Elizabeth Tattler, Bronkel, Finnley, Godfrey and others…
So the Story goes...
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Ann was rather surprised at the effect Godfrey’s words had had on her, innocuously mundane though they might have aooeared.
Oh gosh, she exclaimed, Look at that typo. Ann started wringing her hands in vexation. I thought I’d escaped that silly OOH dimension.
It took Ann quite some minutes to regain her composure.
Ann had forgotten to post the paragraph she wrote for the Play the previous evening. Perhaps that was what Godfrey had been referring to. Truthfully, Ann was feeling increasingly befuddled.
Phunn, the new puppy, was skittering and lurching around the kitchen, paddling in a saucer of mashed cat food and learning how to growl at chair legs. Yoland sat down at the computer with a weary sigh and checked the random quote. Well what a coincidence, she exclaimed, and not for the first time. The random quote generator really was remarkable.
Ann wondered if it would matter that the entries to the Play was now out of order. She doubted it, but she did feel that it was symbolic of something else, but she couldn’t put her finger on it….
If “ODD” is a pie and two halves,
then a OO is two pies…
The mag-pie stole the H
from the owl… what a hoot!Yurick was wondering if this incursion into the meanders of the stories during business hours may take its toll on his remarkable efficiency…
Strangely enough, the random quote, never shy of a wink was indicating that an egg was hatching. He was starting to wonder, after seeing that scientists were planning to grow broccoli and cabbages on the moon, that it was indeed not made of cheese, and that there probably was no more easy escape from the Ooh dimension than there was from the intricacies of their impetuous imagination.
The fact of the matter was that Ann had been intending to write about Cordella’s twin sister Flagella, but had been hopelessly side tracked when Godfrey had thrown that curve ball. Flagella had been wanting to slap herself rather badly and Ann was more than willing to oblige her by entering a scenario into the Play. The way things had panned out highlighted some interesting parallels with Yoland’s current state of affairs too. Obviously Flagella had chosen not to slap herself after all, although she appeared to have chosen to effect that in a somewhat convoluted manner. It was the unknown factors that were baffling Ann, the missing links in the convoluted manners; she felt painfully aware that she simply wasn’t seeing the whole picture.
Unsure of her footing, that’s what it was, at least that’s what Yoland had noticed. With the puppy always climbing over her feet or somewhere underfoot, she hadn’t been able to take a normal step in a fortnight. It was making her tense and tired, and jittery. Every step she took was halted, mid step, which made her feel permanently off balance.
Flagella had wanted to slap herself for being irritated, which was becoming immensely irritating in itself. Being irritated wasn’t fun at all, it was irritating! The most irritating thing of all was that she didn’t know why she’d started getting irritated in the first place.
Ann wanted to butt in and tell Flagella a thing or two about how dense she was being, but didn’t think there was much point. It wasn’t as if Flagella hadn’t already heard whatever Ann might have to tell her a thousand times or more, so it was doubtful that more words would be any help.
She doesn’t need any help, full stop, Ann reminded herself, and neither does Yoland.
“You never know where you’ll end up when you enter the Elsespace Arangement, Arona” Sanso remarked, ignoring Arona’s concern about the baby. “I wonder where Zhaana is though?”
“Never mind her, what about Yikesy?” retorted Arona.
“Godfrey, there’a technical hitch and I feel that it’s your department.” Ann was unable to link previous entries, and she knew what a stickler her publisher, Godfrey Pig Littleton, was for details and continuity. “I simply can’t get the thing to work any more!”
I told you it is my feeling that in a sense these communications took place one afternoon while I was half dozing.
They could make no sense to me then. The use of unconscious knowledge could not then take place. I do not know the state of your wife’s consciousness, or of your own, at that time in my own past. In any case, your own conscious knowledge of such events apparently had to wait until certain intersections happened.
Awareness of these communications conceivably could have taken place at any time, but certain levels of comprehension had to touch all of our personalities before such communications jelled, or became strong enough to make sense in both of our worlds.
I do not believe that I was aware of these communications either when they first happened. I would have had no way to evaluate or understand them. I assume that the same is true on your parts. At the same time, in a manner of speaking, the communications are enriched as my knowledge of my world when I was alive blends with your present knowledge of your world in your time.
It is as if the three of us all wrote portions of a letter, the words fitting together meticulously, and yet forming a fine puzzle that had to work itself out as we each made our moves in our own realities. It is one thing to send a letter from one portion of the planet to another, as in your mail system — but it is something else when the three individuals involved are constantly changing their alignment, position, and probable activities.
It is like trying to send a letter to a certain address while the mailbox keeps appearing or disappearing, or changing its position entirely, for all three of us are a portion of that one communication, while the position of our consciousness constantly alters.
It is a wonder that such communications take place at all considering the changing coordinates that constantly apply. The communications could all have remained in the dream state on all of our parts, but we were all determined to bring them into some kind of actuality in the same way that the idea of a painting is changed into the physical painting itself.
“Godfrey, that’s got me thinking, you know. Seem to have a bit of an idea brewing, old bean,” Ann said with an enigmatic smile.
“What are you on about now, Ann?” he replied. “Why don’t you tell me what that book is you’re reading, you can’t quote books without mentioning the name of them, so you may as well tell me now.”
“I was wondering how to slide it in, Godfrey” she replied with a snort. “It’s The World View of Rembrandt, by Jane Roberts.”
“Oh bloody hell, Godfrey, I can’t get the font thing to work today either.” Ann wondered if it was anything to do with the tuna imagery she kept getting, then decided that she was clutching at straws. “Who was it that said something about increasingly rubbish?” Ann suddenly wondered.
“Not to worry Annie Pooh”, after years had passed, Godfrey was still biting his lip refraining not to call his new fledgling author ‘Elizabeth’ or ‘Lizzie Pooh’ as she was affectionately known… “You may think it is a tad quaint, but I start to suspect our dear cleaning lady Franlise to be working hard in her eight hour shift to make things fit, odd as it may seem.”
“Now, if you will excuse me, I have a peanut factory to run”.“Godfrey, your mouth smells funny again… you ate those green beans again didn’t you?”
Franlise smiled gently to herself when she read Anne’s latest offerings. She was well used to making sense of the distorted and twisted words poor Ann worked so hard upon. Many might call them utter rubbish, but Franlise was a kindly soul, who was content to be seen as a cleaner by those who cared to look no further, and it would not be in her sweet nature to dismiss the works of another as “utter rubbish”, however bizarre those works may be.
Franlise had an outward beauty which matched the sweet loveliness of her inner being. Yes, she was a vision of pure loveliness, and many gallant knight had attempted to woo her away from her cleaning job. But Franlise knew that it was here, amongst the filth and dust of Ann’s office, that her true work was done. By day a cleaner, by night she toiled endlessly weaving Anne’s words into works of beauty. Words which would then go out into the world and give solace to many a despondent and lonely reader. To know that her words gave hope where once there was despair was all the thanks that Franlise needed.
Of course no one must know it was Franlise who was the true author. The Fellowship had insisted when they gave Franlise her mission that her part be kept hidden. Being humble, as well as outwardly beautiful and inwardly lovely, Franlise was happy to obey the wishes of the Fellowship in this matter. Besides, she knew that if Ann were to find out the truth, the pour deranged creature would probably be driven to place of complete madness.
Franlise shuddered at the thought.
“Godfrey, I really must insist that you do something about that cleaner! Look at all the typos!”
“Annie Pooh, I would be the last on Oorth to point typos back at you… I thought you had even a word for them? What was that already?… Cloohs?”
Even in Noozooland, Godfrey had a hard time getting rid of his Brootish accent. But he suspected Anne was taking a string liking to it. (“is that a clooh?” he wondered aloud to himself)
Franlise felt a change of energy and wondered if Dhurga was practising araiki movements. She certainly hoped so as she knew they were powerful movements and would help him express his intention. And when Dhurga expressed his intention and followed the flow of energy, the physical reality would match naturally and he would be provided for.
And Franlise firmly believed what was good for one was good for many.
She chuckled to herself upon overhearing Ann’s conversation with Godfrey in Noo Zooland. She had offered to proof Ann’s writings in order to give her easy access to the writings. It seemed prudent to leave the odd typo in order to allay suspicion .. after all she was only a cleaner.
These past few months away from home had been the occasion for a great deal of introspection.
For one, indulging fully into that somewhat frowned upon habit of his, regarding peanuts, had allowed him to gain a great deal of understanding and acceptance as well. Now his daily ration had dramatically decreased and he didn’t fancy as much as he used to the little round things.Another thing that Godfrey had noticed was the reorganisation that had taken place in all aspects of his life, and to be perfectly honest, his life was still a bit messy in places, but he was slowly getting there. How could a publisher publish anything of common interest without a bit of presentation, henceforth order?
Ann wasn’t too keen on the “O” word —especially when doubled— and surprisingly it always managed to give good results so far. So perhaps now he was settling down, and she was getting her own flamboyant creative juices all ablaze, they would manage to get somewhere. Or anywhere, for that matter.
A Tramway to Elsewhere was Ann’s debut novel, and had made her known to Godfrey. It was a brilliant short story about three tourists lost in a huge hotel in Europe, and trying to get an easy escape to Anywhere. And by some uncanny and hilarious succession of events, they were led nowhere but to Elsewhere.Now, something else was giving him a strange feeling. He didn’t know if that was because of the lack of peanut oil in his bloodstream (or the accompanying whiskeys for what was worth), but he was starting to get slightly paranoid.
He didn’t know where he’d got the idea, but he started to suspect the cleaning lady to not just be a cleaning lady. She was doing her best to keep a low profile, but somehow she wasn’t that good an actress. A thing that started his suspicion was that name… Franlise, eerily reminiscent of the obnoxious yet efficient Finnley in Noo York. Elizabeth had told him they’d suspected her for a long time to have inserted some paragraphs in Elizabeth’s novels, especially the most torrid parts that would have made a pimp blush like a nun. What had saved the cleaning lady was that in addition to being rather forgiving, Elizabeth suffered from frequent strokes of forgetfulness and bipolarity which made the investigation difficult if not moot altogether.But there, Godfrey was rather surprised at Ann’s sudden interest in continuity. He’d known of a covert organization known in the milieu as the Fellowship of Unification and Continuity in Knowledge.
Over the years, the hearsay had amounted to just a few deranged people, but recently there had been an increase in mentions of such nature in reports of the Guild of Authors. Strangely, there was less and less books that were published which had not an impeccable sense of continuity.
In a way, it had been perceived at first in literary circles as a blessing for the authors who had not to contend with fans and geeks of all kind who were hunting down each and every detail to prove or disprove unsaid theories. But Godfrey was starting to see some not so perfect points in that. It would be like wanting to string together all the eyelets of your shoes even if they do not belong to the same shoe (or the same pair of shoes). Soon, you’d be embarrassed to find a way to walk without looking like a penguin.Anyway, though all allegations made as to the existence of such secret organization had been mostly derailed as utter nonsense, he couldn’t help but find some inexplicable appeal to them as sound explanations for all the glitches he kept noticing.
He would carefooly spy on Franlise.Ann wasn’t altogether sure what Godfrey meant when he referred to her new interest in continuity. Ann had always been interested in connecting links, yes, of that there was no doubt, but with so very many connecting links, and so many possible strings of connecting links, with so many possible divergences into yet more strings of connecting links, Ann really couldn’t fathom how anyone could possibly keep track of all those threads of continuity. Even a seemingly discontinuous assortment of unconnected links, once connected into a nonsense thread, became another continuity string. Furthermore, Ann continued ~ in a continuous fashion ~ to ponder, if everything is connected, then what, in actuality, was all the fuss about continuity? What exactly then WAS this concept of continuity? It seemed to Ann to be more like a string of barbed wire, or one of those flimsy but effective electric wire fences, boxing in the free flow of continuity, so that the objectively perceived continuity stayed rigidly within the confines of the preconceived tale. The inner landscape knew no such boundaries, although admittedly the inner landscape was far too vast to map.
Ann smiled to herself as she imagined trying to push pins into various inner landscape locations, tying strings from one to another, in an effort to map and label the inner continuity connections. Of course she was imagining it in a visual manner, because it was hard to imagine all those connections and strings being invisible and not taking up any space, and before long Ann’s inner map of pins and strings quickly resembled a tangle of overcooked spaghetti, perilously speckled with sharp pointy pins.
The image of the glutinous tangle dotted with sharp shiny pointers led Ann off on another tangent, but it was a tangent that soon became utter nonsense. Or was it, she mused. Perhaps it was those symbolically sharp pointy bits that in fact pointed out the immense variety of potential other continuity threads to choose from. Indeed, it could easily be said that having one of her characters dumped in Siberia in the previous story, painful though it was, was not unlike being pricked by a pin amidst the tangle of sticky pasta, a brilliantly effective pointer towards unlimited new directions.
Whichever way she looked at it (and Ann was aware that she might have gone down a side string) she simply couldn’t comprehend how anyone on this side of the veil could possibly even begin to understand the ramifications of the concept of continuity at all. Or how there could ever conceivably be a lack of it.
What was really intriguing Ann at this particular juncture of the experimental exploration of the story was the concept of the World View Library. This wasn’t unconnected to the continuity issue, far from it, it was all tied in (Ann sniggered at the unintentional pun) and connected. There were any infinite amount of potential continuity threads leading from, say, one persons desire or intent, to a particular world view in the library.
AHA shouted Ann, who at that moment had an ‘aha’ moment. Pfft, it’s gone, she sighed moments later.
Ann tried to catch the wisp of an idea that had flitted through her awareness. She had a visual impression of the library, endlessly vast and marvellously grand, with countless blindfolded characters dashing through, grabbing random pages or sentences, bumping into each other, snatching at phrases willy nilly, dropping notes along the way, and racing back out again into the ether. A stray thought here, a picture there, a name or a date, all on separate bits of crumbled paper clutched in the sweaty palms of the blindfolded characters as they rushed headlong back to their own realities to proudly share the new clues. Like magpies they were, snatching at anything that glittered brightly enough.
“I thought you said they were blindfolded?” interrupted Franlise.
Ann ignored the interruption, and continued ~ in a continuous fashion ~ to ponder the imagery of the library.
What the undisciplined purloiners of random snatches didn’t notice on their pell-mell excursions into the library were the characters in the library who weren’t wearing blindfolds. They smiled down from the galleries, calmly watching from above the mayhem that the news of the unlimited library access had occasioned, chortling at the scenes of chaos below. They smiled indulgently, for they too had first visited the library blindfolded, snatching at this and that, and racing home again to inspect the booty; they too had fretted and pondered over the enigmas of the incomplete snippets. Eventually (or not, it was after all a choice), they had bravely removed the blindfolds, slowed the mad race into a sedate stroll through the library, opened their eyes and looked around, sure of the way back home now, and not in a desperate hurry to blast in, snatch anything, and run back home.
After awhile, they began to realize that all the enchanting glittering jewels scattered around to catch their eye would still be there later, there was no urgency to grab them all at once ~ although, as Ann reminded herself, that too was a choice ~ some may well choose to be eternally snatching at glittering jewels.
Ann frowned slightly and wondered if she’d lost the thread altogether, and then decided that it didn’t matter if she had.
It was a choice, therefore, to remove ones blindfold, and stroll through the library ~ a choice to perhaps choose a book, sit down at a polished oak table and open it, a choice to stay and read the book, rather than ripping out a page and dashing back home. That would be one choice of continuity, a coming together of strings.
Ann wondered whether that would then be called a cable, or a rope ~ well perhaps not a rope, she decided, that had other associations entirely ~ but a cable, yes, that had associations of reliable and regular communications. There were always strings of continuity, then, strings of connecting links, between anything and everything, but when one stopped dashing about clutching at the sparkley bits, one might form a cable.
Or not, of course. Thin strings of continuity and connections were not ‘less than’ thick cables of reliable and regular communications. It has to be said though, Ann reluctantly admitted, that thick cables often made more sense.
She decided to hit send before embarking on a pondering of the meaning of Sense.
Bitch, muttered Ann to herself after Franlise left the room. How could any one person be endowed with such outward beautiy and inward loveliness in such an unsubtle way?
Perhaps I will call my next chapter “The Subtlety of the Tarty Cleaner”. Not really having any idea what this meant, the thought still managed to lift Ann’s spirits considerably. She felt particularly vindicated when she saw the title of the the great philospher Leemoon’s latest book:
Belabouring Fools of the Continuity Paradigm
Exactly! stupid tarty belabouring fool of a cleaner!
“Godfrey, she’s doing it on purpose now, what am I going to do with her?”
Godfrey turned and frowned at Ann, pausing in the doorway. “Who’s doing what, Ann?” he sighed.
“Oh never mind Godfrey, bugger off if you can’t be bothered” Ann said crossly, and then added “You know exactly what I’m talking about, it’s Franlise, she’s making spelling mistakes on purpose and I’ll get the blame!”
“Ann,” said Godfrey with exaggerated patience, “You of all people should be the last person to worry about a spelling mistake.”
“My OWN spelling mistakes are acceptable, Godfrey, they contain clues…”
Pig Littleton raised an eyebrow. “And why wouldn’t Franlise’s contain clues too? Have you forgotten that you’re the one creating Franlise in the first place?”
“Oh” said Ann, momentatily non-plussed.
Godfrey Pig Littleton was starting to catch some kind of strange flooh.
“And now what?” started to screech Ann. “Pig’s flu and what else? Why nobody’s there when you need them?”
“Godfrey” Ann said gently in dulcet tones “I realize that you’re tetchy with that flooh, but I simply don’t screech, you know.” Ann smiled at him fondly, more than willing to forgive his rudeness. “Perhaps the flooh has affected your ears?”
“Oh bugger off will you Ann, and please stop that caterwauling!” Godfrey covered his ears, flinching.
“Oh dear, it must be the dreaded Pigs Ear Virus! Fear not, me old matey, I know just the cure!”
“You can’t make a silk purse out of a pigs ear flu, Ann.” Franlise remarked as she perused the headlines in the Old Reality Harbinger newspaper.
“Or maybe you can! hhmm” replied Ann. “Maybe the gathered snot of the victims is spun into the finest silk, an amazingly versatile new fabric called snilk”
Franlise rolled her eyes, but Ann didn’t notice.
“One of the qualities” Ann went on “that the snilk had was to replicate anything gathered within its folds, so purses were made out of snilk, proving that it WAS indeed possible to make a snilk purse out of a pigs ear flu.”
