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.”