I am in the Royal Festival Hall
and the soprano of vengeance is the one judged the world’s best and connected to me in some ways, but I am in terror and in a moment in Hades
- from the clarity of the vision,
- the urgency of the chorus, and
- the remorse of the penitent tenor at her side.
Ransom Note Left at the Crime Scene
Howling dog, freezing bull, streetlit faces.
In this house, we were all together, in the world and developing, contesting against unfulfillment, but the species has changed and devolved in mind and body.
There is the normalisation of horror and the diminishing of the dimensions of reality, which is now considered hollow and shallow, its colours pale.
You have noticed that, right? Good.
Now, every narcissistic fantasy of victimhood can be indulged.
- All white babies are racists.
- 100,000 dead of malnutrition in Yemen.
- Not from our bombs.
I am abused by your weeping.
With the ability to impose narratives of simple-minded cause and effect and the violent assertion of virtue, every single thing and body, that for some time could be commodified, is now a ritual, a game disintegrated to a colourless absence.
Interesting how it is understood and how they are doing it, ‘rioting.’ The new festival.
- Hoodies looting more hoodies from designer stores.
- Replacing trainers.
- Picnics from burgers cooked in looted Macdonald’s.
- Cooperative van use.
The state fasces, chattery narrators, seem actually to believe they are governing by the consent of the people even though they obviously aren’t. They believe there are values.
There obviously are.
The real politicians are terrified as they do walkabouts.
They know they govern by narrative.
The pre-emotive illegal arrests of last month by police political units against ‘gang leaders’ are suspended, but inquiries into political corruption and police bribery are also suspended. The real cutbacks in social spending have yet to begin. The fictional cutbacks either caused or did not the riots.
A stereotype is being tested during its creation.
It was class war! And the underclass (made up of all aspirants, rich or poor) must be defeated!
In the experiment, lumpen areas were left to burn, a là U.S. tactics. Rich areas looted had compensation pumped in. It was beautiful how the kangarooo 24-hour fast-track trials turned up
- theatrical characters,
- 9-year-old gangsters,
- lawyers,
- Olympic stars.
The underclass now have the fantasy that there isn’t any conscious state and that they can do at will by messaging one another where to gather, travelling by tube or car (or on hijacked buses) to loot something.
It is the ultimate consumer society! The underclass looting like the ruling class does!
No regard for money. Just goods.
We are all Saudis.
Dress like them.
Blending in is self-defence by race.
But there were also wonderful absurdities, such as looting baby clothes stores and hanging the garments on trees in affluent suburbs.
The troubling UK version is here.
Police defended middle class suburbs and tourist areas. Individuals miles from everything, including in villages, just burned some stuff to see what it was like.
In that suburb the police closed the tube station so that the creative LOOTING adventure tour mob of 300 was left on the street in a strange upper middle class land hours from their dens and so trashed the whole posh town centre and all the streets home. Looting followed tube lines.
Police defended middle class suburbs and tourist areas. Individuals miles from everything, including in villages, just burned some stuff to see what it was like.
Citizens of Kiev petitioning to get in on the Transport for London Tube expansion plans.
They travelled differently, but they used the same styles throughout the country: knocking down brick walls to get missiles and burning council bins as barricades.
They dressed the same, some changing in mid loot. New cars were set alight to become gathering spots. The mob moved from there for undisturbed fun as police set up pretty lines to guard the cars on an empty street.
Looters developed a common language, a pidgin. Much of it U.S. antique gangster speak.
So did the police!
Staff at fast food restaurants and electronic stores waited for end of shift and looted their own stores. People burned furniture stores they owed money to or which had turned them down for jobs.
Upper class criticism was that only unfashionable stores were looted. Bad brands. A lack of standards.
Alexandria and Kiew.
On a humid night, we had to close windows to smell of burning cars as the centres all around our hill burned. We had come home by cab after a Royal Albert Hall Choral work. Romantic German.
Lovely red smoky sky.
I was a poet and warrior of light. I was mean and crappy. We all were. We are not now becoming. We cannot just leave those selves and walk on yet. Nor can we stop. Not yet.
This is the great migration.
The Nile valley has islands less lonely at Cairo.
On one, surrounded by white-trunked and tousled tall palms just like the poem pillars at Karnak, is the best poolside drinking spot in the city. The water in the pool is teal and clear lit from below. There is an ancient palace stone wall to frame the constant stars and to keep out the infrequent sand blown down from the plateau, that howls into the great combined bellow of the taxi horns.
There, the Canadian and American Embassy staff often drink and flirt, sometimes fornicate, in circumstances and contexts purely mysterious to the populace without.
A short block away, at river’s edge, in front of the city of the dead on the far bank, is the great mosque.
Screams floating over the Nile at quiet midnight can just be heard at the poolside bar.
Within that view, nestles the historic and traditional traditional building for secret police torture of
- political opposition,
- of peasant fundamentalists,
- child innocents and, on commission,
- of the foreign enemies of Christian Democracy
- and the rule of law,
done as a favour to the great western funding powers.
My apartment was next to that building. It had a high balcony from which, in the sharp winter cold that stilled everything as it tumbled from clear night skies, I blew large bubbles made using a coat hanger and washing up liquid. They would start out iridescent and rainbowed, drift over the black, slow waterflow, age to grey sacks, and then drop silently onto the torture building’s roof to symphonies of polyphonic torment.
Ah, the moment.
They are drinking there still.
The Building Site
Breaking News:
the Company has withdrawn investment in Zanzibar, due to fascist homophobic brutality and illegal laws by the government.
Shhh!
In the period before the German Disaster, nationally based cultures were mobilized in support of national interests. Cultures were defined as those things not being the cultures of others.
Nations were defined as peoples having a common geography, history, economics, language and culture (shared by all classes and genders) and a common psychology.
Treaty discussions catered to inherent and intrinsic commonalities.
Transcultural architecture, though, is a process rather than building to design. Every day you must show up with something you have carried with you a long way and fit it in, without nails.
There is a fundamental, continuous rejection of any notion of inherent characteristics or intrinsic beliefs in an encounter between persons of different cultures. It is experimental.
Facts are confirmed by negations of experimental overtures.
Empathy is practiced beyond ritual and convention, by giving full time and space to hearing and understanding the associations and meanings of ‘the other.’
It turns out that our neo-colonial activity will be halted by Indigenous cultural affirmation. On a deeper level, isn’t it ironic that postmodernism is not as much fun as liberal academics said it would be.
Instead, identity politics based on the wrenching of dead corpses from our neural patterns is on.
A method for understanding the whole life of the other is built without finding evidence of inherent, absolute characteristics relating to mental health,
even though some modern diplomacy rejects an assumption of inherent national or group interests or a stable and inherent attitude and the transcultural approach rejects notions of the absolute origin of personality type or behaviour in gender, race, class or family history,
eschewing absolute mind and permanent readings.
Instead, it constructs.
Some practices of transcultural diplomacy extend beyond the promotion of national arts and academic institutions to the promotion of localized creation and the exchange of capacities,
an adhoc process that runs parallel to national level diplomacy,
establishing and influencing third party supra-national structures and collective interest groupings to mediate transcultural conflict emerging from interaction with the global system.
It has been largely successful.
National-level diplomacy has not, because that is not its goal. It is a comedy of cultural encounters and of manners, a coming-of-age memoir, moving from the old village to the modern world, post-colonial in politics and attitude, within an exotic setting.
It is entertainment, like “traditional” dancing.
It is clear that some people get a real charge out of leaders who make politics and life comedic in deeply fascist theatre: democratic one moment, feudalist the next and ribald macho by dinner.
Those dispossessed and depersonalised by modernism love it. To have a violent character to look at and love. To be absorbed into.
The transcultural novel does not pay the ransom for an older point in the transculture.
It is other, not a delusion unfolded to a therapist, an account of a collaborative creation of a fantasy, a proposal of a discourse of imaginations, a comparison of framework and boundaries, or a comparison of psychologies and mythologies.
A transcultural novel is written for mainstream reading, often by a transcultural individual, usually about a journey, during which a relationship is built in a strange landscape with someone who is ‘other’. It makes the unfamiliar familiar to the reader. Every night now is wrested from peace.
The pedagogy of creative writing is complementary.
It reveals the effectiveness of individual narratives in encounters with social context. It constructs a culture, while disassociating from a dysfunctional one.
Opposing solitudes in world conflicts encounter each other as an amalgam of other and self.
The transcultural architect recognizes that narrative is not everything anymore. It is the obvious theatric pantomime that is, that where it was once the novelists, the Eng. Lit. graduates and pornographers who strategized the politics, it is now failed P.R. persons and anarchist lunatics.
When drawing up your building plans, check out their advisers. See what they have written. See their literature.
- Is it like yours?
- Do you feel you need a few theses against it?
- Is it post-modern,
- obviously undeniable,
- narcissistic,
- opiate virtuosity,
- imperialistic nudity,
- armed,
- infinitely wired
- and patrolled by drones?
Culture is forbidding and allowing.
The Barbarians at the gates
It shows language organizing experience. The novel is an exposition of identity in society and of the effectiveness of culture, although there is not yet a truly postcolonial narrator nor a decolonized reader. But you are still here.
There is hope.
Pop Culture
A straight jacket. A drugged cosh. A warehouse super ego.
As an architect I am making an intervention in this developing rave. I am constructing a thesis that Canada has no ethnicity. It is a hole into which the suggestion of the possibility of being Canadian is thrown…
…along with genocidally-altered original nations.
Because ethnicity is no longer possible culturally, linguistically or as a life, it is re-membered by grant-aided, socially-parasitic arts, a loyal opposition trained not to depict anything beyond the fictionally parochial and the victim memorial, and other 3-D printed versions of Frankenstein’s monster.
Without the stitching.
Canada is permanently a colonial culture, colonized not by European fur traders but by transculture itself, a culture of low sentiment.
It largely ignores the room and offers small complaint and smaller soul.
Its artists ignore one or more of three duties.
3
To art.
2
To entertainment.
1
To truth and beauty.
It is the fault of the artists that there is a fucking popular culture.
More calmly, conflict often is a re-occurrence of previous contradictions expressed in new forms. It often occurs where culture, especially identity, is rendered political towards the creation or preservation of hierarchies, expressed by identity, cultural diversions, distortions and cover-up narratives — like a religion or ideology.
On the other hand, when systems decline, incoherence arises, needs are not met, connections cannot be made, coping mechanisms fail and storming the chamber of the people is considered the highest form of liberty of and for the people.
Even still.
The transcultural electrician is challenged to rewire that initiation, to create images that will shatter the dangerous and restrictive politics of stereotypes that block it. An electrician like that gets into the mind, to project in order to get a response, which then enters the transcultural field, confronting the dissonances that culture creates in gender, race and other continuous spectra.
Transcultural politics is not a politics such as
‘multi-culturalism,’
which proposes rules of interrelationship and reconciliation between people grouped culturally and is based on adapting cultures to a common law, nor is it the politics of ‘interculturalism’ which proposes exchanges of cultural enterprises towards a common market, characterised by the critical filtering of culturally acceptable objects and activities to a mainstream and dominant culture.
In the ongoing collapse of globalism there is no dominant culture.
Says Global Culture
We all suffer from interpretive violence. No one helps construct anyone else from what could be plausible beyond that which is accepted. One person to any other is no more than a wind to a stone.
When people actually see themselves in books and poems, see themselves unfamiliar, in new planes, when they are no longer encouraged to see themselves in widely circulating stereotypes, they will prefer chaos, as I do, cured of vanity that supports the lack of conviction with quotations from the dead who cannot correct them.
Let us look at grace, or freedom, or redemption, or
revolution.
None of them happen, especially not grace, in some God awful mild and present harmony. They come together in otherness.
As the early transcultural writer Ernest Hemingway said,
“the sun also rises.”
Then the fool went on safari.
Origin Stories
I did not create the transculture.
It is a natural outgrowth of humans.
Soon, it was applied to the post-World War world, although that was no longer a world.
The new cultures of this non-world displayed fundamental differences in language, class structure and material culture from pre-war cultures. The new culture was now dominant over them.
No longer love but vengeance: a proof one must never say ‘doubt God but do not doubt my love.’ It may be futile to wish every sojourner a safe journey and every dream of love immunity from illusion, but there is justice and the angry spirit will come and you will be hers.
The culture Ortiz observed was popular and spontaneous, a product of the life of a new sort of people.
It was not the product of official politics, national institutions or any other parts of the superstructure.
Now it is nursing and psychology, as only the women and children were saved.
It describes practices that join cultures by constructing new bridges of understanding.
All improvised.
Він описує практики, які об’єднують культури, будуючи нові мости розуміння.
Your Bots at Google
The culture itself is a way of critiquing and explicating literature an the visual and performing arts during the global diaspora. It reads language as a function of myths, metaphors, preconceptions, moral imperatives and stereotypes…
…leading towards and empathic and utilitarian encounter. A transcultural architect, on the other hand, recognizes stereotypes and formulaic language as living fossils of situations, past and frozen, by which the status quo arrived. Grass is always green.
These stereotypes are used, in phrase and structure, as they were in ancient chants:
That lack-of-relationship (that is still a relationship) and the frustrated search for its authenticity has existed since written language replace oral tradition. It is why the first texts were illuminated as a chimera cinema.
Because in the new stereotype (now the old), image became abstracted to thought, separated, just as image an sound were, from the senses, all progressive culture requires visual exegesis.
Well, if you were a Russian sniper in Stalingrad today, what would you aim at?
Consequently, the authentic self contains shades of the self seen through glass that we did not think we knew.
Even if that self has a soul, it can still belong to a fetishism of the present detail of existence.
That fetishism which is the basis for popular culture and popular repression should not be made golden.
The false complete identity they assume for participation in society is bad enough, but worse is the range of prescribe and pre-scripted cartoons they speak through. All those dizzyingly thin attributes.
All that oozing irony which is literally true.
As with the lurid covers, the purpose of stereotype is to create fear, to find and then organize the death of real opposition to systems…
…to freeze the cultural mirror from any window by consolidating the confusion of scenes and mind that reality engenders as it contradicts the social narrative and the official history.
I demonstrate how one can get lost.
Once this process has created great men from nothing, these creations write their memoirs as a search for the originating stereotype. They become memorials to their ephemeral life, declaring life itself ephemeral. In the transcultural action novel, the purpose of such stock phrases is to create a sense of an apocalypse, that everything familliar is being overthrown.
By their climaxes, the prevailing Law, belief and hierarchy become the meta text for a person’s life, although the origins of law were to relate stereotype to position in society. A falling action, a sudden escape to the Maldives, is not enough to transmit the original intent of the law, that morality is a social construct, not an absolute.
I advocate such immunity. I advocate that one does a rigorous translation of the different styles in which the same life is expressed.
There is no divine hierarchy,. There is no natural talent. There is no skill built with experience.
The reverse is true.
That’s the Law, Folks.
In transculture, understanding embraces a contradiction between the knowable and the true, the accessible and the necessary. No good art goes without its erasure. No good thought without its burning.
Most middle-of-the-road cultural oppressions and deceptions create situations meant to prompt interrogations of their own banality in order to arrange destruction of potentialities.
Onward.
The Dream of an Uncommon Language: Part 2
Yes, I knew Robert Mugabe. I wrote to him in the bush.
I made a small contribution to the arming.
I went there to teach and to make theatre. I saw the body bags go by my house and my son’s nursery school.
I heard the night screams.
I saw something begin.
At first, Robert could write pragmatically and could conceal the sectarian.
But I did not make the revolution.
There was hope.
A lot of it was made by children who I later had to teach a truer history. First, I had to teach it to myself.
The decline, the sectarianism, the racism that developed, was so obvious. The pedantic cultural nationalism, the scams for thugs and murderers. The deliberate deceptions and populist rants to appeal to the lowest.
I have tried with many others to support a change. I went back a few times to try a few things. I have tried to support the celebratory and glorious resistance literature that Robert hasn’t.
Probably like you, I thought things were of cosmic and universal significance and of personal reference to me, my narrative, destiny and self, in completely banal events, as the latest number one.
You and I were thinking like Robert.
As I became antiques, I found, as a matter of fact, obvious truth and common sense; that I was wrong about everything important: love, family, significant persons, art, and common sense.
Like Robert.
Now, I am in the best shape ever, I am as sharp as a wasp nest attack, I am as funny as a dancing baby camel on being set free in the yellow desert.
Transcultural adventure novels, on the other hand, are game parks. They are managed by transcultural guards, hired from local communities of readers and trained in literary weaponry. Transcultural literary novels resemble modern diplomatic processes.
They do not have a familiar structure.
Transcultures themselves lack classic architecture. They attempt to lead their readers outside of patterns of thinking and preconceptions.
They bring fluidity to genres and instability to characters. They require co-creation with their readers.
Call that trust.
ARE YOU IN?
Pale light.
Like pain.
Now the rain.
The Dream of an Uncommon Language: Part 1
In restless sleep, I will dream of virtuous government.
With merciless policies clearing the nests of poets and narrators. Of moral exactness and shaming psychological illuminations by sudden floodlight.
I will dream of a literature which evades beauty with duplicitous integrity.
The good have none of the best weapons. They do not have the best lines. Their images are tattered.
The others have the fire. They triumph before the rain tumbles over us and batters with what’s left of the good.
I spent a lifetime as a body, preparing to have these reams now approaching a reader and the way the reading, especially the process of challenging assumptions and expectations, is managed.
As a body, I travelled with death and pain, with malpractice, have been battered with corruption and betrayal almost constantly for at least a decade, with impossible love and dreamless sleep…
…twisting and shouting with nightmares.
If you don’t arm yourself against fiction right now, you are click bait.
Grotesques: Part 2
The writer is decomposing. You can view the initial decomposition here.
I ran outside with my reeled tape recorder to get the instance of the deluge to send to my sister far away in Ontario.
It was to remind her of leaving the house as I did as a summer storm came across the lake.
The thing is, people are going through cultures.
In this form of architecture, culture is not in statements.
This is not a statement.
Barbaros
I am haunted by Africa.
Andros
The cultural nationalists, the ones who are burning down schools, are not going to end up with the rebirth of a tradition.
I was hired to build those schools. I built a mosque instead. Eventually, they burnt that, too.
anoitos
The ideologues among the oppressed or even their representatives are not going to make new women and men in a work of art.
For example, when I wore a literary mask, I was bullied into defining and redefining the obvious over and over again without qualification:
race, gender, ideology, the cultural nationalist industry that evolved from the unequal development of oppressive globalization and the mirror development of, for example, the novel on different continents and in different cultures, needs to protect its product.
The aspirant tribunes of the people need to protect their publications and jobs. For this, they need to create people.
Identity is the product.
Identity is the object.
It is all they can think of.
People!
Grotesques: Part 1
I have frightened my peers.
There is no certain knowledge to which I may return.
I lectured about transcultural observation in Prague, Lisbon, Swaziland and even at Oxford. I wrote a novel particularly to illustrate it. It did.
Especially the writing of it. The book is hitting the streets any day now.
I became a fable.
In this package, I was bullied, as if I were a proverbial ass. Then I was expelled from my PhD course, because transculture wasn’t based on gender, class or race interpretation of cultural phenomena. ‘O.K.’, I said, that too, but also this.
Torn out of that package, I learned that the politics of culture, like sex, resemble the politics of my own memory.
When I was more distant, I was in Nigeria, at the foot of the mountains near the Cameroon border. The mountain was aflame from the fires of “those people.” The school was still smoking from the fires of the first fundamentalists.
It was a new world. I was a teacher of women teachers. None were fundamental. Some were Madonna-like, demanding purdah, second wives, some were fifteen-year-old liars in too-tight uniforms, who had to be kept from the fences at midnight when the gowned boys came to howl and the old men in government Peugeots with offers.
The rain was coming in a wall across the horizon then. Dust cast before it in billows reddening skies.
It is time to prevent men from becoming books and books from becoming men.
Inspiration and Independence, Part 4
Memory, word and image are reasons why books can hold heritage and electricity can’t. I began to write when I noticed that. I listened to the House of the Rising Sun.
The clouds at dusk in orange and deep blue make less immortal what was this sunny cold day. They are a reclusion embedded in the cycle of night.
The dream inside the dream awaking was sleep.
In examining the architecture of transcultural literature, the construction of its form, the rhetoric of its language, the signification in its imaginary, a cultural architect can begin with a question that carries its own answer:
If so, how is it constructed?
Thunder has been roiling steadily over Canigou mountain. The gutters have been frothing with rain. It catches on the first fallen leaves and spills over the cobble stones.
It is now just performance.
In the Union Hall a mass of elderly Catalans sing shanties from their times and their sea to Jamaica in preparation of the cultural day. The day of well-being in the absence of tourist painters and tribute bands.
Today I drove through Spain to the prison where some of the last viable identity politicians are kept. The rain has not come yet, so I think of the dead. My mother, father, friend, a lover and my sister. The rain of pale faces.
On the windscreen, the day, all I am, is a grey promise reflected thinly in front of a mottled sky.
That is the end of Chapter One of the eight chapters of The Architecture of the Transculture by Richard Rathwell and Harold Rhenisch. Next up is Chapter Two: Grotesques.Like this:
See you on the other side.
Inspiration and Independence, Part 3
I have been responsible (in part or wholly) for good. I have blended families and rectified some wrongs. I have had schools rebuilt where they had been destroyed. I have caused to be organised properly the alleviation of blindness. I have refurbished clinics. I have trained, taught and mentored persons who have shone. I have fathered and loved. I have buried loved ones in dignity. I have written some beautiful things. I have opposed wrongdoing and evil.
With young writers in southern Africa, I discussed evolution and skirted around love and the new law on safeguarding, as compared to bride price.
In the southern African case, the jungle or savanna is like the readers and other writers, the snakes and dead trees (bark eaten by elephants), the predators and the nourishing sweet grasses,
A poem or creature either adapts, regresses, or stills and attempts to destroy the context changing around it to something compatible or just empty, something between punishment and banishment.
Writing is like self-taught and self-practiced dentistry informed only by the dreamed ghosts of antique dentists.
The same goes for criticism.
It is not an issue of thought and feeling, virtue and sin, abstraction and concreteness, nor even the social and political. It is certainly not self.
God, I loved the snake in the grass. The old Bull elephant sniffing the teenage cow while the young guy snuck through the bush to hide by the waterhole.
Don’t forget: it was the poets and novelists who advised the strategic theatres of the dictators.
…now there is the added menace of the P.R. persons making obvious shameless and deniable transparent undeniability.
Continued in Part 4