It begins. There’s some stuff we have to pay attention to.
In the 20th Century, graves were tended with flowers.
In the 21st Century, they were, too.
It is a grave for Western Culture. With the seeds of a new culture within it. This culture has been growing for a long time. For years, Richard has been arguing that this new culture is transcultural, that it lies at the point where cultures collide, along with the socially-conditioned meanings and experiences they carry and pass on. Wars start at these points, wars that have destroyed everything that Richard built in Africa while he was there trying to end the wars that came before them. It wakes a man up, you know. One feels complicit.
Richard is very clear that these cultural intersections are not stresses between existing cultures, which only need to be separated and returned to a former state. But, here, take it from Richard himself, describing the difference in an application for admission to Cambridge, where he had hoped to create a transcultural literary genre, before the university got confused and tossed him out:
Richard has written a goodly lot of texts like that, which are meant to appeal to neurotypicals, before he finally accepted that neurotypicality was a transcultural audience, too, and that the drive to find acceptance in what was essentially a past culture was going to fail and he’d better get up to speed, quick. By a past culture, I mean something like this, from the Cambridge site:
Poe was writing nearly 200 years ago, in a transcultural situation, not one of a steady culture seeking to reform itself on a new continent. His model wasn’t, say, Daniel Defoe writing about the Plague in London, just as Hemingway (who Dr. Lucy Durneen, ICE Creative Writing tutor also mentions) makes a lousy model for writing about Africa.
If Papa Hemingway is a big game hunter, aren’t you the game?
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is not a game. Lives are at stake. Yours.
But, don’t take it from me. Take it from Richard himself:
To translate, it’s not a belief in retrieving common humanity through the equivalency of diverse cultures reaching a state of refinement, but of ferment.
This time, it’s for everyone, not just the neurotypicals.
If you haven’t noticed, there’s a war going on.
