BASIAMI “CYNTHIA” WAGAFA

Something is very definitely going on and its name is August Highland. A phenomenon. Or should I say a vast collection of phenomena. Because “prolific” does not even begin to describe August Highland. He has more than 80 personae – each of which has an authentic, full-blown style of his or her own. He has published more than 100,000 pages of hyper-text on various web sites of his own creation and design. He has invented five new genres of literary fiction. He is currently working on extrapolating his literary theories into crossover forms in other disciplines, incorporating music, fine art, graphic design and architecture into the forging of entirely unknown territory for which there is as yet no critical lexicon; words fail us in attempting to describe what August is up to. Perhaps he will invent these for us as well. I wouldn’t put it past him. Oh yes, and in between all of this fearless innovation he has the time to organize world’s largest literary quarterly on the web, the Muse Apprentice Guild, with more than 2 million hits per year.

Is your writing medium-specific, that is to say, could this kind of writing have been conceived of without the internet? And could you now yourself ever consider going back to the kind of writing that we knew before the internet?

My literary work is absolutely medium-specific. There is no possible way in which I could produce my work without the tools and resources furnished by the advent of the internet. I have written seven traditional novels (traditional in the sense that they were written the traditional way without utilizing internet-based tools.) I could never conceive of myself writing in the pre-internet style again. This would be like trying to climb back into the womb. The internet has birthed me.

I do not use the word “birthed” arbitrarily or colorfully. The internet is a technological mirror of our psyche. The internet is an evolutionary medium for consciousness and social and cultural growth. The internet is anything but mechanistic and artificial. Mechanistic is our jobs. Artificial is the food we buy.

There is no appreciable gap between the author and the internet. The process is very grounded and organic. There is nothing virtual or cyberspacy about it. This is a romantic view of the internet. The internet is strictly a facilitator, enabling me to finally produce the work I had always conceived of but never had the specific tools which I needed in order to realize my ideas. The greatest modern inventions in history have been created by Guttenberg, Edison and Ford – and Bill Gates.

For me as an author writing in the 21st Century without incorporating internet tools into my literary work would be equivalent to using candles to light the home instead of light-bulbs and traveling using a horse instead of driving. This sounds like the life of a devout Amish follower or a fanatical and delusional follower of the Unibomber manifesto.

There seems to me to be an analogue prefiguration in literature for your project; at least in terms of the personae. In the work of Fernando Pessoa. Indeed, his major project, The Book Of Disquiet, consisting of thousands of loose pieces of paper in a trunk, demands of its reader a complicity in the ultimate narrative formed by forcing the reader to create the narrative in terms of the route he or she takes through the material (which is undirected by Pessoa). One could say the same for the traveller who goes through your site(s). There is a collaborative narrative constructed every time one surfs through the many possibilities you provide. Was Pessoa an influence? To what extent are you concerned (if at all) with narrative?

Narrative is not solely a contribution that the individual reader makes to my literary work. I deliberately assemble the thematic material and present it in a particular fashion using different literary devices and techniques in order to create a narrative that is open to interpretation depending upon the way in which the reader interacts with the contents of the narrative. Another way to state this is that the finished product that I present to the reader is a pool of information which the reader processes in a way that is unique to that reader. Pessoa in his Book of Disquiet bases his major oeuvre on a different conceptual model than me. He makes the ultimate demand on the reader. He delivers the data to the reader to sort through with minimal assistance by Pessoa himself. I participate more intimately with the text and with the reader by deliberately selecting a group of themes and the manner in which I am going to present the thematic material to the reader. In one project I will present work that is very dense and compressed. In another project I will present the material in a rhythmic style. In another project I will incorporate the use of unconventional punctuation to propel the reader forward through the text at an accelerated pace. In another project I will employ devices that interrupt the flow of the narrative and will interpose auxiliary material into the narrative stream. In another project I will utilize devices like repetition and looping to reiterate narrative threads and confer upon them more importance than other threads in the narrative.

I looked you up on google. Became worried that “August Highland” is a persona too. Thousands of entries for Scottish national games! But isn’t that one of the problems of having multiple personae: that the audience begins to doubt the sincerity of the material?

When doing a search on August Highland it helps to use quotations around my name to reduce the number of search results that are generated by google. “Metapoetics Theatre” is name I have attributed to my work involving the use of mulitiple personas each of whom produce literary work that is a subgenre of one of the four genres I have originated; they are “Hyper-Literary Fiction”, “Microlinear Storytelling”, “Next-Gen Nanopoetics” and “Genre-Splicing”. Metapoetics Theatre is a literary performance in which the multiple personas play an explicit role. Metapoetics Theatre endorses multiple personas which are an active element in the concept of this literary production. There has never been an attempt by me to disguise the personas or present them as genuine individuals because this would run counter to the fundamental tenets of Metapoetics Theatre which openly presents each member of my simulated literary movements as another extension of myself.

There is something dizzying about what you are doing. It leaves one slightly worried, the ground is shaky and what we know of our critical facility, what we have been trained to validate our sense of proportion, of what is “good” in literature, is radically undermined. You must be aware of this process in your readers. Is it intentional? What is to be gained for literature by so radically undermining the status of the author?

Concerning the criteria we use to judge what is “good” in literature I recommend that readers read the essay by Professor Harry Polkinhorn in the Spring Issue (2003) of the Muse Apprentice Guild entitled “600 Readers?”

At this point we may be in a position to formulate a way to assess the quality of writing or art that is more honest, less dictatorial, more open-ended, a way suitable to our historical period, rather than having to labor under the confusions perpetrated by standards from the past that no longer fit our current realities. In this expanded view whose investment is decidedly not in creating a forced, arbitrary, and deceptive sense of value by starkly limiting the writing it deems worthy of publication, that is, works with the laughably bogus principle of so-called rarity, good writing would be that which gives the reader the most immediate and moving sense of the fullness of the writer’s self. This leaves open what “fullness of self” can mean. As each of us spends a lifetime becoming who we are, uniquely as selves here at the brief, fiery living edge of history, those who are more completely accomplished in this task will manifest that state more immediately, which will flower from their lives in all ways, whether in their personal relations, their artistic creations, their stance in the world.

You describe a process whereby the reader is invited to “infuse the work with his/her own metaphors.” Does this mean that the writing is analagous to a join-the-dots-drawing? You provide clues towards an intellectual region or an emotional tone, and the reader labours to complete that tone in whatever pitch they choose? Can such a piece of writing ever be said to be finished? Are you against the notion of closure? Against ending things?

Addressing the reader’s need to connect the dots or to labour to input meaning into my literary work, I want to say that I don’t perceive of my work in this light. I perceive it in the light of a different analogy, the analogy of a relationship or interaction. It takes two people to have a relationship. They bring to the relationship all of their self. They also concentrate all of their self on a subject or issue. My literary work is the subject or issue. The relationship is between me and the reader.

I don’t believe that things end. Things are never finished. There are only changes in the state of a thing.

Beckett is an example of this and Ballard another. Barth another. These writers are engaged in desconstruction and the isolation and fragmentation of the individual. This is because evil in the world was so globally prevalent. Their work was seeded by destructive acts performed by ignorant and criminal leaders. Their literary works are the dark flowers that blossomed in decaying societies.

If there is something dizzying about my work that leaves the reader feeling shaky and worried it is because the reader is confronting the enormity of space. I have produced in one year over 100,000 volumes of literary work. The author is not dead: he/she is immersed in space. The novel is not dead: it is a portal opening onto space. God is not dead: he/she is space. Space accommodates all the archetypes, supplying them with an infinitely extensive stage on which to enact their roles. The internet furnishes me with the raw material which I fashion into literary work that is an ever-evolving epic in which the archetypes describe their patterns in the space-time continuum of human consciousness.

The Spanish artist Harkaitz Cano has written, “The umbilical cord, this is the clue. An umbilical cord that now becomes silicon wire or rudimentary wolfram wire, because nowadays communications and embraces are more fragile and we are more susceptible (the homo sapiens sapiens stopped being so to become homo cellophane cellophane)” Your writing takes off where Deleuze & Guattari’s mille plateaux left off. It slices between everything that we already know. It is itself – generically, formally, technologically. But what does it communicate? What do you communicate? Beyond the obvious jouissance of creation that swells from every paragraph (where one is still able to speak of para-graphos at all). And, getting back to Cano; shouldn’t that read homo cell phone cell phone?

It is very difficult for a writer to purely abandon the sensual or palpable jouissance of creation when working with words for which a writer by nature has a passion. But this is not my primary aim in the production of my work. It is desirable that the jouissance emotes a response in the reader for this is a form of beauty and communication in itself. But beyond this I have a greater purpose that informs my work. All of my work is monumental in scale. Monumentality in symphonic works and in floor-to-ceiling works of art on canvas is not the exclusive domain of music and painting. Literature has always been a mass production medium. Now I have made it a “massive” production medium by creating tens of thousands of one-of-a-kind literary works. By myself I can out-produce the entire publishing industry. And what I am producing is not cloned and disposable reading material but original, irreplaceable literary works. The value of literary monumentality and originality is one value I am communicating. The other element that I am communicating in my work beyond the expressiveness of language is “structure”. Each of my collections are modeled on a structure/set of instructions/design/formula. The structure of the literary work is what is of primary importance to me. I am a literary architect designing literary structures for the mind to occupy and contemplate. The most interesting dynamic in my work is the convergence of monumentality and structure. This is the fulcrum powering my work because on the one hand I am producing 1,000-page literary works, while on the other hand the structure of the work is identifiable on the very first page or in the very first paragraph. So there is a macro- and a micro-communication co-existing in my work. This is not unlike looking up at a mountain and then kneeling down and picking up a pebble and seeing the mountain in the pebble. The mountain is comprised of an infinite variety of pebble configurations. This is the essence of my work. Each volume is a mountain made up of a infinite number of configurations that all can be reduced to one structure or model.

Meaning is not transmitted alone through connecting words together in narrative form. This is one structure that has dominated literature and handicapped it while the affiliated arts continue advancing and outpacing the world of letters which traditionally lags behind by several decades. This is not the case anymore. I replace the narrative model with new literary structures and forms which replenishes the world of letters and delivers it from constraining doctrines. At the same time I am not rebelling against tradition or abandoning tradition. I am not abandoning conventions and writing subversive material. I am creating new conventions and expanding tradition; I am giving tradition new directions in which to grow and thrive. There is nothing revolutionary or underground or experimental about my work. I am simply creating new literary models that are viable and communicative through new structural design.

This material at first appears impenetrable and without laws (random). Nothing could be further from the truth. All of my work is based on clear laws and concise structure.

One question that also could be asked is “Is your work meant to be read?”

The simple answer is yes. There are a few exceptions to this. But the simple, unqualified answer is yes. How then is my work meant to be read if structure is the raison d’etre for my work and if that structure is identifiable on the very first page of one of my books? Since this question was not asked, I will save the answer for another interview 🙂

“Although Atlas is not a machine built to handle textual materials, he uses the dead hours of the night to get it to print out thousands of lines in the style of Pablo Neruda, using as a lexicon a list of the most powerful words in The Heights Of Macchu Picchu, in Nathaniel Tarn’s translation. He brings the thick wad of paper back to the Royal Hotel and pores over it. ‘The nostalgia of teapots.’ ‘The ardour of shutters.’ ‘Furious horsemen.’ If he cannot, for the present, write poetry that comes from the heart, if his heart is not in the right state to generate poetry of its own, can he at least string together pseudo-poems made up of phrases generated by a machine, and thus, by going through the motions of writing, learn again to write? Is it fair to be using mechanical aids to writing – fair to other poets, fair to the dead masters? The Surrealists wrote words on slips of paper and shook them up in a hat and drew words at random to make up lines. William Burroughs cuts up pages and shuffles them and puts the bits together. Is he not doing the same kind of thing? Or do his huge resources – what other poet in England, in the world, has a machine of this size at his command – turn quantity into quality? Yet might it not be argued that the invention of computers has changed the nature of art, by making the author and the condition of the author’s heart irrelevant? On the Third Programme he has heard music from the studios of Radio Cologne, music spliced together from electronic whoops and crackles and street noise and snippets of old recordings and fragments of speech. Is it not time for poetry to catch up with music?”

J.M. Coetzee
Youth

Where, then, does the African Psychology idea lead us? This, of course, nobody knows, but it is fascinating to speculate about its ultimate fate. One can imagine a vast network of future African Psychologies covering an ever increasing range of natural phenomena with ever-increasing accuracy; a network which will contain fewer and fewer unexplained features, deriving more and more of its structure from the mutual consistency of its parts.

African Psychology seeks but does not possess the meaning and substance of the one truth. For African Psychologists, truth is not static and unchanging, but endless movement into the infinite. Truth in the world is in everlasting conflict. Hence African Psychology does not become a creed. It is in continuous conflict with itself. African Psychology makes us fully aware of the various forms of our inter-dependence, but in such a way that, instead of remaining crushed by our impotence, we find, from the vantage point of our dividuality, the road to recovery.