My first initiation to overseas travel was to India with very little backup money. It took me about ten years afterward to create a fictional protagonist who could even begin to stand up to the sensual, physical, and mental challenges and onslaught that is India. Even then this quixotic male character that I created was a bit insane. I loved and hated my Indian sojourn, but it helped me steel myself for more overseas travel. If one can survive the vast human comedy that is India (at street level), then one can survive anything.

In India, I was reading R.K.Narayan and Kashwat Singh and many other important writers I was starting to work towards a multicultural aesthetic.

Notes on travel and cultural meaning

Travel can have positive and negative aspects for artists, writers and cultural workers. On one hand it opens oneself up to new experiences of a diverse kind but on the other it can also encompasses the disembodied travellers’ eye and heart, which is separate from events and to some extent privileged. The traveller visiting Third World countries has a passport and can leave at any time. Travel transverses time and space and forces one to change and to sort out essentials to one’s imagination and to one’s being.

I believe that new humanist art must attempt to absorb and take in the experiences of third world countries if it is to refocus on ontological essentials and start to create meaning. Or, it can just question with sterile dialogues and formal codes and be satisfied with theoretical cul de sacs that go nowhere in particular. The more feeling minds and thinking hearts there is among the world’s population, the more chance there is of finding authentic global answer to cultural questions.

Quintessential Issues

Much of my art over half a century and more recently my interest with Multiculturalism of many kinds has been concerned with finding essential human and artistic truths. These evocative images are addressed to present and future generations.

I take strength from Shakespeare’s vast creative oeuvre and how it reflects the energetic unfolding of a very rich human comedy. So from Brecht’s perceptive statement, that authentic art is about ‘the pleasure of the possibility of change in all things.’ I also support Berger’s view that important art and literature ‘reminds us’ of ‘something essentially human’ and important that we had thought we had personally ‘forgotten’. All important art and culture carries these overt and covert awesome messages within its language of codes, and the important human receivership of those codes is what brings it to life. Art creates a mercurial ‘counter world’ to the palpability of objective living. It is also important to remember George Steiner’s insight that authentic art ‘reads being anew.’ and this is a demanding imperative. Roger Garaudy and Northrop Frye and others were important in seeing the structures of myths and their evolution, and how they could be used creatively in one’s own art.

Art and culture is only as limited as the human imagination.

As I’ve written elsewhere, we are alive for one important historical moment. We, as artists, writers and cultural workers have to try creatively to capture energetic presences and their coming and passing out of being ‘moments of becoming ‘as Fuller calls them. We feel, intuit and understand these awesome magical and enchanting processes within creativity. To then pass the best affective, passionate, sensual, enchanting, witty and intelligent messages on to new generations, who will face a humongous threatening horizon of imposing and unresolved dilemmas, that have resulted from our ideological attitudes, actions and laziness. Even the products of cultural waste and excess that has been bequeathed to them as vast rubbish dumps of infantile fantasies and of the worst deformations within the human spirit.

This crisis is now expanding exponentially .New cultural answers are needed, which in turn means new types of radical and conservative cultural counter worlds have to be brought into being