Wednesday 31 December 2008

the cause of the mess in Zimbabwe

I was born in Zimbabwe. Patrick Bond's view that sanctions did not seem to hurt the Rhodesian economy are largely correct. The dollar was stronger than the British Pound during the time of sanctions. My understanding is that Zimbabwe is very much capable of sustaining itself independently, due to its rich farmland and minerals sector. (However, it cannot yet sustain all of its population at the same economic level .) Furthermore, the sanctions currently being directed at the Mugabe regime are far from economic, according to my
understanding. They involve travel restrictions on certain government ministers and the freezing of their personal Swiss accounts. So, they should not affect Zimbabwe per se.

From what I can gauge, neoliberalism did have a negative effect on the Zim
economy because of the inability of the govt to pay back money to the IMF
and Worldbank. It seems that the growth of the economy had not been well
planned but was too reliant upon outside aid, in order to see it through.
This approach was to have negative (and possibly, in theory, foreseeable)
consequences. I see an overly optimistic style of management on the part of
Mugabe's regime, that was insufficiently rooted in a real world experience
of the global politics of playing economics. Mugabe should have approached
the whole IMF/Worldbank proposition with more cynicism (something his wily
predecessor, Ian Smith, wasn't short of.)

However the demise of the farming sector seems to have been the greatest
economical blow sustained by Zimbabwe. Land redistribution, in the fashion
that it took place, was supposed to have been a policy of appeasement of
those peasants who had not noticed any significant change to their status
post colonialism. It was a purely political gesture by Mugabe, rather than
having any grounding in a theory of economics. Apart from its mining
sector, Zimbabwe was largely built on an agricultural economy.

The land issue -- that matter which over which the second chimurenga had
been fought -- seems to have been unresolved by Mugabe's government, largely
because it is very difficult to move from a peasant style economy of
traditional subsistence farming (capable of sustaining a fraction of the
present, overburdgeoning population size) to a properly industrial economy
style overnight. It is only the latter style of economy that can sustain
the size of the population that Zimbabwe has today. Yet, most societies
take a century or two to industrialise fully. (Russia did it quicker than
most, under the authoritarian pressures of Stalinism.) It is unrealistic to
expect Zimbabwe to sustain itself on the basis of subsistence farming --
however, this is precisely what ZANU-PF are ideologically committed to,
since the land issue had been the basis for the war of liberation. So the
problem is that the practical issue of taking Zimbabwe economically towards
the 21st century, and the ideological issues that Mugabe and his ilk are
committed to, are at odds.

---

UPDATED

My own feeling and perceptions are that Zimbabwe need not be dependent on this aid in order to sustain itself, however, it probably needs those resources in order to flourish. But, those are two different things.What you have also suggested is that the economic resources of Zimbabwe are in the hands of the few. By denying the elite access to their private bank accounts, the trickle down economics effect is denied. I see that there could be some truth to this, although that kind of economic elitism sounds rather dysfunctional, in terms of what would serve the majority. Zimbabwe needs political reform, and not just economic reform, but it has a long way to go to achieve this. I think that part of Zimbabwe's problem is that its regime has tried to achieve reform overnight. The other part of Zimbabwe's problem is political cronyism.

Some thoughts for the new year.

eine.

I would like to thank Sekuru Bob for the wonderful music sent to me today to hail in the new year and to push forward the agenda of freedom for Zimbabwe. You can find his work on YouTube under the name of Sekuru Bob.

two.

I think that Bataille's notion of contingency and of immanence (two very related concepts) are to be taken NOT as independent or free-standing intellectual concepts, but in more guarded neurological terms, as states of mind contextualised by the two-tiered system of the brain (with its higher and lower faculties). To spell out what I mean even more clearly: What this means is that immanence is always experienced, as it were, framed by knowledge that is already transcendent and abstract. One does not, because as a human being one cannot, actually experience "pure immanence". The latter does not exist practically, in the real world, unless the person has been rendered a vegetable.

three.

It is this doubling of consciousness -- the ability to experience two things at once -- that is shamanistic and this also relates, although in an entirely different sense, to DuBois' "double vision".  The second manifestation of shamanistic doubling can still be viewed in terms of higher and lower, immediate and ego-transcendent, but it's structure is more social, rather purely psychological.

Tuesday 30 December 2008

What would we call this?

To experience for oneself not the idealised and content-empty image of one's identity, but the actual relational re-experience of its original formulation, rediscovered in its complexity as the unthought known....

What would we call this?

Monday 29 December 2008

men's rights


The current gender-based bifurcation of reality boils down to a state of deep personal and psychological laziness -- permitted by social consensus.

The state of personal lassitude that strongly embraces the importance of gender identity was perhaps less an invitation to sink into stupidity in the past, when economic and social options were limited. One had to do what one had to do, without mechanical leverage to lift you up, and without the liberating measures of chemical birth control.

These days, however, when diversity is made allowable by the increase in general social knowledge and by greater scientific advancement (including social scientific), it is laughable that some people demand to be treated according to a particular categorical definition.

A male demands to be viewed  as 'masculine' because "I say so."

This is the logic of a two-year-old, slamming its foot down, whilst fearing any adversity from  its mother.

Even this assertion of his independence is deceptive, for it is not really the need to be treated as a member of a separate and distinct category that drives the one who claims "his rights" as a member of this category or the other.

Rather, he is intent on assuring his sense of safety and security in the world, though his demand to be treated always in the same way, both before and subsequent to any actions that he might perform. For, if his actions were truly attractive and desirable, he would have not have made them dependent on others according to him the self-definition he prefers. After all, masculinity used to be about facing hardships, including not being acknowledged as having the identity you thought of as yours. Swimming in the glamour of self-image, conversely, was once considered pejoratively feminine (the fantasy of femininity, with its fluid qualities of self-creation, as per the movie screen.)

Underlying his demand to be treated as "masculine", come hell or high water, appears to be a desire never to move or change anything about oneself, not even his perceptions. Is the desire at hand to become a woman? Does such a desire mean returning to become again a passive, suckling infant? Or stranger still, requiring to be treated always in one particular way, no matter what -- doesn't it involve the strong determination to be treated like an already dead person, a corpse?


Saturday 27 December 2008

My memoir is now published!

You may order a copy of it online:

http://www.lulu.com/content/5487684

However, I advise waiting just a little while, as I go through the proof copies I ordered last night, to pick up any typos that got through despite the computer's spellcheck programme.

Tuesday 23 December 2008

step down father mugabe

the de-metaphorised ape


Apish dwelling in the Shadowlands of ambiguity, between linguistic literalness and linguistic metaphor, was for making life easier. Whilst claiming his cultural rights as worker-boss and enjoyer of art, the evolutionary psychologist could always suppose to himself that "ape" is just a metaphor for human life.

However, convenience is preferred for its ability to buy a sense of superiority cheaply for its adherents.

"Ape" can be a term appropriated more literally, too -- as within domestic relations, in such instances as when the urge to rape and decimate appears from anywhere, and the adherent feels the need to give in to his lower impulses, without cultural mediation.

Exploiting the ambiguity between literal conceptualization of humanity as ape, and figurative conceptualization (as, for example, when he means to make use of civilisation's apparatus of legal, social or financial power) suits our social Darwinist adherent very much. This approach justifies the ape in whatever he feels like doing, and makes him very comfortable with himself.

The possibility that others may view his antics in a rather more perspicacious way, as being revelatory of the aesthetics and thought processes of an ape, passes way above his devolved consciousness.

Monday 22 December 2008

Wrecked out of our wounds: Identity politics and the metaphysics of presence


Identity politics is primeval -- rooted in the pre-Oedipal*. It always evokes a "metaphysics of presence" (term from Derrida); the "good breast versus the bad breast" (terms from Melanie Klein).

Those who say that they are postmodern, and yet invoke identity politics at every turn are engaging in primeval sorcery, because they believe that they see more at hand than is actually capable of presenting itself to them.

A "metaphysics of presence" is fundamentally an erroneous or "magical" way of seeing. It is erroneous because it oversimplifies what is actually there to be seen and understood. It is "magical" because this mode of seeing is creative and inventive, actively constructing what it claims to perceive, rather than passively observing it.

The "metaphysics of presence" is unavoidably postmodern, since the postmodernist must make initial reference to presences that "appear" to him or her, before deconstructing these appearances through clashing them against other "appearances". The postmodernist, then, is involved in masking as well as unmasking, and plays the role of a kind of magician.

Ultimately, what is lost -- psychologically and ontologically -- though the mutual clashing and splintering of opposed identities is not the firmness of reality as such(as with a postmodernist interpretation of the world), but the firmness of the boundaries of identity. It is these that shatter and fragment, leaving only the core of a vulnerable human essence (Note: not as an "absence" but fundamentally as a "presence" of core humanity, stripped of its identity postulates. This is the nakedness of the human soul that we encounter at the end of Black Sunlight.)

In Marechera's writing,  the pure essence of human experience is on display, with the other signifiers of presence (such as race and gender) shattered and gone.

We are thus "wrecked out of our wounds", according to Marechera.  In this particular case, which is far from being postmodern, what wrecks us is also what redeems us. We rediscover our true humanity as a metaphysical human core only after experiencing and overwhelming imposition of the metaphysics of presence through a visceral encounter with opposing and contradictory identities. It is this encounter that wrecks us "out of our wounds".

The postmodernist, who retreats periodically to his or her island of skepticism, cannot lay claim to the same sort of shamanistic experience of reading.

NOTE: *Jungians see this early childhood level of consciousness as being simply different from the rational, adult norm.  It's a realm of transformation and mystical consciousness.  We all have components of that  in us; the ability to see ourselves as part of life's  great "oneness".

Patriotic Front

I am unable to contact my friend in Zimbabwe. The phone lines seem down there.

Saturday 20 December 2008

new ending

Whilst I was living in Zimbabwe, it had been okay for me to show little or no emotion. In fact, that was what was necessary for me, in order to get along. In Australia, it was the opposite. You had to show a lot of emotion to be accepted. The thing was, I couldn't. I had too much of a backlog of feelings about encountering strangeness and dealing with loss. So, I couldn't express my any of deeper feelings and I choked up. For ten years, I couldn't speak too clearly about myself or my reactions, and then when I did start to speak again, I'd learned from books, and my words came out in a stilting fashion much like academic jargon.

I knew it was wrong for me to speak of the past, for I was deemed to be celebrating it rather than mourning it. Yet without speaking of the past, I was doomed to a life of ever more increasing stoicism, a stiff upper lip and an inability to be done with whatever it was -- I wasn't sure -- I'd left behind.

Friday 19 December 2008

shamanism and a key aspect


The use of psychoactive drugs enables a shaman to discover a cosmology that would make us all connected to each other, in particular via a sense of unity with organic nature, as the prime source and origin of life. The insights gained through exploring this cosmology are useful. The sources of malaise can be ascertained, observed and come to terms with.

The range of possibilities for life may be greater and more widely varied than those observable in everyday existence. Thus, a shamanic journey can lead not only to healing, but to creative solutions to life’s difficulties.

Shamanic experience could also free one from idées fixes through a baptism into new experiences.
This is of course against the grain of Nietzsche, who feared, as Luce Irigaray pointed out, the element of water, including oceanic experiences.

Have no fear that water is "feminine", as it is only so according to essentialist notions of identity. Patriarchal religion would urge us to see it in this way, but there is no need to trust patriarchal versions of anything, given that the patriarchal priest is invested in maintaining specific power relations. We should rather distrust anything essentializing -- at least until we can test it for ourselves and work out what its value might be.


obscurantist posturing

Let us suppose, for a second, that there is such thing as masculinity. Perhaps it consists of bravery and the kind of derring-do touted by such antiquated artifacts such as DIEHARD and RAMBO .

Now suppose such a thing existed in life, and not just on the television sets? One would be able to see its traces in the real behavior of those around. By expressing such behavior  they would be deemed to have hit the nail on the head as concerns masculinity and its expression.

Now suppose, just for a second, there was such a thing called patriarchy. Perhaps it would consist in such things a bosses and politicians dismissing their female colleagues and workers as mere "girls". One might also see it in a wages differential, and in boys' clubs in organisations. One might see it in the posturing of those who act as if women cannot have an intellect worth reckoning with.

Perhaps one actually believes that one observes this patriarchy in action. Experience itself teaches; and the evidence amasses that there is a patriarchy at work. Yet, when patriarchy is pointed out as a peculiar sleight of hand that prevents women from getting their due, the defenders of the things as they are turn up to state:

"You got that wrong, twee dearie." They go on to say:

"It was masculinity in action that you were in fact observing!"

Would such an argument alone suffice to obscure our vision?


Thursday 18 December 2008

Jennifer and Laurie

You can help regarding Zimbabwe's abductees

Take ACTION now!
RECOMMENDED ACTION from Amnesty International (download PDF version of appeal here):
Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible, in English or your own language:
expressing grave concern over the abduction or arrest of Jestina Mukoko, the director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, who was forcibly taken from her home by people believed to be state security agents on 3 December 2008;
calling on the Zimbabwean authorities to disclose the whereabouts of Jestina Mukoko and not to ill treat her.
calling on the Zimbabwean authorities to allow Jestina Mukoko access to her lawyer, family as well as food, water, warm clothes and medication;
stating that Amnesty International considers that Jestina Mukoko is solely detained for expressing her views, without advocating violence, and considers her a prisoner of conscience. Amnesty International therefore calls for her immediate and unconditional release;
calling on the Zimbabwean authorities to immediately end its practice of enforced disappearances and follow international standards on arrest and detention for persons under criminal investigation;
expressing concern about continued harassment and intimidation of human rights defenders and political activists by the Zimbabwean security forces;
calling on the Zimbabwean authorities to immediately investigate all those responsible for the enforced disappearances, including those who sanctioned it and bring them to account.


APPEALS TO:

(It may be difficult to get through to Zimbabwe by fax so please keep trying, alternatively send letters)

President Robert G. Mugabe
Office of the President
Munhumutapa Building
Samora Machel Avenue
Box 7700 Causeway
Harare,
Zimbabwe
Fax: + 263 4 734644
Salutation: Dear President

Commissioner General of Police Augustine Chihuri
Zimbabwe Republic Police General Head Quarters
PO Box 8807
Causeway
Harare
Zimbabwe
Fax: + 263 4 253 212
Salutation: Dear Commissioner

Commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces :
General Constantine Chiwenga
Ministry of Defence
H/Q Defence House cnr Kwame Nkhuruma
3rd Street
Private Bag 7713
Causeway, Harare
Zimbabwe
Fax: + 263 4 796762
Salutation: Dear General

Attorney General :
Justice Bharat Patel
Office of the Attorney General
Private Bag 7714
Causeway
Harare
Zimbabwe
Fax: + 263 4 777 049
Salutation: Dear Attorney General

COPIES TO:

Zimbabwe Peace Project
PO Box BE 427
Belvedere
Harare
Zimbabwe
Fax: +263 4 778311

Ambassade de la République du Zimbabwe :
Square Joséphine Charlotte 11,
1200 Bruxelles
Fax : 02.762.96.05
Fax : 02.775.65.10
Email : zimbrussels@skynet.be [1]


Further actions

1. Email SADC and the AU and point out to them that these abductions violate Article XVIII of the Interparty Political Agreement which is meant to ensure the security of persons and prevention of violence. Visit our Action Contact Database and click on our current action initiative - ‘Demanding the release of Jestina Mukoko and all Zimbabwe’s abductees’ - to gather the contact details you need.
2. Call Norton Police Station, and put pressure on them to take immediate action. Ask them where Jestina is, and who took her. Tell them the world is watching closely. As always, be polite. Tel: +263 (062) 2120
3. Write appeal letters and email them to savejestinamukoko@yahoo.com. These appeal letters will be sent to the Government and members of the local, regional, and international comunity.
4. Click ‘Share This’ on our Jestina Mukoko widget, then copy and paste the code to embed the widget on your blog, on your website, and on social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo and Blogger. Ask other websites to carry the widget too. Click the email link on the widget that appears when you click ’share this’ - and email everyone you know; ask them to get involved. Then be sure to watch the widget for updates, and be ready to respond.
5. If you have a Facebook account, help raise awareness by donating your profile status to this cause. Change your status to read “(Your name) is donating his/her status to demand the safe release of all the people abducted in Zimbabwe by Mugabe’s regime”. Your friends and family will probably ask you why you are doing this. TELL THEM, then ask them to do the same. Keep your status on message until we get a clear response from SADC leaders. If you need to switch your status to something personal, do so, but make sure you switch it back to this message as soon as you can.
6. After changing your profile status, join the Facebook group called “I donated my profile status to free Jestina Mukoko”. The more people who join this group and show that they are taking a stand by donating their status, the more the media will sit up and take notice of how angry we all are. If our voices grow louder and louder, maybe SADC leaders will finally wake up and stand loudly in defence of those who who should be defended, rather than those perpetuating the terror!

Christmas in the time of cholera

Wednesday 17 December 2008

Pre-Oedipal Nietzscheans

The pre-Oedipal level of development, (which as adults we have access to, to varying degrees, depending on context and personality), appears to be the basis for mutuality -- indeed symbiosis -- and therefore a measure of egalitarianism. According to a theoretician who uses Kleinian object relations to suggest a psychological basis for a sense of political mutuality, the knowledge of the early dependency we have on our mothers remains a part of who we are as adults.

It seems to me that this is why those of the contemporary era, who embrace a version of Nietzsche's philosophy, are actually looking to reignite this mother-child dynamic in their own lives. They want that sense of nurturing and succour, whilst at the same time claiming the dominant or "mother as control figure" part of the relationship in relation to others who they posit as taking the role of the child.

By contrast, the Oedipal level is less free, since submission, in terms of this psychological construction, only occurs out of necessity and fear, and not as an intersubjective experience of mutural give and take, including nurturing. Instead, accommodation to the Oedipal level is based upon one's sense of a rational need to survive and compete, against social and material pressures from the outside and primarily from above. Since such a feeling of an absolute need to conform comes from the powers that exist in society as it already is, (and not as it might be modelled), conformity is imposed as "the law of the father". There is nothing or little experientially "inwards" about that. Rather, superego tends to impose itself in a manner that acts as a prohibition against looking inwards -- against having too much of a self.

So the Nietzschean of today seeks to awaken the buried pre-Oedipal aspect of his buried self-awareness, in order to experience the world in a deeply subjective manner, as if he were either the instigator or the imposer of dynamics which enact the dominating power of the mother or the neediness and submission of the child. (If he cannot take the position of the mother, he will readily fall into taking the position of the hungry and desirous child.)

My own prolonged experience of the pre-Oedipal state, (perhaps metaphorical, rather than actual), was in relation to Nature as the mother, granting me my desires bountifully and rarely withholding. Those who have experienced such an entirely fulfilling engagement with the world in its pre-social, natural sense -- the breeze, the grass, the sun -- will find this need by the Nietzschean to reinvent the Mother and the Child (as if to extract more nurturing from the Other) to be rather tiresome after a while.

Mankind's deadliest threat.



Bought to you by Hyperbo-Fear-XXX

"We know what's best for you, thou racist!"

Mugabe

Flatness


In my view, the key characteristic of  someone who is NOT being bourgeois is the ability to be at odds with oneself, or in opposition to oneself. What this implies is that one part of the self is capable opposing another part. Despite proclamations by postmodernists that capitalism has taken all the fun and wind out of transgression, I maintain that there is an overabundance of possible situations in which one can find something within oneself to oppose.

Without such a characteristic of being capable of opposing oneself, a person simply isn't all that interesting. Lack of self-opposition leads to being dependent on others to judge one fairly. Yet this is an ultimate form of moral abnegation. To be judged by others but never really by oneself means that one travels through life without self-awareness, never really mastering on a deep level one's own ideas, feeling for directions or goals.

To be self-consciously at odds with oneself is much more interesting and allows character to form.   Unfortunately, in the eyes of  bourgeois individuals, the primary 'things in themselves', (that is, they themselves) are deeply and interminably unknowable.

Tuesday 16 December 2008

Zimbabwe power sharing talks -- fun for all

On communication with conservatives


I now accept that I must handicap myself in relation to conservatives. When they are talking to me, they are not actually addressing me by any means:  they are addressing the 12 year old (the one I used to be).  Conservatives worship innocence, but hate adult women, who are defined for them in terms of a dangerous sexuality.  They are intent upon turning adult women back into children.

It makes sense that they should panic, believing something nefarious is taking place, when an adult woman introduces a certain amount of irony into  a conversation with a conservative misogynist, as if one were to say:

"Hey I'm not a 12-year-old any more. LOOK. I am over here. And just begin to pay attention!"

To the conservative, for whom the twelve year old is all there is, this is like the twelve year old going nuts, going hysterical, showing a mean side. They want the old image back -- the twelve year old who simply listens to what she is told, with measured enthusiasm.

They don't want the twelve year old that is going nuts. They don't even want the 13-year-old. They demand that reality adapt to conform to their terms. It upsets them deeply when they cannot see what they expect to see, or when their hallucinations about the world and who is in it are put to question.


momentary pleasures of the gym

Ah, when the gym is only open for 1.5 hours in two days, tis a momentarily pleasure to make my visit there, as I did today.

Alas, my fitness suffers in the interim.

Monday 15 December 2008

repressive desublimation

...the art of
non-castration

We welcome you here
at this altar
and shrine

My personal style

So I start to figure out what my personal style is, because at about the age of 40, it is time to do it.

I find that my body either accepts or rejects certain items of clothing. There is very little inbetween about this. It is as if I had a certain blood type with regard to clothing, and could only accept an outfit from the right donor.

My personal style requires that the clothing be generally of a tight or snug fit, especially in the case of the inner garments. The outer garments may hang much more loosely, and indeed, ought to.

The inner garments, however, ought to be elasticised, at least a little.

Items should be functional and easy to wear. The material should be of a high quality, preferably not synthetic. They should have a certain amount of utility about them, since I move quickly and am inclined to tear anything too fragile. Also fidgetty straps fall off my shoulders, and are a nightmare.

note to self

There is such a thing as a rigorous loss of control -- ie. in reference to the control that one part of oneself loses over another part of oneself, due to one's effort to change things around. Automatic writing as self-exploration fits here. The possiblity of a rigorous loss of control -- whereby one part of the self loses control of another part of the self -- already implies a multiplicity of the self. Object relations lends itself to such a perspective, whereas Freudian psychoanalysis, which deals with the person as a totality does not.

Sunday 14 December 2008

Lacan upon the lap.

Lacan's psychological paradigm would make more sense if by "language" he was not actually (as I have read in a book about Jacques Lacan's Return to Freud) concerned with "dictionary definitions", but with the very specific, which is to say peculiar (in all senses) way in which language is employed within patriarchal systems. That is, his paradigm would be more structurally integrated if Lacan's understanding of what it is to speak is an implicit recognition that social meaning is constructed on the basis of a metaphysically (pro-patriarchal) loaded dice, (as the French feminists conten). Then it would be clear why we have the term, "law of the father" as the basis for induction into languistic meaning, rather than "law of the mother".

Another point of contention, which I see in the text I have linked to above, is that the "law of the father" (as opposed to the law of humanity, or indeed, the law of the mother) is deemed to be efficacious even in the absence of specific fathers. One wonders how patriarchy can function in its absence, but clearly it is such a robust system of necessity or the imagination that there is nothing really that would suffice to draw a limitation on it. Patriarchy -- love it or lump it, it's never going to leave you.

On a perhaps related note, these days I have spent some hours wondering why it is that those who are bourgeois through and through -- that is, who believe in the system of advanced capitalism as it is, and see no reason to alter it -- have such an overwrought sense of the fragility of the human psyche. I see this System Adherents literally PANIC when I do the slightest thing differently-from-what-had-been-anticipated; when I step out of line just a fraction. At such a point, they do panic, possibly on my behalf, believing me to have gone entirely mad and to have put myself into mortal danger. This fear ... this absolute terror ... of the consequences of not conforming is alien to me. It seems that some people suffer from an all too virulent superego and project their day and night terrors onto me.

On a tangential note: Using psychoanalysis to describe (or analyse) any situation, when the description is not intended to return the subject in question back to marching in lockstep with the established social order, is always going to be a risk. That is partly because of the way psychoanalysis is constructed as an intellectual lapdog of patriarchal notions and formulations. It is also because the greater masses of people are those with normative unconsciousnesses, who would quite freely, if they were more educated, use the tools of psychoanalysis, to whack down anyone who moved in manners unexpected. (It is such normative behaviour to which Nietzsche attributes the characteristic of interminable intellectual and emotional laziness.)

One uses, all the same, the descriptive and analytical methods that become available for use -- only, one avoids using them in any way conventionally.

Nietzsche, social Darwinism, Darwinism, morality and gender

--------

Nietzsche argues against Christianity as a system of values. My view is that he is dangerously close to invoking social darwinism as the replacement for those religious values – as a secular alternative. Let me say that in many ways, this is precisely the scenario we have today, in Western societies – the replacement of Christian values with a social Darwinist belief system. This is a secularist mystification of society and the people in it.

Now if we take Nietzsche exactly at his word, it was Darwinism – the biological theory of origins – that Nietzsche wanted to use, to replace Christian ideology within society. This would mean that exposure to a biological theory of origins could be used to undermine the force of Christianity in society, since it would give a competing and scientific view of our origins.

Nonetheless, what we have today in Western societies is hardly so much a belief in Darwinism as a belief in social Darwinism, which is an entirely different thing. Social Darwinism is the belief that those who are objectively superior will automatically rise to the top of society, as its cream, whereas those who are lacking in biological (meaning mental, physical, and so on) capacity will automatically sink to the low levels of society, and stay there. There is an element of truth to all ideologies, and of course, social Darwinism is no exception to the rule. There are all sorts of elements of truth to Christianity as well – eg, such morally sound advice as “judge not lest thee be judged.” Often those with exceptional mental and physical abilities do rise to the top of their respective societies. However, look up, at the echelons of business people, politicians and spokespeople of your society today. The variables that lead to an outcome of social success are actually too complex to be limited by simple and direct postulations of mental and physical superiority. Nepotism biological or cultural, shrewdness (a quality that Nietzsche himself saw as being the mark of an inferior character), tradition, material inheritance and opportunity, these are also influences that can determine success or failure within society. Yet the dangerous tendency of the ideology of social Darwinism is to impart the mystification – lookest up and thou wilt see thy elders and thy betters.

So there are difference between social Darwinism and Darwinism itself. The latter produces a body of evidence about our origins -- material artefacts to back it. To date, however, there is no evidence for the truth of the ideology of social Darwinism. Like Christianity, it is merely another belief system, in some ways worse than many aspects of the Christian ideology, which at least counseled “do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. Many social Darwinists use their belief system incongruously, as a theory concerning the nature of morality – which is meant to excuse them from what they do to others.

Despite its failure as a scientific theory or as a system of morality, social Darwinism is still embraced by many – whether implicitly or in an overt and more conscious manner – because it fills an ideological vacuum produced by a diminishing faith in Christianity. (Yet, watch an Australian soap opera, such as Neighbours or Home and Away, and you will be able to guess how much religious mysticisms do continue to hold sway, in the popular consciousness, even today.)

My view is that social Darwinism must be rejected, as just another religious mysticism, which clouds moral and scientific judgement about society itself, and how it functions. There is another aspect, too, that I want to address. The subconscious image that we can tend to carry around in our heads, the subconscious image that comes from a social Darwinistic ideology, is that of a gesticulating ape, who, nonetheless through sheer determination and self-will has made himself king of the castle. To be honest, as a tutor for all subjects for high school in the area of Perth, I have never found anyone more hard to teach than the children of secularists. I believe it is this subconscious image of success that is to blame. For all I know, perhaps the several students I have taught of a religious background have an image of Christ on the cross in the back of their minds. It is very possible that they expect learning to be a crucifixion, and therefore knuckle down and take it. However, the ones who expect to climb to the top of the tower without learning, through sheer swagger and bravado – but with very little effort -- are the hardest to teach. For this reason, they are the ones who are most likely to remain mystified for the rest of their lives.

There is also the aspect of gender to consider. Social Darwinism tends to reinstate a very primitive notion of gender roles. There are perhaps mitigating factors in an advanced society such as ours that can limit its worse effects. I won’t go into that right now, but they includes rule of law, training in the humanities, and so on (in a few words, education and moral discernment, backed up with force, if necessary). The rhetoric of social Darwinism, it seems to me, adopts an imagistic rather than intellectual form, most of the time. The image of so-called “alpha male”, the head honcho of the monkey tribe, who beats his breast whilst standing on a sand castle, is absolutely indispensable for an emotional grasp of social Darwinistic society. His contemporary manifestations are as the head of the corporation, the king of the capitalist jungle who has really made it, and therefore gets to order others around and make them do his bidding. Due to his might, (which makes right), he can choose from the throngs of the female masses, a trophy wife for himself, at will. The so-called “Beta males” – the rest of you who are still fortunate enough to be direct participants in the success game on your own behalf, and not relegated to the sidelines like some mere female – are able to choose from the females that remain, after the alpha male has taken his selection.

I’m not sure who could be happy under this arrangement, unless it be the figurative monkey-king himself, and he alone. Perhaps resorting to a Bronze Age arrangement of society seems necessary, even today, in the face an apparent lack of ideological alternative to a religious social matrix. Yet speaking as a female, and indeed, Darwinistically, I have to say that I lack any respect for this gesticulating ape. I don’t admire him or his ways. I experience no romance in a return to the jungle. Speaking Darwinistically, the kind of male I have always admired is not this product of the social Darwinist imagination, but rather the product of my own imagination, which is perhaps an echo of my own biology and its inherent wisdom. Some may have seen the works of David Attenborough, particularly in his recording of the fascinating Lyre bird. Its weak point it that it is merely a mimic – however, the noises that it is capable of reproducing, to attract a mate, are wildly varied and complex. Let it be noted that I am continuing to speak very figuratively, when I suggest that I would consider it wise and socially advisable to replace our fascination with the image of the Alpha ape with the much more melodic and fascinating image of the Lyre bird, who actually is still capable of learning, and applies his knowledge to create all sorts of melodies in order to seduce his mate.

In closing, I want to suggest the lyre bird as the new symbol of secularism.

2.  Bataille
To understand Bataille, it pays in any case to have read some Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel and Freud, since he draws a lot from these. Visions of Excess has a simply premise from Nietzsche, that when we are unhappy we lose all moderation and go into excess. Another Nietzschean premise is that those who a psychologically rich can afford to go into excess more than those who are psychologically impoverished. So it is that Bataille tries to appeal to a particular segment of society -- those who have been made to feel unhappy by their lack of power in relation to society's hierarchical structure, but who are nonetheless intrinsically rich enough, within themselves, to express a different kind of spirituality than those who are on top.

Andronieff says:

"There are no Americans. No British. No Australians. And, if such a preposterous thing did come into existence -- let's say, as a congomeration of some kind of moral monster of some hideous sort -- the only safe response would be to ignore it.

Let me repeat. There are no Americans or British. There has never was, and there never has been any monstrosity of that sort."

Saturday 13 December 2008

Please intervene in Zimbabwe and save lives

You intervened before -- and changed my life forever. My forthcoming memoir will state just how much.

Please, intervene again, just as courageously as you did before, and change the face of Zimbabwe forever!

********************************************

Historical betting as non-participation in history


Contemporary Nietzscheans often tend to fuzzy up their images of the patterns and formations of historical processes by adopting a very one-sided morality that is predetermined and calculated to offer the winning formula in the game of historically contending forces. They think they've figured out how to play this game of roulette, having spent moments of their time consulting the secret book of the dark forces of Nietzscheanism. Having spent time in backrooms calculating their winning formula, they have no more to add to the processes of life than do the evangelical Christians who can only sit back and wait for doomsday to arrive.

The Nietzschean with his metaphysical formula of success through "mastery" and the Christian with his own contrivance of redemption through maintaining faith during the "End Times" are both very much alike. Both have cast their bets, and have nothing better to do than sit things out, whilst hoping, maliciously, for the worst (since it is only by the arrival of the very worst conditions history has to offer that the shining glory of these group members' 'true natures' can be historically revealed to those who will be shown to have missed the boat, having read the wrong holy book, etc.)

This storyline, whether Nietzschean or Christian  is just a contrivance to fuzzy up the image of historical form (which is always very harsh and often lacking in redemptive qualities) in order to make everything look more palatable. The Nietzschean redeems only himself, in terms of his narrative, on the basis of his faux-heroism of surly toughness. His is the patriarchy, the default position of historical manipulators, bound for success if everything remains the same. His self-image is false, since he is the owner of a historical legacy, and is therefore certain that the outcome of the game will be in favour of his casino.  All he has to do is rest upon his tidy laurels to assure that all the chips in the game will go to him so long as he erects an image to stand in for him and for his honour.

white liberals need to get over their self-hatred

Or they will continue to leave themselves open to this kind of rhetoric:

Zimbabwe's Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu accused the West of launching a biological warfare on Zimbabwe in order to overthrow Mr. Mugabe.

"This [cholera] is a serious biological, chemical weapon, a genocidal onslaught on the people of Zimbabwe by the British still fighting to re-colonize Zimbabwe," he said. "And they are using their allies." http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/dec14_2008.html#Z6

Looking for signs of health in the gender wars


Now that the political change has been wrought in the USA, and the scene is now set for a complete change in consciousness, a few words might be uttered about how extremely unattractive the culture of the past eight or so years has been. Ok, that's done.

One of the points I've been learning about myself over the years now drops ripe into my consciousness, from above. It concerns my aesthetic sensibility, and indeed how that is wrapped up in my sexual senses, and let it be said that an ability to enjoy and thrive upon complexity is what I most admire in anything within my sphere that I might chance upon.

Conversely, a renunciation of complexity, a dislike for it, signals to me poor psychological health. (Note how the lyre bird increases its repertoire of noises in its song, in order to attract a mate.)

In Marechera's work, however, I see precisely the opposite tendency of registering and embracing all the notes of a deeply complex and even twisted life. The deftness of his grasp, accompanied by his interpretations, which deftly reproduces all of the twisted mess of life right up to the higher notes of ecstasy, reverberates upon female consciousness as superlative health.

2.

The point I'm creeping up to must now follow. Those who stand up on their soap box and pronounce their seeming "insights" -- namely that all men are one way, and all women are another -- are actually demonstrating their emotional unhealthiness. The ability to make fine distinctions -- not just in terms of a particular women's personality and disposition, and the different notes its capable of hitting, but in terms of differentiating between one particular woman and another -- is all lost on them.

To be unable to discern right from wrong, change from more-of-the-very-sameness, this is not any advertisement for a good state of health. That which it advertises, should it have to be mentioned, is a state of sinking, in despair, beneath an ocean of cultural and social difficulties.

Evolutionary psychology does not say to women or to men that all the men and all the women are competing on the basis of some easily interpretable signs and signals. One would have t be of rather average psychological health oneself, to fall for someone who displays the features of a gender stereotype. The notes that such a manifested idea hits suffices for some, though, I'm quite sure.

As for me, I look for complexity in others as a sign of health. Should I see that they are quite capable of enduring with their complexity, I start to show some interest. The dumb persistence of the stupid tide of beef is not complex.

Friday 12 December 2008

moving the swamps


Nietzsche was right in that so much of the mass indoctrination into modes of morality is about moving the swamps. In making this judgement, Nietzsche was drawing on his understanding of mass psychology -- that the masses regularly feel a need to release the tensions that come from being squeezed together into a massive conglomeration of human feelings, needs and desires. When the tension starts to build because of the pressures exerted on individual minds in relation to the cause of becoming massively ONE (one state, one national identity, one fuhrer), the reality principle starts to demand its recompense, that is, in blaming others. "Since I have had to sacrifice so much, in order to become one in mind and heart and soul with my community, others who seem different from me and who may not have suffered as I have, will now also have to suffer."

Thus the nature of so much of mass morality is reward oneself for all of the efforts of delayed gratification by going on a psychologically bloodthirsty rampage in order to impugn others -- those whom, presumably, have not conformed to the programme quite as well as Thou has.

There are people whose whole moral-psychological structure is based upon redeeming/rescuing the Brown People, but should I make a similar appeal to them, that I am just as good as many of these Brown People (TM) that they would like to rescue, they virtually lose their minds. After all, by impugning me, they manage to move the swamp in my direction.  This doesn't do much to change reality, but helps the moralists release their pent up tension for a while.


Enjoy the cliche


Thursday 11 December 2008

the patriarchy: prey on us

..is that whatever you say and do about it is defined back into patriarchal terms.

Do you have trouble w/ your father?

Well that is obviously because of your Oedipus complex. It's not contempt, it's love at work, for what else could it be?

Is your employer not making the best use of you, causing you problems in such a way that disturbs your sleep and/or keeps you up at night?

That is because you love your boss, in fact so much that you want to sleep with bosses. That is why you are unable to sleep at night, you feisty thing, you.

What if you have insight enough to perceive that the whole system is upside down, because cowards and those who are emotionally weak are running the show?

That is because you are a bully and a shrew, running the show from underneath the system, causing everyone to throw up their arms in alarm, which, in turn leads things to slide into disarray.

But what if you defined yourself as weak? Then you deserve everything that happens to you. You need to get a thicker skin. No wonder your life is in such a disarray.

What if you define yourself as neither strong nor weak? Well then precisely what's your point? If you're not going to be opposite to anything, then you are just the same as everybody else. Having failed to prove your moral purity in a decisive sense, you can have nothing further to contribute to any discussion.

You may be Taliban

You may be a Taliban [or closed Brethren] if...

1. You refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to beer.

2. You own a $3,000 machine gun and a $5,000 rocket launcher, but you can't afford shoes.

3. You have more wives than teeth.

4. You wipe your butt with your bare left hand, but consider bacon "unclean".

5. You think vests come in two styles: bullet-proof and suicide.

6. You can't think of anyone you haven't declared Jihad against.

7. You consider television dangerous, but routinely carry explosives in your clothing.

8. You were amazed to discover that cell phones have uses other than setting bombs.

9. You have nothing against women and think every man should own a few.

10. You've always had a crush on your neighbor's goat.

From the Yahoo group "Real World Atheism"
Posted by: "Tom Andrews"

memoir

I was sixteen years old, flat chested, and very sorry to be there. My dad had just resigned from the Harare Polytechnic, where he’d taught a number of courses, but it was mostly photography I’d heard about, which he loved. Now someone else would be getting that entire load, which he had worked hard to build up, in some cases by starting courses from scratch.

I had to go to the farewell party, at which he would receive the tokens of two metal dishes. I actually cannot remember it too well – he received two items small and silver-plated, and inscribed. I never saw these objects again after that night.

We were not part of his professional life, but we had to be there, Glenda and his whole family. And there was something poisonous in the air; some sense of dark, deeply ingrained hostility between my father and several of the attendees of this party to farewell him. Was one of the younger male lecturers contending to take up my father’s place, to be the new head honcho, dominating much of the field of commercial arts? I sensed that this was so, but it was not for me to concern myself with. My task, to the contrary, was to be very, very still, to the point where I could perhaps disappear from this embarrassing adult party, at which I had no place. If I propped myself up against a pillar, and stood there, very, very still, it would perhaps seem as if I hadn’t existed, and then, like the only child left alone in the playground, without anyone else to keep her company, I would curtail my embarrassment until the bell that marked the end of break began to ring.

It was getting later, about 8 pm, when the presentation was about to happen. My father was getting increasingly agitated. It seemed the young man in question was making wise cracks at him. This had to do with my father’s professional life, which I didn’t know anything about, as I have said. It was also to do with men, and how they were, having exchanges of thoughts and ideas that women just ignored.

My father received his silver-plated items, and now he was fit for exploding. His fate had been sealed as no longer belonging. Perhaps this is how he felt? As if he had made his pact with death, as with being an outsider, as if ashes from Vesuvius had started to tumble out around the place.

He picked up his silvery, shiny baubles, and directed us straight towards the car.
“Where you looking at that guy?” he said.

“Which one?” I asked.

Since I had decided to adopt a mode of denial, my father was even more furious at me.

“You were looking at him,” he accused me. “He said you were looking at him.”

His anger was about to burst his ear drums. The rest of the drive home was in silence.

Wednesday 10 December 2008

To all the liberation soldiers of Zimbabwe!

The unusual and interesting version of masculinity that we have, almost globally, these days concerns men who just wanna be "tops", but don't really care to do the hard slog that would get them there. Really, if anyone is capable of doing any of the work, any of the hard revolutionary slog, any of the desperate and gutsy activity that can bring about a change in a society, it is probably not the males of the particular society.

In Zimbabwe, these days, it is only Jenni Williams who is giving everyday Zimbabweans hope:

From: Women refuse to be silenced by Robert Mugabe
http://www.timesonline.co.uk

Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, named Mrs Williams one of her ten "women of courage" last year. For all their success, however, the ultimate prize - the removal of Mr Mugabe - remains elusive because there are too few Zimbabweans as bold as Mrs Williams. Battered, terrifed and starving, they will not rise up.The regime is "weaker than it's ever been, but the missing link is the people", she said with evident frustration. "We live in hope. Mugabe is five days away from being removed if the people do something. But they are too good at being victims."We've taken to insulting them. We say, 'even the frog eventually jumps out of the sewage pond'."



Perhaps my impressions ought to be mistaken when I see that men these days want power in order to be glamour-pusses. They want to lie there and be stroked and do nothing. They are naturally cynical to the cores of their beings, about old fashioned values that would have condemned them to stand up straight and be soldiers for a cause. It's all about the image, and their fortunes stand or fall upon that much.

Those who have a thicker skin, these days, have no use for image. So thick is the skin of their hide that they don't give a shit. They know that true soldiers are not always rewarded or even acknowledged for their tasks. Those know what they are -- and that they simply can't help being soldiers.

against Cholera


The Transference and Countertransference

Or: It Takes Two to Tango.

What the books on psychoanalysis are slowly teaching me, above all, is something that I had aready recognised implicitly, but was never, until now, able to put into words, to formulate as a realistic principle.

The idea that being in a relationship often involves engaging with a certain about of something called Transference, along with something called Countertransference puts into words something that had previously avoided articulation. Perhaps others have tried to communicate it, but it has always sounded abusive: "Victim and Dominator are the same" is an abusive notion that avoids getting to the point rather than hitting the nail on the head. However, to view someone's reaction within context as always being indicative that there is something they're reacting to, hits the nail on the head every time. And psychoanalysis, with its notions of the Transference and Countertransference is also suggesting as much -- although it involves conceptualising the mind as a multi-dimensional sphere which brings elements of past experiences into the presence.

I remember when I made something in art school. This was a very distressing period of my life, when I had been freed from the tepid fishtank of life that was Australian high school existence, and let forth into the big, bad world, to fend for myself. Only this was not the culture or the world (emotionally, mentally and ideologically speaking) I had grown up in, and little of it made any sense. The aspect of this new world that had stuck me most (in a way that had left me almost unable to speak) had been its garishness. There were so many aspects of it that were extremely ugly, I had felt, especially the buildings, which were very violent against the eyes, compared to the pale and dignified architecture of colonial structures. There were images that almost seemed to defy the intellect -- to deny it.

So I made a terrible and garish structure out of glass. It was poorly put together, for I lacked craftswomanish skills. Perhaps it was merely a cry of distress?

So I presented this in a review meeting, as all I had been able to make until now. "What is it?"

"It is life," I answered. Life as it had become. Life as I was now experiencing it. Sharp, with jagged edges. Ugly.

"You must think that life is very tacky," said one woman, intending, by her statement, to hurt.

I didn't feel hurt by it, although in relating this story to an artist friend, she suggested that had it been said to her, she would have. Been personally devastated by the rejection, that is.

To me, I was telling the truth about something. If my artistic piece had been able to speak, it would have said, "I find life here to be devastating. It is beyond words. It is so very tacky."

If this story tells me anything, it is that we should be careful when assuming that someone is merely telling you about themselves. They may, rather, be telling you about their reaction to you.

Of course, that is something that someone who is depicted as "evil" is in no position to do -- to speak to you as an equal, with a particular viewpoint.

If I am punching badly against these bags, you have to come along and turn it into a good punch

Actually no.

I don't.

Always look out for those who have subliminally or implicitly accepted a tough talkin' doctrine -- for example, like the doctrine of social darwinism. The probability is that they're just looking for a way out to sit on their laurels while getting someone else to do all of the heavy lifting work involved in sustaining their sense of meaning.


But -- actually no. I don't need to sustain your sense of meaning.

I'm not going to spar with you over an issue that I take to be common sense. And it is not up to me to make sure that your guards are up and that you are a holding a good position.

Instead, I go on my merry way. Observing what I observe. Seeing what I see.

Going deep

As a writer, I find that one can speak the truth about things only to the degree that one is able to break from ideology and its perspectives. For that, one needs to condition oneself to stay long and hard in what is termed (in respect of its mode of alienation from other social beings) the paranoid-schizoid position. This is like conditioning oneself for deep diving, by the practice of holding one's breath for longer and longer periods of time. After a while, one can dive for up to four minutes, going deep, without the sensation of panicking. There one finds that peace that enables one to hold to one's own truths, indifferent or just seemingly oblivious to the pressures of others.

Tuesday 9 December 2008

the male Nietzschean

All in all what the contemporary male Nietzschean desires is to appropriate for himself the rights and prerogatives of femininity as he sees it. That this femininity has nothing to do with the way most women experience the world, or indeed how they might experience "femininity" does not bother him. Femininity as it is experienced by women is often nothing less or more than the atrophication of ambition and desire as they are faced with avenues of life that lead to one dead end after another.

The male Nietzschean, however, in his romanticism and naivety, sees feminity in a different light -- as an eminently desirable range of possibilities, which he would like to appropriate for himself. He feels that the traditional masculine role is too hard a lot. Femininity, however, offers him the opportunity to start himself from scratch, presenting himself in a brand new light, according to his whims. He can embrace a narrow version of faith in aesthetics -- believing something to be true, so he makes it so. He seeks to find himself reflected in the mirror of the eyes of others, and of their deepest desires. He has found a way to make himself superficial -- and yet whilst still believing in his depths (made note of in the string-pulling behind the scenes, which enables the whole remarkable show of the male Nietzschean identity to take place.)

Having given himself a histrionic personality disorder, he believes himself admirable, and will not stand for any suggestion, no matter how carefully phrased, that he has missed the boat entirely when it comes to engaging with reality.

Saturday 6 December 2008

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT FOR NOT BECOMING INSANE (in a society that sides with male authority that is beyond insane)

Never do anything you do not 100 percent agree with. A divided city cannot rule itself – so be either entirely for or against something, but never inbetween. Never fail to know where you stand.

You are at war and never forget it. Never give an inch by conceding that others were right in some way, that you were wrong, for they will take a mile.

Never again put yourself in the insane position of being a victim to clerical work, when you do not have the slightest clerical bone or attention to detail in your body. Such abject subservience leads to the road to nowhere that simply does not return.

Side with those who still want to play – with them you can never go wrong.

gender relations

In appealing to the intrigue of metaphysical opposites, as Nietzsche does in The Antichrist, he is no doubt expecting that these will be rooted in "instinct", in other words, in the experiences of the pre-Oedipal. My view is that one does not go deeper than this, and it is a mistake to presume, as perhaps Nietzsche himself did, and as many of those "Neechians" I've encountered on the Internet have, that their deepest instincts are not also thoroughly psychologically conditioned. The emerging sexuality and ego of the infant child can be helped or be left broken by the nature of parental nurturing during the first few years. This much is documented and self evident.

So, one goes back to the pre-Oedipal as the source of the individual's deepest instincts. In the child's apperception of its mother (and perhaps its father, too), one finds the source of the individual's entrenched aesthetic pertaining to relationships, sexuality and a deep sense of identity as a feeling of being situated in a particular way in relation to significant others. One encounters the beginnings of sexuality here, too, in what will become the stored memory of being nurtured and reflected in the caregiving parents' eyes.

Those whose early experiences do not involve great deprivation of love and attention will probably continue to develop a sexuality that is mutually inclusive and bonding. Alternatively, the tendency to see the lover as the hostile other in relation to oneself, could well be the result of negligent parenting. (One recreates this negative aesthetic of this earlier experience, "instinctively," expressing it as hatred of the other gender, usually women.)

So giving the green light to the game of metaphysical opposites, as features of deepest, buried instinct, is not necessarily redemptive in any way.

It could just cause those whose instincts are quite sick for any reason to become still sicker.

Thursday 4 December 2008

Paging Bruce Moore-King, White Man, Black War

Paging Bruce Moore-King:

I would like you to do a FOREWORD to the Rhodesian memoir I am writing, which is currently being professionally edited.

Please contact me on scratchy888@iprimus.com.au

when you get the chance.

Schadenfreude

I am inclined to think that Schadenfreude is part of "African" culture.

For instance when I was at the Melbourne conference, we were all warned to turn our cell phones off for the delivery of the papers. However, seated several rows down from where I, and a number of black intellectuals were seated, was a hapless black academic (who knows if my colleagues behind me knew him personally). His phone had begun to ring, and in his flurry to deal with it, he kept pressing the wrong buttons, which puncutated the air with their trill as he became increasingly agitated. There was a prolonged snickering recognition from at least three  behind me.

Nobody else, no Australians, were laughing.

I think this is a real cultural difference -- the level of humour tolerated within a culture -- which might be worth bringing out.

Wednesday 3 December 2008

killing innocence, again

There was no link between the child I was in Zimbabwe and the adult I was forced to become upon migration. I had to learn to speak again, from scratch, and when I did it came out as academic jargon. I had resorted to teaching myself from books, the only companions who were tolerant enough to bide with me until I’d figured enough things out. I still had the choking hesitation in my voice, of the strangled child, but I was fragile steps, little princess walking on a ground of swords steps, in order to assert myself and my perspectives.

Donald Meltzer, the psychoanalyst, says that those who murder their inner child develop a grave capacity for brutality against themselves and others. Mine wasn’t dead yet, and was doing her best to stay alive, but all was based on precepts from a different cultural paradigm, which I could not have dwelt in any more, due to my growing need for knowledge, even if a part of me had wanted to remain that innocent – to retain the innocence of a child indefinitely.

Yet the transition had to be harsh. The inner child, according to indications from those in the new culture I’d entered was a mean-spirited fascist. Consequently, my inductors into a new morality were helping her to die, bit by bit, and by attrition. Inner death, it seemed, was the pronouncement of justice to be meted out.

The Nazis, according to Meltzer, in his work, The Claustrum, would form a sense of solidarity within their group, on the basis of each murdering their own sense of childhood innocence. That is what gave them their evil but attractive allure, as well as their ability to do harm without the sensation of remorse. The Mau Mau, too, in Kenya, used to prepare themselves for war by brutalising themselves first. All pronouncements of death to the inner child are dangerous. My memoir is a way of finding the route back towards the sensitivities that had been lost during my struggle for survival.

I must admit, I reached a point where I was prepared to kill others with a feeling of impunity. After all, I reasoned calmly, they had done as much to me, and had wished even worse. Those who had thought I was condescending to them, just because I’d rounded out my vowels – so as to be understood – and had learned my language from several books, they were the people I wanted to die most of all. I would be there to help them to this destination, if at all possible – I would join the rabid armies of the right, I figured out. Such began a very short time, in my life, when I foolishly, but driven by the need to communicate viscerally the intellectually incommunicable sense of loss I had experienced, identified with right wing causes.

shamanism versus mediumship

The point I was trying to bring out in my paper is that no matter how evil
is conceptualised, whether according to the idea of spirit possession, or on
the basis of another cosmological system that also conceptualises good and
evil, health or illness, somebody like Marechera has to use the resources
available to him, as an individual, to try to turn things around. My view
is that the "spirit possession" was a cultural symptom, that Marechera
recognised as telling him that something was wrong within the social life of
his community. So, it registered on that very primary level of personal
experience, in his consciousness. Where he took it from there did not have
to do with the community's cultural conceptions of spirit possession, but
with his own sense of having become acquainted with a quality of evil in his
community which had become concretised -- so as to be experienced in his own
body and mind as a destructive force. This wasn't a conceptual feeling
for him, in the sense that it would be if he were participating in a larger
social and religious system of mediumship and possession. He was rather
reacting to, in a much more narrow way, a concretisation of evil, felt
directly in his body and mind, as if it were a sign to him that he had
become sick because his community was sick. It is this immediacy of the
experience, which is without conceptualisations being attached -- that is,
Marechera's feeling, "I am sick because my community has been made sick" --
that is shamanistic, rather than pertaining to mediumship or other such
modes of traditional religion. The shaman feels his sickness without direct
cultural mediation. He experiences his illness initially as a puzzle, as an
overwhelmingly shocking sensation, during his initiatory madness. He does
not, however, conceptualise within an established system of religion,
concerning the meaning of his illness. It remains, rather, for a long time,
a puzzle, an enigma. It is only later, after much personal investigation,
that he manages to make conceptual sense of it all. His later
conceptualisations of his illness and its possible meanings will not be in
terms of the traditional paradigms of religious practice, therefore, but in
terms of his own highly personal and individual solutions, which he
developed in the pratical processes of learning to heal himself. So the
shaman is a highly individualistic practitioner of healing, following
formulas that he has trained himself to know on a personal and private
basis, rather than following more well established, known and shared
cultural rituals of healing.

Tuesday 2 December 2008

Perhaps it was that my father always wanted a boy as the eldest – and perhaps it was that he indirectly set up the conditions for me becoming one. When people call me “dear this” and “dear that”, I think, “that’s nice dear, but you do not know the thing that you’re addressing.” In fact, my life has been hard enough, on the psychological level. Most girls, apparently, are coddled by their fathers. That’s what gives them their Oedipus complex, and makes them ready and compliant to find a predetermined niche within the larger honeycomb of society. Nancy Chodorow says that women are more entwined in the identities of their mothers, and find themselves pulled in two directions of love – between the mother and the father. My own experience has been different – stand still long enough and you will be targeted, a principle I later transferred to the boxing ring.

I have been attacked by women because I don’t seem to understand the game of giving them reassurance through the kind of empathy that focuses on comparing insecurities – my own insecurities have been too real to me to indulge them in that way by making them a mechanism of common bonding. I don’t relate and pull free from the game, or in the past have played it badly, and with muddled fingers.

I relate to the absolute necessity of being physically and mentally tough, as if my life depended on it, because so often it has. When I got my first job, in the midst of a snowstorm of heavily allergies and general unwellness, as my body rejected the new Modernist and Modernising cultural organs it had been implanted with, my father didn’t congratulate me. Instead, he sat on the porch and pontificated about how “girls” were paid too much. It seemed to me that he always placed himself in direct competition with me, as if by any glimmer of success, despite the difficulties, I could be taking something from him.

And of course he had lost much. However, my compliance with what had been socially expected of me by the culture I was now in was only going to make things worse for him. I had to comply, but if I did, I was expected not to have. Rather, my father had to have me as a repository for his sense of failure, so that he might point to me, and say, “Look! This is a failure!” which would give him room and space to grieve about the way his life had turned out after his decent from his higher place of lecturer to factory man.

I, in turn, learned the ten year lesson, never to stand still psychologically in one place, enough for my father to get a mind lock on me. Keep moving, keep moving, keep your guard up at all times, jab, jab, jab, check the distance between you and your opponent. Final lesson of life and the boxing ring: It is either him or you.

non-knowledge

The difference between me and my friend Jenny, who sat next to me, and was from South Africa, is that she already knew what the limits of her existence were, and was quite happy with that. I didn’t know them even slightly if at all, and even if someone had told me what they were, I wouldn’t have accepted that. I wanted to find out what they were all the time. But Jenny had much more culturally in common with the Australians who sat around the classroom in my first year in Perth than she and I had together, even though we were both from Africa. Even though Jenny went along with some of my more interesting schemes – to meet the sunset at the break of dawn, for instance – there was something within her that was already settled, that knew what to expect from the sun, and didn’t anticipate anything more or less than what had been expected.

It was like so many of my friends who sat with me in my classes at the next school I went to, when my parents moved up into the Perth hills to a place called Lesmurdie. Even if they went to Mauritius for a break, and sunbathed there naked, you had the impression that they already knew what to expect, and had developed their sunbathing naked story to tell only for anecdotal purposes.

In a strange way, this limit drawn on taking a risk was also the limit drawn on their friendships. They knew who they were and that was it, whereas I was always querying it. I just sought, as if to assuage an inner dryness in my throat, others who could feel the same inner yearning. When I found skydivers many years later (SCUBA divers weren’t quite up to snuff), I knew I’d found my spiritual and social equals. I had come home at last – at least for a little while, to where the grain of life seemed normal, satisfying and healthy. A child of war, I had to live up to this level of excitement. My partner at the time got cold chills. “I couldn’t jump,” he said. “The newspaper article on the wall at the dropzone said that a man had been sucked up to thirtythousand feet, had nearly frozen to death, and had drifted hundreds of kilometres away from where he had been dropped. I was afraid that this could happen to me.”

I sneered at him a little, I’m sorry to say, since this artefact alone had been more than enough incitement to persuade me to jump. What if the hand of god had snatched you away and given you a really journey to experience? How would you write home if that had happened? All the things that you would want to say ……..

utter nonsense!

I smelled my natural enemy in any system that sought to orchestate my attitudes and behaviour from beginning to end. That was my best excuse to introduce a symptom of the here and now – to snatch the fellow girl guide’s hat and throw it anywhere, to disrupt the circle of sleepy conformity by introducing the presence of myself as tangible reality, the obstructor of the system that would have us sleep walking along, failing to recognise each other.

I had to create an effect, through my scheming and planning, to prove that I was out there. In seeing myself performing, I would know that I actually existed, like cold shivers of excitement descending down my spine, I’d know through the immediacy of the experience that I was actually alive.

In another way, it was my reverence for authority that simply compelled me to scheme and plan another practical joke. I wanted to know better the boundaries of order imposed by authorities, and how these functioned. I simply had to find out. I enjoyed the terror that such knowledge seeking invoked  – it whet my appetite and made me certain that I and authority belonged to each other, like pairs, like opposites in a symbiotic tangle. If I could find out what authority thought of me, I could feel, in that moment, alive. 

To finish to train

Despite my several days break from training whilst I was in Melbourne during the last week, I managed to return to training today and do a full half hour of aerobics work, plus some other goodies. I'm still far from fit, which is what happens when I have any sort of break, but somehow had much more energy than I had been expecting to have.

Monday 1 December 2008

NO Zim Dollars

fetal madness?

With regard to my mother I did some things which would not have helped.

“This is a dinosaur,” I proclaimed to my first year painting class, brandishing an image of my mother doing the ironing. The shape I’d imposed on the panel of electric blue was reminiscent of the shape and form Dino, with a harsh expressionistic outline, and jarring intermittent spots on the red and yellow, that decorated the figure’s preposterous torso.

We had entered our second year in Australia, and I was reacting to things, I tell you. I saw the possibilities of feminism, of freedom, and I was expressing what I felt, without regard, without consideration. “Why is the woman so emaciated?” asked a fellow class member, at the production of a wasting female nude, straight from the Unconscious, on my first day in class. “Emacey… what?” I’d answered. It was a picture of my self, jauntily rendered, arms angled and outstretched to reveal a hanging garment of transparent batlike skin clinging to ribcage.

The fact is that my mother and I lost much of the depth and emotional resonance of our relationship since the “turning” when I was in Zimbabwe. This was when I was supposed to be when I had come of age, and when I was rendered into the condition of the typical female madness. I’d started to spend time alone – a sure sign to my mother that everything about me was going awry. I lay on the hay in the stable, and reflected. “Where were you?” she demanded to know.

“Getting some privacy, lying on the hay,” I uttered.

Whereas freedom in the past had been my birthright, my inheritance, right now that I was in danger of being afflicted with typical female madness, it wasn’t so. I had to account for all the hours of my whereabouts, so that it could be monitored and ascertained whether or not I was already going mad.

This was distressing. “Sometimes you sit in a fetal position and just hold yourself!” asserted my mother, brandishing her weapon of my certain descent into madness. “Fetal?” I queried.

It was all quite transparent that something was about to, or had already come over me. My female cousins on my father’s side have all exhibited one mode of madness or another around the teenage years, for instance by becoming suddenly unmanageable and going nuts and running away from home. In Masaai culture, I have since learned, the experience is similar. In this patriarchal culture, the villagers apply decoration to the young woman’s body and chase her away from the village she’s grown up in, with insults and abuse, designed to assure that she remains with her husband from the other tribe, never to return. Sometimes females needed a harsh and helping hand like that.

I heard my mother proclaim a few months ago that nobody can tolerate teenagers, because it is a stage at which the human mind goes mad. “But I was exceedingly tame for a teenager, wasn’t I,” I said, “because I did nothing at all.”

“Yes,” you were,” my mother conceded, without perceiving the contradiction between her ideology and the concrete and historical reality.

Cultural barriers to objectivity