Here among the neurotypicals, I am determined, at least, to write without narrative, without the given accoutrements of story that brings them comfort and me pain:
symbol,
metaphor,
culture,
stereotype,
nationality, and
authentic culture,
prison.
An early, wrongly-directed attempted to escape the neurotypicals in the DDR.
Where? Why, here:
Not story.
All narratives are the causes of war. But the neurotypicals won’t tell you that. All facts. But the neurotypicals can’t see that. All counter facts. The neurotypicals are just too good at countering facts. All virtues and bios. All humans can generate those between an olive and its pit. All deaths. It’s too easy to leap to war with that. Here, let me show you:
Right, a translation. Here:
We’ve got to stand together, all of us, otherwise we’re just in Hameln with the rats, and…
…false.
Editor’s note:The Pied Piper of Hamlin is a terrible tale that documents the sale of citizens of Hameln town by their Prince as forced settlers in newly-acquired border regions in Poland. The price? Usually six silver dollars a head. Such shenanigans allowed princes to fund armies, to conquer more territory, to… well, you get the picture. So, to that one thing, don’t lay the blame on any piper in Joseph’s Coat of Many Colours, and don’t lay the blame on the messenger. Face the world, while you can!
As well proven by history and graveyards.
An archaeological dig in Hameln.
We all have front row seats at our deaths.
An Old DDR Image of the Pied Piper
Don’t you dare make a narrative out of it. This is not a story.
Mayfield Parish’s Version, at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco, 1909
This is the real thing. Hameln is not on a hill. Stop dreaming. Drinks won’t help. Be reborn instead. I know I am.
I am among the neurotypicals, travelling through places stuffed with hidden mistakes and layered with inconceivable hurts that would be true elsewhere.
Selves are created by environments. It’s even worse when it’s the other way around.
Everywhere, there are nonsense nations, bordered by bald, leafless paths, beaches of quicksand and crocodiles. I swim with terminated wraths, wreathing wraiths, roaring raging moralities about how values are not what they used to be.
The Gate to the Neo Nazis’ Club House on the Pirna-Sonnenstein Euthanasia Site in Saxony
Of course they are.
There are anomalies.
.
They lurk
They have all the time in the world:
none.
In forgotten prison cages, floating in cranial coffins. On the red chalk banks, where jolly gallows stand, surrounded by swirling flocks of angels that are not there.
They call:
Hello
Hello
Hello
echoing.
Hallowed.
The sacred of some nowhere in their refrigerated morgues.
Gloom.
The stars of all true romance, where greetings are ritualistic, with kisses and slaps.
I am not yet on the maps, you dear armchair gorillas!
I am still ill and squeaking,
working the infinitely empty room
using languages you don’t speak,
a mic that mutes,
and doing the shuffle dance, once again,
upside down and hanging.
Because neurotypicals believe in a concept called time, I have drawn this little map to illustrate reality more clearly, as a point of reference. Ed.
I am snowed in under brown smoke. Buried on a communal farm. Sawed-off, armed to clamped yellow teeth with a taped pipe bomb for the attack.
And that’s just the man you think I am.
The man is horse-haired and triple-gunned, a mad planning ape, pacing the floor, now rehearsing the last slogan of the attack to the Cambridge wards in refined rain, his foot in pain while knocking on doors, down endless streets of identical gates,
armed with detailed phone voter stats.
A map of Richard’s journey, which he left crumpled on the floor. Ed.
He is greeted by insane, false-toothed smiles, some with ratty hair under tweed hats, begging to be allowed to vote Liberal Democrat again.
What fun.
Everything has remained the same!
Sign off on your wills!
Poets Have Failed to Explicate Creation!
And the street artists of the nightly street wars in the old communist East.
But laboratory “assistants” have.
Minds and Brains persons are constantly changing the DSM towards best descriptions and categories of disorders, presentations and assumed material, brain malfunctions, acronyms from case stories of varieties of social demons, while economists have their own turgid and invisible wild creatures, whose hidden movements, rising and falling, are actualized in symbolic materials and dancing lights.
Dear Reader,
what Richard means at moments like this is that the self is a mask doubling as a virus, that you can pick up down at the corner store, or, if luck will have it, at your local cigarette kiosk, run by your apartment block warden, and, come on, you have one, you know you do. Here’s a whole collection of dress up parts for Richard, I stumbled upon at an identity kiosk in Erfurt (formerly it had served cheap East German cigarettes), in the hope of finding someone to put them on someday. Richard had obviously torn them off and run off without any disguise at all.
And so we search on. Ed.
Back to Richard in his labyrinth:
“They are both daddied by Marx, the almost poet, and the bad boyfriend, Keynes, the pacifist looser of investments and inducer of crashing frights. Politics, I’m saying, has pathologies: promises, accusations, bribes, tax-funded vacations, martyrdoms, massacres, crap kingdoms, wars, Clausewitzes, Sun Tzu, bleeders, bores, backstabbing and heroic betrayal and (redacted) ‘whatever’. Here’s some of that ‘whatever’.”
Richard catching some voltage at the old East German Border Station at Point Alpha, where an entire transmission line was redirected into a fence, and, as you can see by the levitation, into a Richard with a burner phone in his pocket and a pacemaker in his knee.
And they call that a world!
The hunt goes on.
But, poets!
God, what is a virtue?
What is vile?
What to weep for?
Why smile?
Love dying as dust.
Ladies and Gentlemanners, so you can be maps of this journey as well, here is the hunter’s ditty that Richard sang under his breath as he prowled the halls in search of a self, any self at all, to sit with. A vain hope, I know, but one does get nostalgic in one’s terror. Ed.
Dirty doves and divine lust: every mystery of human strength and fragility mystified improperly. Huge egos cracked like reptile eggs. Supposedly immortal princes pouting: dying dregs, like me.
It’s over.
Happier Days: Richard Flogging His Books to an Attentive Audience in the Fulda Gap
The long and short of it is how on Earth does one keep the proverbial chin up when the world is a grave, celebrated far and wide as the apocalyptic film of the year, screened on every retina:
Climate Change!
My garage has become my Dad’s,
as has my grave,
with unused recreational instruments,
elderly dream cars with busted lights,
half-hearted crafts
and an old dog that licks in sniffy darkness,
all to remind me of mindless
loves I still have.
Lives I think I have forgiven
and understood.
Oy vey!
I have only tried for the best life. In my misunderstood circumstances, I remember my father’s last words:
I haven’t answered yet.
As the screenings in our minds become seamless in my theatre seat with the sticky spilled Orange Crush under my feet, literally glued to the spot, I watch, aghast.
Who will I be screened as today? Who you?
Another Day in a Refurbished Jewish Department Store in The Fulda Gap
The question has taken on a certain urgency. The last of my three personal enemies has died. As soon as I heard, I found myself cast in a new film, viz:
I do not mourn.
Real enemies, that’s what I’m talkling about Not the surreal social ones I spent a career fighting:
Mugabe,
Nixon,
all sorts of South Africans who have no names,
those who had done nothing to me.
NO, the personal ones:
one a development aide posturing as a benighted fraud,
one a thief who, in being exposed, was hidden, officially, and then ruined my family,
one a political charlatan, a police agent or equivalent,
a provocateur,
a vacuum for mincing idealists,
who propelled me to prison, twice, beaten near death, and left another destructed family.
I say nothing here about continuous painful memory.
Welcome to Fulda, the city in the Fulda Gap, which was supposed to be the site of World War III. It was all planned. There was even a cathedral there to stop the Russian tanks in their tracks. Ed.
Meanwhile, back in the labyrinth: One of Canada’s initial trolls, a predator entranced with selfies, a posturing parasitic hollower-out and self-groupie, a small part of why a culture never was, even before e-intellect (sic) webbed us, made another family into a passed wind, like Russian dolls but backwards…
…a small void within a larger one, all within the never and the nowhere.
After each death, I became a different person, only to reflect, again, my self:
nobody.
Do not forget. I am among the neurotypicals. I am giving them a report from the world. I do not know how they will read it, but then, I do not know how they will read you. Until next time, watch out for snakes. Remember what you can if you can.
Anti-immigration sloganeering and the dodgy proposition of creating a White race out of a kaleidoscope of diversity.
Don’t be fooled. This racist imagery, this Neo-Nazi activism attempting that old German trick, of making a homogenous people out of a healthy hodgepodge, is more than what it at first appears. Sure, if you jostle it, it’s going to blow up, yes.
Jostling the Canadian Novelist in Exile, Richard Rathwell
Canadians are always helpful in a pinch, right?
The only snag is that it’s not a Neo-Nazi image. It’s more enduring than that. It changes. It takes on whatever form the times allow. Harry Heine, the great German-Jewish poet, exiled to Paris a couple centuries ago for his politics, used the term to describe his situation when he received political immunity to return to the Prussian-occupied Rhineland, to the annoyance of the authorities.
Harry Heine
Not a Nazi.
There’s more. The dissident East German folksinger Wolf Biermann sang of being a stranger in his own land for his STASI jailors while he was under house arrest in East Berlin. He sang it again when he was stripped of citizenship and singing in a basketball arena in Cologne, in the West all in the same day.
Not a Nazi!
One of Wolf’s album covers from back in the day.
But
a bit over a decade ago
the Neo-Nazis started to steal this image of living in a country ruled by Russian occupiers and homebred German stalinists.
Gorbachev and East Germany’s President Being Close
And, gasp, is that Our Man in Tirana looking on transculturally?
History has a way of closing in on us like a runaway train. Here is a neo-Nazi version of the slogan from 2010, deep in Thuringia.
James Bond as ET, an Alien from the West
Throwing Garbage into the White trash box yet.
As Richard Rathwell explains in By the Graveside of the Mind (of which this discussion forms a part),
I have had three names this week.
I am “Doubly Loved” in Tirana,
because I am in a relationship.
It is an insinuation.
I am
“L’espion Canadien”
in Ceret.
When I deny it, the affection grows
in this village of spies.
Images have their own lives. Unlike James Bond, they neither hide nor reveal.
Or as Richard puts it:
On Google, an essay long forgotten suddenly arises through the regular slanders and the rare remainders of a forgotten conference on a forgotten island on a forgotten topic, where I dallied as an expert.
I was told by email received in Cambridge.
I insinuated myself into a feverous band of bloggers and internet groupies, younger than me, and wrote like mad as one of them. I put together two project descriptions to do what I really cared about, to assist those in difficult circumstances to organize. One was for trade unions in Canada. Did not work even though it was supported by a King in exile. The other required me to jump through a bunch of hoops to read in bars and so on to be selected by the Canadian League of Poets to be the International Person (I was actually living internationally, was technically wanted in Canada, and only flew in for the meetings.). Margaret Atwood’s Office (although she may forget) liked the project. I did not mention that it was actually to create an underground in a few designated countries. This didn’t work. The League expelled me, or someone did, on executive order, mysteriously and precipitously.
And that’s the unofficial version of Canadian Literary history. To play it again as a transcultural image, voilà:
Everyone is drowning.
Deep underground in Africa, a place from which Canada is extracting many of its people today. Richard sent out a message. Richard was not extracted. He was simply where no neurotypical Canadian could be coaxed to go, trying to write his presence there. Finally he wrote his presence in words instead, in the hope that something would get out after he passed through the transculture as thoroughly as his African clients and lost his self:
“Operation Lightning Thunder has strengthened the armies of the Rain Queen around the village of Gula. The scales have tipped towards universal dying. “
Or, in neurotypical terms, the botched Ugandan attempt to reign in the murderous children’s armies of the Lord’s Resistance Army in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2008, which resulted only in their dispersal into small murderous bands, murdering at whim and abducting yet more child soldiers to sustain themselves resulted in strengthening the push to reverse a patriarchal takeover among the Balabedu people in South Africa by officially installing their rain queen over her usurping brother. The rain queens traditionally have had the ability to control the clouds above the ancient cycad forests of their homeland and negotiated with their enemies by granting rain instead of war. When Richard wrote his grieving report, the last rain queen, Modjadji, had died of Meningitis in 2005.
Modjadi and the Cycads, tipped towards universal dying,
The current Modjadji is Her Majesty, Queen Masalanabo II Modjadji VII, who turned the legal age of 18 in April.
She will be crowned in August 2023 by the Modjadji Royal Council.
Trapped in a medical facility in late 2022, Richard wrote of his jailors:
I explain. Identity meant little to me at the time. It has meant little to me at any time.
Richard Posing in the Window of a Former Jewish Department Store in the New “Multi-culti” Germany
Fulda, 2010
Poetry ruled his mind. And Africa:
I can remember an exact bush by the sea just fine, but I can’t remember the ten thousand operations I underwent for blindness in the shadows of temples of screaming monkeys, even though the scheduling was mine.
Richard Rathwell, 2022
So Much for National Health
A couple of the foolish virgins at the woman’s entrance to the Cathedral of Erfurt.
It is an invaluable question: is it possible to come back from Africa? And the question that goes along with it: is it possible for neurotypical technicians to recognize neurodiverse poetry in practice? And the third of the triad: Or will they see it as madness? Will they see this as madness?
“I remember this, too, exactly: there was a sky over Vancouver. I don’t, however, remember your character. I don’t see persons. Ever. Not under concrete things: totems and pillars. I remember mountains. Same for oil fights. Shadows moving in trees by the river are only characteristics of meta-atmospherics in social weather.”
Richard Rathwell, 2022
For an answer, Richard tries to capture the whole picture:
“I remember here. Which is also you. Perhaps in Vancouver.” R.R. 2022
And that includes seeing Canada as a symptom of contemporary British National Conservatism, the movement that, straight out of the Neo-Nazi playbook in Germany, sees countries as bastions of ethnic purity, closed to all people who think differently, including those attempting to come from Africa today by boat. As the doctors descended on the “hospital room” in which his neurodiverse mind was sent for treatment and recovery from Africa and Canada and Egypt and Albania and Vienna and Ceret and a whole lot else besides, Richard had the presence of mind to note:
“This is the day that gathers small brain connections, ones close together, in focussed areas, connecting whatever has been gathered there. They are leaping.”
Richard Rathwell, 2022
It remains unclear whether they followed his leaps.
The Leaping Dogs of Chernobyl…
… and their radioactive visitors.
This much, Richard can hold together, perhaps more in imagery than in neurotypical “sense” or “sensibility,” but there was more:
“But I can’t remember my underwear. My friends seem to be dead, or not there at all. Their faces are unknown in the smoke of burning owls and monkeys dropping from sudden bright strikes. They are fogging my glasses.”
Richard Rathwell, 2022
To which, the Internet, the algorithm mining contemporary intelligence can only add, with no understanding:
Don’t doubt for a second that the intelligence of the Internet, as demonstrated is above, is a form of National Conservatism pretending to be transculturalism, which in its hope of freezing its transformations into a decorative narrative it calls multiculturalism.
Richard Visiting the Lutheran Church at the Pirna-Sonnenstein Euthanasia Memorial
Behind the church, mentally ill and divergent patients were gassed in 1941. After that, the doctors and nurses, with their new expertise, were sent to Auschwitz. The next day they turned that agricultural research facility and model farm into a killing factory for Jews, homosexuals, Roma, Jehovah’s witnesses and more.
It is now a Neo-Nazi shrine. The exotic hardwoods of the botanical garden are dragged at night into a bonfire behind the city hall. Compared to this “reality”, Richard’s observations are sane:
“Sorry, these true perceptions, made with my five senses, are momentarily interrupted here by the Pope, who is, wisely, giving homage. He is an inverse vision to wit.”
Richard Rathwell, 2022.
Here are Richard and I, his editor and the illustrator of his transcultural states, consoling each other at a brewery in Canmore, in the Albertan Rockies, again in 2022, shortly before he was incarcerated.
The point, as Richard puts it so evasively, is…
No poem or story of one’s self is true. Whether it spews out from lust or a desire for self-preservation, as a weapon against corruption or a defence against punishment given for the boundless stupidity, the self is not anyone’s story, yet is true about you.
Richard Rathwell, 2022
Does he really want us to believe that? When it looks like this?
Fortunately, Richard is messing with us. What he wants is for us to set the algorithm aside and face the diversity, not of others, but of ourselves:
“Age is getting to be a person, with new memories each day, declaring batches of attitudes, many really gruesome, many more inappropriate. Few are attributable, other than those constant repetitions from discarded narratives that excuse, in time, deeds done by someone else.”
Richard Rathwell, 2022.
Or, in a truer language:
Richard Performing in a Neo Nazi Gathering Square Outside the University of Jena
And yet, this language, now co-opted and standardized by AI, is the prison we are given.
Such deeds don’t associate freshly. In cartoon clarity.
Richard Rathwell, 2022
No kidding. In cartoon clarity, then:
May the Rain Queen help us.
~
Next, Richard talks freely about Neurodivergent thinking. Until then, remember our new book:
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
a
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
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 welland 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
The new book by Rathwell and Rhenisch, the wake for the precursor to AI, Robin Blaser, a kind of American intervention into the Coast Mountains of the Northeast Pacific shore, Don’t Expect the Sun to Shine…
… is itself a remake of Lindsay Anderson’s sheepish film, O Lucky Man!…
… which was less a film than the stage for a soundtrack by Alan Price …
… with Alan playing many of the parts between gigs.
When I saw it in a small mountain town in British Columbia in 1974, the theatre manager was so confused by it that he refunded our tickets. Richard had already left British Columbia. Not long after, he received his education in how little Canadian culture could do at that time, when exported to Africa. The experience is included in his visual novel Ultreye. He went as a Canadian. He finished his NGO experience as a being with two minds.
Ultreye is a post-individual viewpoint that saw the Western self as two selves, from the viewpoint of a non-Western third personality. Neurotypical literature and psychology would eagerly point out that this third personality is self awareness, as indeed it is. As a neurodivergent artist, Richard was discovering how
Neurodivergent literature employs the humour of masks, puppetry, buffoonery, and play. It seeks intrusions of objects bearing projections of selves aware of their fictional nature to turn both selves and fictions into dramatic stages. It then bows and departs.
As Richard learned from two decades of poking at literature as protest (and the police beatings that followed), this literature can be real action in a material world. It doesn’t have to be penned within the thorn hedge of a book. A Canadian abroad doesn’t have to follow the time-honoured model of embedded English writers, such as Sir Richard Burton…
… who “explored” Kenya like this:
Burton “exploring” Africa.
Richard Rathwell learned just how much literature and imagery can be euphemisms for silence and silencing, even at the same time that they are voice. The colony of Basutoland has been the independent African state of Lesotho since 1966, with the British Crown occasionally making it a protectorate due to the mangling of any ability at administration out of the Cape Colony.
In the end, Queen Elizabeth II became less a symbol of colonialism but of an invitation to modernity and independence:
Queen Elizabeth II inspecting the Territorial Police
With a purse!
This learning experience led to Richard’s fraught return to Canada thirty years later, documented in Don’t Expect the Sun to Shine. As Richard laid it down, colonialism remained very individual in Lesotho, and always contrary to expectations. What looked like good deeds and foreign aid support remained as ridiculous as Capetown’s experience with demilitarization on a model learned from the Highland Clearances in Scotland and foreign aid workers seemed to remain as stuck in inappropriate imagery as these oblate fathers moving a heavy imagery of the Boer exodus into Basutoland a century before:
A colonial initiative that continues to succeed in places like Nepal, the giving of goats as the foundation of an economy, ran right up against another aid initiative that seems obvious to any Canadian’s heart, the planting of trees. What in British Columbia, might have looked like this…
Tree Planting in British Columbia in 1973
Note the US Army Surplus T-Shirt
… but which was really a heavy-handed conflict with Indigenous land use…
… became an environmental and social disaster in Lesotho. To be effective in a global context, a Canadian first has to learn what Canada’s culture is in a global context and integrate it, not the other way around. As Richard documents:
A still from Ultreye
…in…
After that, Richard devoted himself exclusively to world literature, arguing that Canadian Literature does have a place there, albeit a neurodivergent one. That is, it could support divergence rather than convergence. Or independence rather than integration. Or literacy in images rather than to the authority of words. Watch how Richard’s intelligence became a field of interest, played from many points, instead of as an individual.
For those of you not from Britain’s old Black and Métis colony on the Northeastern Pacific, British Columbia, here is Horsefly:
Here’s how the American ranching culture that settled in Horsefly in 1864 (just as Blaser’s incursion in 1966) worked out in Lesotho:
Richard was learning that the neurodivergence that made his participation at university in Vancouver more of a protest than a partnership, had strengths in the world. Three lessons he learned are:
Neurodivergent worlds are diverse and alive and have diverse agencies.
Neurodivergent literature moves through them all.
Instead of abstraction and cultural traditions as foundations, it employs multiplicity of views and selves in flux.
These selves in flux led to the stop screen motion of the screen book, Don’t Expect the Sun to Shine. There, the wake, a celebration of academic literary connection goes awry when the city speaks…
It became a feast, but not for Blaser’s descendants. But then…
Life is like that.
Do check out Don’t Expect the Sun to Shine. You can order your copy from your bookstore or from Eighth House Publishing in Montreal.
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.
We have some actual something left, at this particular juncture: transcultural cubism. We are now back to writing. For example, in Canadian literature, generations have missed the apocalypse. The horror and beauty they were an extension of. You can’t hear the screams. It’s not there at all.
If you got this far upriver, you knew that. You know there are only memories of nations. That memoir and biography just will not do. They are as inadequate as history.
The self they serve is dissolving.
One point of view doesn’t get it.
In the meantime,
readers are less beings of mind than conditioned responses. The government finances the training by funding acculturalization, while denying it to the acculturated.
The struggle is other.
The failure of globalization and its historical forms of coherence induces a social psychosis, manifested in a social art, an art of obligatory interaction and aesthetic, a controlled madness,
as though there were laws for atomized emotion.
Instead of feeling trapped, we can be up front about what we want from others. We can accept separate meanings. We can disconnect from lingering assumptions. We can let everything fail.
We can try the premise that there is one humanity and we go through each other.
My experiment today is to:
take seriously the minute and local and find the meaning of the things that live in it,
the places where there are not large facts, only small myths to sustain belief in life,
where each character, as I suspect each person I really know, prefers it that way,
where sentences are long,
conclusions short and
moments of connection frequent and
wide open.
To do so, I intend to underestimate the power of the afterlife in determining the measure of my own life.
I will give up the comfort of belief in any socialized paradise that I will share with my too ordinary friends and dissatisfied lovers and where my attributes will not be redeemed only tolerated.
I will go for honorary martyrdom in my own lifetime.
I will submit to thought experiments each specimen of fragile humanity imprisoned in my mind.
For the love of marble countertops, even you are in there!
Where there were once gods.
Face it. I have.
Tragedy thrills me. Past and present together on the road. Now and then on the street. The dying flame to the already exhausted reader moth. The next to last word. The thought of you fluttering away into darkness. Children with flashlights and little nets.
Before, I donned disguises.
I still have them all in mind.
There is the eternal Marxist of the international class,
the cosmopolitan archetypical exile,
the writer exposing the rhetoric and joys of realities that do not exist,
the critical academic of national literature of faux new and improper countries,
against all the earnestness and nonsense of dying modernity rendered incoherent by globalization,
first losing short-term memory,
then long-term,
then kept alive on tanks of oxygen behind locked doors
for the protection of society.
There is a literature, not all literature but some, of trauma and mourning.
It is in this region I had once contrived, and managed, a water pipeline project slashed down a snowy mountain, which had used thirty of our engineers and employed seven thousand of their donkeys. That project spun the money in, despite the locals’ tendency in the beginning, especially the guerrillas, to dynamite it. This was a problem I solved with some payments for their scrappy land, which I put down in the accounts as ‘maintenance’. And when I resold it to developers, I put that down as ‘donations and legacies.’
The new opportunity delighted headquarters. There were one hundred thousand refugees from the war trudging the mountains, there were destroyed orphanages with disabled kids chained in earthen pits, which a venal government which ours had put in power. It was a dream come true. There was no need to make anything up as we had done in the Sudan.
Oh, to be young again in Africa and with a gallon of cooking oil to my beautiful name!
As for raising the required matching funds to the government ones, those raised by us through donations from the weepers at home, we would use photos of the kids in the pits. My minder, a director, an aging academic, fully modern and recreating himself with every breath, drove his stuttering car to them through the bald mountains. The trees had been cut for firewood. The rest houses, like the clinics, had been angrily destroyed during the overthrow. I sat beside him, answering his questions about what the words to old country and western songs meant.
His assistant sat in the back, translating as necessary. She was the country’s only child psychiatrist and pediatrician, who had been deployed exclusively for the children of the elite. Mental disorders were impossible for the masses in the socialist paradise. Proper children were the healthy soldiers of the state. She wept sometimes in the rural orphanages we visited while I photographed.
“I didn’t know,”
she said.
We found one place where the kids, a mélange of whom had been disabled or suffering from protein deficiency, or were the children of dissidents, all called ‘orphans,’ were being sold to farmers. The director assured us that this was good social enterprise and permitted, now that they had a modern economy.
‘We will rebuild this all ourselves’ said the psychologist from the back seat. ‘Our doctors, our people. We will overcome this corruption.’
‘Bullshit’ I thought. Our trade ministry knew about the rare minerals in the mountains necessary for the production of British-built mobile phones.
But I was the one who knew nothing. She had bought a bag of cherries to eat as we drove the narrow prisoner-built roads. She passed a cherry over from time to time as I discussed the possible projects and local needs with crusty. I slowly worked out that I was getting a cherry only when what I said met with her approval. Me liking Mozart got a cherry. Me thinking Levi Straus was nonsense got a cherry.
Me praising British know-how got nothing.
For the project, I built an icon museum in her home town, to exhibit the eleventh and twelfth century gold-leafed portraits of the Madonna and Child that the old regime had hidden. The local people loved them, even the Moslems.
I put this down in the reports as a clinic.
I had to be found out, their foreign ministry complained to ours, and I was jailed for embezzlement on returning home on a leave. I was the third aid worker jailed that year. One was a pedophile and one had ‘gone bush’ and burned down a market and killed a pig in Nigeria. Since then, I have decided to flourish. What the hell. The old will never understand the young. The problem is the reverse.
When I get out, I am going back for more cherries.
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.
Eastern European Travel Highlights, 2022.
There obviously are.
The real politicians are terrified as they do walkabouts.
They know they govern by narrative.
The narrative went.
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.
I know. I was there.
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!
When I was a young Marxist, I invaded the USA like this once, but that was before Twitter. I had the wrong technology.
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.
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.
No, not the Taganskaya Station in Moscow, but only because it’s not hooked up to Transport for London’s Tube expansion plans yet. Look for updates soon.
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.
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.
What it was like.
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.
U.S. Federal Agents Practicing for Taking On Bonnie and Clyde.
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.
This is also what it was like.
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 Retreat: 1945
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.
Early Canada Council for the Arts Jury Meeting During the Suez Crisis
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.
the Company has withdrawn investment in Zanzibar, due to fascist homophobic brutality and illegal laws by the government.
King Richard IV , Blending In.
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.
Badger Hunters
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.’
Bad builds are discarded.
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.
The Scottish Game
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.
Hamlet in Harare
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.
Russian Army Uniform 2023
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.
Whack-a-Mole, 2022
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.
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…
Toronto at the Tipping Point
…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.
The Bell Tolls for Thee. Really.
Without the stitching.
Canada is permanently a colonial culture, colonized not by European fur traders but by transculture itself, a culture of low sentiment.
Sediment.
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.
Even one is enough.
It is the fault of the artists that there is a fucking popular culture.
Long Live the Revolution!
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.
Bild Lilly and R.R. at Buchenwald
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.
Bild Lilly All Grown Up
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.
Just Visiting
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.
In the strange.
As the early transcultural writer Ernest Hemingway said,
