Out by the Graveside (a ghost story)

For two weeks recently I was inside one of the world’s most advanced neurological wards with a condition that involved hallucinations, related and unrelated paranoia, a sort of rigor mortis, which I believed to be self-induced to feign death, and other creative and imagined terrifying experiences wrapped into a loss of space-time and identity.

SS Barracks, Buchenwald

The camp was built by the former elected socialist and democratic politicians of Germany.

I tried several times to escape from a secure ward. Twice, I was restrained by heavily protected security persons in body armour, assisted by ward staff and perhaps visiting relatives. Once, I left a blood trail near where I was hiding in an open gown, tackle waving about, behind a perfectly skeletal bed trolley in a lighted, abandoned room. I remained there for some time despite coaxing, by very pleasant psychiatrists, and others.

The Buchenwald Gate

A judge from the Cold War Capital, Bonn, holds the key. The words on the gate are Jedem das Seine. To each their own. The letters can only be read from within the prison.

This is an instance of what I call:

The First Lesson of Transculture:

Real people have no character. Only characters have character.

I wrote that in my essay on the codependency of foreign aid: The Apocalypse of the Narrative World (and my role in it).

Once I refused to cross a black line on the floor. I think it designated the border to the staff lounge and office space.

Guarding the Iron Curtain in the Fulda Gap.

For a generation, this was the proposed battleground for World War III.

I apologize for some of the stereotypical nature of my hallucinations.

I had a fairly long one, where I was in hiding from a son, who also was an owner of the hospital. I imagined it to be a private one in the Caribbean.

This is an instance of what I call:

The Second Lesson of Transculture:

Personality is a construct, some of which is consciously done as performance, some of which is scripted by context and derived, some as programed derivations, some designed as legacies (both biological and cultural). Some is only desire manifest. Some is sold.

I also wrote that in my essay on the codependency of foreign aid: The Apocalypse of the Narrative World (and my role in it).

In this hallucination, it was extremely important I control the flow of midnight stars, tiny white pricks of light, in an upward direction in increased speed towards the pole.

It is possible they were fireflies.

This movement of lights commencing and accelerating at the right moments would open a portal.

I do not know what this portal was for. I was guarded behind a curtain by a person from Zimbabwe who had both white and black spotlights to detect whether I was moving or not.

Probably Not.

What began as a poster cancelled in the nightly Communist-Nazi street battles of Weimar, in the river valley below Buchenwald, became an image of myself when I looked in the mirror.

The private clinic, set in a countryside setting amidst ruins which included the folly reconstruction of Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, was called

‘Lillian’s’.

From behind the curtains, I often heard the voices of various consultants discussing flights to their next assignment for brain surgery or brain experimentation.

I apologize, again, for the clichés. It is possible that I was never Hamlet. It is possible that

I had become African.

This is an instance of what I call:

The Third Lesson of Transculture:

Identity is only a fantasy. It is the thing that gives real advantage to oppressors, predators and criminals. And lovers.

Someone calling himself me wrote this in The Apocalypse of the Narrative World (and my role in it).

Most of the experimental clichés were in the field of transforming certain old and rich people into younger people, or with eliminating sectors of old people active in economic activities which had no relevance.

I have since been told that many people succumbed to the same hallucinations at the time.

Getting into Trouble in Kaiserslautern:A Self Portrait

Barbarossa started his bungled crusade (the 2nd) here.

Now, doesn’t that sound like literature?

The consultants (behind the curtains) ordered brandy and other liquors (as well as bagels with salmon and crab on peppered crackers) from the world, while I was served horrific layered puddings and vile coloured squash by masked individuals.

Had they realized that I was neurodiverse?

Sometimes they were in carnival dress. Sometimes they were relatives. I peeped out to see the sunset over the ruins.

I met Zelensky in Weimar Before He Started Dressing in T-shirts in Kiev

This is an instance of what I call:

The Fourth Lesson of Transculture:

The literature of our time is not in books.

As one of the many Richard Rathwells I have been wrote in The Apocalypse of the Narrative World (and my role in it):

The object of poetry and some other arts is to detach from these sorts of things intellectually and emotionally and encounter what is there, and spin it in language as precisely as possible. Poetry, in this meaning, is not necessarily formally presented as such. It can be invisible in ordinary life… In speech, silence and memory.

And what you find out as an aid worker in Africa, to your peril:

It can be something else previously unimaginable.

Late at night, there was a great celebration in the bar downstairs. The staff guarding me explained that ‘Lillian’s was ‘saved’. By the block fees paid for me. By expenses charged as accounting tricks. By other charges for unnecessary treatments that kept our bed stay going. By the removal of people who were unproductive experimentally and unprofitable because treatment was not working. By all that.

Hanging Out as Angela Merkel at Barbarossa’s Hideout

(Where the neo-Nazis hid from the communists.)

All literature is political.

During the celebration, one colourfully dressed Caribbean remarked to another that he saw from the window in the fields beyond, my relative and co-owner of the facility riding by on the way to the beach for a midnight swim on a carbon bike, towing my dog on a leash.

For this undercover work, I was in training for a long time. I call this:

The Revenge of the Neurotypicals.

A perennial favourite, it went through many editions.

Autobiographical interlude, just for you:

I do have experience with neurotypical narratives, whether as groups of sisters, committees of guardians of the state or party, masters of departments of great institutions and budgets, laboratories and space programs that prey upon infants of the neuro diverse.

Going deep undercover to rescue the space dogs.

I am no elite. I was raised by a virtual single mother. It was in the backwoods. Throughout the world there were millions of us backwoods persons, with mothers virtually made single because dads, virtual or not, were at wars. I was not sure which war it was in my case at the time of my birth or early schooling or other times he was supposed to have returned and went.

*Maybe it was a war in Lesotho. I did try to work as a teacher during that one myself, although by my time the weapons had been upgraded.*

Schooling was at first in a small hut-like place heated by a wood stove. The teacher hated us, me more than most. Despite being pre-school I would get the grades mixed up

(we were all together)

and answer the wrong questions. This resulted in a loss of patience, an order to the other students to beat me and me fleeing for my life down the path and across the river to the home of a widow who defended me with the sword of her ancestors.

Baba Yaga: my teacher in life.

This took place in Canada, where bullying is a crime now, but then it wasn’t.

That war ended and my mother, still virtually single and supplementing a service income that never came by living in a storage area at relatives’ in the cold or picking various commercial agricultural things, and evading rape in rainy fields and seasonal accommodations, moved.

So, really, it was outside of Canada that I started collecting my selves. End of autobiographical interlude.

At Lillian’s, I spent an amount of my hallucinatory time faking, as I thought, rigor mortis, in the hope that I would be rolled beyond the locked doors as a corpse. However, I seemed unbelieved. Persons tugged at my eyelids and repeatedly asked me to stop.

I then constructed a master plan, fragments of which I remember. The key to the plan emerged when the rigor mortis led to a funeral which was attended by staff, including cleaning staff, consultants, and the aforesaid team of relatives and owners. It was puzzling, as I had never been accepted as a certifiable corpse.

That’s me inhabiting the corpse of the statue of Hindenburg, erected at Barbarossa’s Hideout, toppled by the communists, dug up by the neo-Nazis, and left there in its grave by bureaucracy.

And all this time, that trickster Harold Rhenisch and I were working on our new book Don’t Expect the Sun to Shine, about a wake for

https://www.8thhousepublishing.com

Literature is not in books.

There was a lot of giggling as I lay there. One by one, the mourners excused themselves, leaving the relative and owner, who had solidified down to one person, who had asked for a quiet moment. Alone with me, he laughed. He tossed onto my body what looked like a bundle of wet and decayed reeds.

I was at sea.

A resplendent pharaonic funeral on the Nile, it was not.

And if it was Canadian, it was not the Canada that Canada tells itself about. That looks like this:

I did.

To be continued in Egypt. Soon.

By the Graveside of a Mind. Chapter 1.

The story’s author, Richard Rathwell is a Canadian, which means he is trained in being luggage to colonial powers.

In this case Britain and the United States.

Liz Truss and Barbie on the Runway, with their Rathwell Accessory

Well. That was then.

Richard at the Fall of Berlin. Pick your century.

Just two of Richard on patrol with the Canadian Army Forces Securing the Arctic Today

The hard won individual identities of the neurotypical West mean little here. What matters is to have boots on the ground.

Right, so let me introduce myself as well.

Harold Rhenisch,

It’s my roll in this staging to translate Richard’s texts into images, for this new, post-textual world. The Chat Bots are writing the poetry now.

It’s time to move on.

The point of translating texts into images is part of Richard’s transcultural project, which he brought back from Africa. It is to provide images that mediate for uprooted people living as their cultures and suddenly stripped of them and thrown into troubled an uncertain ground.

Richard, Child of Refugees

All involved can read the images equally. They are words: words taking the next step forward, as refugees must. Into the unknown. The 20th century self is not the guide here. That one, tied to culture, has been driven out by forces of violence created by the attempt to hold onto culture in change. The binding force here is transformation. Humans are migratory animals.

As usual, Richard was the voice of Canada abroad.

What, did you think it was Celine Dion?

*Richard Rathwell Fighting the Crimean War for Canada in Zimbabwe*

Now the battle is for what’s left of his story before he disappears like a hard drive poked with a cattle drive. He writes:

Welcome to post-individual life.

*At first, I thought Richard was describing poetry, then I realized that he had been imprisoned in a variant of concern of the SS Barracks in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp on the Ettersberg*, *united with its Cold War twin, a postal drop box from the old spy capital of Bonn.*

So….

My answers to these questions are in the images you see in this blueprint. Richard writes. I translate.

An example follows:

Here:

After all, you can only read the legend on the gate, To Each His Own, when inside the camp, looking out at the SS barracks outside. The pig-man is a political sculpture of a corrupt West German Judge installed on the verge of John F. Kennedy Allée in the Cold War German capital, Bonn, now a ghost town. He has a key, but passes in and out without it, even when the door is wide open, like the ghost he is.

So the self decays, while the images of it linger until they have a life of their own. The images I am presenting you with here are the point at which the new world order that Richard finds himself in collides, or sometimes embraces, the world of images and won’t go away.

As Richard says:

I apologize for some of the stereotypical nature of my hallucinations. I had a fairly long one, where I was in hiding from a son, who also was an owner of the hospital. I imagined it to be a private one in the Caribbean.

In this hallucination, it was extremely important I control the flow of midnight stars, tiny white pricks of light, in an upward direction in increased speed towards the pole. It is possible they were fireflies.

They could have been ashes from his mind, burning out.

Or mine. Perhaps we share one. A mind. Not just the biological entity called Richard and the biological knot of cells that people call Harold because his mother loved to read historian novels, but this map written on our skin.

Our eyes are battlefields now.

After all…

We continue to witness Richard battling against the attempts of neurotypically-programmed machines telling him something similar to what a Chatbot told me yesterday, that his mind was a niche project, so not in its database:

This movement of lights commencing and accelerating at the right moments would open a portal. I do not know what this portal was for. I was guarded behind a curtain by a person from Zimbabwe who had both white and black spotlights to detect whether I was moving or not.

Richard’s old friend Robert Mugabe promised Richard transcultural transmutation but cloned himself instead.

Note how he shows up in sticker on a lamp post in the old East German prison city of Bautzen, left over from a street battle the night before. The West is right to be afraid.

Unfortunately, it chooses to be afraid of immigrants.

These guys:

Water is no barrier to life.

Really.

Next, we’ll go to the clinic for Richard’s makeover. Bring scissors, glue and a medical kit.

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.

*Is that Really Germany’s Foreign Minister at Lunch?*

Nations were defined as peoples having a common geography, history, economics, language and culture (shared by all classes and genders) and a common psychology.

*Well, This is Certainly Germany’s Chancellor Gnawing Into the Obligatory Wurst.*

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.

*The Great Zimbabwe. This is my heart. Really.*

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.

**Marilyn Monroe Escapes from Buchenwald**

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 couple of billiards players back in the day.*

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.

Academic culture is how duty to life is avoided.

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.

To art.

To entertainment.

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.

Can you really have your cake and eat it too?

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 though culture evolved as a substitution for instinct. Even though it rewires the processing of the sensations which prompt actions for securing survival and pursuit of desire, the associations that initiate emotions.

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.

To *project*, not to create a narrative arc, to react *against* acculturated memory and its social identity, not to complete a circle.

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.

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.

Isn’t it time to read The Bush of Ghosts?

But I did not make the revolution.

There was hope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKfwIJSp7bc

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.

It doesn’t help that I wasn’t the first.

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 seek to create results similar to those sought by applied neuroscience.

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.

Mopane Worms, Anyone? There’s lots here for all.

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.

Now that literacy has eroded, words are visual artefacts again. Visual literacy is back!

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.

*Freed from Buchenwald, the Comrades Enter the Bronze Age*

The good have none of the best weapons. They do not have the best lines. Their images are tattered.

*Protest erases guilt.* *Or affirms it. Quick! Choose!*

The others have the fire. They triumph before the rain tumbles over us and batters with what’s left of the good.

*You cannot leave Buchenwald. That’s the thing. Or can you?*

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…

*That’s a poetry book in the child’s hand.*

…twisting and shouting with nightmares.

*The barbarism is that Adorno both did and did not say this.*

If you don’t arm yourself against fiction right now, you are click bait.

Apocalyze

The pandemic of culture

Buchenwald Memorial

Out by the Graveside (a ghost story)

By the Graveside of a Mind. Chapter 1.

The Building Site

Pop Culture

The Dream of an Uncommon Language: Part 2

The Dream of an Uncommon Language: Part 1