Boys will never be Women!

It may be difficult for others to understand why I see right-wing men as generally passive -- after all, the current cultural rhetoric would try to chime in, "They have penises, and that makes them anything other than passive."

But let me try to explain, and we will see how far we get.

To begin with, let us try to imagine a place called Herstralia, where the women roam free as magnificent as Giant marsupials, and where the males are fine and dandy, too, but are somehow incongruously referred to as "boys". Plodding along in parallel time with this magnificent land of Herstralia is a rather mentally grainy patch of land called GoodolUSA. It's far away so I can't tell you much about it. Besides adult women do not pay much attention to context -- social, political or other -- because that is for whiny little boys who have nothing better to do with their time.

Anyway, in this whiny continent called GoodolUSA, I have a couple of internet pals. I try to help them as best I can from my distance in this great country of ours -- but somehow they won't be helped.

One of them complains about a chronic health condition and says that the hospitals over there simply won't pay to get him healed.  "Why doesn't he just access our public health care system for free?" I think, to myself.  I guess he's complaining about the costs he's charged because he enjoys it, but I've never had that experience myself, over here.
Now, from the perspective of my armchair, I simply don't know what all the fuss is about. "Whine, whine, whine," he goes. (I label this one "the whiny boy", although he doesn't know it yet. It will take a while before I suddenly spring my conclusions on him.)

"Whine, whine, whine," he says to me, one day. "America, blah, blah, blah."

Frankly, I don't know what the trouble is. But in my heart of hearts, I think it could point to the decisive issue that separates the Women from the Boys. After all, I have never had any trouble getting health care. I guess the key principle is to be assertive enough. You really do have to make the time for the doctor's appointment, and turn up when expected to. Once you get there, it is imperative to look the doctor straight in the eye, and tell him exactly what is wrong with you.

But he goes on and on about the same thing. It really tries my patience -- this constant mention that he is in great pain or something.

"Dick!" I tell him (for he really is a Dick), "Haven't you considered that there really might be nothing wrong with you at all? I mean if you are not getting treatment as you claim you should, isn't there the possibility that you are MALINGERING?? I mean, the pain might not actually be real?"

At this, Dick hit the roof -- or at least I imagine that he did, since he never did write back to me again. But isn't that the thing with boys, and how they are? You have to tell them some home truths about themselves sometimes, give them a little bit to chew on, and in reality they simply can't take it at all.

Sometimes I wonder if it's worth all my time and effort trying to help, but I do try to point out that for me accessing health care is relatively easy.

100 percent proof

My ideas are 100 percent ironic proof like the mind-bending spirit kachasu.

And it seems that I must learn again and again that when I see only in an ironic light the forms and structures of ideas that to other people are a mainstay of life -- the very source of their sense of stability -- I am asking for trouble.

One cannot use for fun what other people use for bread and water without risking offence. Just because I get no sustenance or nutrition from gender stereotypes, and therefore feel free to treat these ideas like a puppy would a soft toy does not mean that others cannot or do not receive sustenance from them -- although the manner by which they achieve this I simply cannot imagine.

If I am comfortable with you I'll joke with you, and this is also often a mistake. One gets to see the side of me that doesn't take much seriously at all -- and  as I must keep reminding myself, people do need to take a number of things seriously to derive their spiritual nourishment.

Right wingers, despite their ability of sometimes being able to churn out some startling humour of their own -- arbecht macht frei was quite a cracker -- always turn against my sort of humour surreptitiously. They are like those earnest leftists who can barely tolerate my rendering of all that's solid into smoke.  I can't help myself.  It's my inherent tendency.  My flaw

But after all a flaw is a flaw is a flaw.

And I have no doubt you will floor me for it.

meming

It seems to me more than likely that it is men, not women, who are the carriers of the dominant meme of femininity (they carry it expectantly in their imaginations, and are driven by a half-repressed desire to see the pattern of it repeated everywhere.) Women, on the other hand, carry it only as a recessive meme. If it were not for certain men and the power of their imaginations, femininity as such would have long ago ceased to exist. Instead we would just perceive a spectrum of different people with their different desires and longings.

Marechera as shaman

Of course, as might be anticipated or expected, there is a downside to all of this shamanism, all of this propensity to “shape-shift” and to enjoy “soul journeys” into other psychological realms. The difficulty is the wound, that originative wound, by which one was initiated. Does it produce anything more than the sensations and reactions that are now medically defined as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? That which requires that shamanistic solution of constant self regeneration might be precisely this, which also prevents one’s untroubled re-entry into conventional modes of society and more ‘normal’ patterns of integration? A marginal and not untroubled character, the shaman might be considered to be one that makes the best of his or her less than fortuitous circumstances, and often delivers way beyond what would be considered normal in terms of creative productivity, and not least in terms of the productive nature of the shaman’s self-awareness. It is in this sense, rather than in the sense defined by anthropology as traditional religious practice, that I see Dambudzo Marechera as being a shaman.

Clearly, what the writer was not is simply mad. A lack of self-awareness is that quality defining what we have conventionally and historically (in terms of the Western tradition concerning pathology and its genesis) considered to be a defining factor of madness. One would be better served by looking at the issue from the point of view of the shaman being the recipient and conducting material of society’s madness – a societally engendered madness that he also tries to cure within his own body. When a shaman “reads” his own symptoms in order to come to terms with them, he or she is actually reading that which society disavows about itself. The shaman is thus positioned by accidents of fate as society’s unconscious. Marechera’s particular skill was to be able to interpret the particular unconscious structures of colonial Rhodesia by interpreting his own symptomatology. The role of “shaman” was clearly not one he had consciously or even willingly chosen. Yet, he was stuck with it. No doubt, the term for his condition and above all for his response to it would seem entirely alien were I to have somehow, by chance of luck, encountered the author and suggested it to him. He might protest, resoundingly, that he was a Modernist author, and by no means something so archaic sounding as what I have been suggesting – a traditional medicinal practitioner. The universalism of shamanism, as a result, as I’m suggesting, of our shared human neurological structures, would help to explain how someone as advanced in intellectual study, as the contemporary Zimbabwean author actually was, could still have been a shaman. Not least, one may be considered a shaman if others can obtain healing from one’s perspectives. As Marechera was a gatekeeper to the other world of the colonial unconscious, those suffering from colonial afflictions will be best positioned to obtain healing from his cultural mediations.

de nazifying culture

Then we have the so-called "gender wars", which are touted in some circles as sexy, but are about as sexy as the goings on in Abu Ghraib were sexy. The same principle applies here and is necessitated by the belief systems of the sexists. The belief that to demand one's freedom is really just a cryptic demand for power OVER you, necessitates the severity of the reaction. The sexists have set their terms: The price for the removal of their boot from my neck must necessarily be my boot on their neck. Nothing else will convince them to stop abusing their power other than the exertion of a countervailing force. Their belief system -- which leaves no room for the intervention of reason -- necessitates the severity of this response.

And so, forward with the de-nazification of culture!

And let those who nurture a belief that women are only out to steal their masculinity be reminded that if your intrinsic properties can be taken from you, and appropriated by another, then they were insubstantial.

patriarchal logic

1. Please tell me again, and in natural language if you please. What happened? Do you mean to say that a patriarch -- that is someone righteous, noble and of good standing in the community -- made your life -- that is to say the life of someone irrational, irascible, and irrelevent -- somehow worse? I'm afraid I really can't draw a mental picture of that scenario at all. So please tell me about it again, and once again, be sure to employ only conventional language.

2. Those people at Guantanamo? Of course they were all guilty. How do we know? Because they are have post traumatic stress disorder. They wouldn't have it if they didn't have something they wanted to hide from us. It's just lucky that we caught them as soon as we did, before they destroyed civilisation.

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/limina%20draft%20rewrite.htm

we can see your dubious mechanisms of power

I think what patriarchs (meaning chauvinists of all shapes and sizes) cannot seem to understand the most is this: "Yes! We can SEE your crutch! We understand that you are leaning on it heavily. Yes! We want to take it away."

(Perhaps they intuitively grasp the last meaning, which is why they are so intrinsically afraid of "feminism".) Why should one want to take away the ideological crutches of so many men?

Well, to liberate them of course! One wants to free them to be real men, rather than remaining cripples with a crutch.

But why can't a real man not also be a cripple with a crutch?

Why, indeed?

The eternal childishness of patriarchs never ceases to amaze me.

now that that is over

It would be super joyful gooey goodness all over to be able to get back into some physical training, and observe what sort of decline I have experienced due to my forced vacation from the sport.

Gratefully, the sore throat has turned out not to be swine 'flu as the virus only attacked my throat and nowhere else, making it as dry as the edges of an African drum.

Now that that is all over, perhaps I can get some sleep?

delicates

I have a sore throat. The travel warning slip said I may have SARS or pig flu.

analysing culturally inflected trends of thought

The Brits are peculiar to me in their strange psychological insularity, and I shall make no attempts to understand them. I do like -- and understand -- the self-acknowledged working class Brits, actually. I could joke with the bus drivers and found them to be largely pleasant characters. Their extraversion and tough mindedness amused me. I had the following conversation with one of them:

"My bus ticket it booked for 11 am, but is it okay if I catch this [earlier] bus anyway, if you can check and confirm this ticket?"

Bus driver says: "The number on the ticket doesn't mean anything to me. If you can show me some photo-ID, you can catch this bus."

I said: "So long as my photo-ID looks like me, I can catch this bus?"

Driver: "Yes, if your photo-ID looks like yourself, you can catch it."

[I show him my University photo-ID.]

Driver [Scrutinising it]: "This photo-ID doesn't look like you. It's older than you."

***

On the other hand, the culturally static and inert nature of most of what passes for British "culture" gives me pause for thought.

I am particularly inclined to rethink the value of the school of British psychoanalysis, in particular in terms of whether it pertains largely to the British character structure (in its more common and passive forms) rather than to the human character as such.

I'm thinking about Donald Meltzer and his idea (which now appears in starker relief to me, than before embarking on this trip) that somehow eros (in its mastubatory forms) puts a premature end to epistemological enquiry. This, it seems, could be the case in an incredibly culturally inert societal context. Yet it is counter-intuitive that it would be the case in any other societal context. Rather than being a mind-coagulating, inwards-moving and psychologically narrowing force, eros seems to me to be an expanding and expansive force -- if anything, quite the opposite to how I now see Meltzer as portraying it.

It is the opposite force to that of eros -- the death instinct, and that depicted by Freud as "Thanatos" -- that, for me, has the quality of inertia (or at most a centripetal energy,) according to my cultural experience in Australia. Nietzsche seems to agree with me that it is energy or positive life-force that causes us to separate (as if it were a centrifugal force), whereas "ressentiment" (or a barely contained hostility to others, along with the need for an assured proximity to others in order to take out one's vexations on them) causes us to bind together.

There's something about Perth -- and that is, it ain't Britain

I'm back in it, and it feels dead right to be back in the Southern Hemisphere again. What got to me (initially quite starkly, but perhaps less so, and nonetheless, irksomely right to the final hallowed minutes when the plane passed out of British territory) was the British taste for complete neutrality in fashion, eating and personal style. I yearned for something flagrantly Southern Italian for more times than I could have imagined. Is there anything wrong with expecting a little bit of pizzazz?

When I snapped back into my normal mental state of casual non-conformity, I found the gap between my hope and expectations and the actual state and condition of British processes of cultural thought was even greater than it had seemed to me to have been earlier.

The stark neutrality in taste (the failure to even try to have any particular quality of one's own that isn't general and applicable to any situation) reduced me to my own level of pragmatic utilitarianism. I would take from the situation what I needed, make no effort to get drunk as it would only end in failure, and efficiently process myself out of the country via customs. This was to be the climax of the trip.

I had one item of clothing that remained, for my last morning's stay, and it was woollen, billowing at the bust and sleeves, and cinched around the knees. It has the glorious status of not having encountered my sweat through wear at even one point on the trip. I wore it down to breakfast, with my eyes still puffy and enlarged from the glass of champagne I had made my acquaintance with, the night before.

I came down to encounter one last engagement with a typical English breakfast -- something I now knew on familiar terms as I'd had 16 in one row, during my consecutive days' stay in Oxford.

I was dragging -- sweeping slightly -- however unapparently to me, and I didn't know it. Some pale whisp of a Nosferatu character, a male in only general form, felt fit to tell me. Somehow my sleeve was encountering and sweeping plates. Oh my god, one didn't want to be reminded of an English sensibility, just when one had almost succeeded in eliminating it from one's mind. Just one last act of bland servitude towards my body, I as its slave, feeding it hash and bacon and the ordinary things the English love to eat. Here I was still, in my state of abjection, feeding my body something that it needed rather than desired, and here was an entity, without humour, reminding me precisely of that which I was intending to forget.

A critique from a male slave to blandness, criticising my form.

I tend to react to all forms of interpellation (look it up; it is a term by Louis Althusser) by taking on something of the form in which I've been interpellated -- only in an ironic and exaggerated sense.

In this case, I would be the ingenue and foreigner who knew not how to control the manner of my movements, nor how to be compliant and discreet.

"Oh goodness!" I replied, matching a lack of humour for an irony that wasn't going to announce itself as such. I stared down at amazement at my drooping black sleeves, and gathered one of them up in deliberate fashion. "I don't think that there can be any solution at all to these sleeves I am wearing!"

His Blandness was not cracking a smile.

I later regretted my lack of commitment in follow-through.

"I should have said... I should have said... " I thought, as I sat down to another meal of repetition, "Oh dear! You DO look pale. Are you feeling quite fine?"

If the quintessential British fear is to create a scene, then those who venture forth to challenge foreigners they do not know could find a true encounter with their inner selves by virtue of gratuitous dramatisation.

groundhog day

In my mind (and spirit) I have aleady left Oxford three days ago. Yet when I wake up, each day, I'm still here.

Each day, I have an experience of getting lost in London. Each day, I catch the Oxford coach back to this destination, and start the whole experience again.

I can't feel anything in London because the air does not catch me in any particular way. It has that luke warm blood temperature quality, as if you were still being incubated in a womb. So much of England feels like this that you want to switch off from it in general. Surely it has no deeper meaning than a mother's womb?

I'm glad all of this will come to an end tomorrow morning. Around late morning I will leave for good. I'll leave this womb and the pacification I have felt in it, and kick my feet around in solid dirt and dust.

Have I been decompressed in this deep-sea chamber? Only time and fate will tell.

I've always preferred intense experiences, and I've always set out to create them when the generally haphazard nature of life was not forthcoming in and of itself.

patriarchy and masculinity

It's merely a sign of the depths of depravity of the patriarchy -- its complete inner corruption -- that it cannot imagine any critique of it that is not also inherently corrupt. Thus does patriarchal thinking make corruption out to be the commonplace, the normal human condition.

Yet it need not be so.

Imagine a boxing circuit where it was considered quite permissable, quite de rigeuer, for half of the competitors to dope their opponents between the first and second rounds. Here you have an image of the patriarchy.

Why some people continue to confuse patriarchy with masculinity and to insist that what we feminists are attacking is masculinity never fails to perplex me. It seems that some people have trouble knowing the difference between freedom to rort the system and freedom to demonstrate one's strength.

 Let me put it plainly: one is never not free to attempt to overcome difficulties, and if masculinity consists in this, I see no harm and all benefit to be gained in encouraging it. But complaining that an underclass of women are holding you back does not demonstrate the willpower or the courage of any kind of fighter, and breaking news is that women have it harder than you and emit fewer whines.

No -- the freedom to dope the female opponent should not be confused with anything good or worthwhile. Masculinity, I have been told, does things under its own steam, and does not need additional tricks and gadgets to try to make it look good. It knows when it looks good, because it is authentic.

The reason that the patriarchs are never quite sure if they look good and resort to taking out their frustration on women is because they were never really true to themselves to begin with. They want women to give them the reassurance about themselves that they have failed to furnish on their own behalves.

At Oxford

click on individual images to expand them:


pictures by Rosemary Phizackerley

comparing mysticisms

This is from my impressions walking through Oxford, which is full of religious iconography....

This trip really is coming to a end. I have found Britain to be rather a religious place, at least with regard to its overall cultural suggestiveness and iconography. Australia is less imbued with mysticism at the level of the mainstream. There is something much more considerably cultish about belonging to a church in Australia, as compared to how it seems to be here. The mainstream of the Australian population is considerably more agnostic and irreverent towards authorities such as religious authorities than the society seems to be here. It's not that I have actually met anybody who was overtly religious here -- there are the street preachers, the tramp that told me "God bless" when I bought a charity newspaper from him, and the various cathedrals and theosophical and Christian bookstores.

So religion is in relatively good standing over here, as compared to over there.

Notably, however, I come from a cowboy state where the mysticism of survival of the fittest -- the predominating social darwinistic faith -- holds sway. In general, despite with the surface religiosity of British society, mysticism holds sway much less than it does in Perth. The British approach the things that are beyond human control -- like disablement and death and gender -- in a thoroughly enlightened way, compared to the many social darwinistically imbued Australians.

Memory

I had a late lunch with Memory, yesterday. I know that seems too strange to be true, but I insist that it is.

I'm still in the pattern of eating only two meals a day, most probably because of jetlag (although I feel that less, now) and my body's still generally discombobulated sense of meal times and when they ought to be. Generally, twenty past four pm seems like meal time for me, but yesterday I might have ventured forth a little earlier.

So, I returned to the restaurant (and the table) where all of us has been sitting, the day before, when I'd had to leave early in pursuit of relative (family) matters.

And suddenly: There is Memory.

"Today -- you do not look tired!" -- he pronounced with deftness. It was untrue. I was still tired, but no longer stressed.

He had come into the pub to reflect upon the conference presentation. So I bought him a meal and something to drink with some of my funny-money, some of this strange monopoly stuff that is actually worth more than it seems.

It was pleasant enough to have company. I reflected obsessively about my tiredness, which is something I had been doing more or less ever since I had arrived in the UK. My concern for my health has been a preoccupation ever since I came tenuously close to losing it to chronic fatigue syndrome (during the long periods of maladaptation to the new cultural environment).

In all sorts of ways that I care not to mention, this trip has involved facing various aspects of that trauma and the initiatory factors that bought it on. I don't yet consider myself to have fully recovered.

And Memory and I talked, and I had another pint of beer (which, I suspect made him feel more and more that I was not like the ordinary Zimbabwean women he had been used to.) And I remembered that fatigue, in my father's eyes, was always a sign or characterological weakness, that had to be punished within an inch of its life in order to bring it up to scratch and obedient again to convention.

And we talked of skydiving and I said how easy it in fact is, compared to a lot of things that we take to be easy.

And a couple of hours later, Memory recalled an appointment that he'd missed by several minutes, and he had to rush to meet it.

as concerns "glomming on"

There comes a time when with certain inquisitors that it is necessary to cut your loss and simply allow these inquisitors to glom on.  Such is the paradox:  to be present, but absent in the face of strong oppression.

On what are they internally driven, by all the powers of their imaginations, fueled by the restless agitations of their unconscious minds?

They want a negative story about women -- about how women are eternally weak and inferior and how they deserve everything that has ever been dished out to them.

My first explanations are always, let me say this here and now, the ones that I know to be true. Yet they are also the explanations that are least likely to satisfy the inquisitorial mind. Such a mind eschews the most direct explanation in favour of sordid fantasies about inherent feminine corruption.

It is to these folk and to others of an inquisitorial nature, that I throw the chicken bone, the tail of the lizard, a small distraction.

I make efforts to confess to all of the "witchcraft" that has been imputed to me. In doing thus, I merely provide the only form of explanation that they are capable of latching onto: The form of explanation that suits their craven innermost desires.

Needless to say, such an explanation isn't true . To repeat: my first explanation -- and the one that I always insist on, and keep returning to -- is always and forever the correct one. Yet one must throw a hungry dog a bone.

Inquisitors always get the explanation that they crave ... the one they most richly deserve.

my emotional block

It's the end of the conference -- finally, I feel released!

Mon dieu. Overall it was a success, although I rattled, somewhat, one person, because of a certain social ineptitude that wasn't only related, in the initial case, to severe jetlag and culture shock, but also to the reality that I'd identified her as a social conservative in manner and attitude, and felt immediately out of my depth. I haven't dealt with social conservatives since I endured my experience of being bullied in the workplace about 15 years ago. I've avoided them. Like the plague.

I realise, too, that I have some Marecheran tendencies, that can wear thin. Standing at the top of the bell-tower overlooking Oxford, I exuded: "Being here reminds me of my old skydiving days, and it's in moments like these that I reflect on how I don't want to repeat them."

cultural stereotypes

One might, taking a cue from Ashis Nandy, differentiate between the kinds of damage that can be done in colonial societies and that which is done in and by those societies that have an efficient industrial machine -- far more efficient than is available in colonial societies. The later societies also have a more efficient military system. But the evil of naziism is projected backwards (in developmental terms) onto colonial societies, as if the racial distinctions were somehow a religion (which, for some colonialists they were, indeed, but these were a small cluster of 'true believers'). The majority of the 'colonisers' were not so efficiently organised by an ideology to think and act very clearly according to categorical terms of race -- an anti-intuitive fact, no doubt, for some. Rather, the inherited certain attitudes quite subconsciously (and what I mean by that is that these attitudes about race and gender came to them via cultural conditioning in entirely subtle ways).

But, the assumption is that a white from Africa has learned an ideology about race, that they are tenaciously holding onto and which they must be disabused of in a way that forces them to release their tight, possessive fingers from the holy grail of racism. (read: "must be reeducated").

This is the mistake. Those self appointed re-educators also have an attitude that has been just as subtly imbued, concerning the naturalness and superiority of their own moral position, which, like all positions, has been subtly culturally conditioned. But they don't see that their own cultural conditioning is precisely that, and has its own errors entailed in it, such as presumptions about progress, presumptions about the superiority of their own nationalism, and illusions of being in a position to judge others.

The assumption is that it's just all about ideology and who has the superior one. And the answer to that is taken to be self-evident: The reeducators do!

To the naive -- who are not yet initiated regarding the burden of femininity in Century 21.

[A CONVENTIONAL TOKEN OF SKEPTICISM]:

I’m sure there are true instances of workplace mistreatment but I’m also just as sure that there are times where mistreatment is perceived where there actually is none.
Dee | 05.16.09 - 2:36 pm | #

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[TO WHICH I REPLY]:

IWorkplace bullying, as I experienced it, involved the shifting of the blame for bad managerial decisions onto me as I was weakly positioned to deflect criticism. In terms of the organisation's structure, I was in the weakest position as a new employee who didn't know the ropes, furthermore didn't understand the dominant culture of the society I was in, and was female to boot (thus easily impugned in terms of various already salient cultural insults).

Deflection of blame for bad decisions (in this case, the purchase of a computer database system I was using, that was not as efficient/easy to use as had been anticipated), plus an already stressed out workplace with dysfunctional ways of handling stress (taking it out on junior employees) led to my predicament.

Of course the gendered element in all of this is that a male is automatically presumed to be competent due to some supposed inherent rationality that he inherits via his penis. A female, conversely, is assumed to lack this basic function of rationality in her assessment of the situation -- particularly if she is a junior employee, and even more so if she is not fully cognisant of all the workplace psychological and structural dynamics that were set into place before she entered the scene, and which tend to trip her up.

A female who is being bullied because of the prior existing illnesses of the organisation must be able to thoroughly explain the full background of the disease and disorder of the organisation to anybody who will listen. If she cannot account for the seemingly irrational behaviour of others, then it falls upon her (as the feminine, and therefore imputed irrational party) to take the blame for the irrational behaviour of others. So she simply must strive very hard to get to the bottom of things and furnish a very thorough explanation (to explain the REASON FOR the seemingly irrational behaviour of those in the organisation) or else whatever appears to be irrational is imputed to her, as if it were her own irrational perceptions, or behaviour, that was at the seat of the organisational problems.
jennifer armstrong | Homepage | 05.17.09 - 4:29 am | #


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[TAKE /2: emendment]:
If I may utter my feminist whine or two in relation to the above comment conveying skepticism. Workplace bullying, as I experienced it, involved the shifting of the blame for bad managerial decisions onto me as the path of least resistance to criti[ci]sm.

By this I mean to say that I was in no position myself to deflect the blame onto others for problems that were passed down to me, and made into my responsibility by bad management. Actually, it is impossible to "manage" from the bottom, especially if you do not know the history or the deeper workings of the organisation. But this is effectively the burden that was passed onto me, as a junior employee, to take responsibility for things that had gone wrong at a managerial level many years earlier, and yet without understanding the background to these problems initially.
jennifer armstrong | Homepage | 05.17.09 - 4:34 am | #

jetlag in the Soviet Kingdom

Jetlag has its own superordinary effect. It still lingers -- and it is restricting my diet, making me prefer sleep rather than something to eat. I do not crave social company so much as I crave sleep, although I sometimes have these strange mad longings for things familar - the sun, the sound of a lover's voice, familiar tones and faces.

Culture shock imposes its own version of delirium on the mind. It can give the mind a feeling of invulnerability up to a point, such as "I'm walking rather close to these construction workers on the street, but were I to slip and fall, they cannot hurt me, because either I or they are probably unlikely to exist." (There simply cannot be both sets of us in this parallel universe.)

That is how it is when jetlag meets culture shock. There are other dilemmas, too -- unresolved issues about where and when I belong. I have a yearning for a home, a little wooden farmhouse somewhere, with some animals to take care of (as well as to take care of me.)

The parallel universe that is British society couldn't be more different than I had anticipated. Only the University, which harbours a culture of the intellect (and study) has any cultural overlap with where I've come from.

This is easy enough to forget. I wake up in a mind-numbed state, having conspired with fate to consume half a back of ribs plus chicken wings, along with a couple of margaritas last night (my failure to think of anything more imaginative to imbibe -- the consequences facilitated by the waitress, who made it easy to follow along previous lines.) It is the next day, after the "test", and I will take my time preparing for it. Somehow, I imagine vainly, everything must have returned to normal. After all, there is no more anxiety.

But step outside, and I am met again with these strange aliens, these underwater snakes and seahorses, who bear a vague resemblance to humanity, but only in its most estranged formulation. They don't notice me and I don't notice them. This is the truce we have agreed upon. That way, we do the least to disturb each other's parallel worlds. It jars the mind a little, though, the recollection: I'm not home yet; I only thought I was.

The behaviour here is odd indeed, and the accents. Because I had thought
"Are you being served?" was British high farce, I had overlooked the fact that what is depicted in this show is actually British reality. Similarly, "Some Mothers do 'ave 'em" is British reality. Neither of these shows are farce. There are various indications of this.

For instance, whilst sitting in an Irish restaurant, I saw a man, whose index finger, I am sure, was inserted in his left nostril, for at least fifteen seconds. Maybe it just seemed that way, upon reflection, but from several yards away, the gesture seemed incredibly convincing as a nasal entry. Today, a minivan, which had your sixty year old mother's voice, was bleating rather plaintively and repetitively, "Help. Help. This security vehicle is under attack. Please, call the police." Nobody called the police for the dame, although the alternative option would have been more polite.

This society, it seems, just isn't very macho.

It's also, I hesitate but momentarily to remind the reader, out of date. People don't wear the same sorts of clothing that they do here anymore. They also have different attitudes. People, where I come from, assert themselves and jostle for position.

Where I come from, people think that if you have a problem then it's "in your head", but not in everyday reality. They think there really aren't any problems unless they're other people's problems -- which are not worth worrying about, if that's the case. That is to say, people where I come from are unconscious sophists, who put their own interests first.

People here, however? They are utilitarians in moral fervour.  I'm joking, of course.  Road work signs, among other things, indicate this philosophy: "We are here to improve the roads for you. Please get back to us if this isn't okay, or in an emergency." Also, rather than signs roaring militantly from the heights of buildings, "Union Built", we have the rather more demure, "Considerate Construction," which, pedestrians are told, is all about an administrative initiative to make necessary construction considerate, presumably to passers-by.  And then there is the problem of the early 1950s and how it never went away.

British rationality and the Australian cultural cringe

One of the main things I am finding that makes it much easier to function in the UK than in Australia is the higher cultural level of British rationality as compared to the aforementioned.

Let me put it plainly. When I say, "I am from Australia," people do not look at me as if I'm playing a trick on them or trying to take advantage in some nefarious way. They simply assume that what I'm saying is true. It seems to me that British largesse is mature enough to allow that other countries and cultures actually do exist, living alongside British culture and existence. I'm not sure if the general zeitgeist of Australian culture has this maturity in general -- I would suggest not.

In Australia to confess, "I am from elsewhere," immediately tends to put people on alert. "What is wrong with Australia that you would somehow mean to be from elsewhere?" people seem to want to know. "Why can't you just be from the same place, with the same outlooks and perspectives as everyone else?"

Primarily, Australians tend to want you to stop "making excuses", and just accept that we all have the same basic cultural conditioning, the same basic outlooks, and the same educational backgrounds. Another way of thinking is a direct threat to this point of view because it opens up the question of social hierarchy. Are you expecting to be placed in a higher social position than everybody else, because you claim to be from elsewhere? Australians are not sure, but they are certain that the door to this possibility must be immediately closed. The quickest way to do it is to assert that even though you could possibly be from somewhere else, you are so in no significant way that matters.

Due to this cultural (and political) reflex, it is very difficult to make any sort of progress in Australian society if one is starting from a cultural position that is simply not reducible to being 'just like everybody else'.

In Britain, things seem otherwise -- at least on the surface.

Lord have mercy on the ppl of England for the terrible food these ppl must eat!

The one advantage of Oxford and its region is that it is condusive to the intellect and to learning. Really things are made quite easy here -- easier than I had expected to go ahead and discover new information.

The disadvantage to being in the UK is that it is neither a Mediterranean country (nor culture) and that it is not influenced very much by such. That which to my mind is classical food does not make its entrace here.

The stomach craves olive oil, with fresh seafood and vegetables dark brown and green. It desires antipasto.

It implores Lucifer, as king of fire and appetite, to provide them, but street after street yield only odd things, sturdy things that by virtue of their sturdiness in concept you fear may sit forever at the top of the intestines, never to pass further in the process of digestion.

A pint of guinness helps these sturdy meals along. But then it's necessary to wander home, initially in the wrong direction, as molecules of guinness conspire with jetlag that has dug itself in and is determined to last the full duration of my trip. A helpful street sign most luckily points me in the right direction -- the opposite direction, and saves me hours of hapless wandering the streets.

Chargrilled fare or "old orleans" blackened chicken seem the next best things to those my stomach most desire. Yet, amazingly I'm offered condiments to go with the blackened chicken. Tomato sauce on anything other than an English breakfast strikes me as odd.

The taste of lime or lemon would have complimented this dish more. (It has taken me a few days to realise this.)

How funny.

just a shumba drinkka

You know, when I and my family first arrived from Zimdesia in the dizzy days of the early eighties, and landed far afield, it eventually, after hundreds of days, dawned on me that I was exceedingly uncool in terms of my attire, my hairstyle and my manner of conducting myself. I thought it was because of the timewarp that Zimdesia more or less was in those days, after Zimbabwe had newly cracked itself out of the nut of Rhodesia.

Yet Oxford region takes the cake in terms of uncool (read: conservative) dress-codes and mannerisms. Albeit that the people, so far, have been extremely accommodating, I can't help looking at every-single-person-around-me and thinking, "what time capsule have you just crawled out of?"

Truly part of this is the uncoolness of attire. The other part of my reaction has a deeper history and meaning to it. Britishness as a style is historically to the rear of both Rhodesian and Australian cultural politics. It's what we leave behind in order to grow up ourselves. Consequently, somebody with an overtly pommie accent seems somehow larval, somehow laughable. I find myself subtly taking a distance from these people: "Surely, they can't be serious???!"

And, on a final note, since all good things must, eventually, come to an end, I leave you these few thoughts:

"Met a pommy
In the army
All thin and wan and pale
We offered him chibuku
He said
No thanks very much,
I'd rather have ale!"

update

you cannot contact me via the phone number posted below, as my phone is apparently out of function in this zone.

Please try emailing me instead.

I'm sad to say...

I'm off to the UK.

Won't be back for many a day.

My cell phone number is 041 635 7552

for those who are interested in meeting up.

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/newoxfordpaper.htm

The Western world is much more priestly

One of the reasons why I still have a strong affection for the third world in relation to the first world is that in my experience ideology had less of a hold there. I speak merely of my experience, in this case, and things may have changed, and will continue to change.

Yet it was in the first world that I first came across the most outright manifestation of rampant ideology. It is -- as Nietzsche pointed out -- always with the priests that one can expect to find the most extraordinary lies. This point of time relates back to when I was 17. My family and I, at that time, were rather Christianised in something like the cold, Anglican sense. Suffice to say that religion did not go all the way down to the core of my being. My father's case, as I have suggested elsewhere, has always entailed a far more severe form of Christianisation. He is one of God's fool for whom black is white and up is down.

It was at the age of 12 that the first real way of misogyny kicked in. We'd lost the war, and stress seemed to bring out a misogynistic reaction in my father, as if it were women who had lost the war for him. There were other stresses, too. By the age of 16, it was the stress of feeding the family, which mingled back then with the idea that boys were worth something, but girls really had to be off-loaded into the hands of another male and why weren't they gone yet?

My sister and I bore the brunt of my father's greatest fury around this time of post-migration, although one of my younger brothers also came in for his rage attacks, although to a lesser degree. You could tell that in general there had been a shift towards directing the family's meagre love resources towards the two boys and pushing the two girls out into the cold. You could tell this in part by who won the family battles, and whose side was always taken -- it was never the side of a female.

At the beginning, when all of this was just starting to brew, and hadn't reached its magnificent peaks of hostility that it would later amount to, I went around, for some reasons unknown, and since forgotten, to drink tea and eat a biscuit with the priest of my parent's current church. I mentioned to him, during the exchange of niceties, that my parents were not fond of me at all. They seemed, I said, to hate me.

I had been brought up to consider all authorities to be potential mediators, not to take one side or another in a debate, but to uphold their authority by trying to get to the bottom of any significant matter. That is what my Rhodesian upbringing had taught me -- which is the proof, more than anything else could be, that my Rhodesian upbringing had not been thoroughly imbued with ideology. There was still some room in the culture for practical action based upon belief in actual truth values, rather than a descent into pure ideological practice.

This priest at that time, I am sorry to say, gave me my first tast of pure ideological practice, in a way that registered entirely false to me, even at that time. He responded to my expressed concern with a denial: "Of course your parents love you." As I had never been flat out contradicted in my perceptions before, this response registered as fairly nonsensical. I'd thrown an arrow and it had bounced off its target without penetrating it. Oh well, I thought, it doesn't really matter.

It remains worth it, all the same, to consider the kind of response I had been expecting, based upon my rather different cultural expectations. Having been well enough exposed to Christianity and its mannerisms, my expectations were already not too high, concerning what might effectively be done by appealing to a priest for anything. My anticipation was that the 'family priest' would have listened very carefully to what I was saying, and would have believed it to be accurate communication about my experiences. He would have kept it in the back of his mind to speak to my parents in the future, at some convenient moment, in order to see if the relationship might be improved somehow. In the meantime, he would have given me biblical platitudes, to keep me going. That would have been the Rhodesian way; the Third World way.

The Western approach is often much more flatly ideological, I found then, and have found since. There seems to be a disbelief in basic truth values. More often, one immediately feels combative when confronted with an unfamiliar truth, and accuses whomever is saying something of lying.

The Western world is much more priestly than Rhodesia ever was.