas
No mood emotionally stirred
by company, by songs or liquor
No wish to be in someone’ s arms
There’s nothing needed but a crumb
to bite small pieces from And snow
sun-kissed to scoop for my dry growth
No thirst helped by confused old streams-
routes lost through the ambitious boulders-
all wanting to be waterfalls,
all wanting to be steps and landings
No, really nothing that I need
but time to place all in a picture-
a decoration on my life,
a love which I call my own love
V.P.T.
I Know
I know,
in a next life,
I’ll turn upon my inspiration
with hate
well equal to this love
which it now uses
And telling all the world
a simple truth,
I’ll clean efface
its laurels and success
V.P.T.
Then
The future, I know, will be grateful
to have my poems and your songs
Its stomach full will be of debtors
who will repeat my words for long
There, somewhere there, there, I hope,
repeated will be your tunes, too
Of course they will, their human scope
helped inspiration to produce
There, somewhere in the future,
I know someone will be born
What is a crumb unused but useful:
she’ll take it meeting structure’s norm
She’ll read and sing, and be suspicious
if it is not her words she says
A man will, open-hearted, listen
and recognize the tunes and plays
I hear them, them, the two discussing
how lucky they have been to meet
Our love is here now parted,
but then, with their love’ll compete
V.P.T.
Getting Used
I need another poem:
who for and what about
The only inspiration:
a dog on catlike rounds
The poem’s really needed
to finish up the cycle
which I have planned for: deeming,
self-tasked, and self-accustomed
The dog’s eyes grow brighter
as peopled hopes near,
the eyes I’ve never written
a word of fondness clear
I need another poem,
or drink I’ll get used to
They’ll suffice like the stories
of serials men do
V.P.T.
The Eyes of the Thieving Woman
Hey, how are you, my Jane Brown?
Still looking for an inspiration
or early nettles on the ground?
Still with the three-star epaulettes
upon your bending, tired, shoulders:
on one the three
who won’t leave you
because you’ll lead ahead the people,
and on the other those whom
you’ll never let free to mislead
Still looking for the best world’s balance
with all the fear of it round
Still looking for the hungry beasts
which steal in turn from everybody:
some stealing what is a potential,
and others stealing what’s existence
Between them, all like you, Jane Brown,
all living only to survive
Hey, you, my Jane Brown, see the sun,
the river which belongs to snow,
the trees that do not see their land
because they’re aiming at the blue sky
Hear early sighs of breeze and lovers,
hear birds which now learn to sing
Be more than is the lonely person
who, to the grandeur of the world,
is so obviously small
that he will not see or enjoy it,
be it the loveliest of the sights
You’ll find, Jane Brown inspiration,
just look inside the battling eyes
of that young thieving city woman
who’s stealing the discarded cardboard
which should have waited in the bin
for its all lawful frequenter
Or wait to find the early nettles
Don’t hope for your inspiration
to spring up from the bare ground
Hey, how are you, my Jane Brown?
Do not forget the eyes that thief
V.P.T. 7.02.2004
Spring Moments
Spring’s freedom new and spring’s variety
will range from pleas to inspiration,
and any song or tune will give
thrill to the people who can feel
the combinations of emotion
These moments of our full belonging
will free the clouds small and moody
which leave our souls to wander
and watch the world as it lives on
with its own frowns, laughter, tasks
They come before the green of April
surprising us, all unexpected,
as if we didn’t sleep to dream
of spring’s youth, where we’re eternal
As if we never saw a spring
so promising and so light
As if we have to prove a part
of its rush towards a flourish
As if we have to ask ourselves
the question whom it’s to believe,
and whom to see as ever-lasting:
the green recurrent hurried spring,
or each calm winter dream about it
V.P.T. 21.02.2004
No Inspiration
The topics old
I keep turning
inside my brain,
on blank sheets
My wish is stale
My eyes - burning
I toss
the themes off
like glass beads
V.P.T.
The social policy applied in Bulgaria in the years since the legal start of the transition period from socialism to Europe-ism is giving its fruit and, as expected, is showing to have transformed the fear of the population into a humbleness where there used to be the bravery of arrogance, and where there used to be economic instability and confusion, into a diplomatic criticism that is beating round the responsibilities of the state administration and is pinpointing the state’s organization failures.
One can only admire the selection of phrases and tone which the people are now using in calls made to morning television and radio programs to inform of faults and offences, or to practise their generations’ styles of reasoning with the facts.
Those of the people who are engaged in gathering crops in the fields, or in the production of something which the bearers of opinions can consume, are obviously rather engaged and can’t be bothered with asking them about their view points, anyway, they have their own chat groups where to wonder about what is going on in the places where the logistics momentum usually comes from.
Everybody now seems to be looking under their noses and a bit ahead towards accepting the idea of a social diversification into two modern classes: the class of the toughly engaged in organization patterns, people who hardly have the time to spend their income and not big enough income to afford the time to plan the spending, and the class of those who have little, or donated, income but have the world of time to speculate on how all the changes were made during the transition period, and how it happened that privately-owned foreign companies took over all the major industrial sectors if the socialist doctrine had preached that the people owned everything the state had.
The hurried integration of Bulgaria into the global world created the necessity to keep the old structures, as well as, raise them a bit to match the appropriate connection points.
The as hurried creation of the local country communities, however, has been felt more tangibly due to the networks of social-economic dependencies and the standard requirements for belonging to one or another level and class reached through a job, a profession, or a trade.
Now that my style of catlike criticism can be seen in many other people, I guess I can recall an old poem of mine and proceed in a new style.
Why And Because
‘Why them again, the sunlit ripples
which outline the hidden bank
The sunlit windows of vehicles
which trace that hidden road’s track
There are more beauties in this global,
this infinite for lovely things,
this so important, this so total,
this earth with unseen by you scenes’
‘What, for example, rivers, watefalls-
their colours mixed from stolen soil
Or landscapes fitted in some stories
Or someone’s rhymes Or texts of old’
‘Why did you sit upon the lakebank
To wait for creeping waves sunlit
to slip their shiny backs, their daythanks,
towards the place you honoured to sit’
‘I chose to sit to hear a mother
speak, make her kid’s way bit by bit
And the assirtive hearty answer
which doubled at the mother’s speed’
‘Why didn’t you come, see the wonder
of one rainbow curved upon
the chasm, in which the river’s water
pours soil and colour with its song’
‘Because you wouldn’t let me cross it
Because you wouldn’t come my way
Because not, at my speed, you’re walking
Because I may not what you may’
V.P.T.
When Big Politics decides to clear its premises of something or someone, it does so in due time, often at the expense of the common people whom it aided in their settlement into families and homes.
A morning blast of much of the stored thousands of tons of old ammunition- goods protected from the inquisitive by guards, from structures fighting against their existence by the nearby capital city, goods promoted as the only way to be ready for the defensive international wars of socialism against capitalism, goods kept samples of from the period before that of socialism, goods paying through their production, storage, testing, and destruction, a lot of salaries to people who can keep their thoughts to themselves- such a morning blast may be accepted as a fireworks celebration of a new period, or as a tragedy by those who are shaken and shattered by it.
A blast like this- maybe organized by time, maybe by someone aggressive, maybe by a whole system for the creation and control of alertness and readiness for adequate reaction, maybe one more discrepancy that is clearing itself away- is leaving behind issues of ecological and coordination nature which, if added to previous problems and seen as preceding next ones, will clear of the old weapons the valley of a capital city, Sofia on this occasion, for a future residential area enlargement, and will make everybody’s heart beat with gratitude for each lived in safety day.
An ammunition blast comes at the time when the idea of referendums is trying to introduce some plain order between the elections organized on the party principle and the elections organized on the individuality principle, in a pyramid which began with everybody voting for the state’s single candidates, then for the candidates chosen and substituted at leisure by the numerous parties, now directly up to candidates of broader world contacts, prepared to act individually, and the referendums will have the base and the top, allowing half of the voters to feel responsible for having chosen one alternative, and the other half feeling responsible for failing to outnumber and choose an opposite option.
Big Politics is not a fan of blasts, it is a fan of organization, and if it were to have the final word, it would have transported the weapons to the almost ready utilization plant to have them recycled, but like any organization structure, Big Politics depends of the people: those Big Politics can control and those it is controlled by, like there are people who come to live in, or leave, a place, and people who are the bricks and the tissue of the very place.
In one word, Big Politics, if seen as a whole, is eternal in its novelty, and if seen in its elements, is a historical lineage of adequate dishonesty and necessary mistakes.
Still Unborn
Between the sunset films and dawn’s blast of stored ammunition,
the night was summer heavy and was ordinarily intense
The films upon the TV screen attracted with adorned life fiction
The sunset quietly retrieved its spilled into a patch round blaze
Between the sunset films and dawn’s blast of stored ammunition,
the night was summer heavy and was ordinarily intense
The blast alarmed the shaken homes, shattering the day into uncertain action
The armament, so long concealed, vacated a reserved for real life place
If someone asks how old I am, counted in nights intensive,
in films at sunset watched, in blasts confused with cheering the dawn,
I’ll say that, counted for singularity, all years in my life reflected
say I am sixty, but if seen as one whole life, I’m still unborn
V.P.T. 3.07.2008
Big Politics has its own games and its own organization, and if it has chosen to be ruled by selected individuals, it means that Big Politics can rule another set of selected individuals, only such that are a bit to one side, and for the reason of creating a torque that will pump up assets for the formation of a new level, say the one of developing life on the Moon.
Living on the Moon won’t be easy, that is why all the organization, control, and repression, structures, in their regional and structural development, are engaged in creating an impossibility for anyone on Earth to make life in space more difficult than what the natural conditions and the unknown circumstances there have in stock for mankind.
In due time everything that has been developed as a weapon and hidden from rivals to develop an ingenuity created by competition, has to pass through the period when an opponent must be found to wage a war and demonstrate the power of the weapon, then a treaty must be signed for go betweens to carry the co-ordination plans between the rival parties, then the world must be convinced that wars are the least either rival would like to happen, but it will if someone excluded from the treaty or member of a different one, tries to enter the business of development and control, then the world turns into an obedient audience that is watching the race of arms and keeps alert its instincts of survival, and then the technology funded for the purposes of successful wars and successful protection are applied in spheres far from collision but with the unknown on the Moon or on some other satellite or planet.
In the context of this, and in the context of all the special satellite surveyor equipment that can slice a block into floors to get a thorough picture of what each flat is doing, I think I can recall an old poem of mine:
No Symbols, It’s the Truth
The weather’s changing, and the winds
bring fear in man’s ancient nature
There’s something knocking to get in
A something’s coming from nowhere
There’s trees that sway and, scared, shiver
There’s windows still in blankness white
There’s motion, there’s thin air clear
A cross upon a blue pane’s dark
There’s memories of former, swept, smells
There’s memories of hungry birds
There’s frankness in the full moon’s flat face
There’s blazing streetlamp flashes hurled
The streets ease, powdered with night’s rest
There’s dust that’s travelled far and wide
The weather’s bringing on its heart’s change
All lights ahead seem so far
A fine small willow in a huge pot
upon a balcony, is kin
No symbol to the gardens’ tree lots
A teenage tree upon their green
The night is sighing its last dark range
The chimneys point to the sky
The air’s denser with the new change
The world is bleaker at day’s start
Still, something’s beating at the house wall
as if a guest is tired, knocking
at his own door to make his call
instead of, with his key, unlocking
The morning’s here, not the change
the windows tall get golden-starred
as if the dawn has kissed each pane
evaporating, the dark night
V.P.T. 26/27.08.2004
Big Politics will not allow the business of publishing to be diluted, and the business of selling publications to be realized by the authors themselves, a truth I took the chance to ignore during the period of transition.
Although I shall no longer publish my works myself, I can commence writing for sale now that I have formulated the parameters of my style, have seen my future reading audience, have invented an easy reader access to reading options, have almost reached the sources of motivation to which my future readers can be taken, have almost formulated the topics which may be of interest to them and of little engagement to me, have developed the technology to let the readers choose the specifics of the characters, the environment, the weather, and the mood, everything almost like in an interactive game though a bit clumsier to keep the plot unchanged.
In this context, I recall an old poem of mine:
BEAUTY
Don’t give my beauty
food to breed on
Don’t teach it sex,
or teach it style
Don’t go far,
or come too near
Let me enjoy it
for a while
V.P.T.
Big Politics is both a friend, because it allows for little getting lost once it has invested a gathered fund pool into the creation, or innovation, of the structures and the flows of a region, and an adversary, because it allows for little freedom in the selection of relevant places or directions.
Although Big Politics is on the side of human rights, it is on the side of competition too, and on the side of party interests, and on the side of the selection of appropriate individuals who can create a policy to control what other selected individuals are doing or planning to do.
There seldom have been occasions when I have got a refusal, and today’s is one of them.
I seem to have neglected some important intelligence trick in the searching for all the information connected with the closing of a sole proprietorship business.
This latest stage of economic development in Bulgaria has reached the administration heights of accepting fee payments in return for the provision of reasonable attention measured in time, though not as high to reach any ambition alluding to information about the character of necessary documents, nor below the counting of the number of the documents which, with time, have to be joined by more on new fees paid.
In line with this, here is the beginning of another story which I might, or might not, finish:
The period, during which the administration model was being changed to match a counterpart across the ‘iron curtain’ that used to separate the capitalist system of economic development from the socialist system of economic consolidation of the country’s assets, was marked with administration shifts in the laws and the regulations, which were so often changed that one had to stay awake and spinning in attention and in mind to be able to guess which needed a supportive influx: the raising of funds for the new system of ownership or the raising of staff for the new structures of control.
The world had evolved so far that money weighed less than control, and control was achieved when the administration knew less than the requester, and the requester had few rights to administer a wish or a plan without permission or a fee.
Those who could take the burden of such instability were two young recruitments: that of the nonchalant clerks who had finished school in the city and had stayed on to work and perform a couple of tasks each, in a computerizing itself system that was promising to become reliable and global, and the country lads and lasses who were indignant without feeling disappointment, and were disappointed without feeling indignation, and who had come to the city to cash what they had invested in learning in their native places.
The latter could stand any chaos, especially a controlled chaos, because they had the natural worship for the unexpected and a natural aptitude to be doing several things, one at a time but with an engagement all the while.
Their parents’ gardens, cattle, households, and their lineage back to when their grandmothers had woven and sewn, planted and raised food, sown and reaped, and kept up a moral image and an economic proliferation, helped them to take with indifference any law altered with a latest regulation passed overnight or discreetly voted for a year before.
The city was slowly enlarging its tidy centre and going from one administration headquarters or nest to another was a cheap and easy sightseeing tour in an environment civilized and clean.
Now an then there were pinpoints of difference in mood or style, especially where a pedestrian dropped a tear at the sight of some icons in the window of a souvenir shop, or when an old woman shook her head in wonder about what opinion to express before her friends about the street musicians wearing feather head adornment.
On the whole, however, every shop seemed empty and expensive, and every person seemed tidy and ready to comply with paid demands on his or her public performance.
Now and then, one could come to be at the door of an administration nest together with an adversary coming, and instinctively measure him or her, measured in response too. One could even find out things about him or her, or oneself really.
It may seem obvious that the adversary, who is in shorts in the shady draft and queue outside the administration door, is wearing a tight shirt over his bulging belly, sandals on his plump bare feet, a moustache on his plump dainty face, nothing on the slope between his chin and his chest, spectacles over his small tender eyes, and a solid cheap watch on his left wrist, is carrying in his large black square slung over his shoulder bag as many documents, and as trifling in their importance to his welfare, as me who may seem to be an adversary as economically unwanted in my social environment as he is socially unwanted in his economic one, and that due to just our great ambitions to be ride the beaten cream.
My long skirt, made of cloth strips matching in grey and brown hues, is a moody palette compared to the brightness of his sky-colours shirt, and may seem to be a developed by a zebra pattern sold to a giraffe in a bargain exchange of styles that can chant themselves to sleep, forgetting to look in the mirror while it is still daylight time.
At about the time of that meeting at the administration door, my adversary slowly pushing me way from the entrance and me trying not to shiver with cold, Big Politics’ optimists were sitting at their administration desks and were trying to find relaxation from the crowds in a bewilderment about what identification name another office meant when it pointed out the need for a requester to provide a document known by its code classification number, and Big Politics’ pessimists were going administration sightseeing all over the city, some stopping for a cup of coffee at a kiosk, and some integrating a call on the phone to check what their mothers were doing to raise their children well, some were waiting for their turn in long lines outside the computerized administration blocks, some were confusing which room to enter due to an ambiguous discrepancy of door plates and electronic flashing queue numbers, and some were waiting for things to just happen in the way Big Politics wanted them to.
At that very time, pensioners of both sexes were arguing the money they had been charged by the electricity and the central heating industries, going round with complaints, visiting trusted friends, or standing in the street, and were clearing off the idea of fraternity and brotherhood which Big Politics had crammed into their heads on the socialist side of the border at the time when the idea of individual prosperity resulting from much ado and even more work was being crammed in the heads living on the capitalist side of Big Politics’ border.
In one word, everyone was making politics, and was staying in one place to block the life of someone else, and Big Politics was just mending the broken and clearing away the unwanted.
Where I was is more than clear, where I am now, not far from the start, but burdened with much experience that is worth nothing but getting included in the comparative studies of the boundary between two millennia.
It is a fact that the world is consolidating in organization, is developing in means, is economizing on consummation, and is creating its modern image.
There has been news about the establishment of a Mediterranean Union of the Mediterranean countries, which union excludes not only Bulgaria from participation, but reminds me of “Dorman” (http://vpt.hit.bg) and Jane Brown’s need to participate in the world’s realized dreams, too early for her if time is measure in life-span, and too late for her to accept that when a dream cannot substitute reality one feels betrayed by mankind:
A Necklace of Sea Resorts
Life seemed unfair to love, any love, even love which bordered on keeping a liking for something inside one which one had to get used to the idea of losing to keep something else.
Jane was at the age when any physical pressure could lead the more liable to keep restraint home than develop the instinct of the predator, keep it to the point of derailing from everyday ways while losing property to support life, and while creating in the closest environment the poverty which could be blamed only on a failure to cope with the challenges of a modern and ever-changing world.
Jane was also a woman of an age, with life and experience behind her, who, when seen by others, feel the discomfort of being watched for faults and offenses, and when seeing herself as the object of merchandise- from advertising to resources of ideas for school teachers and psychologists, could very easily collapse into the style of a social
lunatic who can neither strike nor be relied not to.
Many like her had been in the plans of different people who worked on their individual projects, but
were all in one program for the country, and were indirectly supporting different programs
worldwide, people who came and went in uniform with the regularity with which they succeeded or
failed to carry out their experiments and perform their tasks, and get the results they had envisaged,
or contrary to these results- any other were unnecessary at this point in Jane’s country and could
be used later or somewhere else as ideas for new projects.
Many of the people who had lost their sensible orientation had been misled to believe that free
lunches did exist, many walked with the uncertainty of the small animal followed by the full of other
small animals large beast.
Many swayed physically and mentally, but Jane seemed to have kept a small victory over the huge
beast: she still had the flat her happy family had lived in before disintegration proved the only way of
survival, and she still had her profession of a teacher, only the joy and the excitement of living had
disappeared somewhere along the line which had to connect the east to the west, and the west to
the east, in a shuttle of activities which passed through the interests of the same people who crossed
the borders to be where something had to be met or to be received.
It was a pretty exchange of all kinds of goods, interests and deals, which the future of the earth’s
advancement could not do without if it was the future of science and technology whose greatest
projects could not be put to hazard.
Dorman, part of one of the top projects, and with an own one for a lower level, said to himself, at
the very moment as Jane Brown was saying to herself: “If you need the sea I wrote about, ringed
with its shining resorts, all along the coast, seen lovely as it will be- like a blue eye with a diamond
necklace- from the satellites and by people planning their holidays on the Earth, why did you
believe that I would ever be led to participate, be it through your dream, in a project controlled by
you.”
‘If you were not as restricted by a need to make no allowances for the existence of tricks in the
chest of the honest, and for some honesty in the heart of the cheat, you could have spared yourself
the anxiety and the miserableness of the crisis of transition. We cannot but go round the world and
be sure that what we do is safe. You could have given your name to the most precious necklace in
the world, the ring of diamonds, like diamonds around the blue of the sea on whose shores you
wrote your lovely poems, as thrillingly lovely yourself.” Said Dorman.
“Keep your ring of shining resorts, I’ll keep my poems. But if I learn I was on anyone’s project
connected with the families of the war veterans, I’ll find you even if it takes me to work out my own
plan, project, or program, be it in the centre of the sea, be it in the chain of resorts, be it in the
whole world.” Said Jane Brown as if Dorman could hear her, as if he were not just a tiny fraction of
a larger project which the earth and life had worked out for themselves.
It was the time of paranoya, but only those who had been used as, or chosen to be, the subtle
underground, rooting, systems of different tree growths, and had selected ways to go under other
trees to claim belonging to their parameter when the squirrels complained they had nowhere to bury
their nuts, and to remind the same squirrels, when they complained their nuts were being grown
through, that the trees they had taken the nuts from belonged to these roots’ origin
and relations.
Life was developing, and trade had given in to the oldest science: psychology, where people who
had a strong dislike for direct contact with material, machines, or production, were in the spheres of
art and change in studying the human nature in its ever-splitting-up variants, like a dandelion with the
direction of longing for activity and the one of the reticence of pretence, like in a smart project
where the falsitude of art when produced by a practical person is studied against the case of the
falsitude of life links when the common directions are unwelcome and what the world can spare is
most willingly taken and asked for, together with what the world would like to keep back, but
cannot get over the vacuuming drain of: two cases where the artificially said ‘I am living’ sounds
much more convincing than the real ‘I am living’ coming from someone who has difficulty in feeling
life because of the full occupation in participating in it.
Life was going on, on one level- near the earth and all over it, but the games for control over it
were going on, on different levels, and those whose origin had thought well and seen far, were the
most ready to start a new game on a board way up, while finishing a previous one of a lower level.
The people, those whom life really could depend on, and who had no liking for different
experiments or any shifts of direction, and who were the trees in the garden of life, were feeling from
sad to furious, from understanding to misled, from optimistic to paranoid, and from believing to ever
suspecting what the future might bring on the day after.
The secret offices and services, which had split the world up into easy to control sectors where
different projects had been experimented with till the best was taken as a global one, were now in
the trade and the technology spheres, and when one or another said they were in Jane’s country to
do business, advertising their new function through the mass media, Jane suspected they meant
business she was involved in somehow, and when they said they were there for love or interests, she
thought it was her they were after- to stop her, to check her, to court her, to use as a model or a
pilot project, or to lead to the idea of using the other people in return for a new idea about a new
manipulation project.
The time of paranoia seemed it would last for her for as long as she lived, and she hoped to live long
to find Dorman, or to see him come with a new wave.
It was the time of paranoya, and everything was dealt with in a manner, which could years later be assessed as one of inadequate and unprofound investigation and over-reliance on long-term programs, but now was good enough to keep the reins of the chariot of victory rambling over lands and fates towards the rising sun to meet and be met just before finding out that the settlements in its trail will curse its existence, and bless their own, and that the world is too small for any victory.
It was the time of paranoya when the compact masses of ethnic, of generation, differentiation had grown in their own population which now could be channelled to form the boundaries of the areas in which the victory of specialization would breed its own masses, which to channel later to form the next level of boundaries and areas, all till only a specialist in finding an escape would be able to get out into the sunlight of freedom of deed, where, before the stars started monitoring the complex net, one could dream of an adventure or a reality.
It was the time of paranoya when all the conditions for trade and business on a larger scale were ready for them to give life a glazing, even the undergrounds were patched up and matched in colour and understanding of the importance, like the importance the lining a party piece of clothing has- neither to show up, nor to let the shiny top cloth cling to the skin to reveal the structure of the body.
It was the time of paranoya, when the decisions were made at high quarters to be challenged by the public in a well-organized campaign in support of what the manipulative decisions had been denouncing.
It was the time of paranoya and almost the end of the year two thousand and two, when Jane had found out that all her dreams were so far away that they had probably learned to lead their independent lives. They could have become someone else’s, or maybe were pooling their own crowds round them, Jane could not worry about that too, she had classes to find for the time after the New Year celebrations which were for many a freezing into someone else’s victory time.
It was about the end of the year, some years before…, some years after…., but at the very time of paranoya. (V.P.Toucheva 2002 Sofia, Bulgaria)
Now the floors of the new global levels have already spread their material wings over Bulgaria, and the time has come for new constructors to come to furnish and place the ceilings.
The managers, made all the important decisions, shaded and blessed by the people acting as top administration of the levels being created, are sleeking out of their roles, their decisions, and the results, leaving all the responsibility, by the letter of the law, to the players with first parts to find out about themselves that they were too busy to learn what they were in charge of, because of an overschedule in the proclamation, commencement, celebration, advertising, and outstanding, of the righteousness of many destructive to the old organization of the same logistics structures policies.
There are more changes: one is the transportation from the old warehouse to another old warehouse of the secret and classified files on the civil population that was treated during the period of socialism as subordinate military reserve.
The secret and classified files are charged with individual tragedies and success, but are of little importance to any but the different researchers. Much of the information on paper and film documents and the reports was cleared to make a file clean for a person to survive or socially develop, much was gathered from the surviving and the developing people as exacted or compulsory submission of feedback, much was collected in a paid job, much was invented to secretly subordinate a person of a different breed.
If someone said I am being ungrateful to history for keeping me alive, I would ask that person to look at the conditions history provided me with.
Of course, I have learned to alter many conditions and avail of many circumstances, and have reached this now time when, instead of looking with envy from down in a cellar lodging up to the lit windows of the multi-storey blocks, I am looking from the balcony of my own flat to the lights of the planes and the satellites. It is, however, as impossible to reach the new lights now as it was impossible in the nineteen-sixties to return to the house my family left to come over in search of any job.
In line with the cycles in social manipulation, I recall an old poem of mine:
A Tired Soul
I’m clawing at my neck and chest
to catch my soul lest it speaks out
and says it’s tired, will escape
to some more friendly body quiet
I claw at it, but which hand’s right,
which one will keep it on a promise,
and which will give it as a fine
to someone who, to keep, has promised
V.P.T.
When one develops a writing hobby, one need not wonder why some people, like inspectors lurking in the shade to check out a bankruptcy for manoeuvre income, seem to be expecting something unexpected or hidden to pop out.
The different global speeds for the different countries can now be noticed to develop one variant in the streets of the city at the pace at which the people are walking in on business days, and are recognizing in passing a similarity or a discrepancy in social breed or fortune status.
The modern trend is to have diversity on the time scale rather than on the position one, which can be seen the other way, or may be studies as shattered time integrated in a consolidated position, and a shattered position integrated in a consolidated time period.
The logistics puzzle of this now time seems to have been split up into all the letters of the alphabet that have been distributed unevenly, and by a classified secret system, into many boxes whose old labels are both reliable and misleading.
One’s survival tasks exact from one the formation of words relevant to one’s needs and environment, though it is up to one to find out which letter is in which box, and what words one has to form for them to be relevant. More or less like looking for the route through the offices of administration, or like the administration trying to find a new working for the location system variant which will not double any other variant but will stick to the main principles that keep all the variants globally level.
In the context of logistics, I now understand why the most inappropriate among the men were chosen to play the rivals in an already decided economic competition, and why the most appropriate among the women were selected to be saved in the cages of the connoisseurs’ protectionism.
What I can now support my writing hobby with is the following:
‘I entered, a brave step from the heat in the street into the coolness of the shop, and asked the price of a watch that appealed to me from the shop window. It turned out that the watch cost one thousand three hundred, enough to keep me believing in my good taste. The fact that it was a man’s watch that appealed to me was not bothering me because I was sure that only a man of taste would like me, but also that the man of taste would never buy himself such a watch. A matter of acquiring and keeping a belonging.’
In the context of writing, I guess I have done much to spoil my poetic image.
But maybe there is someone who would like to go on a co-venture project with me, taken for granted that it is not too early for an author born to spend sixty years in the former socialist block to be welcome worldwide.
Big Politics has made information transparency so lucid that the people answering concrete questions at press conferences seem more stable, serious, or attractive, than aware of what is going on.
They seem to be developing new variants of proper to individual appearance intelligence, and are doing it before a changing audience of journalism that is humming up the ladder their big issue questions.
One can learn from the answers and develop a skill which, if summed up, appears like this: a ‘when’ question is answered with ‘We are in constant touch’, a ‘why’ questio