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.

Introducing… By the Graveside of a Mind

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:

*Retrieved.*

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.

*Richard in his Russian Prison days, past, present or to come.*

If you haven’t noticed, there’s a war going on.

Riot Gear

I am in the Royal Festival Hall

and the soprano of vengeance is the one judged the world’s best and connected to me in some ways, but I am in terror and in a moment in Hades

from the clarity of the vision,
the urgency of the chorus, and
the remorse of the penitent tenor at her side.

Ransom Note Left at the Crime Scene

Howling dog, freezing bull, streetlit faces.

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 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.

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.

The troubling UK version is here.

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.

**People learned like lab rats.**
Citizens of Kiev petitioning to get in on the Transport for London Tube expansion plans.

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.

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.

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 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.

Ah, the moment.

They are drinking there still.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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…

…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.

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.

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.

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.

Apocalyze

The pandemic of culture

Ukraine War