Let’s Go to the Snack Bar

Let’s face it. Travel is hungry work.

Tourism and Foreign Aid are both branches of literature, just as literature is a branch of … well, nothing. It has a mind of its own. On a first reading, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was sold as a Morning After.

The roving hand of God.

On a second reading, The Sun Also Rises clarifies as an instance of hagiography in the cult of Maria…

…a bit blurry with time, sure, but still decipherable. We, Richard Rathwell (above) and Harold Rhenisch (below)…

Just Another Day as Puck

…call this ability of reading to reassert cultural values in the place of individual readings as a specific branch of literature called Neurotypical Literature.

One important facet of literature from the dominant spectrum of human consciousness is that…

It defines individuals as characters and character.

In other words, what passes as literature today.

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

On the other hand, luckily enough, by celebrating the life of the individual as clothing picked off the rack and as quickly discarded, even a novel, that quintessential neurotypical form, can be read as an instance of neurodiverse literature, because neurodiverse literature plays with character (as above.) Succinctly:

It is an intervention, an interjection, an exclamation, a resistance and even an insubordination

but

never

kidnapping.

As novels are.

(proudly)

This variability in perception is not in the eye of the beholder, so to speak, or built upon individual experience, culture and inclination, to speak it slant, but a property of literature itself, which is a kind of see-through mirror. If the variability were just a matter of perception, that would be tantamount to saying that neurotypical literature is the real thing and other literatures are a deviation. The layered mirrors, however, are real, as we saw last time you visited when the two-way mirror that is commonly called Richard was being held captive in a kind of novel.

A German Anti-Relativity Scientific Paper from 1935

aka the reverse print (branding iron) of the Buchenwald Gate

See for yourself here. Like all neurotypical art forms, the novel that is Buchenwald

champions self-expressive emotion and discovery

fighting against its absorption into a narrative that is driven by structure, which is an expression of emotion directed away from the self. For a long time (hours? centuries? seconds?) I lay there alone in that poem, slowly (quickly?) disappearing into the surroundings.

But were they surroundings? For the neurodiverse, who are their surroundings, aren’t they withinings?

When the crowd came back, giggling, laughter broke out anew. I became a creature of resistance and revolution. I denounced everyone as fascists. I resolved I would never rest until I escaped and threatened strangulation and shooting for one apparently serene laugher with terrified eyes.

My choreographer Harold Rhenisch found this image of me in Weimar. Thanks for bringing me home, Harold.

Immediately night fell. I had noticed sympathetic body gestures (winks and clandestine waving) from some of the cleaning staff. It was apparent now that they were the working class. I heard voices from beyond the curtain saying, ‘we should let at least one of them escape’.

Harold found a neo-Nazi criticism of my early lives as a Marxist in Weimar as well and smuggled it back over the wall. I was many.

During my time hiding behind the trolley, I was bleeding from the foot. I thought I had removed a device for taking something from between my toes, or for injecting something. I’d also removed a dressing, which I thought might have been fake, for a spinal tap, which I remembered but may have been fake. I remembered bunnies. That much was real.

The bunnies and other cute animals were actually the sympathetic staff, some doctors, who changed into costumes in a room opposite the room I was, hiding in full view and invisible.

Harold caught up to me in Hamlin. He says he didn’t see any rats. Sure.

It is tiring to be inside a novel. All the plot changes, and you can’t even change the story. The changing into costumes by the breakfast, lunch, and dinner staff and the doctors, I was on to. I wasn’t fooled, either, by the identification bands identifying me, in florid handwriting as Sonja with Leukaemia.

Harold found me entangled with a doctor-novelist in Karl May’s Villa outside of Dresden. The leukaemia remains undiagnosed.

Nor was I fooled by the changes of location and décor of my ‘ward’. I was really in Kafka’s Castle.

The novel.

I was in the graveyard of a mind.

There was no fooling me about the fairground serving cart with breakfast cereals from my past: the branded rice crispies with the pictures of sinister elves, the Wheaties with the baseball stars made strong.

I knew the actual time and place. The Caribbean. I had heard it. 2024 was the year. I had seen it on the badges of security.

The animals did a very cunning thing to organize my escape. They returned me to the funeral. I was discovered again. They returned me to the stars. I was left with those until I slept.

A Mutated Bear in Czernabyl

Meanwhile, I have been told discussions were underway to diagnose the overall condition, and that treatments were underway.

Come on, after Chernobyl, that’s all of us. Our futures have been written. On our bodies.

Or, as Harold says, after he failed to properly come back from the East:

Primary Axiom of Post-Atomic Life and the graphite core of neurodiverse literature:

Our bodies are our souls.

It doesn’t mean we have to rest in peace. HR

Some of these I resisted. In addition to eating. I did cause disturbances. One amusing (to me now) was that psychiatrists, neuroscientists in fact poured over ancient, relatively reverent and planned publications, some collaborative, for clues. Such as my new book, the one Harold and I knocked together in the basement of a chop suey house on Vancouver’s Pender Street, which begins with an interview, like this:

from Don’t Expect the Sun to Shine: A Wake for Robin Blaser. Eighth House, 2023. Link

Or as it looked when we pried off the lid:

A book that reads itself to your eye.

from Don’t Expect the Sun to Shine: A Wake for Robin Blaser. Eighth House, 2023. Link

As we were all thrown together into the neurotypical world, some of these needed to be explained somehow, as to genre and intent.

Richard Rathwell’s Days in the Russian Prison System: an in-the-body experience.

On the day before Putin’s Chef showed up with his promises of freedom.

I was, after altered medication, discharged. Two weeks and perhaps more had passed from the onset of symptoms. Two weeks, at least, in the Neurological Ward.

There is some theory and evidence that my seizure, for so it is called in science, was only the most dramatic and recognizable of many, some of which would have been unseen even by the trained eye.

Poppies and buttercups explode. Fields of pale green blooming vines. The Pic du Canigou, ripples with pink snow. It peers around every corner against milk skies. A wedge.

Sunrise over the Pic du Canigou

Boats, flattened by sandy winds from Africa speed the drowned home. A dog bullets low from a door to chase the street washer away.

I have returned to a madly altered world.

As the Kenyan Albino Rhino said when I tried to explain plainly about how to the photosensitize the sea, it’s the neurotypicals. Being iced, empty, blue and bearing a flattened sun, hurts.

Heavy Water in Africa. An Alternate Fission Model.

So does being white all through one night.

A Token Canadian in the Former East German Communist Heartland

All this is being quietly erased by the Wagner Group.

Choose all that apply:

Foreshadowing: a common technique in novels.

The Rhino was preoccupied as he listened to my speech about limbs being harvested for magical protection against gout, then said that narratives harvest memories indirectly. Losing a horn hurts as much as that.

The neurotypicals stink of sulphur.

So do the neurodiverse, naturally. As Harold and I said to the guys, eh (the doctors in the ward, charged with chemically maintaining neurotypicality before it was taken over by their understudy Chat GPT):

Don’t Expect the Sun to Shine: A Wake for Robin Blaser. Eighth House, 2023. Link

It is time to bury the dead.

So it begins.

It is time to raise the living.

Next, we go deep undercover.

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:

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.

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:

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.

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