The Typewriter

The morning was misty, dark blue and cold. Swen flicked on a table lamp and sat down at his typewriter. His chair scraped across the wooden floor toward the table. As he shifted his center of gravity he began to collect his thoughts. His fingers engaged the steel enameled keys, embellished with the familiar code; he hunched over his place-setting, just like he was sitting down to breakfast.

The light from the lamp cut through the blue; he felt its warmth on his face. His thoughts began to work in unison with the machine; transferring his words to the page almost instantly. His voice worked internally to trace a line around a few stable concepts, like a tailor pinning an old cloth around the body of a new customer.

The words did not come easily: occasionally he got lost in the infinite number of permutations. He had to re-shape his sentences a number of times and fit his edges to their contours. He had not set out with any specific plan but he had felt a need to fill the absence in his world with something that had the power to hold his fascination.

The arc of each hammer fell perfectly to the center as the ribbon rose to secure the page. He felt the weight of the machine as it drummed each letter home. When it felt like he had captured almost all of the complex structure; when his mind had exhausted all the permutations he could muster; when he had finally pinned the cloth down to a reasonable amount of words; he took a deep breath; looked at the page in front of him; and read the first line:

“Culture: Keep-Sake or Lingua-Franca?”

Dissociating himself slightly from the world he was inhabiting and the abstract line that was now distracting him, he sat back. A smile flashed across his lips. He noted a brief surge of arousal and a mildly uncomfortable feeling in his belly. He dismissed the feeling, like the chatter of a marketplace, and returned again to his task. The lines continued:

“The current political debate in Europe defines culture as either: a precious ‘keep-sake’, that we have inherited from God, a symbolic fragment of our past that needs to be protected and preserved against external threats. Or an amorphous language, a ‘lingua franca’, that is continually re-invented to share the experience of displaced Europeans, like a wound that has the means to heal itself. All culture has an organic basis.”

And in this moment of reflection lay the whole of his dilemma. He coughed. 'Culture'. It was just a word to him now, but outside, in the living, breathing corpus of humanity, it could mean more than one thing to more than one person. It could also mean division and hatred and war and famine and terror. He looked at his definition and found himself staring at his own internal contradiction.

Words should not contradict themselves. He admitted that much. His definition of ‘culture’ had unearthed an internal fold, a kink, interrupting what was supposed to be a seamless, beautiful, logic; a logic that should unify all the sentences ever uttered towards an eternal, internal truth. His world of order and peace and security was suddenly being undermined by this fractured seem of rock; a social stink-bomb! He briefly smiled again, sarcastically this time.

He rubbed his eyes. He was tired and exhausted and alone in the room with this conflict now starting to churn up somewhere deep inside. He reached out and raised the paper with the return a couple of times. The real world was far away, but he knew at any moment it could appear at his door or pounce upon him when he was least expecting it. This was Europe; this was his mission; this was his politics; this was his logic, after all.

As he allowed his mind to settle his contradiction began opening out along the entire expanse of his memory; it began to take in the history of his life. Yes, he knew he was magnifying the imperfect detail of a small insignificant idea; he was a small cog in a large machine; but each part of the machine must reflect its position in the whole, even if the function of the whole is, in the end, greater than the sum of its parts.

He felt his eyes begin to close. The cold blue and shining golden moment met his breath as he exhaled. His lungs filled up again with the cold damp air. The room was drawn to move within him; through his warm veins and into his overheated brain. It really was a strange magic that he enjoyed liberating; this machine was his vehicle; guided by his fingertips; enabling the morning shadows to escape into the light of the day; he briefly smiled again.

His feet settled against the wooden floor boards; his mind blended into them and out towards the walls; the walls stood silently as always, against the cold dawn. He could almost touch the wind moving the trees outside and he was suddenly aware of the random tap of swirling debris, having been caught up in the passion, testing the wet windows.

He awoke, with a start, as his head began to fall and the reflex to action took a few minutes to subside. The sun was getting bright outside. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand and returned to the page in front of him. Two political interpretations were now united by a third in his mind. He inserted another sentence into his text:

“But ‘culture’ is just a way of doing things; a structural order within which ‘normal activities’ can take place. So it exists without meaning unless meaning can be found within it; it has no words or symbols unless it produces them for itself. Culture is a system of internal order and external exchange. Culture promises great rewards, in return for the suppression of the animal instincts and the sharing of mutual goals. But its goals are neither memories nor friends. Its only goal is its own survival. Compliance with a culture has rewards but the rewards are not chosen by the individuals who abide by its laws, they are chosen by God and by 'God' I mean, natural selection.”

He had cultivated the small garden outside his backdoor for over a decade. He had recognised the battle between order and entropy, the theatre of war, playing itself out against the backdrop the of the solar and lunar cycles. He had struggled to maintain a non-native flower that had no economic value to recommend it apart from its beauty, against the will of the indigenous weeds, insects and diseases. He had experienced the world as an organic whole; that knew itself through constant electrochemical exchanges within and between its internal organs; he felt implicitly that this communication was a consciousness that had existed before life had organised itself around it. He had always doubted the reality of any idol who had promised material rewards in exchange for a man's obedience to its will but he had never doubted the reality of nature. Given food, water, shelter, a Sun to live by and air to breath, he could be happy. He didn't have to see his garden to know it was there. By the same token, he knew that other people's conscious experience of their lives and their Gods were very different to his own. There were other gardens, other flowers, other weeds, insects and diseases. What then, was his reality? Was there more than one? If more than one, then more than one God, or culture, or idol could claim him as one of their own: could this mean danger? He resorted to reason:

"Cultures are defined by their practices; some practices must be common to all cultures and others must be peculiar to one. Etymologies evolve in political spaces and semantic conflicts define their boundaries. We can take different positions in relation to the same practice but that doesn’t mean we have to kill each other before we can survive. That is a logical contradiction. We all see the rainbow but no-one ever sees the same rainbow. The line of sight to the Sun for each one of us is slightly different but we all see the same thing. We know each other to be there. If we can each learn to express our positions, allow our words to express our internal states, when we have shared our emotions, then we can find alternative courses of action. Our words have come to govern our spaces but we have the authority to govern our words. Compliance with the conventions is the key to understanding culture and culture is the key to understanding each other and oursleves."

The clock ticked quietly on the mantle piece. The low bright sun had now obliterated the dark; his insignificance was abandoned; he flicked off the lamp. The weight of his thoughts became more apparent. The ink had coded his thoughts; the paper had held them; the darkness had vanished, along with his discomfort. He shivered as another fact bore in upon him:

“The reward of obedience is the avoidance of anxiety; the resolution of internal conflicts created by external forces; and the maintenance of culturally specific communication channels over background noise. This is where the ‘lingua-franca’ must begin.”

In a corner of the ceiling over his right shoulder a spider had spun her web. The dawn began to dry out the moisture in the air. Her silk talons amplified her consciousness to each corner of her web and, by extension, to each corner of the room. She could feel Swen's movements and, in that way, she had shared a part of his consciousness but she could never know his thoughts. They both knew his thoughts were coded in a different language, one that she was not equipped to decode. It is true that every culture is bound together by its lexicon; a dictionary of self-defining words; like a web with its own internal code. The more complex and ambiguous things known by a culture tend to have the most culturally specific names given to them; the nodes at the nexus of many different arcs may have the least possibility of a direct translation to another web. The translations become harder, the deeper and more complex the existence of a symbol within a culture becomes. This is the theory of the 'keep sake'. This was, for Swen, the beauty and scary thing about a complex word like 'culture'. It might help him catch a thought on a piece of paper but it also led him to perceive the cleavage of his deeper consciousness. The contradictions between us are real but extinct, he thought. He reasoned further:

“But the complex expression that is the 'keep-sake' may not have a direct translation in another culture; a phenomenon may only exist within the culture that gives it its name. That means that mythological beings, and the mnemonic quality of the ‘keep-sake’, are inventions that make sense, only within a culture.”

The keys were falling like rain against the page now; the table top thundering under the force of his intellect. His words were just an epiphenomenon; they were fantasies; they expressed something that had no physical existence; they were technological devices; they did a certain amount of intellectual and emotional work; within a certain political environment; they had meaning within a lexicon that was changing at its extremities; as the territorial limits of his mind expanded and interacted with new worlds at specific points on his mental map:

“The 'keep-sake' must, therefore, provide the stability for the 'lingua-franca' to grow as an adjunct and branching structure. Archetypal images may appear in all cultures but their expressions are, of course, all different. We identify with the similarities that we recognise between these phenomena, collectively, intersubjectively, and allow them to define our cultural identities; but ultimatelty they must evolve along with the complexity of the emotions and lives that they encode.”  

The Meaning of Angst

Swen waited until her breathing had slowed to a deep lulling unconsciousness. He knew he had nothing left but he didn’t know how to tell her. He had tried, my God how he had tried, but something kept getting in the way. Some other emotion would swoop in and take over. Take them both away. On some mad swirling twisted tornado of feelings. She would cry and he would apologise. Eventually, yeh, but always, he smiled. She would forgive him. Immediately at times. When he told her he loved her so much it tore him up inside. She would look at him with the depth and need that he wanted to see so much. Even when she didn’t say so, he could see it in her eyes. It didn’t matter how long it took. If not immediately, then eventually. She would forgive him. Always.

He started to cry. Somewhere deep inside. His eyes welled up. But he couldn’t hear himself because he was lost to himself. He was lost and he had nothing left. He had lain there until she was asleep. Waiting until his darkness could reveal itself. Waiting for her to fall away into the deep. And then he rolled away. Heaving his great cold limb away, like a huge sodden tree trunk after a storm. Broken. Useless. Fallen. Heavy. Dead. Cold. His limb. Her limbs. She fell away and into him, through the hours of darkness, her warm breath rising and falling against his bones, in the stillness of the moon.

He told himself to go to sleep but he could not stop. History was now. How could they have forgotten the simple things so easily? He worried about his wife; he worried about his children; he worried about now. They thought they were invincible. He knew they were vulnerable. But he was growing old. So old. He was haunted by his own youthful invincibility; by his dead heroes; by his reckless valor; by his stupid mistakes; by his secret vanity; by his submerged fears. His horror of his past; and his visions for his future. He felt that no-one could see what he saw. He was unknown even to himself. How could he teach them? She knew every inch of his sullen limbed and lifeless body, but she never knew what he was thinking. His mind was a furnace, his face reflected a moon, his limbs were cold and dead. His brain raced away like a steam train through the shivering mists and lamenting thickets. Onward to infinity. But she was a thousand miles away. Sleeping silently beside him in the darkness.

He looked out into the vast black distance that opened up before him and he saw his own torment. He saw that he was inside and outside of himself. He was a torn and knotted sheet, a reflection passing in a window, a half-remembered word. He was inside and outside of himself. He wanted to be at one with the Gods; with all their spiritual gifts; their abundance of luck; their natural justice; their plurality and unity; in the light of their judgement; under their truth; within their beautiful ideas; their faith and their holy dreams; their innocence, honesty, peace, compassion and love; he wanted to be remembered by his children; and his children’s children; to be in their memories; in their words of kindness; and live within the law. But he owed his body to the Kings, with their pious gold and envied jewels; their armies and their weapons; their jealousy and their greed; their prisons and their lust for power; their taxes and their contractual bonds; their slaves and their brutal battles for survival; their murder and their deceit. He hated himself for it but with every day that passed with him in their service, he was helping them to drill into the molten core of the earth; to unleash its nuclear forces; upon a tender world; that screamed in pain and terror. The Kings alone - imperious, victorious, merciless - screamed louder than the hell, that surrendered its soul, unto their ears, in the flickering flames of the night.

Now he could make out the faint ghost of the ceiling three meters above his nose. He disliked the wallpaper that he could not see but knew was around him, and he sighed. His forehead began to twist in and upon itself. He rolled his trunk further away from her, in the twisted sheets, but unconsciously her hand fell out to touch his back instinctively. He reminded himself that he would always be an animal of the material world. He knew he was - because he had always given in to her, in the end - well didn’t he? His emotions were numb, but his blood kept returning to his brain, again and again, like the fire that drove the burning engines, that kept on pounding their fists into the sodden ground. His heart kept pumping through the night, on to the infinity, without him thinking. His spirit could not will his blood to stop churning, but it had tried, how it had tried. He knew it would keep pumping even if he tried to cut his entangled life away from his fallen broken body; his heart would keep pumping, until all the life was drained from him, out into the infinity. He knew he could not stop that at all. To the infinity: the place where the Gods are always hiding; just out of reach; always just beyond the horizon; the train of his life, always on an uphill track, to some silent destination beyond the moon; where she was now, is now, and will always be. A thousand miles away.

(A few years after the second World war existentialist philosophers in Europe were grappling with the meaning of their lives. The industrial revolution, that had signaled the end of the old Feudalist systems of production had led to a World so full of nuclear weapons it could destroy itself 10 times over. Europe was divided between the totalitarian institutions of communism in the East and the laissez-faire inequalities of capitalism in the West; socialists in the West were struggling to find a 'third way' between the humanism of the Utopian Socialists (e.g. the 'Fabians') and the materialism of the Marxists. 'Swen' is struggling with the exigencies of living in that epoch. His feelings resonate with a post-Industrial, post-Soviet, post-Modern World; the same old political and economic dialectics, re-inventing themselves today in the battle between the Nation State and the Globalised Markets.