Tuesday 30 September 2008

I didn't sleep so goodly

Somehow I got Zimbabwe in my head last night -- as a result, I didn't sleep so finely as I might have.

Monday 29 September 2008

more psychological sparring lessons

From what I have learned in life, on a psychological level you will generally encounter the typical trait of the reich winger as a defensive sparring practitioner.

He likes to plant himself in general. And, he prefers not to move in general. So he awaits for you to come to him.

Once you do so, he attempts to use up all your energy by asking you to respond to questions that he, himself, does not have an inkling of an answer for.

He will demand, for instance, to know: "Why are you not 100 percent perfect??!! How will you account for yourself!!??"

There is never any answer to a question like that. Even the reich winger himself does not know why he is not 100 percent perfect. He has no interest in finding out.

His point in asking you to prove yourself is simply to waste your time and energy.

Move on.

Marechera's black sunlight draft

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/CHAPTER%20Marecherasblacksunlight.htm

Sunday 28 September 2008

marechera's shamanism

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/SHAMANISM%20AND%20MARECHERA.htm

postmodernist solipsism -- where will it end?

There is a certain manner of discourse that always tries to push one into a position of embracing solipsism.

Do you think that it is wrong that the US government is using torture as means to get its way? Well that is simply because you have an overly harsh superego, and you are projecting a particularly noxious image upon the US government. Away with you!

Do you think that you have something to say? What was that? About yourself? Well you don't have a self to speak of, although you may insist you do. That ego delusion is all part of the pathology, though, don't you know? The one that caused the holocaust, in fact! Speaking out like that just demonstates the degree of the delusion. A nice, restive personality is passive, in itself, merely adding its number to the aggregate that drives the 'discourse'.

Did you have something to say? Well, it is a neurosis! And I will do you a big favour by letting you talk past me. Your neurosis will eventually wind down and use itself up. Please don't speak to me in ways that go outside of our transcendent discourse!!

Oh, and another thing: We are all 100 percent free. So, if you have some troubles here, fly on and sit upon another perch!

Let us see what a 'discourse' actually is.


Suppose that every time I do a jab, I resolutely and predictably follow it up with a cross. My opponent therefore learns to understand very well my 'discourse'. S/he knows that the meaning of a jab is preparing to defend against a cross, because I am just about to deliver one."

This, then, is what I understand concerning what it means to speak within a mode of discourse. One speaks in a mode that is recognisable, certainly. However, the recognizability of one's mode of discourse is premised upon the predictability of what follows next. Should I fail to follow my jab punches with my cross punches, I am no longer relating to my opponent in a way that is inherently as intelligible. This failure means that s/he will not "understand" me quite so well, then.

But what is assumed, and what certainly is far from proven, is that failure to speak in terms of a recognisable discourse will reduce the efficacy of the speaker.

LET'S LOOK AT THE ISSUE IN ANOTHER WAY:

My faithful adherence to following up every jab with a cross may well be appreciated by my opponent -- for it makes me more easy to read and understand and therefore easier to respond to. Yet we are barely struggling at the peripheries of bland conformity when we seek to assure that everything we do occurs in line with common discursive practices.

Should I fail to follow the route of predictability sometimes, by occasionally mixing up my techniques and manuevers, I can be certain that I will not always be immediately 'understood'.    My efficiency, however, is likely to increase.

the need to break down illusions


I add to these observations my summary that the early childhood stage is concerned with resolving the ontological question: Do I exist or not, and if so in what form? The link with shamanism is obvious: "Why am I human, and not, rather, a tree?" One may return to this psychological field in order to resolve ontological crises.
Other points are that I see the task of the shaman to liquidise that which has become all to crystalised and "fixed" within the individual or cultural personality. This allows for an injection of eros and suppleness into ways of life that have become all too crystalised and rigid.
Thus the healing potency pertains to breaking down and dissolving what exists, so that suppleness may be imparted and possibly new ways of thinking and feeling may result.

No pleasure without pain


This is a culture wanting to have pleasure without roughage in their diet, that is experiencing anything discomforting. The quick fixes for psychological disturbances, the desire to identify oneself with the process of consumption (but not with the condition of being a worker -- for that would involve pain), and indeed, the vulgar white British takeover of African Safari Culture in the new family television series, Nondescript Life, (taking place on a private wildlife park in South Africa), shows that a frontier mentality is certainly NO LONGER needed to conquer "primitivism" and the African wild. (This is certainly how things were viewed before!) All that is needed is the ability to smile haughtily and yet somehow endearingly at the natives.

Contemporary culture wants its pleasure without pain, and now that evil has finally been removed from the world (in the shape of white colonial agents), it is pleasure only that we can expect to have recourse to -- never pain.

My plea is for a reinjection of a much broader scope of organic reality into contemporary consciousness. I am certainly not pleading for the manufacturing of pain -- which contemporary society tends to do mechanistically, in any case, and without reflection or reason.

I don't think Marechera's works are understandable without this, and I also think there is no muscle growth without a process of breaking something. No healing without pain.


Kachasu

I sometimes enjoy a precarious dance between the traditional ideas about the shaman and a metonymic idea of the modern, 21st century shaman. So, when I say that Marechera "heals", I would say that he often does so violently -- in the same sense that a surgeon is violent. This may not be the soothing impression that most ppl want to maintain about a "healer", but there it is. So there is the healing that takes place through an encounter with violence and disruption. I think this is counterintuitive in some ways, but not in all. The disruption, the chaos making may be Dionysian, but so is shamanic "ecstasy", and the pleasure you recieve in life without the additional quantum of pain attached is hardly so pleasurable. So, I don't think that healing and wounding can be separated quite, either.


Ah. That is the way I think. Why does Marechera as psychopomp offer kachasu to the spirits of the dead freedom fighters? Doesn't he know that (according to a source online) it is made of 'dead babies"? Actually according to my Zim friend, Letwin, it is made of hedge clippings, rotten fruit, and other things found on the rubbish tip. But it is this chaos (and disturbing contents) that is offered up for "healing" or for dead freedom fighter nourishment.

Saturday 27 September 2008

ideology isn't intellectuality and vice versa

Ideology simply isn't intellectuality. They are a world apart, these two things, in terms of methodology and content.

At the magical level of consciousness, one can see only ideology. One embraces an ideology as a talisman to ward off bad luck. Once having sworn oneself to an ideology, one is not permitted to deviate from its system of beliefs. Doing so will produce bad luck -- a curse on oneself and one's kinsmen.

Intellectuality isn't anything like that. You can't introduce intellectuality as a fad, simply because you cannot embrace the position of being an intellectual as an ideology. Intellectuality is not a subject-position (vis-a-vis) the objects of the world. It isn't an identity.

Therefore what one is or isn't when one engages in intellectual thought is a question for dogma and ideology to give a definitive answer to -- but it is not a question with a definitive answer (at least not usually) from the perspective of the one who is used to thinking about things deeply.

If you are intent upon embracing a definitive answer to all the problems of your life, you are probably only embracing an ideology -- and not an attitude of intellectual openness to life and its possibilities.

The ontological question

The preoedipal stage is therefore the stage at which one solves the ontological question -- Do I exist or not?

This is why it is shamanic -- because the question of existence (including what form such existence) might take -- is up for grabs. Since the very nature of one's existence is diffused and uncertain at this stage, it is easy to imagine (project a fantasy) that one might be a deer, or a lamb, or an osprey (perhaps each in turn, or all together). Phenomenologically, a return to the preoedipal stage is a return to the world of 'spirits' -- a grey world (ontologically speaking), wherein one is not quite living, although not quite dead. It is a creative world of possibilities, however, whereby fantasy can guide and determine what turns out to exist and what doesn't. This, therefore, is the realm of the see-er and of the creative poet.

***

When I said, once, taking a stab in the dark, and not yet having an understanding of this preoedipal field -- at least not by name -- that Marechera wrote "beneath language", I was not wrong, technically speaking. (At least not in all ways -- despite the fact that obviously he was quite clearly using language to speak in this way that I had insinuated was "beneath" language.)

That which I had a sense of, was that he was depicting a phenomenology of experience that preceded the firm sense of reality that maturation into full ontological awareness gives us. The use of language itself moves us towards a kind of positivism -- whereby objects are acknowledged automatically in the fullest sense of by virtue of being NAMED (and by virtue of the convention of not arbitrarily changing names, once something has been given a particular name.)

Marechera, however, changes names and identities seemingly arbitrarily, throughout the stream of consciousness novel, Black Sunlight. His disregard for the conventions of language in allowing identities to remain FIXED is what I had picked up upon, and which I had thrown my descriptive term at, by saying his approach was "beneath language". (Of course, this term only made sense to me at the time, and not to anybody else -- so I also had my problem trying to label the phenomena that I had seen, in terms of conventional linguistic usage.)

Anyway, it is now quite transparent that the pre-oedipal stage in a child's life (and the vestiges of it that remains with us at the adult stages of development) are concerning with the question of how it is that one might come into existence. One operating within this field certainly does not take the fact of one's existence (or the even the particular nature of it) for granted. Rather, it is a question that still seeks an answer. As I have indicated earlier, the question of non-being is that to which the shaman is traditionally driven in his or her confrontation with death (and, of course, with the 'spirit world')

Friday 26 September 2008

On Presidents

Seeing the American political scene unfurl its rather mediocre candidates, it is so clear how power is managed inadequately -- which is to say for the sake of power, rather than for the sake of humans and their more complex capabilities.

The system -- the one in Australia -- attempted to rule me by terror. A very small mistake -- a palpable human error, whilst attempting to do well with a good attitude -- was seen as the end of the world, as the beginning of doomsday, as an intolerable menace upon the perfectionability of life. Yet allowing huge sections of America to sink underwater, bombing this country because you mistake it for that one, and generally running the economy into the ground is ... perfectly okay.

The standards I have always been held to as a mere worker are a zillion times higher than the standard to which one would hold the American president or almost anyone in office.

Power has its own justification by which it perpetuates the most abject incompetence as normal and acceptable. Lack of power can never justify itself, no matter what its competencies or skills happen to be.

Is this the lesson we will take from the 21st Century?

the thrill of living fast through history

One of those things I do not think I will ever be able to fully bring out in my assessments of the writer who is Marechera is the thrill of his life in terms of living through so much of history.

When the ever so posh Oxford scholars came in and found that he was trying to dry his clothes in his student room by hanging up lines and turning all the heaters on, and shutting windows, they had not idea that what they saw was somebody who had crossed whole eras of historical time very quickly.

The lines he put up to hang his clothes were just the first link he had to make between his early origins in a mud hut and the modern network of communications he would utilise to write his books.

navigation

In the end, I've learned that the best approach towards writing is to take all advice on board.

Then.

Follow your instinct.

Knowledge of our world is not so small that every question, every concern, can be catered to.

Knowledge is an ocean.

One navigates this ocean wisely using one's own compass -- not the compass of thine enemies.

Tuesday 23 September 2008

and another thing

I had a dream last night of setting up a sparring session/fight, with one of my old school friends. We spend much time preparing for it but ultimately nothing came through.

This is a dream about the non-fluidity of femininity under patriarchy. Here it is exactly the opposite to what it should be. More so than for the men: You are in your stall and I am in mine.
And your "stall", in this instance, is not just your narrow self-identity under the bourgeois system, but the way the system proscribes your actions with its repressive morality.

Mon dieu!

I find my hormones have an interesting effect on me, although rather subtle in all so many ways, and not by any means (at all) the stereotypical effect that 'whore-moans' are supposed to have in developing/shredding the character of the hysterical woman.

Quite simply the less hormones I take, the more masculine becomes my taste. Thus there is a window of a day or two, in the absence of imbibing, when my sexual tastes turn almost purely homosexual, and then flip back again upon returning to the schedule of imbibement.

And so it is. I lose a slight surface quality of sensitivity when I am not partaking of the delicious artificial product of commercial hormones.

Apart from that, I get a headache -- a withdrawal headache, one might possibly presume.

I might be less creative and more logical.

Monday 22 September 2008

anti-feminism and the pre-Oedipal field

Speaking very much from my own experience, I can put the pieces together as to much of the cause behind present day misogyny.

The underlying problem is the ubiquity of people without a fully developed, fully emerged self. {Questions I'd like to know the answer to:  what causes it? The training for 'masculinity' though a failure to nurture sufficiently? A harsh post-industrial climate? That part needs investigation} Today, nonetheless we have a large number of people without a fully emerged adult personality. Maybe, indeed, they had one once, but harsh and stressful circumstances have caused it to retreat as they have regressed to the magical pre-Oedipal stage.

In terms of this regressive condition, as Gertrud B. Ujhely has explained in her article on the PreOedipal, every viewpoint or value is made up of soley two poles -- representing a polarised (un-nuanced) and two-dimensional view of existence. {In terms of this someone is either a saint or a devil, completely right, or absolutely wrong, with no gradations of grey inbetween. Furthermore, one sees the other as a necessary whole of either good or bad, and not as parts of likeable AND unlikeable aspects.}

This regressive mode which forms the lens thought which one comes to view the other does not enable one to perceive the full humanity of the person who is seen as 'other' (eg because of race or gender). The 'other' is merely the other polarity (not the other human being) in relation to oneself. The task allocated to this other is an instrumental one of giving the undeveloped self of the one who has regressed to the pre-Oedipal perspective, something to latch onto, in order to anchor and stabilise itself within what is felt to be an otherwise incomprehensible world of flux and change.

Thus the regressed male feels a painful need for an opposite polarity to stabilise and give organisational meaning to his mind in flux. He sees feminism as a threat, on quite a personal level, because it seems to take women out of his reach, making them nuanced, complex and something other than this simplified pole of "otherness" that he craves.

When I have communicated with various "feminist critics", I have received the impression that anything that I say that is nuanced or complex is simply not understood at all, unless it can be reduced to something that would fit within the pre-Oedipal perspective -- for instance as a cry of pain and horror that could be differentiated only crudely from the opposite polarity of pleasure and feeling safe. Thus the nuances of what I have to say, and the complexity of actual (in the real world -- experiential) gender relations are not at all understood. Rather, the "feminist critic" sees what I have to say in terms of his own painful condition, of gut level neediness (with me being seen on the opposite polarity, as triumphing over him in a mode of unrestrained pleasure, though my feminist self-assuredness.)

The fearful and regressed male, as we can see, mistakes the ability to engage in a mature sense with social and psychological nuances, to be be a sign of hubris and greedy triumphalism. Thus, such a person is deeply threatened (by virtue of the polarising nature of his mind) by the maturity that does not permit every value and meaning to devolve into a crude polarity. {He needs this crude polarity -- and you as the representation of it -- remember, in order to find order and meaning in life, and stabilise a weak and shaky undeveloped self that cries out helplessly within its state of flux for some reassuring dispensation of order.}

So it is from a regressive or regressed state of being that feminism is seen as a threat -- specifically as a way of withholding, in a very threatening way, the rights of men to have a full and complete adult self.

However, the solution that anti-feminism appeals to is a pathological one -- ie. that all women should regress to the pre-Oedipal stage experienced by these most unfortunate, regressive males. For women to become the shadowy mother figures of the pre-Oedipal consciousness to these men would not enable them to transcend their pathological regression -- that is, to become fully and calmly adult once and for all (which is what they ought to be seeking).

It's a false solution -- but the anti-feminist men can see no other way than to demand that women take the opposite polarity to them, in order that they may become, finally, "men", and so that their sense of security in the world may seem to be (momentarily, at least) restored.

I like being 40

I like being 40 because finally the circle has been closed between childish youthfulness and maturity. I am not at one pole in hot pursuit of the other any longer. Both aspects are available to me now in abundance.

I like it -- because I am saving up to buy some land.

I like it because I sit on the ledge of a mountain and survey the view, knowing that my privilege in observing it is all entirely something I have earned through off my own back.

I like it that conventional gender relations seem to me like so many childish games and childish faux pas.

I like it that I have developed such power over my own mind that I can get it to do almost anything I want it to.

Sunday 21 September 2008

what can go wrong with human relations

This article is brilliant and reveals a lot concerning what can go wrong with human relations:


http://www.cejournal.org/GRD/PreOedipal.htm

a segment:

Two-dimensionality underlies also the law of all or nothing on which the magical structure of consciousness is based. There are no gradations of value and there is no ability to differentiate part from whole or essence from periphery. This fact too makes it so difficult for a person on the magical level consciousness to make choices. Also, it adds to one's inability to be criticized. For, if the other does not like one aspect of oneself, he is experienced as dismissing one's whole being. And, conversely, one cannot afford to dislike one aspect of the other, for fear of denying and thus destroying and hence losing all of him. No wonder that criticism is not negotiable for a person who lives on the magical level of consciousness and that to tell him that he is hypersensitive to it is merely adding insult to injury.

FELT HUMAN EVEN!

I weep I creep I sneep. I crawl onto my bed and sleep.

We are all asleep so docile in our little sleep. (It is evidenced by the fact that some words work on us whilst others fly on by as seemingly inscrutable.)

We rape we pillage we live inside a village

and in the village there is nothing more than a mooing cow.

Imagination ought to make bridges between us, forging connections where there are none. Imagination is strong enough for that. Instead we use our imaginations to find reason to reject others, and bring them and us down.

bourgeois individualism: you have your stall whereas I have mine.

I have even seen it taught as morality -- in places where giving privileges were actually ways of subtly undermining
Soul

that strange shudder that a bourgeois type emits when it's suggested that he might have been ............. influenced!

you have your influences and I have mine. Only, bourgeois types are more pulled from the head of Zeus than most.

bourgeois individualism: I'm throwing some shit into your stall now. No doubt you will attack me for it!

(oh yes i see tit for tat now I got it I am only getting what I've long deserved.)

Oh a dog attacked me too this time it felt so
HUMAN

zimbabwean shaman

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/SHAMANISM%20AND%20MARECHERA.htm

Saturday 20 September 2008

imagination and its power

The mind is powerful. We underestimate its power, especially the power of autosuggestibility.

Let me go over a few things again: I was frightened of skydiving. We all are. The issue that bothered me in particular was the difficulty in understanding air. Air is thin. Air is nothing. Therefore we do not throw ourselves into air. We only walk upon the things that are by nature "something".

But I overcame this ill. I did so by imagining that air was something. Air was molecules. It was moisture. It had WATER in it for goodness sake!

Thus I made my sixth and seventh jumps.

and once again, for the audience!

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/contemporary%20shamanism.htm

Friday 19 September 2008

Seriously...

Seriously, perhaps we should all say and do nothing -- after all it's safer that way. The only problem with that approach is that the little indecencies, the little degradations to our integrity that we overlook soon get stored up in the system as "the way we do things here". Soon all the little pieces of corruption that we have allowed within the system -- overlooking them in order that the individuals who we are can get ahead -- become somebody's else's undoing, someone else's difference between making it and breaking it, someone else's tragedy as they become the victim of racism, sexism, classism, and so on.

So turning a blind eye to small societal abuses, just so we can climb our way up through the system (albeit on the heads of those who must come after us) is a no go.

Thursday 18 September 2008

Thanatos & Ressentiment

Recently, I detected, in Doris Lessing's book, Going Home, that the attitude underlying the whole book was something of the order of: "Let us destroy this evil in front of us, so that good may result."

I even had someone apppear on this site to confirm my diagnosis for me that this was the attitudinal principle at work: "If we focus on the evil that is in Zimbabwe, and destroy it, good will result."

Well, this conviction about how things work -- or, in fantasy "ought to" work -- has precisely the structure of ressentiment about it. As Nietzsche points out regarding the dynamic of ressentiment, some kind of manifest evil is pointed out as the feature that has to be destroyed. That is the whole point of the moralising -- to destroy what is considered evil. (It's not a creative or balanced or contemplative approach, as you might see.) So, the principle at hand is to destroy "evil" (that which one perceives as such). The erasing of something that exists -- the ostensible "evil" -- is thereby supposed to leave a space for what isn't evil (ie. that which is defined negatively in relation to "evil", as the "good") to emerge. And, belief in this principle of how things work is actually an empirically-unfounded conviction. (Things actually do not work in this way, if you look into history.) So, as Nietzsche said, according to this philosophy of ressentiment, "good" is always an afterthought. (It is supposed to appear automatically, upon the banishment of evil.)

Anyway, one might consider in terms of Nietzsche's paradigm concerning ressentiment, that those who manifest the principle of ressentiment also reserve a very small place in their hearts for eros, which is an afterthought of the pleasure they will receive after they have embarked upon their main task at hand -- a binge of destruction.

Doris Lessing and ZANU-PF youth! -- embrace!

Not a good dream

IN the dream I was being attacked by stink bugs. I threw away a bus time-table to attract one away from me. It belted after the green and white pamphlet, to mate with it. As I approached the fallen document, three other stink bugs had already congregated around it.

I couldn't remember anything. Especially how to exit the concrete monstrosity I was in. I realised that all the windows and doors had been blocked to keep people in.

Mike kept having endless social guests, and there was no room for me even to sleep. And still I couldn't remember anything. Who were these people and what were they saying?

Then one middle aged man apologised to me for ignoring me. He said, "I'm really sorry for my actions so let me make it up to you with my sensitivity: isn't it the case that you suffered some brain damage?"

Oh. Bah!

NO wonder I couldn't find a way to exit the building.

(this whole dream all comes from waking up too early, due to Mike's ferocious snores, then going to check my email, and thinking "bah! I can't be bothered reading any of this stuff in depth.)

Wednesday 17 September 2008

Taking on the violence

It's nice that Zimbabwe looks to be resolving its political crisis.

Reading the Zimbabwe News over the past few months has given me an acute insight into what Marechera spoke of when he referred to black rain drumming on his head.

Tuesday 16 September 2008

Monday 15 September 2008

the shaman does not transcend anything exactly.......

That is where I am in disagreement with:
JAMES M. GLASS
(University of Maryland)
THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE SHAMAN:
The Political Vision as Incantation

WHY THE ANALOGY between the shaman and the philos-
opher? I have in mind three examples where some correspondence exists:
it is on the matter of the use of a vision or image as incantation,
specifically in the case of philosophy in Plato's Republic, Rousseau's
Social Contract, and Marx' Future Society.


I maintain that the shaman, unlike the philosopher, does not create a field of uninterrupted eros, free of the catastrophes of thanatos.

Rather, the shaman seeks to understand the world experientially, in both of its erotic and destructive proclivities. Cordoning off one part of experience in order to create a realm of 'the sacred' does not allow one the experience of taming and mastering the spirits. Thus one NEEDS to experience thanatos, in order to understand how it functions. After that, one can make assessments about the function of thanatos in others.

new article I work on, mustly.

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/SHAMANISM%20AND%20MARECHERA.htm

Sunday 14 September 2008

The Wall

One way of looking at Marechera's 'The Alley', in Scrapiron Blues, is in terms of a critique which he generally makes throughout the book of collected works. In this instance one might say that he critiques the consumerist morality of the Rhodesian soldier, who sees it fit to sacrifice women (specifically, female family members) in order to consume the pleasure of their violence against each other - black and white.

The enjoyment of the violence is depicted by Marechera in terms of dogs in heat. The fighters avidly consume the war in such a way that the consequences of their actions are left without regard. Yet it is the consequences of their actions that Marechera wants to bring home to both the white and black veterans of the war. To bring home this lesson, he takes the white icon of Cecil Rhodes, whom the country was named after, and feminises her (Cecil becomes Cecilia). The white commander is then seen to be sexually torturing Cecilia, and his deeds are symbolically brought home to him -- would he sexually torture the white icon that represents his own power and position of domination? Yes he would, says Marechera. For this is in fact what he is doing.

The black man, Rhodes (another reversal, this time in terms of colour) understands the damage that this masculine posturing does to women. Yet the damage is hardly or barely spoken for much of the play, for its effect resides behind the wall of consciousness for the men become tramps. Only when the wall is tapped, or "struck", does the reality they have been burying from consciousness appear as psychological truth in front of their eyes. The women who had been sacrificed to the necessity of war appear as those who have been able to acknowledge the damage of war, and do something about it -- unlike both of the men who have become physically and intellectually destitute, with swiss cheese memories, due no doubt to the energy it takes to repress key information and lie to themselves (once, lawyers, they are now both tramps). The women, therefore, are lesbians, since they have embraced the psychological truth of war and cannot stand men. The men themselves, however, remain stuck in their attempts to transcend what the truth of what the women experience. The lies they tell themselves in their inability to face the truth assure that they will remain tramps with hazy, inefficient memories.

Changing definitions of masculinity


Consumerism determines what is both normal and what is considered moral these days. Even the concept of masculinity, whatever it was before, of which we ought to be unsure,  has altered into a mere demand for the right to consume only quality feminine goods.   Bravery and stoicism no longer are retained as "masculine" ideals.   To be masculine these days is to consume more opulence.

So what has become of transcendence (the psychological and intellectual space of knowledge once annexed as the masculine prerogative per se)? It has been replaced by the sucking infant, who demands only the best to keep him self-satisfied and suckling.

Oddly enough, consumerism as a creed has also come to totally dominate the right wing's rhetoric, especially when its members accuse other folk of "whining". Reading between the lines, they're saying something like: "You are just complaining about the discontinuous nature of your right to consume, as if it were the most painful thing a human could experience. However, we, ourselves, are able to disengage from consuming for moments at a time! We really ARE the Ãœbermensch of the contemporary era. So you'll have to reach our level in society if you want to consume as avidly as we do, and with such mastery of the subject!"

Decadence

Decadence in the Nietzschean sense is not the same as Fin de siècle decadence, which means that not all decadences are alike.

The Nietzschean sense of the term had to do will a falling away from a standard of what it might mean to be human, in the best possible sense of the idea.

My view is that a consumerist attitude towards life and towards others is one of the most extreme expressions of decadence that we have seen in our contemporary times.

A consumerist decadent always has some aspect of the pre-Oedipal dynamics going on. It relates to the way that he 'feeds'. He must be able to assure himself that he can take from you, by making you preoccupied with him and his dependency structure.

In truth, he doesn't really differentiate too much between you (whom he feeds upon) and his self, which is geared towards getting his needs met. He sees his need to consume and your need to supply him with something to keep consuming to be the key nature of reality, social justice, and indeed, the basis of morality itself. You supply something to feed on: He keeps on feeding.

But the narcissistic relationship isn't as complete as he imagines it to be. Besides, there are other uses for breasts besides continually giving an advantage to the consumer. So, rant and rave and throw a tantrum as he will -- the system will one day no longer cater to him as the all-demanding consumer.

further notes on shamanism

1. the shaman thrives during a time of intense stress and transformation

SEE: James M. Glass, "The Philosopher and the Shaman: The Political Vision as Incantation," Political Theory, Vol. 2, No. 2 (May, 1974), pp. 181-196



2 From what I have so far determined, Marechera's shamanistic knowledge of the pre-Oedipal field is specifically knowledge of how power relations function to give us negative forms of identity (that is, not based on conscious choice) within organisations (such as general social, political or bureaucratic organisations). Such identities function RELATIONALLY, as parts of the political whole.



3. Nietzsche speaks of his relationship with Dionysus in terms of sacrifice and self-transformation -- and there is no question in my mind that the relationship he speaks of is in the pattern of shamanism (he even references his interaction with 'spirits' later in this same passage):


the genius of the heart, from contact with which every
one goes away richer; not favoured or surprised, not as though
gratified and oppressed by the good things of others; but richer
in himself, newer than before, broken up, blown upon, and sounded
by a thawing wind; more uncertain, perhaps, more delicate, more
fragile, more bruised, but full of hopes which as yet lack names,
full of a new will and current, full of a new ill-will and
counter-current . . .
but what am I doing, my friends? Of whom am
I talking to you? Have I forgotten myself so far that I have not
even told you his name? Unless it be that you have already
divined of your own accord who this questionable God and spirit
is, that wishes to be PRAISED in such a manner? For, as it
happens to every one who from childhood onward has always been on
his legs, and in foreign lands, I have also encountered on my
path many strange and dangerous spirits; above all, however, and
again and again, the one of whom I have just spoken: in fact, no
less a personage than the God DIONYSUS, the great equivocator and
tempter, to whom, as you know, I once offered in all secrecy and
reverence my first-fruits--the last, as it seems to me, who has
offered a SACRIFICE to him, for I have found no one who could
understand what I was then doing.


[SEE: Beyond Good and Evil]

Saturday 13 September 2008

the pre-Oedipal field and morality

It seems that object relations dynamics do not in fact serve to define a self or to give a positive identity to a self so much as to merely preserve a vestige of a self in the face of some perceived danger from authority. Thus a feeling of danger, reawoken, can open up the dynamic field of the pre-Oedipal again, allowing for a different political construction of oneself in relation to others. This, however, reads conceptually like a negative form of identity -- an identity that takes into account others effects as a danger to onself and behaves proactively in order to forestall the danger. Thus the subject may invoke denial as a mechanism that negates the other and the feeling of danger they impart. Denial of awareness of the other could often take the form of "the person is mad and doesn't have anything to say to me." The dynamic of denial thus comes into play to protect the self that cannot at this time afford to take in any information about the danger of the world around them. Denial thus serves to preserve the self as it is, rather than allowing the self to process disturbing or shocking information that could lead to its undoing (through its inability to sufficiently and accurately process this information).

Pre-Oedipal complexes thus intervene to protect us against the possibility of psychological trauma, which would result if we were to suddenly process too much of reality. Pre-Oedipal dynamics function to mediate reality for us, often by distorting or repressing it in such a way that it appears more palatable (and in effect actually becomes so, much in the same way as baby food is more palatable to a baby than adult-sized chunks would be.) As Nietzsche said, the psyche is also a stomach, and as such it can take in and process only so much.

So pre-Oedipal dynamics are a primary defensive mechanism against the world and against consuming too much reality. We can see how this works in a hierarchical institution, in which one's sense of self is systematically threatened by the authority of those working above one. In such a case, on projects one's capability for efficiency upwards, so that it appears to emanate not from oneself but from the more powerful authorities above one. Similarly, one projects one's incompetencies on to the strata of people below one in the system's hierarchy. [See The Dynamics of the Social, by Isabel Menzies Lyth.] Thus the dynamics of projective identification -- a pre-Oedipal dynamic -- come into play to create a distorted reality on the basis of which de facto social hierarchy is seen to outline the basis of a genuine hierarchy of superiority and inferiority. The key point not to be overlooked is that the use of projective mechanisms to enable one to adapt to the social hierarchy gives the system one adapts to a seemingly moral meaning -- one submits to those deemed superior by the de facto nature of the hierarchy on the basis of a projected moral superiority. One justifies the necessary harsh treatment of those below one in the social hierarchy on the basis of imputing to them a moral inferiority. (One in turn accepts the identity that is projected onto one in terms of this selfsame dynamic.)

This resulting form of identity, however, is empty. It has an outline that is forced upon it by political necessity. Since it is hard to submit to those whom one would deem morally inferior, the necessity of the white lie (that one is submitting appropriately to those who are moral superiors), comes into play to make life easier. Superego thus gives its seal of approval to one's co-operation to a social order that in actual or real terms ought not to be regarded as a moral system whatsoever, but as a practical hierarchy, alone. The morality or otherwise of this co-operation within a specific system is defined passively (and actually unconsciously). Hence the identity and the feeling of morality attached to such co-operation within the hierarchical system is in fact negative and reactive (and in terms of intellectual content, empty).

A positive form of identity would be based on entirely different principles than the pre-Oedipal ones.

Friday 12 September 2008

linking it up: the role of the ego

My intellectual explorations and my martial arts training are very much interrelated.

I've learned a few things from martial arts, the most significant of which is that you can't expect to get by with an attitude of asserting mind over matter. Rather, you have to train your body to respond reflexively -- almost as if you didn't have a mind, because your body must think and move faster than your mind does.

A very close cousin of this principle is the knowledge that a puffed up ego doesn't help you to defend yourself. Actually, ego takes a lot of energy to generate and to maintain. You could be using this energy to make your practical game more efficient. So don't waste energy pushing it into the maintenance of an ego shield around you. Rather, slow down your heartbeat and your mind and keep a greater distance than you're used to from the centre of emotional confrontation.

The fact that it is even possible to see the world not from the perspective of ego but from the perspective of aptitude and efficiency is very interesting. Ego distorts reality by representing part of the picture as the whole. Is her punch straighter than mine? Well then I'm a failure. Is my kick better than hers? Well I am Queen of the sandpit! That is how ego functions -- slow and ponderously, taking in one bit of the environment at a time and mistaking it for the whole.

Perceiving without ego is more impartial. You see what is good and bad about everything, without becoming fixated on any one thing. You process more of reality and filter out less of it.

Martial arts has also taught me that there is no gain without pain, and that the learning process is never-ending. It is not helpful to have a know-it-all attitude, unless it is your way of suggesting that you have learned all that you need to know, and that your training stops here. Criticism -- when constructively given -- is your friend.

More stuff:

* Pain is not necessarily a sign that something isn't going according to plan, or that the experience is not in accordance with the best possible outcome.

* Describing pain in the aftermath of the experience isn't "whining".

gnote

(N.B. In Jungian dream interpretation one is all the characters.)
This might relate to the ‘magical’ pre-oedipal field, wherein identity is not individuated yet.
What I’m wondering, beyond this, is whether all forms of intersubjectivity really do call upon pre-Oedipal ways of relating. Intersubjective dynamics — whereby one’s persons emotions and perspectives are experienced as a relation to some other person’s emotions and perspectives — are very common indeed, at all levels of society. They are based upon the way we learned to relate to our mothers before we knew she was a separate person from us. It’s an emotional level of relating that is oriented towards us getting our emotional and physiological needs filled.
Anyway, if we never really grow out of the pre-Oedipal stage completely, but always have it as a facet of our sociability, I wonder if that is a problem or not?

****
UPDATE
Yet dreams may not be pre-Oedipal in their construction, after all. The pre-Oedipal dynamics are probably quite limited in terms of their simplicity (but stronger, subtler) than the imaginative range of dreams.

Thursday 11 September 2008

a practical definition of shamanism

To think in terms of shamanism, it helps to think of what your identity might be if there was no category to describe it. It has been said that even the very haibtuation to the use of language causes us to think in terms of abstracted conceptual categories which do not, in actual fact, exist. Thus Lacan states that by virtue of learning to use language in a conventional fashion we accept ‘castration’. Shamanism, however, is a reversal of castration in this Lacanian sense – although never quite to the degree that we can fully escape society’s limitations and conventional interpretations of us. Think of an identity – your own – without a category or name to describe it, and you might conjure up the image of a dark flame, forever producing your subjectivity without a name. As it flickers and changes – so does your identity. But there is no word or concept that can fully and adequately name it.

Writerly and oral styles

Interestingly, shamanism and oral history go together in their enshrinement of subjectivity as ‘presence’. Remember that Derrida sees the written language as a potential mode of liberation from the traditional metaphysics of presence? However, this decentering of the subject specific to late industrial societies is not part and parcel of traditional societies, which still have modes of oral history, and a view that subjectivity at the ground level is a primary source of meaningfulness. Actually, it seems to me that Derrida is merely trying to find a way to accept reification (the reversal of the subject-object relationship in terms understanding the source of meaning) as inevitable – and to find a way to make it fun and endurable. The means by which shamans have fun is, however, counterposed to this: by the enshrinement of deep subjectivity as a mode of experiencing that one is real.

In Marechera’s stream of consciousness novel, Black Sunlight, there is a hybrid mode of writing, since we encounter a mixture of an oral history approach and a more writerly style in the same book. The oral history approach, with its metaphysics of presence, is evident in the spontaneous – indeed, impulsive -- nature of some of the humour in it. You get the distinct impression that Marechera is making reference, here or there, to people he actually knows or has known in his life, and to his attitudes toward them. At other times, there is a more self-conscious effort to deconstruct binaries – especially those of black and white identities, and of high and low society. So the writing both takes into account the factor of reified thinking (in terms of classes and identities)but at times also asserts a metaphysics of the author’s presence.

Learn to think front on!

It is a very unfortunate tendency of contemporary (post-industrial) cultural thinking that the subject-object relationship of proper cause and effect is generally seen in reverse. This tendency to read reality 'backwards' has all sorts of dire consequences which undermine efficient communication and reception.

Let me put is clearly in this way: The subject (me or you) creates meaning in the process of living a life. During an average lifetime, most people will experience all sorts of things, and although there may be a tendency to experience one particular kind of thing more than others (depending on one's personality and socio-economic status), most people will experience such a range of things that you will not be able to categorise either them or their experiences in a few easy words.

That is the reality. The subject experiences life. And that is meaningful. The interpretation of the experience is not as meaningful as the experience itself, however, since interpretation is a process one step removed from the actual experience of life -- from actual meaning.

Now, let us talk about the object of experience. The object of experience is the person who is seen by someone else to be doing something. This object of experience is two steps away from the generation of actual meaning about life. Let me reiterate: The subject experiencing life is the most meaningful form of reality. Next, the subject interpreting their own experiences of life is rather meaningful (although this mode of representation is a diluted form of meaning.) Finally, some looker on watching the subject experience life and/or interpret their own experiences is three or four steps away from ascertaining the real meaning of the subject's experience of life.

We get it back to front, however, more than often. For instance, we (as spectators) see the subject doing something or being something -- and then the interpretation we make from a position three or four steps away from the point where meaning is generated becomes the point from which all meaning is proposed to emanate.

Thus we see that some poor person has fallen into a trap set for them, and has become a victim of some sort. It was an event that was just part of the subject's myriad dimensions of experience in life. However, we conclude (in our detachment) that this is a defining event from which the subject's character and identity emanates. Wrong!

Identity does not emanate either from a subject's experience of any particular event. Rather, identity is always in the process of being made and reinvented -- primarily be the subject herself, but then secondly by you in the position of the spectator (where you are standing, three or four spaces removed from her actual reality.)

So, to put this in more formulaic terms: If a person claims to have experienced a state of anger, or a state of happiness, or victimhood, that does not make them fixed in that position evermore, as a) an angry person, (b) a happy person, or (c) an eternal victim. No! Those are just passing phases of life, which we all go through.

You cannot turn a person's experiences (or even your or their interpretations thereof) into an identity, expecting someone to wear your interpretation henceforth. That is very wrong.

You really have it backwards, when you do that.

Wednesday 10 September 2008

Rhodesian autobiography

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/rhodesian%20autobiographical%20murmur.htm

I wrote this one for a somewhat more sophisticated reader, who may nevertheless hold stereotyping views about the way things are.

male

It seems so obvious to me these days that ideologically the system of ideas that governs notions of identity is rotten through and through.

That which is perceived most commonly as quintessentially masculine these days is generally some lazy posturing, which endeavours precisely NOT to stick its neck out in any way. It's an example of how image trumps reality, and is expected to do so on principle. We are all inclined to be victims of the advertising man by virtue of our attunement to the radio, TV and billboards.

The management of identity by the mass media is part of the reason why the right tends to win -- especially in US politics. That which is not at all real -- but based on fantasy and wishful thinking -- is projected through the media as that which is super-real, transcendentally real. IN the case of promoting a right wing agenda, the nature of the media, as the organ for advertising incredible claims, suits a particular (non-real) message.

However, I am finding something else that is altogether interesting, these days. If you can manage to separate, just for a moment, the content of the message from the swagger of the medium, you catch sight of a lot of poseurs in a light which is the least flattering. The dressed up tough-boy act appears clearly as an expression of a dependency structure. What I mean is that the boys (posing as men) are clearly seen to be relying entirely upon some form of reflected glory. Perhaps they emulate a cowboy of yesteryear or a fighter pilot of today. In any case, it is an attempt to get power from an image beamed from elsewhere. This condoning of image without content -- what should we call it? Hyper-feminine? Animalistic?

I don't think we can really call it either thing. There is a lot of authenticity to be found in hyperfemininity or animalism, by sharp contrast.

I'm so tired

I think that watching Franz Biberkopf's perspective on life has given me much advantage in terms of writing that quick autobiographical piece yesterday and today. He has the same naive good humour, and the inclination to value friendship above almost anything else.

I'm now glad I finished that second lot of writing. It helps me to clear up certain ideas in my head, before proceeding with some academic work.

I wrote the 7 chapter passage from a slightly aggressive point of view, which has always been a partially supressed aspect of my personality.

Tuesday 9 September 2008

///6/// insight



Lynette was my appointed as my mentor and "friend".  It's hard to feel much of anything when even your friends are appointed for you.  In a way you could stretch out your arms and poke right through her, because in a way she didn't actually exist. I'd been poked towards her by insipid fingers of the Rhodesia Association. These were the remnants of our former civilisation, the soft-hearted ones that felt no other recourse was possible other than starting their own version of the salvation army. Thus we received a couple of old chairs and tables from them, and contact with a more firmly established family, which happened to included Lynette.

The point of being a Rhodesian was to go to church and to have various meeting on the too-green lawns underneath our old flag. The reality was that these "WHEN-WEs" had migrated all too many years before us. Their flag was not my flag, although it might have been my parents flag still, I'm not sure. My recent habit was to burst into my most tuneful rendition of Ishe Komborera Africa, at all times to and home from school, in order to will away the tar roads and the concrete pavements. I whistled this often and relentlessly and felt more soulful. It was the national anthem of the new Zimbabwe.

But here we were again, under the old flag, whisked back in time to an experiential consciousness where little white folk held onto the broken driftwood of their once proud ship. And here I was at their Salvation Army, watching my parents sorting through the junk. Which of the junk did we need? It wasn't a question of want for the ascetic bald-headed guy that sorted through the rubble.

It was imperative to go to church, though. That way we would meet new faces and contacts that would help us to adapt to life. Church in Australia was a lot like the evening news -- it was all about having fun. There would be no mention of 'so-and-so has been killed in combat. Security forces regret to announce..." It was more like some man had lost his dog, but there is was, in front of him again! Church had the same feeling. It was all about rubbing up against each other and the good feelings that could bring. We pledged to take a stand and take Australia to the Lord. It was fun and left me feeling wistful. It was like Ishe Komborera all over again: "I'd like to pledge my feeling that the world come to experience a bit of Africa."

But that wasn't the only church we went to. First we went to Lynette's church. It was at this church that she had a conversation with me, and I didn't feel a thing. It was like a could have pulled my arm out and stuck it through her. She said, "Do you want to sit down?" and I felt I didn't, since I wanted to race around the countryside to find mountains and trees to climb, and to play practical jokes. So we sat down, and she said, "So how are you managing?" and I didn't know the meaning or the context of the word. I asked her, "what?" and she said, "Are you able to adapt to your life in Australia?" And I didn't realise that it was supposed be my project. It seemed like a rather mean little project, like completing one's homework in time, which I hadn't agreed with anyone to do.

"It's okay," I said, remembering my dad's advice to always tell Australians that you are pleased with whatever you find.

She turned her attention to something else. "Ooh, look there's Minette, with such a lovely pretty little dress. Don't you admire it?"

There was nothing here to feel.  I felt nothing.

It was now the after sermon tea. We'd listened long and hard to the pale-faced Baptist go on and on and on about the book of Joshua. The high point had been his mention of Joshua Nkomo, one of the liberation leaders now in government. However, it turned out that he hadn't been talking about anybody important, but the idea of some old testament prophet wandering around the local suburb. Como. So he had seemed to be talking about something, but in the end he was talking about nothing.

I tried hard, but couldn't find much of the insight I was desperate to gain, from looking at a pretty dress.  The search for genuine knowledge occupied me from this point forth.




The bargain basement of reality


Like Virginia Woolf, pockets full of stones thinking of the river bed, anything that aims for the absolute base of reality has truth about it. It's not the truth of my own mind, of my ego bouyant and demanding to be heard. It's a truth which having given up all hope has acquired its own gravity and weight to guide it. Everything that aims for the bottom has its own truth.

I live with a certain dread of consumerist envy. The houses here are far too close together, invoking tension and distrust. The old ways of neighbourly concern and community togetherness have almost gone. I knocked on the door. My car engine was still running, but the car was locked, the keys inside. I would have to meet my neighbour. But I'd avoided meeting her until now. I am not that neighbourly myself. My fear of giving the open hand of friendship to those not brought up in a similar context to me, those who would not think before harming me, had made me reluctant to know anybody. The neighbour came out. If I paid her 40 cents, she certainly would let me use her phone, but otherwise not.

I more than happily accepted her offer.

It's not bad if you understand the quid pro quo of this society. You really have to understand it from the gut, though, otherwise it seems too jarring. She was gaining something from the newly found relationship as well. "Come inside and I will tell you all about my lonely life." It was an offer too good to refuse.

The kind of maturity you must have here is different. Look to the left of you. Look to the right. These are not your friends. Now look UP to the persona of your boss, your esteemed national businessman, the politician. These are truly your good friends!

It took me long to learn that friendship isn't horizontal but a vertical proposal. These were not my feelings and still are not, but related to the structure of this  new class society.  Failing to learn the nature of this one true moral principle as I had spent my days languishing in a colonial outpost -- this had surely held me back more than any one thing. Only now, upon understand the depth and breadth of this principle was I truly able to snuggle up against the nipples of the liberators -- those who held the key to the one true value of meaning and life. I could surely not be lonely licking up this milk of goodness. I was innovative, after all:  one of the winners! (if you can call a person with no money and no home that), I would quickly adapt to this newfound milieu -- doing my duty as a right-wing Rhodesian to fulfil all of my promise. My movement to adapt to a mode of conformity would be quicker than a Gestapo's heal click. That had been my father's idea, and indeed it was written in the script for all white Rhodesians to follow (or to avoid following at their own peril). Quick adaptation is the key. No lying around and licking one's wounds day and night. Hop to it soldier! Show these new masters and wanna be controllers exactly what you're made of! Hup!

"When Australians ask you if you like their country, you should immediately say you like it very much. That is what Australians want to hear," my father told me, on the second day that I arrived.

We were staying in a caravan park at the base of a small range of hills. The sand was hot between my toes there. The food didn't taste like anything, in Australia. It must have been the shock of finding nothing was familiar. You could pour loads of salt onto it, but it still had no taste.

We moved after two weeks to some tiny house within the suburbs, where everything was unbelievably emerald-green. It reminded me of how I had experienced Britain. "Australians must hate themselves," I thought. There was so little of the natural vegetation being allowed to thrive. "They must not want to be here at all. They must want to live in Britain."

My father got a job in a printing factory, doing the work he had been teaching his students to do -- only now the printing industry was 20 years in advance of anything he'd actually taught his students. Whilst we had been in Zimbabwe, reality hadn't stayed still. It wasn't the 1940s any more (commanding us to soldier on), or even the 1950s (where exhibiting one's blandness was a ticket to success). Suddenly we were in the mid-80s, wherein everything could make no sense. There were swearwords written on the trees in the park. It made my bones creep.

I didn't have a particularly negative attitude, all said. However, during this period of time, my neck seemed to become my predominant feature. In the school photos it is a real giraffe neck, pale and translucent. It's as if I'm always in the process of reaching up, trying to get a vantage over everything to give me some perspective on it all. There is a little uncertain mouth and tiny head balanced on a huge beanstalk of a neck.

It didn't seem to matter whether the Australians accepted me, because they seemed to move around in a kaleidoscope of colour that wasn't guided by any principle I knew about. They all kept following in this rotation, from one class to another. None of it made sense.

I walked home from school, along concrete all the way, and came home and ate food that didn't taste of anything. The night didn't get really black, so there was no contrasting mode of being asleep didn't really replenish me. I wondered what it all meant, and whether this was a process and if so would it end.

Rhodesia, sex and gender


There was no welfare system in the Southern Rhodesia of the 40s, so you had to be able to survive by wits alone. For men that meant being prepared to innovate, accepting guidance from authority, and if you were lucky enough to secure a foothold in commerce or government, doing as you were told. For women it meant retaining one's virginity until marriage. A single mother was looked down upon, no matter what the context. To have a child outside of marriage meant that you were charged with bringing up the infant all alone. Without the economic support of the father and husband, your chances of success were very low.
My father's dad was a radio man in a World War 2 support plane that was shot down over one of the great oceans of the world. His mother was left with a small child, at a point in her life when she desperately needed to start over again. What man would have her with another man's child in tow? Tragedies like this were never meant to happen.

She was a strict catholic, who married a high-ranking government bureaucrat. It was a solution that ought to have worked. The child -- my father -- grew up with strict puritanical and religious ideals of his own. It ought to have worked -- but there was so little money to go around. The mother rejected the catholic church after they refused to baptise her son as "he is adopted." The father had other ideas: "I'm saving my money for the education of my real sons, not the adopted one," he stated to my father on his 16th birthday. It had been a good try -- to have her son accepted into the ranks of those deemed worthy of embrace by polite society. It hadn't turned out as expected.

The son grew up. Got married, despite the manifestation of one or two emotional problems -- losing his temper easily being a major component thereof. He joined the army and pursued a career in teaching printing and photography as a lecturer at the humble technical college situated in the capital of the country. Life was not too bad for a while. He served his religion and his family, doing just what was expected of him, no less. He fulfilled the expectations of army call-ups. He provided for his family. It added up to a reasonable life.

It was in 1979 that everything began to change. The stress that he had been able to hold together started to tear him right apart. First, there was the difficulty in having faith in everything he had believed in. Rhodesia itself was coming apart at the seams -- now, it was Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. His children were no longer precious goods to be kept safe from lurking entities like an irreligious life and communism. Rather, they were hungry mouths to feed. Their fates, without a system to believe in, were now undecided.

It was all coming apart. And nobody realised it but he. They couldn't see how much he would be actually losing. It was again, painfully unjust. The priest who had put him together the first time wasn't there to counsel his mind and soul into alignment. Now there was only godless communism. And mouths to feed.

He decided Jenny had gained a distinctly mocking tone in her voice when she told him all her friends were 'taking the gap' -- leaving the country. She seemed to be mocking his very situation, the overturning of everything he had believed in (which is what regime change meant).
She would certainly have to pay for her mockery by being taught some serious lessons about who was boss.

He was mad as can be. There was the other thing too. Women were not capable of having much intelligence, and were just these soppy and expressionistic characters who relied all the time on 'feelings'. He realised that Jenny could never be trusted after a certain point in her development. She would change over to the 'other side', where genuine perceptions and good will would have no place. It was up to him to keep her down so that she didn't bring great shame to him when this big change suddenly took place. He was starting to feel it deep within himself already -- that her feelings were not really perceptual feelings of the world around her, but mushy, irrelevant feelings about nothing in particular. When she communicated with him, he knew that actually she wasn't saying anything -- except expressing some nonsensical ideas that women do about nothing. That is what she was saying to him right now when she pretended that she had no friends left in Rhodesia to send her Christmas cards to.   Now she was saying nothing. In so doing, she was deliberately trying to antagonise him.

He would have to teach her a lesson: that having attitudes of any sort would not come cheap. He shouted at her to get out of his sight. So she ran and hit behind a car, and waited.

Children these days didn't understand the cost of freedom -- but his daughter was necessarily becoming, out of the changes wrought by her biology,  his enemy.  That he could not easily forgive.

the incubation tank of arch-conservatism


The rest of the world might have move on without us, but I didn't know that.

"Shit man get a load of that!" my school friend, Helen, proclaimed, newly returned from a vacation in Europe.

"Why are you talking like that? I said. "Everyone in Europe swears," Helen said proudly.

"Shit, its common practice now." I decided to steer clear of Helen and her newfound sophistication. It seemed like her language had become autonomous, set apart, separate from our own.

We were permitted look at the editions of Paris Match, on the reading table in the library, but only individually, which would have been no fun. So we would play the psychological game again -- the game you played with authorities. This involved sauntering forward to the reading desk with an air of nonchalance, as if you might be going anywhere. Then you would flip quickly through the various editions looking for something provocative. We found a nude wedding and an execution. Since we all felt that we shouldn't have been gazing upon such material, the tight huddle we had formed, the whispering voices, would all disintegrate into sheepish looks whenever a teacher approached. We would flip closed the magazine cover and disperse in an unconvincing, since failing to be sedate, flurry.

The other thing that gave us pause for thought were Mills and Boone cheap paperback romances. Mrs Lillywhite was kind enough to introduce us to that genre, and Rosemary soon made it her practice to sit under the large oak tree in the school grounds, before and after class, reading one book after another. A couple of the students also passed these to each other in Chemistry class, with pen marks signifying the bits they considered to be naughty.

The music we listened to did not challenge us, but served our purposes. "Le Freak C'est Chic" was among other many soulful tunes appearing on the top ten, which seemed to long outlive its welcome as an emergence of the late 70s. It's message was clear. We ought to simply "freak out!" Queen's "We will rock you!" gave us a similar message. The class in unison beat out its rhythm and its vocals with martial robustness, amidst a slamming in time of wooden desk lids and blackboard rubbers on the resilient concrete walls, to mark the end of one school year.

"We don't often talk about politics because it is forbidden to speak about it in the school," our art teacher, Pip Curling, ventured once. However, we have just had a war in which thousands of people have died. The kind of installation art I make is to assure these people will not be forgotten." The newspaper that week had featured our school teacher's art. The military had exhumed her art work, which consisted of bandaged hands and heads appearing from the ground. They'd thought it had been the scene of a mass grave -- she, in turn, had been pilloried for her comparative frivolity. Art, after all, was not as serious an engagement churning up a new found site forf a mass grave.

My parents said we might have to leave Zimbabwe, but we could stay for the time being. It was funny. Mercedes cars kept ending up being planted in the storm-water ditches -- one at the end of our street. It stayed there for several weeks. The word from my school friend was that the new politicians liked to buy a lot of fancy cars, and get drunk and drive them around. Her father was in the police force. He said that one of the new ministers was particularly inclined to this behaviour. His name was Rubber dingy Sithole -- however, don't tell anyone, but my father calls him "shit hole" she whispered under her breath. "What is that?" I asked. She said it again, still more quietly

"I still don't get it," I whispered back.

We didn't swear. It was wrong to do so, my mother had warned me, predicting that at the age of 13-- the very cusp of puberty (in her view) -- the swear words would come churning out. I once decided it was funny to make up a word, one that nobody had ever heard of before. "What was that? What was that you said!" my mother shouted, getting ready to throttle me. "I was making up a word. I was saying something like "churrrrrr...chussit!" I pronounced. She slapped me hard. "Don't ever say anything like that again!" I learned never to make up words again.
My practical education about the complexities of life could have filled a very tiny notebook.

identity politics: it's all about the hate


Today, I came across a critical review in an esteemed journal, wherein the author emoted that whereas Alexandra Fuller pleads that she and her parents don't go to the dogs tonight, it would be better if they did. Even today, it is considered the height of good taste and a well-rounded political constitution to emit a tone that suggests "simple destruction would be too good for you!" I'm aware of the difficulties of conveying the realities of my own lived experiences -- the main one being that a wall of hatred quickly obscures the perspective I am trying to convey.
I understand it -- that is, most of it. Evil has often been done in the world, and somebody must therefore pay. That is how we reason, all of us. For each historical era there have been a group of people whom it is considered politically fashionable to hate. It's a resounding cry of "leave the others alone, and hate only these ones!" In the mid 20th Century is was okay to hate the Jews, if you were alive in Europe at that time. Blacks have often been hated -- especially in the American 20th Century. Women are still regarded as sub-human in a myriad of contexts where you wouldn't fathom it. In Rhodesia (and more so the Republic of South Africa) one wouldn't have wished to be born black in the 20th Century. (The contemporary state of Zimbabwe is not much kinder, economically or politically to the average person who has been born black.)
It seems to me that the emotional constitution of someone who is determined to express their right to hate has a message to the ones who are hated: It concerns the very dynamics of power, which put those in a position of structural advantage over others into a position whereby they are conceded their right to express hate. To be hated by one whose position is secure as a maker of popular sentiments is to see the crude underbelly of a very rarely observed political beast. Needless to say, such a vision is always an education.
I'm being a bit glib: had I developed the proper conservative mentality suited to my status as a no-good white trash ex-Rhodesian female, I would certainly be working as a teller in some bank by now. Perhaps I could have gingerly tested the economic waters as a primary school teacher -- or, more humbly, as a teacher's assistant. "As me no questions and I will tell you absolutely nothing at all," would have been my motto. By holding such a razorblade of nullity to heart, I would have survived (if only barely). More likely, I could have darted away sideways, out of the economic loop and into the cool lap of domesticity. There I could have expressed my opinions from a position of being a step or two above the status of being occupied with practical and economic matters. Many would have been the children I would need to produce. However, I would have been able to justify myself quite readily by remaining behind the veil. I would only have to intone "my husband [this]" or "[that]" in order to assure that build upon my own defensive wall against the world. Thus my existence would be guaranteed as a conservative flinging out new generations of conservatives: behind the veil.
That was how it was supposed to be. It didn't work out that way. Somehow, in some way, I couldn't make much sense of conservatism. What I thirsted after, day and night, was Knowledge.
I didn't know where to begin, so I tried various things. Experiments. One of these was to embrace fundamentalist Christianity. That didn't work out. It made me increasingly sick. Sick to the heart. Sick to the bone. I tried to recapture the possibility for adventure I had earlier enjoyed in my life. That seemed to work up to a point, but something was still wrong. The innocence of adventure was no longer there. Even the three hours journey on my bike to do the horse-riding meant crossing dirty highways,  industrial milieu and the perspective of the earth as having become an open wound earmarked for housing construction.
I had to get out. Where there were horses. Then I could think a bit. Only not too much. It would be like just enough fresh air to last me through the week -- a week which would be guaranteed to make no sense at all.
It is hard to be hated. It is even harder when others are hated, too, and take out their fear of the hatred by making life harder for you. My father -- he said he wouldn't take me out to the place where there were horses. I was full of a selfish vibe, he said. He would drop me off in the middle of a Highway, so that I could make my own way on in life, from this point on. I had no right to expect anything more.
The key was to repress my personality, in order to survive.
Still, there was the other project running parallel to the project that entailed survival. This came under the description of the need to "find out what things mean". So the two projects of survival by repression of what I am actually thinking, and the project of "find out what things mean" by trial and error, ran side by side. It was quite a balancing act to keep both of them going at once, and in one particularly disastrous instance, I overbalanced and everything I had been working very hard to keep in order came undone. My mind is stronger than my body, however, and after ten years I was able to rebuild.
Being hated for an identity that people associated with white supremacy no doubt has its beneficial attributes, however. It encouraged a certain necessary independence of spirit. It drives one, out of oneself-preservation, to understand the real political dynamics that govern any situation. It can lead one into the isolation of a hermit. Thus, I became my own teacher, and taught myself to think.
I write from the position of one who expects to be hated -- for whom being hated has become a normal fact of life, like the buzz of the cicadas in the summer afternoon. Sometimes I suddenly leap up from my chair, with a sudden surge of feeling that something new might have developed upon the horizons of hate. These days such anxiety is rarely justified, although I am not fool enough to give up the suspicion that any onslought of hatred could hit me in the near future, from almost any direction whatsoever. The training of the past 20 years has not been in vain.
I understand enough now to know that the hatred isn't personal. It's situational. And ideological. One hates because one must have somebody to hate. The Westerner's hatred of me for being a white Rhodesian would just as easily pass on to become the hatred of somebody else.
Robert Mugabe, for instance.

Monday 8 September 2008

new autobiographical murmur

Most people have no conception at all of what it is like to be perfectly out of tune with the way the rest of the world thinks. The condemnations start to flow, when you encounter somebody like this. You are surely a victim of  your own folly.  You are 'arrogant', 'immature', insolent', overly fearful and overly tolerant, in turn, depending on who is addressing you, and the mood those others happen to be in at the time. You are both incredibly stupid and incredibly haughty. You presume to go you own way far too much; and yet also presume to be defiantly dependent. Who can stand those 'know nothings' -- those who come from who-knows-where and presume to tell others that their situation is 'different'; you have had other ways of experiencing the world; your own way of experiencing the life around doesn't automatically compute, for you have ways of seeing all things entirely differently?

Such was the situation of my generation -- brought up under the protective policies of Ian Smith's regime in colonial Rhodesia. Did we know that the rest of the world had moved on without us? We did not. Did we know that we were presumed racist? Certainly not at all! And I sat blithely next to Rosemary every English class, not registering that she was different from me in such a way that our relationship ought to have been strained. We were of different colours, but of the same socio-economic group, as those 'elite' enough to be able to afford housing in the suburbs. I cannot speak for Rosemary, whose father was in government, and who may have fallen into greater affluence than her everyday attitude and standard issue school uniform suggested. It was rare for my family to be able to afford something new -- whether that be a new car, a new dress, a new bridle, for a very, very old horse, or a bottle of family sized coke to share on the weekend. We kept the old R4, which received a new paint job, thanks to prison forced labour and technology. The old bridle, a hand-me-down from my half-Portuguese grandma continued to work, loaded through the generations with saddle grease. I went without the new dresses, unless relatives sent hand-me-downs, or I was the happy beneficiary of a croched dress, sold to me by a black woman, vending her wares at our gate. (The gate itself was rickety and warped; its metallic frame having received a couple of idents from one or two far too eager cars. The chicken wire that formed the body of the fence was homely and sufficient for the work it had to do.)

Such was the situation of my upbringing in Smith's Rhodesia. I loved my horse and did my school work with a modicum of compliance. My best friends at high school were Rosemary, Julie Wilson (who also had a horse), Cheryl (whose mother used to sometimes take us home from school when it was raining very hard) and Julie Atkinson, whose parents had mad Irish parties. (I was never invited to these.)

I was brought up to take one day at a time. The future would look after itself. In the afternoon, I went to exercise my horse, in the delicate heat of the early afternoon. I would come home sweaty and dirty, smelling like oil and mud. The rest of the afternoon I would spend doing my homework, until mother called me for dinner.

Dinner was a standard formula of one form of meat, a vegetable and something which we came to know of as "a starch". The starch was always the most interesting element of dinner, which we asked about first. If we had really good luck, the starch would turn out to be chips -- deep fried in a heavy saucepan, sending little waves of fragrant sunflower seeds outside the kitchen window, beckoning us. If we were unlucky, it might be mashed potato. We also ate corn some days. A very rare treat for us would be the staple diet of the majority -- mealie-meal porridge, with a side-dish of stew. To be at the receiving end of such a dish meant that my mother had been overtaken with a sudden burst of creativity. We always thanked our lucky stars for the good mood and feeling of excitement that brought us.

I was not considered stupid for my age. In fact, when they started academic streaming at the end of primary school, and then in high school, I always ultimately ended up in the topmost class. Although that was the case, it didn't cross my mind that anything could have been different, or that it meant anything. In fact, in the first year of high school, I spent an early spell within the second highest class because, it was said, that I was "shy", and given to speaking very little. It was reasoned that my confidence could be built up by being in a class that was a fraction lower than my academic abilities. I wasn't shy at all, in fact, but I distrusted authorities, whom I thought could be heavy handed. I was happy to be wherever they put me in the school, since it had no meaning anyway. What I liked to do was to drop popcorn seeds on the heads of the girls leaning over the rail, outside a classroom a floor down from where we had to wait before school. Since these girls were predominantly black, the popcorn seeds used to bounce off their springy heads, which was fascinating. When I sat in class with my schoolmates, I used to line up a whole row of popcorn seeds at the end of my desk, and then wait until the teacher wasn't looking, before flicking the seeds, with my thumb and finger, onto various of my class mates. I could only do this in English class, however, since it was one of my slacker classes, in which I was supposed to speak up about things, but never did.

When I didn't have popcorn seeds to attack my friends with, I found a solution in tearing off a page of fullscape paper, and turning pieces from the edges into little balls of paper and saliva. I would then line up this homemade ammunition in a row at the edge of my desk, and in the same manner that I used to send the popcorn flying, would flick these tasty bits of paper residue at all my friends. The key was a psychological game which involved very good timing. You couldn't be caught engaging in this provocation by the all-seeing teacher. You had to wait for a slight glance away from you, and you had to do it poker-faced.

The fun thing was when I put little bits of rolled up paper into Kerry-Anne's hair style. Kerry-Anne sat in front of me, and her hair was neatly curled around the base of her head to form a perfect gutter. It was so perfect that it could hold a lot of these bits of paper, so long as she was still. I spent about five minutes making sure that every part of Kerry'Anne's perfect hair-catchment received a little ball of paper. I had to be very patient, and hold a steady hand -- but soon it was done. Then suddenly she moved! The bits of paper flew everywhere! She said it wasn't funny; but it had been quite intriguing to see all these papers move through the air all at once.

It wasn't Smith's Rhodesia that was to blame for my abhorrent behaviour. Truth is, I didn't do it all the time in any case. Some times, I sat perfectly still, trying to focus on the subject matter of the lesson. This was easier to do in subjects like maths, physics or geography, since in these class the teachers were generally stricter, and could make you do what they said. That was the case except for the Australian teachers and some of the scripture teachers. They couldn't make you do very much, and the Aussie imports had a whiny tone, and took their umbrellas from the car with them, to avoid the impact of the rain. The female scripture teachers had too much mascara, that used to knot their eyelashes together, which was strange, and you would wonder why they did it -- I wondered this in primary school, especially. The male scripture teachers could be made fun of, because we were all girls in a girls' school, and the teachers were already uneasy. My friend Julie, the Irish Catholic, said: "We teased this priest until he started to cry. We noticed that he had a hair poking out from his fly."

And so it was in 1983, when Smith's Rhodesia had turned into Zimbabwe. The term "mampara" -- (silly fool) -- was one I had become well accustomed to, having been given it more than often from Amos, who ironed and washed up for us. I forget where I left things, and played practical jokes. I was a mampara, however, with a firmly seated notion of ethics. It was wrong not to help those in need. A woman riding ahead of us had a whole basket of tomatoes at the front of her bike. We were coming home from school and saw her lose hold of her bike and unload them all over the road. I stopped without word, and began picking them up, one by one. They were not great tomatoes but sunweathered, orange, mishapen as they were but even more so due to their catastrophe with the road. My friend Cheryl, who was riding home from school just behind me, seeing me pick up the tomatoes, joined me, until we had collected and returned them all -- about 200 of them. This black woman was grateful -- and I was ashamed that she was grateful to us. We hadn't done anything that anybody else wouldn't have done in the same situation.

"You must be Christian girls!" she exclaimed, unexpectedly. "I am also Christian. Where do you girls go to church?"

I obliged her by proving the guess to be a correct one. I said that I, for one, did. I went to a church every Sunday. The one called Kingsmead Chapel on the hill up there. Once all the merchandise had been reloaded in the basket, she separated out half a dozen of these bashed tomatoes for us, and handed them to us. "This is a gift for your mother," she said, with generous finality.

I had been given something very special -- heartfelt thanks and pleasure, which I carried home as if it were very precious cargo. I didn't know what words I would use yet, to explain the importance of these tomatoes to my mother. I'd start by telling her that these were special tomatoes, and that we'd got them by helping an old woman on the road. It wasn't the same as bringing the black baby rabbit home, tied to the back of my bicycle carrier in a shoe box, that other day, but I felt gratified.

Such was life in Zimbabwe. Mugabe had been in power for three years by now. This was Mugabe's Zimbabwe, in a way. It didn't seem to make much difference which leader we had. Life just went on and on, day after day. I had some really good days exploring the countryside with my horse, Honey. The air always had a good smell to it. Sometimes I travelled into the valley across the street from us, and once the whole vlei and the rocky outcrop were burnt. It had a really dark, forbidden feel to it, as everything crunched under foot. I hit my head on a lowhanding smouldering branch, and it made my riding hat sit skew upon my head.

My mother was grateful for the tomatoes I'd brought home for her: "Put them over there in the rack with the other ones!" she'd said. I did as she'd suggested, putting them there in the dark of the kitchen, on the third level down.

Tomorrow would be a brand new day.

is it possible for one person to be able to tell what is happening to another person?

Really. Is it?

If one of your friends was in dire trouble, would you even be able to detect it?

Sunday 7 September 2008

Notes on contemporary shamanism

CONTEMPORARY SHAMANISM

I want to talk about contemporary shamanism. My subject for my thesis is Dambudzo Marechera, a Zimbabwean writer. He wasn’t a shaman in the traditional sense that we might think about shamanism. Yet the arc of his writings, the way they developed, indicates that he had the kind of intelligence which combined bodily self-awareness with sensitivity to the psychological nature of the political dynamics operating within his sphere. Along with this, he was inclined to take the temperature of his society, in order to gauge its health. His mode of writing could be considered high European or Shakespearean in its complexity.

Like Shakespeare’s plays, and indeed like the mythical voyages depicted in Homer’s writings, Marechera’s work also has its share of characters that may not be precisely living. Thus, his writing is a form of engagement with the spirits of his time and era, and indeed with spirits that can be recognised as manifestations of his previous or present outlooks – for he had a few different perspectives that have been culturally and historically engendered. Marechera’s writing is a kind of giving life to a materialist historicism.

One could not understand Marechera without recognising his acute awareness of how history gives us our identities, and how there can be simultaneous influences on us that are not necessarily in logical accord, but may be in some ways contradictory. These aspects of his thinking make it sound like he had taken up a postmodernist reading of the way things are. Whilst there are some superficial similarities between Marechera’s writing and the ideas of Lyotard (in his opposition to metanarratives) and while Bakhtin’s theory certainly got some play, and while there is more than ample material for the employment of deconstruction as a key approach in Marechera’s literary arsenal, his writing is not postmodern, but I would argue shamanistic. Whereas the techniques the writer uses do rupture our sense of a normative, fixed, universalising sense of reality and morality, they do not do so in order to throw us into disarray, but to bring us to our senses. His writing would contain no political message if it entailed an injunction only to disperse and scatter. There is another strain of meaning in the works: a deeper pulse, if you will. It lies underneath the writer’s flourishes and anarchistic, destructive gestures concerning culture and civilisation.

It echoes through Marechera’s regular and faithful return to elements of his own autobiography, through his references to his bodily states, by which he attempts to gauge the condition of health of his community. In a healthy community, evil does not happen, or if it does, it happens with a sense of meaning. Marechera uses the trope of meaningless evil – the unnecessary death of his father, his mother’s turn to prostitution – to stand as a bad omen regarding the fate of whole societies. This deeper strain of emotional awareness and the tendency to read one’s own condition as a register for the society’s condition at large, lends Marechera’s approach an emphasis based upon a very refined feeling for the intersubjective qualities of human experience.

He writes as if to critique – but only in order to heal -- his society. Thus the surface appearance of postmodernist fragmentation of the identity in his works is not intended as the end in itself of his writing. Rather, it is a return to one’s physical body as a register for political right or wrong that is his ultimate end.

Marechera and the shaman of old both rely upon the information they receive from their bodies in order to heal their communities. In a state of ecstasy, one is able to decode the meanings of the material reality that rest above and around one. The very, very measured quality of returning fire for fire, in Marechera’s political critiques of the Zimbabwe of the eighties and the Britain of the seventies (even, if not particularly, in his states of outrage and tone of prophetic condemnation) give his writing a weighty quality of truth, that transcends his particular time and situation but continues to speak to forms of abuse and injustice occurring in Zimbabwe and other parts of the West today.

The writing has a purging and healing potency, to those who are attuned to hearing it that way. Most of his work has a destructive tone too – rather than being merely deconstructive as his portrayal of gender and the black and white of race are. The destruction of the rational (or to speak more plainly) socially conditioned parts of your mind are necessary if you are to undergo the shamanic initiation that would enable you to understand Marechera’s perspectives on politics and on human behaviour.

The writing of Marechera, then, like a perfume or a good wine, is made up of several “notes”. There is the high note, which reads a lot like postmodernism. There is the middle note, which reads like conventional social and political criticism. There is, underneath all of this the lowest and most lingering note of all. It is the strangely swelling aftertaste, the lingering quality of what has already departed: Its note is shamanism. This is the aspect of Marechera’s work which challenges the human psyche to dissolve in order to regenerate itself again, along better and more graceful lines. This is the part of his work that I am most interested in.

Note on restoring the feminine.

Feminist theorists will recognise the theoretical turn towards the body as a necessary part of materialist critique taken in order to be in a position to positively re-evaluate that which we have historically been taught to think of as “the feminine”. The “feminine” in this sense is that mode of awareness which has been repressed by modes of thinking that are determined by the patriarchal mores of industrial culture as definitively “rational” -- thus it has become "rational" to coerce one's body into conformity with industrial mores by the use of pharmaceutical drugs. The primary division of self into ‘bodily’ and ‘mental’ components is culturally and historically specific, just as our notion of rationality is narrowly defined on the basis of this conceptual distinction. The use of the body for divining intellectual truths may seem far removed from our ways of experiencing the world. Nonetheless, contemporary shamanism reads the world through the body as a finely honed instrument of knowledge.

Facing death as a means to wholeness

Perhaps this is the meaning of the shaman's facing death or "death". To give up on the just world hypothesis is a kind of way of facing one's own vulnerability, contingency and mortality. Yet, it is also a way to opening up to genuine wisdom about oneself and others. One sees the flaws in society and attempts to heal them, instead of railing maniacally against them. Awareness of injustice -- the thorn in the side that caused the "shamanic" illness -- is still present, but one's expectations are now more in tune with the truth of the human condition.

Soul retrieval? Or healing by affirming the emerging self?

The key role of the shaman is healing the members of the community. Marechera attempts to heal whole communities. (See Pamela Reynolds’ article, ‘Children of Tribulation: The need to heal and the means to heal war trauma.’). Here are two other examples of contemporary shamanism:

1. The new-age neo-shamanistic book, Soul Retrieval, gives an outline of retrieving fragmented parts of the self, which dissociate from the present due to a refusal to participate in situations unconsciously felt to be subjectively intolerable. This is most interesting. Whereas there are serious psychological books geared towards examining how dissociation and the splitting of identity (ending up in multiple personality disorder, for instance) can happen under situations of extreme stress, more subtle modes of splitting (along the same principles of avoidance of stress) can apparently happen within situations that we would consider objectively quite conventional. The fact that the subject in question considers the externally benign event (such as moving home) to be subjectively so intolerable is key to understanding the complexities and subtleties of individual personality development. Loss of aspects of self through dissociation during significant historical moments in one’s life leads to a devitalised form of existence, marked by resignation, in the present. The shaman retrieves these missing, split off bits of self in order to retrieve vital presence of mind for the subject’s life in the present.

2. The article on the Magical pre-Oedipal field also describes soul retrieval, but from a Jungian rather than New Age perspective. To facilitate healing, the psychotherapist may permit the client (receiving the Jungian analysis) to project onto the therapist the character of someone who has caused the subject damage in the past. The damage caused in the past, creating loss, is psychodynamically transported into the present, to be dealt with skilfully by the analytical psychologist. . By feeling free to recreate the original psychodynamic within the healing circumstances of therapy, the client is able to experience healing. The self in the process of healing is thus viewed dynamically as an “emerging self”. This follows the pattern of shamanism: retrieving aspects of the vitalised self concept lost to the past, in order to bring healing and a revitalisation to the subjectively experienced present.

Bataille

Bataille finds in destruction, in mutilation – the shaman’s confrontation with death and contingency juxtaposed against the notion of transcendence and permanency – a mode of the sacred.

Oral history


If you wanted to write a history of your life that derived from an inner understanding of your own experiences, rather than taking cues from historical “landmarks” that had been objectively determined by history books, you would be able to formulate a great deal of information and interpretation on the basis of a reading of one’s own emotional traces. What do these tell you about where you came from? About the historical time and place you’ve lived in? And about where you’re going?If we are inclined to contribute to the writing of history, then a shamanistic reading of one’s own emotional vicissitudes as determinants of the meaning of one’s own history (and perhaps the meanings of broader historical contexts too), could be a great starting point. However, one would have to become a skilled interpreter of oneself then – a really astute dialectitian, taking both subjective (direct) readings and intrepretive (detached) readings of the self. The shaman is always at least two people, then (a subjective experiencer and an objective intrepreter of experiences) -- never just one.

Interestingly, shamanism and oral history go together in their enshrinement of subjectivity as ‘presence’. Remember that Derrida sees the written language as a potential mode of liberation from the traditional metaphysics of presence? However, this decentering of the subject specific to late industrial societies is not part and parcel of traditional societies, which still have modes of oral history, and a view that subjectivity at the ground level is a primary source of meaningfulness. Actually, it seems to me that Derrida is merely trying to find a way to accept reification (the reversal of the subject-object relationship in terms understanding the source of meaning) as inevitable – and to find a way to make it fun and endurable. The means by which shamans have fun is, however, counterposed to this: by the enshrinement of deep subjectivity as a mode of experiencing that one is real.

Cultural barriers to objectivity