Tuesday 29 September 2009

"The deadly hatred [between] the sexes"


The above is a Nietzschean formula or rather aphorism (for I would not recommend you putting it into practice).

It's the point at which, for all of his insights and wisdom, Nietzsche introduces ressentiment into his picture of human relationships in the future, and so he makes ressentiment into the defining principle of "Nietzscheanism".

I have two important things to say about this particular defining principle of life:

1. I am not a person of ressentiment. I know how belong and get along -- but more importantly, I know how to take pleasure in all forms of genuine superiority without them first having to earn my recognition by declaring war on me.

2. However, there are those who persist in making war on women, as if this act alone would prove their masculinity. With regard to them I will only submit that Nietzsche's conception of "deadly" and "evil" -- which he attributed to women -- are, well, understated.

Let me state it : I do not like the entrenchment of the principles of ressentiment as significations for nobility. That doesn't work for me, psychologically. I'm not that sort of person.

I'm not sure that I ever used to be that sort of person either. Before I knew the literally quite deadly (in the material sense) and evil nature of male ressentiment, I may have found myself, at times, amused. These days, less so, because I think that so many autos de fé are unnecessary. Really. You don't need to prove your masculinity by hating on women. It would also be good to have fewer self-crucifixians.

For there are men -- living and breathing ones at that -- who do up to this day, roam the Earth quite freely, and never have to prove anything about their masculinity.

masculinity as a product of Western metaphysics

There's a sinister little trick of Western metaphysics, and one has to examine it closely in order to understand its mechanism. (It is a much different thing to understand its results.) A sense of how this sinister rhetorical trick works has been lurking at the sidestream of my consciousness for several years, but it took Samuel Slipp ( The Freudian Mystique), and more indirectly Georges Bataille, to make its features plain to me.

You see, Western masculinity, more often than not, is a product of rhetoric. Whether or not it exists prior to the imposition of this rhetoric, by which it sinks or swims, is difficult to say. What is certain is that the rhetoric intervenes to make a subject either masculine or feminine.

Bataille, of course, uses it against Nietzsche, to prove that he was self-defeating. (I understand this manouevre as an expression of Bataille's will to power.) Nietzsche, he said, had a will to fall.

"How was that?", you may well ask.

Well, he ended up hugging a horse in Turin, after he broke down from all the strain. His philosophy led him to that point, obviously, and consequently this must have been his unconscious goal all along. Touché . Or "hoisted with his own petard," as the Brits of yore might have intoned.

For, masculinity, according to Samuel Slipp, was in Europe metaphysically described and circumscribed by the concept of the active will. Logically, then, for something to happen to you that you had not actively willed to happen, would take you outside of the boundaries of masculinity into unknown territory -- perhaps territory that was fatefully "feminine".

So Bataille was both "saving" Nietzsche's masculinity and also scoring a point against him when he attributed what may have been a product of fate alone to Nietzsche's active will: Nietzsche wanted to fall from grace because he had an Icarian complex, Bataille said.

According to Slipp, Freud was in on the same gig of masculinity creation. Except that it was primarily his own masculinity that Freud was creating, by using the logic of "active will" to imply that he was no feminine Jewish dame (an ethnic slur popular during his time). That is, his conceptual system had to posit only "active forces" so as not to be seen as being corruptly Jewish.

Unfortunately this logic of "active will" resulted in Freud seeing incest survivors as subjects who energetically seduced their parents. Passive victimisation would not do as a conceptual construct. The subjects had to be depicted as being at the centre of an active will. Like Bataille's Nietzsche, then, they could also be seen as being instrumental in orchestrating their own demise.

--

Western masculinity, as per the above, is a product of a rhetorical device that is nothing if not contrived. This rhetorical device has a tendency to make anyone whose life isn't 100 percent perfect look like a self-defeating asshole. It's also very easy to defeat a Western masculinist purely on the basis of his own logic, by pointing out some of the failures in his life and insinuating that he must have wholly intended them, if he is to be masculine at all.

Monday 28 September 2009

Shamanic initiation

I have an extremely proficient survival instinct that seems to be a function of either my biology or my very early programming. Quite simply, under extreme stress, I am able to shut down all of my emotional functions to function more directly on the basis of survival. Or rather, a switch flicks in my brain, and I'm a different person.

The first time it happened, I remember thinking, "Oh, that's very strange. A moment ago I had so much pent up rage in me that I could barely tell what was happening. And now the heat has turned to frozen cold, and everything is very clear and utterly transparent. Without a doubt, I am on a mission to utterly destroy my enemies, without pity, without words."

Once initiated by experience to this kind of self-knowledge, one does not forget it. It's not that one does in fact kill one's enemies, but that one knows that it is quite within one's capacity to do so. The logic of one's thinking, in frozen calmness, is to facilitate destruction of the other, and to save oneself. One sees, quite suddenly and transparently, in black and white, the political dynamics that are in operation and wonders why they were not evident before.

This was the nature of my own shamanic initiation -- an encounter with some inner resource that took matters into its own hands, and shook off the outer threads of my existing personality as so much superifical posturing. I'm not the same person that I was before that experience, and at times I've had to actively distance myself from certain people when I feel this inner ruthlessness demanding to be released. (It's like a missile, in that it cannot be recalled, but will find the vulnerable aspects of my enemy, it's target.)

The force of this awareness once shattered my previous identity and made me realise not only that I was capable of far more than I had imagined, but that the life I had been living up until then was not based on self-knowledge.

One does not look back regretfully, after a shamanic initiation. One now has power that one didn't know enough about before, and there is the capacity for self-knowedge that enables one to moderate that power to work for good and not for evil. But, one knows that it is dangerous for others with a different base for psychological knowledge to try to manipulate those who have survived shamanic initiation.

Saturday 26 September 2009

Nietzsche and mountain building

Most people's assumptions are derived "common sensically" enough -- that is, in leaping to the conclusion that it is necessary to have an attitude of self regard, in Nietzsche studies, that one is too cool for school. Those who try to maintain a rugged independence that is based around ego and ego postulations seem unhealthy to me, since they must repress their social needs and cover up their consequent neediness with hostility. Such an approach cannot be related to health by any means.

I think the only way that a degree of anti-social orientation can be squared up with health is if the orientation is shamanistic -- because the shaman is both a marginal social character and one who has learned to be emotionally self-sufficient, by drawing his energies from their originative source in Being.

So a Nietzschean approach without this shamanistic knowledge is like a recipe with half the ingredients removed. The resulting concoction is unlikely to be of benefit, and may do harm.

And there is also the conceptual issue of how a purely ego-oriented approach to living could in any way square with this:



Spirit is life which itself cutteth into life: by its own torture doth it increase its own knowledge,--did ye know that before?

And the spirit's happiness is this: to be anointed and consecrated with tears as a sacrificial victim,--did ye know that before?

And the blindness of the blind one, and his seeking and groping, shall yet testify to the power of the sun into which he hath gazed,--did ye know that before?

And with mountains shall the discerning one learn to BUILD! It is a small thing for the spirit to remove mountains,--did ye know that before?

For those who have no knowledge of the internal structure of shamanism, this stuff could only be nonsensical or "a trick". There's no way that worship of one's own ego can square with the shamanistic occasional reduction of one's ego for the sake of mind expansion.

And this, which refers to the shamanistic purposeful loss of ego for the sake of life enhancement, would make even less sense to those who are purely ego oriented:

And never yet could ye cast your spirit into a pit of snow: ye are not hot enough for that! Thus are ye unaware, also, of the delight of its coldness.

Friday 25 September 2009

mind and body

Shamanism conceptualises mind and body differently from in the manner of Descartes.

In shamanistic practice, mind and body are one -- since the body is the instrument which one uses to investigate reality. Yet, conceptually for shamanism, there is a physical world and a mental world, which are in a dialectical relationship with each other. The apparent contradiction of these two postulates is partly resolved by understanding the shaman's body is in fact a "bridge" between the realms of ordinary and non-ordinary reality. That is, from the perspective of the body, the mind and body are one, but from the perspective of the mind, the mind and body are in dialectical relationship.

The body has access to a broader range of perceptions than the rational mind does, but the mind draws its inspiration from the body, and on the basis of that determines what is to be its overarching intent. Thus an ontological unity is assumed, but a practical division of labour is also maintained, between the mind and body.

It is in this sense that the shaman straddles "two worlds".

Nietzsche / Shaman

But the people ye remain for me, even with your virtues, the people with purblind eyes--the people who know not what SPIRIT is!

Spirit is life which itself cutteth into life: by its own torture doth it increase its own knowledge,--did ye know that before?

And the spirit's happiness is this: to be anointed and consecrated with tears as a sacrificial victim,--did ye know that before?

And the blindness of the blind one, and his seeking and groping, shall yet testify to the power of the sun into which he hath gazed,--did ye know that before?

And with mountains shall the discerning one learn to BUILD! It is a small thing for the spirit to remove mountains,--did ye know that before?

Ye know only the sparks of the spirit: but ye do not see the anvil which it is, and the cruelty of its hammer!

Verily, ye know not the spirit's pride! But still less could ye endure the spirit's humility, should it ever want to speak!

And never yet could ye cast your spirit into a pit of snow: ye are not hot enough for that! Thus are ye unaware, also, of the delight of its coldness.

In all respects, however, ye make too familiar with the spirit; and out of wisdom have ye often made an almshouse and a hospital for bad poets.

---

and how does one sacrifice oneself -- apart from by becoming shamanised?

Thursday 24 September 2009

The source of shamanistic powers

The key discipline of shamanism -- and I would say it is the health-giving discipline at that -- is that one learns to tolerate ambiguity. For instance, when a situation is ambiguous, one can rest with that, and allow it to be so, until such a time when the nature of things becomes clearer. It is the capacity to accept life as it is, in the moment, without pressing for a shake-down so that everything gives up its meaning to you in a kind of positivistic and absolutist manner, that is the source of shamanistic wisdom. One realises that ambiguity is in the nature of things, and that when one attributes meaning, it is not because there is meaning already present to the situation, but rather one is creating the very meanings that one bestows (which is not to fall into extremely relativistic thinking -- some interpretations are far more fitting to a situation than others will be.)

But it is the capacity to withhold judgment, until one is sure about the interpretation that one ought to give, that allows one to experience more of reality in terms of its complexities and nuances. This, too, is enriching and health-giving.

Giving in to any pressing need to immediately have "answers" only produces intellectual and strategic errors. It is this tendency that puts a person who is less shamanistic at a disadvantage in relation to one who is more shamanistic in orientation. For the one who reveals his interpretation of a situation reveals a great deal about himself -- and if the interpretation is at all premature, it will be made up of a greater proportion of projection as compared to the proportion of genuine understanding of the situation's nuances. The weakness of the beholder's mind is shown in leaping towards a premature resolution of the ambiguity in favour of either one aspect, or the other aspect of reality being true. He resolves the issue prematurely, in his mind, because he cannot stand the tension that is bestowed by the apparent ambiguity.

This leads to the other point -- the shaman's "strength of mind". It consists in the capacity to endure great tension in accepting ambiguity, whilst patiently waiting (not passively, but actively), for insights to develop. Weakness of mind, conversely, is manifest by those who have some kind of "received truth", which causes them to jump to conclusions prematurely -- which, in turn, puts them at a disadvantage in relation to complex reality.

Also, there are certain aspects to shamanism that are downright ascetic, despite Eliade's claim that shamanism is "ancient techniques of ecstasy."

But there are some aspects that are very much akin to me working out in the gym and really sweating it in order to enhance my strength. Sure, there are endorphins involved in this kind of preparation -- but it is also kind of ascetic.

The journey back to the pre-Oedipal level, for instance, in BLACK SUNLIGHT, is really about developing one's toleration of lack of meaning and ambiguity, whilst coping under the pressure of heightened emotional states (terror and sexual arousal).

It is really, I think, akin to doing a mental strengthening exercise in martial arts, putting oneself under a lot of pressure, for the specific purpose of developing the mind's toleration of ambiguity which is the source of shamanic power.

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

Wednesday 23 September 2009

black sunlight

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

The Englishman who wouldn't take a bath

NO,
he said
This is how God
made me
and though
I get dirtier by the hour
I shall NEVER take a bath!

For here I am
And this is how God
made me

No regrets, no regrets, none!

If people can't accept me as I am
at least they know

I ACCEPT MYSELF

Get a grip of this

It might be dirty

But it's me all over.

Marechera's Black Sunlight

Marechera’s Black Sunlight is the cornerstone of his oeuvre, for it is the most shamanistic of all of his writing. The book invites us to undergo, with him, a recapitulation of the past – meaning the specific historical past of Rhodesia, and the psychological states that were common to it during the time of the bush war. The term, “recapitulation”, has a specific meaning in terms of shamanism [footnote: it is from Carlos Casteneda’s books]. One very useful way to look at it is in terms of Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence”, which is central to his book on how to shamanise, and thus recover from the past, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

To recapitulate one’s past, one must first have a need to do so – that is, if the past has left one with any psychological traumas, one must revisit the past in order to recover from these. This is not to say that all traumas can be recovered from, since some cut too deeply for the one who desires healing to be able to benefit from a recapitulation. Black Sunlight, nonetheless, is a novel that invites us to go along with the author as he experiences his recapitulation of past events. The book invokes his mental anguish, as it relates to the anti-colonial revolution in Rhodesia. Marechera invites his readers to go on this highly subjective inner journey, where everything that we would hold to be true and fixed and objective about the world seems to melt into the air, and we are left only with a feeling of complete immersion in the emotions of the time, increasing to an ultimate sense of paranoia and terror as the reader is positioned on the side of the anarchist revolutionaries against the encroaching Rhodesian security forces.

The recapitulation that Marechera invites us to undergo in his book is highly effective – for his psychological approach and aesthetics force us to confront ourselves in “immanence” – meaning in terms of the dynamics of an infant’s early consciousness, before a reality-based ego had been developed [footnote: in terms of Kleinian theory, the paranoid-schizoid position].

This means that there is no escape for us in using the transcendent power of logic and safe conceptual references to the idea that we have permanent (and hence unassailable) identity, in order to escape the psychological immediacy of the historical trauma that is revisited upon us. In facing the trauma of the past, we are in fact facing a temporary and relative state of death of our transcendent ego. And yet – paradoxically – through recapitulation, one reclaims the elements of one’s psyche that had been lost to the whole sense of the self at the time when one was overwhelmed with frightening events that caused part of one’s vitality flee away from the present, leaving a consciousness that was left to face the world in a mode of dull resignation.

Marechera’s style of writing compels us to recapitulate those moments when we lost parts of our “soul” to trauma. If we are strong enough to do so, we can affirm our present lives with the fullest measure of awakefulness and vitality: by facing death we will be better equipped to face life. His book also hints that we will become revolutionaries, if we are able to face ourselves without repressing our traumas.

The revolutionary aspect of Black Sunlight – for the book is not just narrowly shamanistic, but has another message to impart -- is represented by a number of social dropouts, many for whom, for good reason, are female. [Footnote: Marechera’s psychological insights/sympathy with women]. The logic to this is that shamanism, since it revitalise the soul, also puts one at odds with the political status quo, which is based upon resignation and acquiescence to conventional roles in life, (which one acquiesces to because of subtle traumas, which have damaged the vitality of the inner self.)

Monday 21 September 2009

Marechera's Scrapiron Blues (draft only)

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/CHAPTER%20ON%20SCRAPIRON%20BLUES.htm

my good will does not stem from compulsion

I was reminded of a few important facts upon reading this article recently.

It seems that much of the ideology of Randian selfishness has penetrated the general Western cultural consciousness, to the point that being mean is equated with being strong. Conversely, expressing good will is equated with weakness and/or meakness.

Binary thinkers beware!

I am important to you, and assuming that my good will stems from an internal compulsion will cause me to remove it from you.

In fact, I've always retracted my good will from those who thought that it was part of my nature, that I couldn't help but be protective of them. It happens very easily: you try to use the product of my good will as trade, to get in with the authorities, and immediately the good will is gone. You will wonder if you ever had it.

There is a certain amount of natural justice that often operates in human affairs. I have actually had people fired from their jobs, not by doing anything active but by simply retracting my good will. Their erroneous assumptions defeat them, for it was never in the pure essence of reality itself for them to express their selfish pursuit of petty oneupmanship whilst I continued to defend them. One does the most damage simply by removing the invisible defence. Active malice is far from my nature.

My good will is not a compulsion, but those who would tend to think otherwise will find out how important it was -- to them.

Sunday 20 September 2009

Marechera as a Zimbabwean Shaman

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/oxford%20new%20paper.htm

MARECHERA'S MINDBLAST

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

the starry final night of shamanism

Another aspect of shamanism that I am now encountering as a result of putting a lot of facts together is that cliche of a bright flame burning out sooner. As I write this it is without a trace of pleasure. Shamans are in danger of burning out.

Perhaps a shaman, as I have understood this animal, is nothing other than a master of intra-subjectivity. Knowing the structure of the psyche like he knows his own hand, this intra-subjective manipulator conjures it up so that he may see the world in the way that lends it its brightest appearance of vitality. He seduces parts of his mind to corroborate this overall vision, she erases parts that cause her to reflect only on perpetual drudgery, he causes others to see what he sees too, and so, she causes the spiritual rain to come to water others' lives when they've been stuck in drudgery for far too long.

But the shaman, as I have come to understand her, pays, quite normatively, a high price for this. For all of the effort of directing flows and energies, first inwardly, and then out to the world, will use up psychic energy, until there is none left. And once this happens, that which the shaman trades in (knowledge of the pattern of psychical energies) and that which she seeks to use her own resources to redirect (the psychical energies that organise society) will no longer be able to be managed any more. At this point, the shaman's life will be over. Time to hug a horse in Turin, or sit desolately on a park bench in Harare wondering who one is.

This seems to be the life pattern of the contemporary shaman, who burns out quickly in the face of the systematic organisational energies of Modernity.

At the point when this happens, when the flame burns itself out, and where the inwards resources implode, the enemies that one had fought against one's whole life start to close in. Thus in Nietzsche's case, his mother and his sister moved in to take care of his living carcass. In the case of Marechera's Mugabe's cronies moved in against him, in his weakened state, to have their feast. And Nietzsche's shamanistic record became, under his sister's control, a fascist monogram. And Marechera's oeuvre was seized upon by those living normotic bureaucratic lives to prove that he knew nothing about politics.

Such is the condition of the shaman when he draws the last flame out of his body, and those ridden with Thanatos hurry to close in.

Saturday 19 September 2009

It's bile and its also ogical!

Another consideration to bear in mind, regarding Nietzsche, if one does not implicitly understand that his idea of truth is determined by his shamanistic (read: inwardly discovered) approach, one either falls into Postmodernist metaphysics as a way of reading him, or rank biologism.

The third approach seems to have been the most common one, on the Internet. However, it hasn't been thought through with any clarity.

If I am to be thought inferior because of my biology, and I am unable to argue my right to be treated differently than inferior (since, from a rhetorical point of view, my overt abilities are not permitted to matter; rather it is my biology that is significant), then I could find myself to be, politically, a victim of the ostensibly inferior attributes linked to my biology.

Albeit it that I can be easily attacked because of my external qualities, in actual fact I would not be completely helpless "because of biology".

Rather, in fact, rivers of blood will start to flow.

But Nietzsche's philosophy is surely not about divesting of his inner entrails another patriarch?

Perhaps, then, he wasn't so concerned about biology after all??!

happenstance

Really, I can't make much sense of this posture, even from my recollections. I do recall following up a few situations where I got into trouble like this with some mini hook-kicks to the belly, from my right leg, so it is possible that this is what I was about to do. That is probably why I am angling myself in this way. (Because, generally my way of getting out of trouble is either a spinning back fist or a mini hook kick.) What we do see, however, is that Mike has learned to step offline in order to avoid being punched.



Here's another one with sloppy guard position. Gotta admire my ability to get in there with the overarm punch, though.



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aggression without insight doesn't engender respect

It's not what most people want to hear. After all, what would you be if you could not use your last remaining weapon against migrants, against women, against blacks and those of other appearance, who don't look like they belong here?

So often I have had a white male, or even a white woman in flustered patriarchy mode, blowing up in my face. And guess what?

It may surprise you to know that such blowing up, such public disinhibition, does not engender my respect.

I know it is supposed to. I am supposed to be overawed, as if I'd lived a sheltered life and never encountered such a thing of this sort in my whole existence.

But.

When what I see is a zombie, a person without inhibition, it does not engender my respect.

I will however, acknowledge that whenever there is any aggression without insight, it is both my migrant status and my gender that implicitly caused it.

It would be wrong for me not to fall on my sword and accept 100 percent of the blame.

For aggression without insight is caused by me, and me alone.

And it does not engender my respect.  I am insane.

Friday 18 September 2009

limits of panaceas: Nietzsche and Reich

The main error that Nietzsche's philosophy seems to perpetuate is the confusion of the issue of health, as seen and understood by Nietzsche from a shamanistic perspective, with the issue of ego strength. Clearly, the two aspects are often interlinked, but be that as it may, they are not one and the same. A strong ego is important for mere survival when your whole environment seems to be at war with itself. One survives by creating an energy-force field that will keep others at a reasonable distance. In Ecce Homo, egoism is also linked to "the restitution of one's energies." But what is also true is that there are energies and there is ego, and the two are not the same. Strengthening ego, unhappily, does not in a simple and direct manner, necessarily strengthen the energies. The former is a "necessary", but not a "sufficient" condition for the latter, and to the degree that Nietzsche's writing leads us to conflate the two, his philosophy misleads. It does so because egoism can very easily become "armour" that prevents us from directly experiencing the world as we otherwise might. Here is Wilhelm Reich, who accurately explains the problem:

Reich decided the patients' body language could be more revealing than their words. He observed their tone of voice and the way they moved and concluded that people form a kind of ARMOUR to protect themselves, not only from the blows of the outside world, but also from their own desires and instincts. Most of us desire something, and immediately set out to find ways NOT to get it! Reich saw this process working in the body. Over the years a person builds up this character armour through bodily habits and patterns of physical behaviour. This being in the days before Kevlar, the armour was presented as a series of corsetry designs in canvas and whalebone, which included a shoulder-straightener for men. Reich called this work Character Analysis.

It is because we tend to develop body armour that strengthening the ego is not the total psychological panacea that Nietzsche's writing alludes that it is. Rather, sometimes the ego must be suppressed, brought down to the level of being exposed to relatively unmediated experience, so that it may encounter Eros in a new way, and thus nurture itself.

is my eros your thanatos?

There is a way of explaining the nature of those who cannot seem to act on their own behalves (or on the behalf of others).

I've come to see many more of the problems we face in a shamanistic light having read this book, which is by no means "mystical", but has a last chapter that veritably sheds light on how some people in society can become somehow afflicted with a static, unresponsive and (fundamentally) unplastic nature, in a way that robs them of their power to be themselves. Although the paradigm is Freudian, the issues can be dealt with in terms that are explicitly shamanistic, for one is dealing with "soul loss", the loss of ontological integrity.

It is no suprise, then, that among the soul-dead, the advice they give each other runs much like this: "You can't change anything. You are stuck. Your vital forces have been depleted, so don't try. Reality sucks, but none of us can lift a finger to make it any different."

It is, in effect, that people have become afflicted with Thanatos, and that their inner condition is one of devitalisation -- and that is why they give each other this kind of advice.

I was brought up in a context that was almost entirely unafflicted by such a heavy wave of Thanatos, so it never ceases to suprise me how little most people these days feel that they can do for themselves. But the gadgets that bind them, to prevent them from reacting more effectively, are invisible. They accept their debilitating condition as simpy "reality" and "human nature", and can't imagine how the rules imposed by an embrace of Thanatos do not apply to those who operate primarily on the basis of Eros.

There is no patriarchy!

"It's just that women are morons and hateful little crybabies.

"If there was in fact a patriarchy, we would all be able to see it!"

Wednesday 16 September 2009

A peculiar phenomenon explained

One of the most peculiar phenomena that I've ever encountered is one that is apparently already fully recognised by certain mystics. Why did Jesus say, "Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces"?

It appears to me that he was dealing with the aspects of eros and thanatos that are often touched upon by contemporary thinkers of psychoanalysis. Teresa Brennan, in particular, has insights into the the manner in which subject are constrained, unawares, by the force of Thanatos, in such a way that marks their effective "castration" (which means, in her sense, desubjectification; in essence, a loss of vital force).

It doesn't solve our puzzle to know that there are such forces of eros and thanatos in the steam of society at large, and that they can affect us through release or castration of our subjectivity.

There must be more to it than this, and so it is worthwhile considering that whatever is Sacred gives spiritual life, and so pertains to Eros. Yet some people are unreceptive to the Sacred. Surely they are inwardly dead, as the scriptures do in fact imply:

But he said to him, 'Lord, let me first go and bury my father.' But he said to him, 'Leave the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.'
From the perspective of shamanistic inner vision, they have been overcome by the force of Thanatos -- the death instinct. Those who are dominated by the life instinct, Eros, are to leave them alone.

But why the warning that they will attack, then, when presented with the inner force of Eros? Surely, if they are truly inwardly dead, they would simply remain unmoved by such an encounter, rather than resorting to attack?

It seems that Teresa Brennan's writing on The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity can lead us to stumble upon an answer, for it seems that inward death -- or desubjectification -- is not a state of mere inertia. Rather it is defined by a state of deformity that has its origins in social relations.

To spell it out more plainly, there must have once been a time when those who have now become inwardly dead were not "castrated" (in the sense that they lost their subjecthood and will to act upon their own behalves). Those who have lost their inner selves would certainly prefer not to remember it, and would remain unawares so long as they were in the company of those similar to them. However, it is those who are still capable of being carriers of the knowledge of the Sacred -- those who have Eros still within them -- who, quite inadvertently, and by constrast with themselves, remind these others that they have become castrated.

It is for this reason that the dead will rouse themselves to actively attack -- but only when their minds recall all of a sudden that they are in fact quite badly off in comparison to others. It is on the basis of the comparison that these make between their own state (which is no longer receptive to the Sacred) and the state of others, that the dead believe themselve to have been insulted -- and so they rouse themselves a little to "fight back".

Psychological tropes of shamanism (Marechera, Bataille, Nietzsche)

A number of shamanistic tropes can be related to Marechera’s life. These reflect a psychological organisation that is geared towards a shamanistic mode of perceiving and questioning the status quo. In all cases, shamanistic thinking involves the possibility – and indeed the necessity – of “boundary crossing”. This boundary crossing is always ontological, at least in the way in which the one who engages in such boundary crossing experiences it. The typical shamanic experience involves crossing boundaries of identity, which may be considered in terms of gender, race, and indeed species. Later, upon returning to a state of rest after shamanic journeying, the shaman may conceptualise and articulate his findings concerning the ontological structure of reality, and the political and social implications of his findings. Marechera’s writings certainly cross the boundaries of race and gender, in such a way as to get us to reconsider these categories in the light of his revelations. From his shamanistic perspective, they seem anything but stable.

A shamanistic consciousness is not just one that is capable of traversing lateral categories of identity, but is rather, from a psychological point of view, one that appears to remember more about his ontological origins that most people do. *  The severing of oneself from the old order is experienced as trauma, as I’ve stated, and in accordance with this, the shock produces forgetfulness, or in more Freudian terms (referencing the Oedipus complex) – “blindness”. The shaman, however, is capable of remembering this world of primeval unity with the mother as a stable and idyllic state of being (a remembrance of the womb, even prior to an encounter with the mother, and before the violence of atomised and separate identities took hold of us.) Even to the degree that such a unity with one’s origins is frightening, the shaman has adapted his psyche to be able to wrestle “truth” from his engagement with terror, as Marechera explicitly does. [bayonets] It is always to the realm of his ontological origins that the shaman returns, as he “journeys” in order to find spiritual and creative nourishment. It is also the loss of this world that all of his writings implicitly mourn. This cross-referencing between the two psychological positions is central to the psychology of shamanism.

Another shamanistic trope that appears in Marechera’s life is his experience of initiatory madness (in the form of depersonalisation and derealisation). This experience relates to a more mature stage of the authors life, which was marked by the intervention of trauma (at the age of 14) with the death of his father in a road accident; the oppression of the “ghetto” of Vengere Township, the madness and hallucinations that inducted him into the “sink or swim” test that is shamanistic initiation. [The House of Hunger]

It is clear from the trajectory of psychological development depicted in the novella -- The House of Hunger -- that Marechera’s recovery from his mental illness took him towards a shamanistic -- or “magical” -- way of seeing the world and of attempting to deal with its political problems. The books he was reading around the time that he consolidated himself as a writer were on the occult and psychoanalysis. The consolidation of a shamanistic way of seeing the world as a form of turning the tables on his madness and on the “spirits” (psychological and political) that had dominated him is expressed in The Black Insider, and in a more urbane form – playfully depicting the nature of a shamanistic journey as initiatory experience in Black Sunlight. The writing of these books roughly coincide with a time after he was expelled from Oxford, and spent time in Britain, overstaying his student visa.

The acquisition of knowledge as power, especially in terms of an awareness of how things work beneath the surface of consciousness (as apart from how things merely “seem” to be) is also a central trope of shamanism. This orientation towards developing knowledge of the subterranean of “unconscious” aspects of existence is reflected in a number of his works. The knowledge of shamanic journeying through trance is very evident in Black Sunlight, as I’ve noted, not just in terms of the drug references, but in relation to the purposefulness of the journey, which is signified by the fatigue and resignation of the author/persona at the end of the book. Both “A portrait of a Black Artist in London” and “Throne of Bayonets” reveal a shamanic structure that seeks to influence the shape of everyday political reality based upon knowledge that is generally concealed from consciousness, as it pertains to unconscious social and psychological structures, or, in traditional shamanic terms, to “the spirit world” (and “spirits” are in fact aesthetic expressions of these psychological facts in Marechera’s works.) The Black Insider portrays an acute sense of what might happen to the new country that had just become Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, and expresses knowledge of the underlying psychological structure of that society, at that time, in a way that pits a warlike faction against a faction of those who seek intellectual and artistic knowledge and social progress. Other works also exemplify the idea that there is a “spirit world” that is visited by the oppressed and a real or in Bataille’s terms, “profane” world that is oblivious to this other level of experience.

Another shamanistic aspect that is particularly relevant to Marechera’s life and how he lived it also relates to the very different psychological structure of the shaman’s mind – for, if he represses less than others and remembers more of his own origins than the rest of us generally do, he also pays a high price for this in straddling the fence between the realm of “spirits” (the realm of the social and political unconscious, as well as his own personal unconscious) and the realm of surface appearances (that which we take for everyday reality). The shamanistic struggle for psychological equilibrium – which is a quintessentially shamanistic one -- is most evident in Mindblast and Scrapiron Blues. In these collections of works, Marechera uses his survival skills and knowledge to attack the hollowness of everyday life in Zimbabwe (this is also true of his intent in “Throne of Bayonets”. Yet, he is also in danger of becoming depleted of psychological reserves due to his effort, and himself becoming hollow.
There is also one more shamanistic trope that is related to the psychology of shamanism as I have described it and is an essential part of Marechera’s overall style and his mode of political criticism. This is the feature of the shaman who engages with us as a trickster. A master of ontological disguises which set surface appearances against what lies underneath, the shaman as trickster will attempt to “deceive the spirits” — (that is in this case of Marechera, the psycho-political forces in society at large) — in order to control them, whereas the “medium” purports to merely channel them, so as to deliver their messages to the world of the living earnestly and sincerely. There is also the aspect of the shaman’s capacity to bring back to his physically embodied life, new vitality, from the world he enters in a trance. This also indicates a shrewd survival mechanism, drawing deeply upon one’s own resources
[footnote: Marechera’s forgetting of the date of his father’s death, or how old he was at that time and how it happened, can be read as an attempt to “deceive the spirits” as to the impact of this experience on him, by recreating the time and place out of his own mind. ]We can now consider a few more points as they relate to the way that a shaman, as one who is psychologically structured differently from others, engages with the world in a way that promotes his own survival and creative functions:

1. autodestruction and regeneration of the self

Destruction is linked to regeneration as its natural prelude: “Ready must thou be to burn thyself in thine own flame; how couldst thou become new if thou have not first become ashes!” [XVII. THE WAY OF THE CREATING ONE] Both Bataille and Nietzsche use the concept of awakefulness to point to the desired human state. Mythically, the recovered state can also be viewed in terms of restoration of “soul parts” that had become traumatically separated from overall consciousness, leading to an inability to be fully present to the present. What is freed up, in becoming new, is creative energy, and capacity to live in the moment. However destruction of conventional modes of thinking and feeling are necessary first, if one is to become “shamanised”.


2. the use of imagination to supplement reality (tragic sense that life is in need of repair) – this is related to an acute awareness of the implications of the “depressive position” according to Kleinian theory.


3. rebirth through shamanistic initiation to become no longer the child of one’s parent/s
(anti-oedipal/self generating/not socially prescriptive creativity)

This refers partly to the many forms and “guises” of Marechera listed in The Handbook. His “plasticity” [Freud/Nietzsche--BGE] enables him to be his own person, gaining energy from a non-conventional approach to life (ie. not by conformity).

Marechera’s writing often evinces a strategic opposition to the “participation mystique”, which is an anti-oedipal intellectual tactic.


4. the doubling of the self (this is also a literary device, for Marechera, which is based upon the inherent psychological structure of shamanistic practices – that is that there is a self that remains in physicality as well as a self that crosses over to the spirit world in trance). Sometimes these two types of self are aesthetically merged or multiplied as in Black Sunlight and as in the following from traditional shamanism. It also relates to the dualism of shamanism – the two-sided nature of experience per se (“spiritual” and “real”). Yet even this formulation, whilst useful as a model for our understanding, oversimplifies the nature of shamanism and its use of doubling or multiplying the self. One of the purposes of shamanic doubling is not to multiply the self, but to facilitate communication between aspects of the self that predominate and aspects of the self that suffer repression – for instance, even at the hand of another version of the self. The shaman doubles or triples himself to “know” what has been repressed. Yet from an outsider-view, the meaning of this internal communication system may not be automatically self evident. Tragic self-knowledge (and comic relief), however, is shamanic:


Ram Rai burst into tears. These were not the tears of Laladum [the wood nymph with back to front feet], but the tears of a man, who re-emerged at that particular moment. But this too is part of the ritual. It is not an anomaly. It is simply the irruption of a new fragment that makes up the shamanic ritual's complexity, providing for the fact that, among the various actors taking part on the stage, besides the gods, there may also be the "man-shaman".

The shaman's body always projects a double shadow on the ground. A subtle tragic vein seems constantly to underlie every shamanic ritual performance. Just so. Without leaving any way of distinguishing between the faces and the masks. [From "shamanistic solitudes" p 87] This “doubling” explains how, for example, Marechera could both represent AS WELL AS transcend his culturally-based, sexist viewpoints. His shamanic/spirit self and his fleshly self are far from being entirely one. . [From "shamanic solitudes" p 87]

5. Developing visionary perspectives: the sense that one is a tenuous bridge between the ‘here and now’ and ‘the spirit world.’ [similar to mediumship, yet neurologically rather than overtly culturally facilitated]

----

*This makes sense if we consider the developmental process in a psychoanalytic way, whereby taking a developmental step implies a traumatic letting go of one’s previous way of relating to the world. So, one lets go of “nature” and a sense of unity with the mother figure in order to embrace the mores of civilisation -- a process which causes some ripping of the psyche.

This ripping, being traumatic, leads to forgetting the wholeness one had as part of nature as one enters the state of civilisation, defined by being divided -- separated from nature and emotional wholness.  Shamanic remembering could be facilitated by shamanic initiatory madness however.  The problem of becoming mad is also then the gateway to its own solution.

nothing like a rework of the old work -- intro chapter

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/CHAPTER%20NEW%20INTRO4.htm

Monday 14 September 2009

explication of the paradoxical nature of shamanism

I think this introduction (which I am still working on) gives a very clear explication as to the psychologically paradoxical nature of shamanistic practice.

velocity

I can't seem to do much work around August/September. I wonder why, but it seems linked, at least in part, to an increasing velocity of production as the year transpires, of which I seem only partly aware until I hit a brick wall it says:

"I cannot get things done, not at the moment."

I also think that there's a certain kind of pollen that appears in Perth in Spring, that afflicts me more than all the other kinds of pollen put together. It is not the runny nose and the red eyes that undermine my focus on the details. Rather, it is a general mental fogginess that August brings. I get overtired very easily, but so long as I stay on the right side of the tolerance barrier, with regular repenishments through resting, I don't get that overwhelming sense of having to think through thick soup, as though the inflammation from the mating trees had coopted my very platelets. So, I fold my arms behind my head and drink my little tasses of strong coffee, and I justify my sense of lassitude, which isn't that so much as an encounter with velocity (the need to get things done still faster) of which I'm only partly unaware.

Marechera paper

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/oxford%20new%20paper.htm

Sunday 13 September 2009

I am not within the stream of life

I am not in the stream of life, and I have reason not to be. For me, the stream of life is exactly that from which I had to extricate myself, in order to save my sanity. It was already eating away, quite voraciously, at my health, and restricting my ability to obtain wisdom.

The stream of life, is it the natural lifecycle? That is exactly what I have spent all the major effort of my life in order to detach from. I understand the cycle: birth and life and death -- and I navigate the challenges as best I can. I do not see them, however, as one who is actually part of them. I do not feel them intricately.

I understand the stream of life, but only from afar, and not in terms of its inner motivations. When politics or science addresses questions of reproduction, I recoil in horror at the very idea of there being, ever, somebody just like me, for whom I am held responsible. It would be as if I'd never managed to bring myself up to adulthood, at great cost to myself, whilst smoothing out the creases that had formed in the structure of the fabric, along the way.

WE WOULD BE BACK TO SQUARE ONE! (A vulgar and impossible nightmare, come true.)

I think the reason why teaching the very young revolts me is the sense of having to relive a bad dream -- namely that of not yet having extricated myself from the stream of life. It took so much effort just to do that, and it cost me almost everything. How does one go back to that, and accept a role as parent (or parental figure) as if this pain had never happened?

How does one relate to those who relate to you from within the stream of life?

The patriarch speaketh

"Your honour, it may have seemed like a mere game of tennis from an outsider's perspective, but I insist that she kept hitting the ball over the net, which was a clear sign that she was determined to be beaten.

"Also, it wasn't just me that she was trying to make look bad -- but, since I am a male and representative of men, she wanted to pick on all the males in the world, at once."

father, son, holy ghosts: an oedipal story in Africa by Jennifer Armstrong (Book) in Poetry

father, son, holy ghosts: an oedipal story in Africa by Jennifer Armstrong (Book) in Poetry

Friday 11 September 2009

Intent and Will / Perception / Articles / Home Page - Shamanism at ShamansCave

Intent and Will / Perception / Articles / Home Page - Shamanism at ShamansCave

Recapitulation Exercise

Recapitulation Exercise

I am a work machine

I have little energy for anything except work. I work to bring in the extra cent, because tomorrow I may have nothing. When I am not working, I am sparring. But, this, too, is work. I duck and weave. My guard and stance are close to perfect, now and then.

When I am not working, I prefer to lounge around, and sleep.

It is only then that I dream of environments that can speak to me.

More than once, a large, evacuated department store enters my train of consciousness. We enter, stealthily, for it is night. Once inside, I explore the various floors, which have been robbed of their conventional meanings,and now have an eerie, airy all-function quality. I wander through the building that might be opened to the public in a day or two.

I find the third floor, and I enter an area that has been set aside as a gym. It's a kind of cold storage room that has been converted into an exercise space. I am bouncing at the end of a rope and not drowning as I had expected to. (The water from the ice box behind the central space does not go over my head as I had anticipated.)

There are young Czech men trying to advertise their need for a partner, but I see that they will be unsuccessful with their formulaic, factual advertising.

Wednesday 9 September 2009

Logocentrism

Magical thinking is the article of faith of all rabid Christians and patriarchs whose backs are against the wall. Moreover it is the belief system of one who has not found any help.


Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.

Tuesday 8 September 2009

nefariously lurking

The idea that communities tend to form a group mind, by virtue of which they function, is likely to be controversial. At least it is post-Kleinian theorists who sometimes suggest it, but it is not widely written about. Such theorists refer to how the function of this group mind is a way of coping caused by stress, and leads to a use of the unconscious mind at a primitive level, to forge a sense of oneness with the other members of the organisation. Donald Meltzer, following Wilfred Bion, refers to basic assumption groups and this link states that It is only at the level of fantasy that the regression occurs. Yet it can be very clear to one who has been operating outside of the logic of any particular group's "basic assumptions" that these assumptions tend to coalesce into something more solid than the notion of a group "fantasy" readily explains. To encounter the fantasy from the point of view of one who is operating well outside of the fantasy is to reinact the experience of the Titanic "discovering" and iceberg for the first time. Up until then, the idea that the group was working on the basis of primitive systems of communication that go beneath the level of rational consciousness would have seemed outrageous to you.

But not now. Now you know that you have most certainly hit something. And even if what it was you hit cannot yet be understood, the gaping gash in the side is testimony to the fact that something significant has been encountered in actuality, not as fantasy.

I think there is a reason why why those who have experienced bullying within some kind of organisational system have difficulty explaining themselves. There are those who will maintain quite forcefully that "there are no icebergs here" and "nothing has been struck!" -- for indeed the ocean seems to look extremely calm from the perspective of the surface of consciousness. It is only once something has been hit that one changes one's entire view about all of this. Whilst life may seem to offer nothing but plain sailing, there is often something else that lurks nefariously beneath sun-gilded surfaces.

Some would call it politics.

I have reproduction in my arms

My muscles are giving birth to other muscles!

Which reminds me of how I read recently about some hapless fellow in the 60s who went to be psychoanalysed because he'd had a traumatic experience whilst boxing. No doubt it was to do with something like being defeated or being knocked out.

He remarked concerning a thickening of his fingers and the experience of intimacy in fighting with other men. Ah! But he should have been more coy with words.

He was 'discovered' to be suffering from latent homosexuality and a tendency to repress sexual arousal via a regression to the breast.

And yet: What to make of the REAL thickening of his fingers and the real experience of closeness to other men that he experienced whilst boxing?

Were they not remarkable sensual experiences, by themselves?

Friday 4 September 2009

dream

An Irish rebel is reading his poetry. I heard these two lines:

Justice was ordered, justice was said.
Well,you should have paid attention then!

Bullying: a situation without ambiguity

It should be clear, by now, how to determine whether somebody is colluding in a case of bullying, or not.

The attitude of one who colludes is so anti-scientific that one gets the idea he doesn't know what a scientific investigative attitude is.

First port of call is his posture of omniscience: he was there with you, step by step, through every significant part of your life, and for the life of him, he can't see that any bullying occurred. (The colluder in bullying seems to act as if he were some kind of god, who knows things that an actual human being could not automatically know. An ordinary human needs to first investigate before he can genuinely come to a conclusion.)

Second port of call: His proclamation that all you want is a great deal of sympathy -- which, by the way, Society per se (and not just the colluder) cannot afford you. You are really asking of it too much! This tactic implies that bullying is merely an emotional or sideline issue, not a real one, pertaining to the lives and destinies of real people. If you think it is more than this, you are just being too sensitive. You are not quite real enough to warrant taking seriously.

So the colluder in bullying is the one who jumps to conclusions in a contradictory way, and without any consideration for a proper investigative mindset.

Wednesday 2 September 2009

severity

I am the fan of a certain amount of authoritarianism, and believe it should be reintroduced into schools. Both Nietzsche and Bataille make the case, in some ways indirectly, that without authoritarianism there is also no space made for a psychological sense of the Sacred. In Nietzsche's philosophy, "severity" is of value because it creates the psychological basis for a sense of reverence. In Bataille's view, without an internalisation of this severity, transgression has no subjective meaning.

I read Samuel Slipp's writing on The Freudian Mystique, and I read other post-Freudian texts about the status and psychology of women. Many of the feminist approaches to psychoanalytic theory, seem to recommend, like Slipp, psychological solutions to remedy a societal disrespect for women, such as (in Slipp's case) for fathers to share more of the parenting, so that they also suffer from the projections upon mothers as being abject. (This mode of projection from their offspring is theorised to lower the status of women.)

I am extremely sceptical that such a solution (of making both parents abject) would have any real value. Perhaps if anything, it would provide the psychological basis for an even more rapacious anti-authoritarianism than we have today. (The situation today is that children still tend to respect fathers, but just not women).

Rather, what has to happen is that women -- especially female teachers -- are given a high level of institutional authority to discipline children from the very early years and onwards. This would lead everyone to understand that women are respected by society and capable of exerting great authority.

I think that it is a symptom of a society that has extremely imbalanced gender relations (maybe not at a formal, ideological level, but nonetheless at an informal, ideological level) that Nietzsche's psychological insights about the value of internalising severity is misunderstood as an injuction to terrorise women (no doubt this is considered justified due to their putative state of being inherently abject -- a projection that originates from childhood complexes.)

The reason I have no trouble seeing myself or other women as authorities is due to an extremely ferocious female teacher in my first year of school.

portrait of a black artist in london and throne of bayonets

It's getting drafty.

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/CHAPTER%20TWO%20POEM%20TEXTS.htm

mindblast

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

a rough draft

Cultural barriers to objectivity