Origin Stories

I did not create the transculture.

The upheaval of cultures under the stress of war did that.
The Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz (1889-1969) coined a term for it in 1940, when there was a lot of culture being wipe off the map and a lot of hybrid culture springing up, but Ortiz did not create the transculture.

It is a natural outgrowth of humans.

Like war.

Soon, it was applied to the post-World War world, although that was no longer a world.

Berlin, 1945. Our forever place.

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.

Ortiz tries out for the World Series.

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.

Like that.

The culture Ortiz observed was popular and spontaneous, a product of the life of a new sort of people.

Liz Taylor Edged Audrey Hepburn out of the Part. Even the Scriptwriter got cut.

It was not the product of official politics, national institutions or any other parts of the superstructure.

That bridge went down off the coast of Newfoundland in 1913.

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
Kiev, 2022

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…

Kiev, 1942

…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.

Everyone knows this.

These stereotypes are used, in phrase and structure, as they were in ancient chants:

to fill out the cadence of a socially acceptable performance, a thing where now and here there is no relationship between words and language, but which can be stuffed with feta cheese and pimentos, preserved in oil, and carried across the mountains on the back of a donkey.

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.

And this, the last.

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.

Even in the mind.
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.

Rommel Whets his Whistle With His Aide de Camp in Afrika

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.

Only the masters of stereotype can save us.

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.

The trouble with passionate unreason and division from stereotype, especially if it is intellectual: once you get out you actually learn to not only approve of being other, but also like it.

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.

He thanked me on his election.

I went there to teach and to make theatre. I saw the body bags go by my house and my son’s nursery school.

However you spell it.

I heard the night screams.

I left with regret, powerless.

I saw something begin.

I saw only the wrong things continue.

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.

Nor did he.

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.

It was a pleasure.

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.

Does it need to be MCMXLV forever?

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.

So Canadian.

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.

We’re all on the carpet now.

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.

They do not seek closure.

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!
A Floodlight for the new world.

With merciless policies clearing the nests of poets and narrators. Of moral exactness and shaming psychological illuminations by sudden floodlight.

Commit Your Memory to Memory

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.