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
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.
SS Barracks, Buchenwald
The camp was built by the former elected socialist and democratic politicians of Germany.
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.
The Buchenwald Gate
A judge from the Cold War Capital, Bonn, holds the key. The words on the gate are Jedem das Seine. To each their own. The letters can only be read from within the prison.
This is an instance of what I call:
The First Lesson of Transculture:
Real people have no character. Only characters have character.
I wrote that in my essay on the codependency of foreign aid: The Apocalypse of the Narrative World (and my role in it).
Once I refused to cross a black line on the floor. I think it designated the border to the staff lounge and office space.
Guarding the Iron Curtain in the Fulda Gap.
For a generation, this was the proposed battleground for World War III.
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.
This is an instance of what I call:
The Second Lesson of Transculture:
Personality is a construct, some of which is consciously done as performance, some of which is scripted by context and derived, some as programed derivations, some designed as legacies (both biological and cultural). Some is only desire manifest. Some is sold.
I also wrote that in my essay on the codependency of foreign aid: The Apocalypse of the Narrative World (and my role in it).
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.
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.
Probably Not.
What began as a poster cancelled in the nightly Communist-Nazi street battles of Weimar, in the river valley below Buchenwald, became an image of myself when I looked in the mirror.
The private clinic, set in a countryside setting amidst ruins which included the folly reconstruction of Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, was called
‘Lillian’s’.
From behind the curtains, I often heard the voices of various consultants discussing flights to their next assignment for brain surgery or brain experimentation.
I apologize, again, for the clichés. It is possible that I was never Hamlet. It is possible that
I had become African.
This is an instance of what I call:
The Third Lesson of Transculture:
Identity is only a fantasy. It is the thing that gives real advantage to oppressors, predators and criminals. And lovers.
Someone calling himself me wrote this in The Apocalypse of the Narrative World (and my role in it).
Most of the experimental clichés were in the field of transforming certain old and rich people into younger people, or with eliminating sectors of old people active in economic activities which had no relevance.
I have since been told that many people succumbed to the same hallucinations at the time.
Getting into Trouble in Kaiserslautern:A Self Portrait
Barbarossa started his bungled crusade (the 2nd) here.
Now, doesn’t that sound like literature?
The consultants (behind the curtains) ordered brandy and other liquors (as well as bagels with salmon and crab on peppered crackers) from the world, while I was served horrific layered puddings and vile coloured squash by masked individuals.
Had they realized that I was neurodiverse?
Sometimes they were in carnival dress. Sometimes they were relatives. I peeped out to see the sunset over the ruins.
I met Zelensky in Weimar Before He Started Dressing in T-shirts in Kiev
This is an instance of what I call:
The Fourth Lesson of Transculture:
The literature of our time is not in books.
As one of the many Richard Rathwells I have been wrote in The Apocalypse of the Narrative World (and my role in it):
The object of poetry and some other arts is to detach from these sorts of things intellectually and emotionally and encounter what is there, and spin it in language as precisely as possible. Poetry, in this meaning, is not necessarily formally presented as such. It can be invisible in ordinary life… In speech, silence and memory.
And what you find out as an aid worker in Africa, to your peril:
It can be something else previously unimaginable.
Late at night, there was a great celebration in the bar downstairs. The staff guarding me explained that ‘Lillian’s was ‘saved’. By the block fees paid for me. By expenses charged as accounting tricks. By other charges for unnecessary treatments that kept our bed stay going. By the removal of people who were unproductive experimentally and unprofitable because treatment was not working. By all that.
Hanging Out as Angela Merkel at Barbarossa’s Hideout
(Where the neo-Nazis hid from the communists.)
All literature is political.
During the celebration, one colourfully dressed Caribbean remarked to another that he saw from the window in the fields beyond, my relative and co-owner of the facility riding by on the way to the beach for a midnight swim on a carbon bike, towing my dog on a leash.
For this undercover work, I was in training for a long time. I call this:
The Revenge of the Neurotypicals.
A perennial favourite, it went through many editions.
Autobiographical interlude, just for you:
I do have experience with neurotypical narratives, whether as groups of sisters, committees of guardians of the state or party, masters of departments of great institutions and budgets, laboratories and space programs that prey upon infants of the neuro diverse.
Going deep undercover to rescue the space dogs.
I am no elite. I was raised by a virtual single mother. It was in the backwoods. Throughout the world there were millions of us backwoods persons, with mothers virtually made single because dads, virtual or not, were at wars. I was not sure which war it was in my case at the time of my birth or early schooling or other times he was supposed to have returned and went.
Maybe it was a war in Lesotho. I did try to work as a teacher during that one myself, although by my time the weapons had been upgraded.
Schooling was at first in a small hut-like place heated by a wood stove. The teacher hated us, me more than most. Despite being pre-school I would get the grades mixed up
(we were all together)
and answer the wrong questions. This resulted in a loss of patience, an order to the other students to beat me and me fleeing for my life down the path and across the river to the home of a widow who defended me with the sword of her ancestors.
Baba Yaga: my teacher in life.
This took place in Canada, where bullying is a crime now, but then it wasn’t.
That war ended and my mother, still virtually single and supplementing a service income that never came by living in a storage area at relatives’ in the cold or picking various commercial agricultural things, and evading rape in rainy fields and seasonal accommodations, moved.
So, really, it was outside of Canada that I started collecting my selves. End of autobiographical interlude.
At Lillian’s, I spent an amount of my hallucinatory time faking, as I thought, rigor mortis, in the hope that I would be rolled beyond the locked doors as a corpse. However, I seemed unbelieved. Persons tugged at my eyelids and repeatedly asked me to stop.
I then constructed a master plan, fragments of which I remember. The key to the plan emerged when the rigor mortis led to a funeral which was attended by staff, including cleaning staff, consultants, and the aforesaid team of relatives and owners. It was puzzling, as I had never been accepted as a certifiable corpse.
That’s me inhabiting the corpse of the statue of Hindenburg, erected at Barbarossa’s Hideout, toppled by the communists, dug up by the neo-Nazis, and left there in its grave by bureaucracy.
And all this time, that trickster Harold Rhenisch and I were working on our new book Don’t Expect the Sun to Shine, about a wake for
There was a lot of giggling as I lay there. One by one, the mourners excused themselves, leaving the relative and owner, who had solidified down to one person, who had asked for a quiet moment. Alone with me, he laughed. He tossed onto my body what looked like a bundle of wet and decayed reeds.
I was at sea.
A resplendent pharaonic funeral on the Nile, it was not.
And if it was Canadian, it was not the Canada that Canada tells itself about. That looks like this:
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.
We have a new book of writing that steps away from literary narratives to talk straight about narratives told from within neurodiversity. It is also a wake for the city of Vancouver and its totemic poet Robin Blaser.
It is on the presses as we speak.
This is important stuff. In a world that is growing to embrace diversity, one great unifying diversity is often overlooked, even as humans display a wide range of abilities at finding narrative in the world.
Here’s a sample of our approach, using a book as a series of video screens and reading itself as a projector.
Does that sound odd? It’s everyday stuff to us. And it’s rather easy to follow, don’t worry. Here is a sample from the book to demonstrate. Just let your eye follow where it will. It knows:
You’ve been watching Richard describe how his neurodiversity creates reality as a series of alternatives, which leap from one to the next. It is a kind of unfolding, not a sequence of plot points. One of the salient characteristics of neurodiverse literature is that
instead of metaphor, neurodiverse literature changes perspective. This can include change of self or personality.
What happens when this type of personality is measure by neurotypical long-term personalities that change plots instead of selves is the subject of this example from the book. Richard describes a study he once had to endure:
What I am displaying with my choreography for Richard’s memoir is another principle that guides the book in its opening:
Neurodivergent literature is a tapestry.
Unlike linear narrative, such as the novels of, say, Salman Rushdie or Margaret Atwood, to name just two, which are tied from strings of interconnected action and consequence driven by projection and recollection of emotional memories, it is woven from the multiple dimensions of bodies in space, which it bends to set them moving. Touch is important here. Richard continues. As you read on, notice how images and words are diverging. The narrative is being given over to imagery. The words become used more in the manner of images than texts.
Did you see how several realities are starting to be held up at the same time? That transformation includes reading as an act that is entering the world of the study itself. This kind of multi-layered approach is common in neurodivergent literature and thought.
Instead of plot and character, neurodivergent literature employs tricks, riddles, jests, correspondences, transformations, pattern, sudden detail, irony, sarcasm, quoting, changes of scale and increasing intensity in place. It creates magnetic fields and auroras, freeways and subway grids. It rides them.
Richard and I continue this dance, as the thought unfolds, and then break it as the self it has created starts to morph into a new one. It is important to return narratives (and books) to a human scale. The machines are watching. We need to be able to step aside now and then and breathe.
This notion that writing would make one feel real is common for neurodivergent thinkers, who struggle as much to understand the exotic thinking patterns of neurotypical people as they are of neurotypical ones. What we are trying to do in this book is to place us all into a common language. After all…
Neurodivergent literature is an intervention, an interjection, an exclamation, and even an insubordination, but never a kidnapping. It does not rely on the social authority of an author. It turns the social authority of books into playgrounds and landscapes of strangeness and wonder and it doesn’t tell stories. It walks through them to initiate conversations and create collaborations.
That’s what we’ve done here. We love to laugh. We hope you do, too. This is, after all, a wake. Sláinte!
We have a lot to share. Please join us in this book as we set to rest Robin Blaser and the world of writing entombed in books.
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.
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.
Two ghosts in Afrika.
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.
Creative immigration.
This time, it’s for everyone, not just the neurotypicals.
Richard in his Russian Prison days, past, present or to come.
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.
