STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Descent of species

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

My demands as a femi-nasty

[TONGUE IN CHEEK] Thank you to the nonapologising Mexican, I have a few extra banditos raging through my site, brandishing little pistols or pistolettes.
I would like to thank you all. As many of you may not yet be aware, according to a recent personality test I took, I am 98 percent masculine! (We just have to wait round for the final 2 percent to sprout and then there’s gonna be some changes here.)
I thought I’d say a thing or two about feminism whilst I’m at it. I like the failing to apologise-Mexican’s description of me, to wit: I am an astonishing hungry-headed femi-woman who terrorises sleeping males in the beds, whilst consuming little little pieces of their outer-edges for my breakfast.
None of this is true! I’m rarely that hungry and (as a rule) prefer to leave the Menz alone. For me to show any interest in a man at all, he first has to be gorgeous. This is a very difficult rule for most men to follow. There are certain physical specifications, and following that, there has to be an easy manner, a quality of comfort in his own skin, self-determination, independence of mind and spirit (the list goes on). So, if the men are going wild and crazy and I am making them so, if they are spitting chips or two, then there is no need for them to worry: I’m happy to leave most of the alone.
I make exceptions for the few, however. Can you talk to me like a human being — as one human talks to another? Can you show some loyalty that goes beyond your outer boundaries — beyond the simple and blind loyalty of saving your own skin? Well then you’re very unlikely to raise this feminist’s ire. Such men (whose names will be selected for a list) will be invited to an orgy in the future, at an unspecified location.
Finally –I’m not an advocate of Twisty Faster feminism. There is one great element lacking in this type of feminism, and the one great deficiency I spy is that such strident intellectual idealism does not leave room for treating individual men or women as human beings. This is a very monumental error, in my view — and I would not have come to recognise it had the owner and proprieter of this brand name, herself, not taken enormous strides to point out to me, personally, the theoretical flaws associated with her radical feminist views.
Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou!

Portuguese swimming lessons

Shamanistic literature and how it differs

Shamanistic literature is open to the accusation that "there is nothing there" (so far as content goes) or that the writing "is all about the author" (that is to say --it is that and nothing more). One critic in Nietzsche's own time thus deemed Thus Spoke Zarathustra to be an exercise in style and nothing more.  This critic failed to see that Nietzsche was writing about how to double oneself to be both the one who experiences and the one who observes one's experiences, to transcend one's limitations (self-overcoming, was his term).

Unique to Nietzsche's writing is that it does away with this moral and epistemic dichotomies by using material that would otherwise be "just about me" to understand cultural wholes.

He describes the process of gaining self-understanding, along with its greatest consequence as follows:

Whatever state you are in, serve yourself as a source of experience! ... You have inside you a ladder with a hundred rungs which you can scale towards knowledge. Do not undervalue the fact of having been religious; appreciate how you have been given real access to art ... It is within your power to ensure that all your experiences -- trials, false starts, mistakes, deception, suffering, passion, loving, hoping -- can be subsumed totally in your objective. This objective is to make yourself into a necessary chain of culture links, and from this necessity to draw general conclusions about current cultural needs.

This method is to create a link between one's own evolving state of mind and the broader cultural needs of the community. Thus, for the shamanistic practitioner "self-involvement" is essential, and not only because it is also the means by which society is served.

In other words, in terms of the shamanistic structure, there is no moral schism that opposes self-enjoyment from respect for the needs of others.  We are used to that either-or form of morality, but it is profoundly incorrect:

Truly, I have done this and that for the afflicted: but I always seemed to do better I had learned to enjoy myself better. Since humanity came into being, man has enjoyed himself too little: that alone, my brothers, is our original sin! And when we learn better to enjoy ourselves, then do we unlearn best to give pain to others, and to contrive harm. --Zarathustra.

Draft Chapter 8: my father's memoir

Rhodesian schools were based on the Scottish system, because the Scottish education system was deemed to be one of the best.  Also, David Livingstone, the early explorer was Scottish.  We has to learn a language,  either French of Afrikaans.  The headmaster, who was also my teacher, reckoned that my Afrikaans was pretty poor.  'Jeeves' Hogard thought I should get some extra study in Afrikaans.   Dad had an Afrikaans man working in his office.  His name was Reddelinghuis.  He had a small holding outside of Salisbury.  It was virtually a farm, a he used to grow tobacco and other crops there and he had cows.

My dad came up with the solution to stay with Reddelinghuis. for a week.   I was duly dropped off at his farmhouse.  In the house was Mrs Reddelinghuis whom I remember as a large, overweight Afrikaans woman with the sweetest nature.   She was grossly overweight.   The fat on her legs wads like in rolls to my thirteen-year-old eyes.  The flesh above the knees would hang down over the bottom part in a big shape.  She had a daughter who was similarly sharper at eighteen.   Her son's shape was reasonable.

I could not understand a word they were saying.   They used to serve biltong as a side dish to the main meal, which was inevitably mealie pap and gravy.  One day I heard a lot of screaming and I went to see what was going on.  The woman was cleaning out her son's room and he had a rod with a hook on it.  The hook had gone through her finger.  They had to cut the hook part off and shove the hook all the back though the finger.  

Another night Mr Reddelinghuis came in and said there was a bush fire threatening his tobacco.  We would all have to go and fight it.   We ended up being driven a couple of miles into the bush on the back of the truck.  There were several Africans with us.   We hopped out of the truck and that was the first time I saw Africans hitting the base of the fire with branches of trees.  The fires would go up in the air and go out as they were separated from their fuel source.   I had just been wandering around in a distracted state of mind and got lost.  I found myself surrounded by flames at least twenty feet high.

You could find an exit path by walking on the parts where the ground had already been burnt.  I was totally on my own and didn't actually know what I ought to have been doing.  Then I heard voices and managed to join up with them.   I must have wandered no more than one hundred metres or so.  I don't think the others ever realised I had been surrounded by flames.

The Reddelinghuis's were very strict Dutch Reformed Church.  They would sell tea or coffee at local agricultural shows.   I offered to make signs for the stall, because it was just a bunch of tables,  nothing to tell you where you were or what was going on.  I bought unbleached calico, called kaffir sheeting.  I wrote coffee and tea in English.

That was a similar situation to when an aunt and uncle invited me to stay for a couple of weeks in Mozambique.  I spoke no Portuguese.  My mother spoke Portuguese.  Again, Katrina was raising funds for her church, which must have been a catholic church.   She suggested I paint a sign for their stand.  She wrote it out on some paper and handed it to me.   I got myself some unbleached calico and paint and started to put on the letters.  Some Portuguese youth, at least I thought they were, came and stood around me.  On reflection, they must have been Rhodesians. They were taking the Mickey out of me because they could not speak Portuguese and they thought I was Portuguese.  They started making jokes about me, and when I had had enough, I looked them I the eye and said I speak English as well as you do.   In hindsight, I would have found out why they were there and seen if I could join them.

I once joined up with people like that.   I was staying in the Estoril campsite in Beira when I was 18.   The beach was a kilometre long and then if you were looking toward the sea, the campsite was behind you.  On the right was a pavilion where you could get food and they played music.   In front of the pavilion was a wreck.  People would walk though it as the waves used to crash against it.  The waves were dangerous.   I settled on the beach feeling alone.   I had taken three weeks leave from my new job and drove down to Mozambique in my new Volkswagen.  I had never driven any distance on my own before.  I'd set off from home at six in the morning, stopped in Umtali for a cup of coffee, and set out full of enthusiasm to drive to Mozambique.   Umtali was on the border with Mozambique.   As soon as I left it, I was in Mozambique and had to go through customs and immigration. I cleared customs easily.  It had cost me a week's wages to get the triptik, enabling me to take my vehicle into a foreign country.

I drove thought he forest, which was on fire, smoke blowing everywhere.  The road was ten-foot tarmac with sheer edges.   It was very hard on steering track rods.   The Portuguese army knew about these steep edges and used to drive playing chicken,  which meant they would hold the middle of the road and force you to get off.   It was very dangerous.  If you just touched the edge, you would go off into the bush.  The Portuguese vehicles were Unimogs, big jeeps.  They played this game all the way down to Beira.

The first moment you know you're on the plunge flats is when your car drops down suddenly.   Every time you came down, you thought that was the end of your shock absorbers.

I made my way to the aunt and uncles household.  I was offered prawns that had been cooked whole.   One of the women ate a whole prawn including the head and legs.  I felt sick watching that.

When I went down to the beach, I noticed some young people fifty metres behind me and fifty metres to my right.   I joined up with them as a gatecrasher.  It wasn't easy to leave and join up with them again as I would have been spotted as an outsider, so I just stayed with them.

Later, I went up to the pavilion and ordered per-peri prawns to give them a try, and loved them.

rehab: swimming

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

rehab

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

The downside of emotional detachment

How much leeway is there for a revision of one's behaviour through culturally conditioning when one is already predisposed to act in a certain way?

There is the issue of changing one’s thought processes, which often cannot be done effectively. When I was a a preschooler, I was dragged away from playing with bricks in order to play house. I didn’t understand the rules of playing house, which seemed to me at the time much more complex and mystifying than playing with bricks. You could see the bricks and what you were doing to them but you couldn’t see the rules which told you how to act when you were playing house. As a three year old, I felt really put on the spot at having to improvise a drama, when I couldn’t understand the gender roles we were to play out. Also, there didn’t seem to be any point to the playing out of these gender roles, since there was no defined objective to the ‘game’. I became very bewildered by the situation, although I tried to hide this by keeping calm.

At various other times in my life, I’ve had the same experience. I can’t undestand the point in playing certain social games when the objective hasn’t been defined for them. Why try to keep up with the Joneses or attempt to become Miss Perfect, when the meaning of that objective hasn’t been defined? I am bewildered by these situations, and my mind goes on a constant error-check cycle, as if I’ve missed some vital piece of infomation from my consciousness. In some instances, when it seems really necessary for me to solve “the problem”, I can end up emotionally exhausted and overwhelmed.

For example, school teaching. To be an effective female school teacher, it seemed to be necessary to read some very subtle emotional signals all the time. This was not impossible to do, with some effort. Far more difficult was the task of trying to nourish my own mind and to keep myself emotionally above water in a situation where I couldn’t compete against myself to achieve a well-defined objective, but had to narrow my ears to listen for subtelties all the time. I began to feel like my head would burst because I was trying to keep all sorts of pieces of information, which were not intrinsically important to me, in my head at all times. It felt like everything that I should be focussing on in this job was somehow in my peripheral vision, but that when I turned around to face it, it had already gone. In short, I had trouble developing the social sensitivity to understand my environment.

REPOST:ABC Meme

Accent: Soft English, often mistaken for undefined European.

Booze: I prefer Shiraz or a very dry Chardonnay.

Chore I hate: Putting on my armor and getting ready in the morning. I am never sure if there is something stuck to me – dregs from the food last night, loose hairs, cat smudge, the bathroom door....whatever. I’m never sure if I look ironed enough. I’m bothered that the limited makeup I’m wearing might be smudging.

Dog or cat: Cog. Well actually, a big dog — bull terrier or German Shepherd preferably.
Essential electronics: Computer with a link to the Internet.
Favourite cologne(s): A variety of French fragrances bought for me by Mike.
Gold or silver: Gold.
Hometown: As yet I have no home. Can I have yours?
Insomnia: Rarely. I tend to sleep through anything, no matter how loud, although I will wake up to check it out initially if and when the noise is loud enough.
Job title: Worker
Kids: Go well with goats.
Living arrangements: I share my homestead with two or three barbarians

Most admirable trait: I don’t give in.

Number of sexual partners: I’m going to regret, when I am well-aged, that I had too few.
Overnight hospital stays: Being born, tonsilitis, appendicitis, ass-hole surgery.
Phobias: Black wall spiders which move fast. That my brain will rot in a clerical job.
Quote: Better to die standing on your feet than to live on your knees!
Religion: Just say no.
Siblings: They do.
Time I wake up:  now and then
Unusual talent or skill: sadza measuring
Vegetable I refuse to eat: This isn’t a vegetable, but I don’t like those eggs of Cod.
Worst habit: Over-preparation for each single engagement.  (e.g.  I’m not sure if what I put on has since got dirty, or if I’ve forgotten to take with me something essential, like my credit card.)
X-rays: Knee, gut.
Yummy foods I make: God makes all my food.
Zodiac sign: Up there in the sky — under my pyjamas

Rethinking work and life

I need to get at least one more part time job, to boost my income.  Here are my reflections on what I've learned from the past.

I feel myself exceptionally fortunate at this stage in my life, because I'm pretty much established what I'm good at and where I generally tend to fall short.   Not having an objective understanding of this in the past used to perplex me a great deal.    I tried out for quite a few different jobs, some that suited me and others that were nothing short of disastrous.

The three of four jobs I've recently had or presently hold have suited me far better than those I took on when I first finished my undergraduate degree, when I simply applied for any job that had became available.  Those I've succeeded in have been being a graduate student (on scholarship) and completing my PhD, working as a teacher of English as a foreign language and now teaching boxing for fitness.  Before that, I produced advertising copy, wrote as a freelance journalist for a martial arts magazine, did part time cleaning jobs, designed web pages when the Internet was just starting up,  taught school subjects as a tutor, edited fiction and worked as an administrative assistant and public relations assistant, all with varying degrees of competence.

What the current jobs have in common is a component of novelty.   To continually engage with novel ideas, novel practices, or novel people keeps me alert and on target.

Jobs that suit me least are those that require strict attention to detail.    Since I think primarily in abstractions, I find it difficult to follow procedures according to linear logic.    My visual memory is also rather poor, especially when fatigued.   That's why it's useful for me to take videos of my martial arts classes, so I can recall the lessons.

I find from situations where I have pushed myself beyond my normal limits, I don't recall geographical orientations or the arrangement of a number of objects in one place, on the basis of visual memory.   It remains possible that visual memory can be trained, and this is what I'm trying to do through my martial arts.   At the same time, this was the factor letting me down as an army recruit and a teacher trainee.  In the first case, lapses of memory grew worse, the more I was pushed to my limit:  "Where is your bayonet, recruit?  I'll tell you where it is.  You left it in your locker and now the enemy has got it and all of your platoon are dead!"

In the second case, I wasn't even tired, just too bored to focus on the children in the class.  They all looked the same to me, and ultimately I used a female pronoun to refer to a male, which immediately cooked my goose.

In many ways, my mind wanders quite a lot.   I retain the power needed for a concerted effort, and can continue to make one when I train my mind to obsess about one topic until I start to make breakthroughs with it.   To train my mind to focus on something boring is extremely difficult.   My past experience indicates that even when this is extremely important, I cannot do so.   It seems as if I don't have the brain power, developed from an early age, to focus on concrete details for a prolonged duration.

I've had many successes in life -- above all, researching and completing my PhD, which finally assuaged my lifelong thirst for knowledge.   I've also re-established my links with Zimbabwe and taught self defense across the country, there.  My enduring relationship with Mike is a long term success that few women could dream of matching. I've established the concept of intellectual shamanism and continued to develop my ideas in relation to it.   I've achieved brown-belt in my martial arts style and am moving like a snail towards my next grading.

In terms of leisure activities, I've made a thorough investigation of Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille and Dambudzo Marechera, and understood them inside and out, including from the perspective of the theoretical platform I've developed, which transcends them in some ways.   I've been skydiving nine times, with one jump from a static line in Zimbabwe.  I've written a memoir, and assorted other material, much of it posted on blogs or available as E-books.  I've traveled via the public transportation system all over Zimbabwe, stayed in a rural township there and been on horseback safari through the north-eastern wilderness there. I've slept rough.  I keep attuned to Zimbabwean and Western political situations.  I publish poetry or articles.  I'm a mentor for other Zimbabwean gender activists and a really reliable friend.  I use the Internet for networking and jaunty explorations of territory that may still still elude me.

Schooling

Always the luke warm temperature — the artificial aquarium forms the school itself. All input, chemical and energetic, must be measured. The mood must be maintained on an even keel. All negativity ignored. The interesting element of abounding intrigue is that all human interaction is totally eliminated. Instead are ersatz human relations: The magnificent edifice of behaviourism — a structure (or obstruction) of immense totemistic reliability. In the classroom, it prevents the teachers from having to have anything to do with the students, and the students themselves, once accustomed to it, can’t handle anything else.

WE ARE NOW APES

Miniature rewards of positivity tumble forth, as if from heaven. The dragon’s mouth opens wide. No negativity allowed (or rather, lots of negativity, but beneath the radar and denied a meaning.)

WE WANT TO BE GIANTS

Behaviourist regulation allow no human spirit to evolve. There are monkey-like, ape-like gestures, males posture whilst females simper, but generally one hears no human noise nor distant echo of reflecting minds.

WE ARE OKAY ABOUT IT

This is also adult culture: the norm. It is only an aggressive totemistic culture that develops out of bland, behaviorism. Only peckings are distributed in pure malice. Pecks are the order of the day, and there are often hours — days — when the whole barnyard is all a fluster.

CHICKENS!

The inability to communicate: a common cultural state of being due to never having come in contact with a human being. An ape preening on top.

CHICKENS.

Women as soft touches

I have said it before and I will say it again: the system of school discipline that is non-authoritarian (that is, unaided by bureaucratic enforcement processes) is a most pernicious anti-woman system in its practical effects.

If female teachers are compelled to get their authoritativeness from nothing other than female "nature" -- indeed, from the students' natures as organic entities -- then they can derive their authority only as a secondary effect, bought at a costly price of emulating motherhood.

For whom does the student NATURALLY respect (rather than from experience) if not their mother? The mother, though, has been through a process of childbirth, dark and dank, in order to produce said offspring. Pregnancy is a biologically enforced pacification process, which prevents running around, behaving vigorously and raucously. Socially, pregnancy is a process which makes one demure and passively subject to other people's control and good will.

Thus, "motherhood" is borne out of certain qualities, qualities which the child cannot fail to internalise. The mother is authoritative so long as she's nurturing. Her authority is, in effect, a nurturing authority, not a commanding authority like that of the child's father, who is more genuinely freed of the emotionally delicate role.

And this is problematic, for the anti-authoritarian approaches to teaching -- which invoke organic "nature" as their greatest ally -- prevent women from having any authority of their own that does not stem from an extremely nurturing predisposition.   This is despite the fact that there are a lot of women who do not wish to become mothers.

KNOW YOUR LIMITS (REPOST)

I'm in no way someone who can adapt to being coerced into doing something which I haven't chosen to do without a sense of losing my integrity.

All the same, it isn't in my power to maintan societal standards.   That's because the dominance and submission societies in which we live do use coercion as a form of domination. Legislators expect that this will cause us to submit, but this submitting isn't from the heart. Instead, once I submit whilst feeling that such compliance is damaging my integrity, then any social relationship of trust is also undermined. In other words, dominance and submission societies can and will be viewed for what they are, and once this occurs, the use of coercion no longer stimulates a sense of social unity, but destroys it.

A common and naive assumption of the would-be dominators is that no human would do anything unless coerced. According to this perspective, the natural state of a human being is inertia. If that were only the case, we could all be grateful for those in society who present themselves as willing enough to unleash a grenade under our bums. Yet damaged, rotting meat only has an appeal to a certain type of sadist, after a while. Even those who profess to like it will ultimately inhale a whiff the unpleasant entrails they've created.

I like nothing more than to challenge myself, but soon lose my desire to do so when surrounded by nothing more than starved would-be-sadist animals. These are the many who have lost their humanity or have not had the courage and open spaces to develop it in the first place.

I love adventure, when it includes courage, endurance and pain. Yet when I go skydiving, I do not choose the tandem ride, strapped onto an instructor, despite the fact that this approach is thought easier by everyone. I'd much prefer to be responsible for my own free movement in the space around me.

I prefer a static line or assisted freefall. Full responsibility for one's self might seem the utmost scary thing to some people, but not for me.

Relearning the turtle (since I forgot it)

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

turtle_defense.wmv

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

I grew up (repost)

I never signed any social contract. Nonetheless I was once under the impression that so long as you did the right thing, others would usually do the right thing by you. I entertained an antiquated notion -- probably stemming from my childhood experiences, which were almost always positive -- that most people intended to do their very best in relation to their treatment of others. Obviously, there was a time in my life when I had enough puppy fat clinging to my whispery bones to make me into an idealist.

Then the first waves of reality began to hit. I realised that not only did strangers and work colleagues alike not hold my best interests at heart, but that there were family members too, who were my downright enemies. It took me a while to realise this, as we don't normally expect our own family members to attack us. In fact there are all sorts of ideological notions which persuade us against this recognition. It is not supposed to be "natural", for instance.

As the waves of reality continued to have their effect, I changed. I realised that reciprocation of good will is actually the rarest eventuality on earth. Most times, this doesn't happen. I eventually understood that whilst others may hold me to a position of moral purity and righteousness, they often do this only to pin me in one place long enough so that they can make good their own unconscionable assaults.

I grew up.

Fantastically, my sudden realisation about how things actually work, (as opposed to how they are said to work by those who do not know you and have no interest in your circumstances), brought about a growth spurt.

I am now pleased to report that today I clearly understand how much we are not "all in this together", but that one must choose one's friends and allies wisely.

Shamanism: the reversal of stunting

Recently, I came across some material on narcissism (a personality disorder), which got me thinking.   I read that this disorder is the result of the emotional aspect of the self not maturing, whilst the intellectual and social self gains in adult sophistication.  It is said that the inner self remains in a form of stasis, not growing at all, yet the outside self appears to have grown and to be fully matured.

The nature of this developmental pathology is deeply problematic, because the stasis of the inner self implies the stasis of the overall self.   The adult cannot mature until the 'inner child', as it were, begins to mature. However,  the adult self, with its degree of acquired sophistication, formulates strategies and engages in tactics to prevent the childlike self from having to engage with an emotionally complex world.

Although such a situation, as it has been formulated, seems hopeless, there is another way to look at solving problems of emotional trauma.   The adult self must take on an authoritative role and go "looking" for the child, using all the wiles and strategies they can muster.   Rather than turning one's wiles against the outside world, one puts them to good use in search of that within oneself that may wish to remain hidden.

To employ such a strategy is what I refer to as "shamanistic doubling".

Perhaps this is a hard to manage.  I have the impression from many years of studying shamanism that facilitating a conceptual and effective 'doubling' of the self furnishes the basis for shamanistic healing.

No mental, social or psychological evolution.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

class22MARCH

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Rhodesian and Zimbabwean economies

When I grew up, very few people had any access to luxury goods.

There were economic sanctions, so national self-sufficiency was very important. Things like cars and parts were sometimes hard to get. We also had sanctions busting secret agents, so sometimes we got some of the missing items, but nothing was guaranteed. In the latter part of the 1970s, chocolate tasted pretty bad, since we had no cacao. Cheese was in short supply, and when a load was deposited at the supermarket, it was strictly one per customer. We kids used to grab an extra cheese and queue up separately from our parents in order to obtain more. Petrol was also restricted and the difficulties increased after Mozambique became independent in 1975, meaning that there were there were restrictions on goods coming from ports in that direction. Tobacco crops sometimes couldn’t be sold and were ploughed back into the land. The country developed a mixed-fuel base, which sometimes set light to your engines.

Then, around 1979, chocolate began tasting like chocolate. Petrol was still hard to obtain and there were long petrol queues, with people parking their cars in queues overnight. I imagine this was because South Africa remained under colonial rule and was now the outright enemy of the newly liberated “Marxist” Zimbabwe.

Then inflation started. Prices had been kept constant by the restricted nature of the economy and certain fiscal policies. Whereas before, you could buy a family sized packet of chips for twenty cents, now the prices were going up five cents every couple of months. Really fancy goods were still unavailable. Contemporary fashion was still unknown. Newly appointed government ministers started to drive around in the latest models of Mercedes. I saw one planted in a storm water ditch at the bottom of my road. Power goes to the head when it comes suddenly.

Zimbabwe today has open economic borders with all countries, but the government controls the lucrative resources such as the mines. The infrastructure — especially water and electricity — has fallen into disrepair. This is much more the case in the impoverished “high density” areas, where there may be only one water source shared by ten or twenty houses. In medium density areas, water and electricity supply are unpredictable and rationed. Class divisions have become more entrenched as per this system of unequal sharing of communal resources. These divisions are no longer largely racial, although it would be unusual for a white person to live in a high density suburb, as I did for several weeks in 2010. If you do stay there, there is no racial animosity, although neighbors may quietly theorize about your reasons for being there.

Owners in low density suburbs often have bores and electricity generators. Their properties are also protected by electrified wires or security personnel. So, security, at any rate, has become privatized. It used to be a function supplied by a militaristic state with a huge army.

To make money, it is common for everyday individuals travel over the borders to obtain rare items such as electronics goods, and bring them back to Zimbabwe to sell at a profit. The government has slapped a hefty import tax on new goods such as computers, but obviously it is still possible to get around this in some way. There are back routes into Zimbabwe and there is a high level of corruption.

There are tolls on the major country roads, which never used to be there. The police are generally looking for a bribe, as $150 US a month is not enough to live on. (They are genuinely gracious when they receive $5. There is no special effort to extort more from an individual.)

There is also the informal sector, where people try to obtain diamonds illegally. This is dangerous. On the lighter scale, people can also pick up hitch-hikers who pay a standard fare of $1-2 for a short distance and $4-$5 for a longer ride. (Longer distances would be for three or four hours).

People have an amazing sense of fairness in terms of operating on the basis of standardized expectations, an attitude of justice that even extends to how one relates to the informal economy of corrupt government officials.

PhD, transgression and regeneration

I started my PhD because there were too many mysteries out there for me not to investigate them. How could I sit in an office and do anything at all when there were mysteries out there?

I continued it because the plot thickened. The mysteries became more psychological than aesthetic and  made my mind ache.

I found socializing to be a huge strain right in the middle of my PhD, because it took away energy I needed to crack the problem that was at the core of my thesis. It could be framed in the simplest way as “how can madness be productive?”

At one stage, I felt like I was going mad. My mind was galloping at a frenetic pace and all of the world seemed to have slowed down and gone stupid. Any part of everyday life that didn't help me solve my problem got in my way. I couldn't even explain the nature of my problem except in the most esoteric terms. It had to do with trying to look at the other side of trauma — at the generative side.

So many books seemed to somewhat support my thesis. Other journal articles only used part of my theoretical platform, but were more opposed to the conclusions I had drawn. Thus, I became perplexed as to how to use this more ambiguous material.

I continued to become madder and madder. I had too much information in my head and I had to make it all add up. I had read extremely widely. The literary material seemed to yield confirmation of my views in flashes of intuitive insight, but in ways which I didn’t yet have the means to articulate. You certainly couldn’t point to the text and say, “There it is!”. Nothing was positivist about these shamanic notions.

Eventually, I couldn’t look at my thesis, as I had looked at it so much, the words had stopped meaning anything. I began to wonder if in fact the words I’d written had no meaning. An old wound had started to open. My father’s words: “You’re a failure and you can’t even communicate properly!” began to resonate. I’d written the thesis to vindicate someone who also seemed to have been victimized by being denied communication — and now, the same was happening to me.

I was fighting my father through trying to complete my thesis. It was the ultimate superego battle — he didn’t want me to show him up through having an education, through not accepting a typical female role, and I wanted to complete my thesis without his interference. Yet, this battle was taking place entirely in my mind — a culmination of a 20 year long battle for my own direction.

Writing my thesis was a rite of passage. The strain of going against the grain was immense. I engaged with experiences that would have been denied me had I taken the path I was supposed to, had I remained a child-woman of African origin and under British codes of control. To engage intellectually with ideas of war, trauma and racism would have been one thing. I engaged with these emotionally, however, and this had been forbidden me, growing up. I wasn’t supposed interact with the realities of the civil war surrounding me. Emotional access to these were related to age, social status and gender.  I hadn't fit the bill.

In engaging with new inner experiences, against the prohibitions that had been set up to protect me, I was destroying myself as I had been before.

The process of investigating and then completing the thesis became my means of self-destruction and renewal, which was done through gaining forbidden knowledge into the interior of my cultural history.
RECOVERING IN THE WILDERNESS

***

It has taken me some years to rebuild.

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

On scrubbing up and being shiny

Perhaps a majority of people feel there's little advantage in educating oneself compared to the feeling of moral superiority one can have by not educating oneself. Educating oneself takes time, often money, and substantial effort to move oneself from a state of ignorance to one of being able to understand complexity. Being moral superior takes a certain amount of confidence that one’s views predominate within a particular cultural matrix. Would you change that easy position of feigned superiority for one that is considerably costly?

I find that people of the English speaking world have also invested quite a lot of energy in the belief that their countries are no longer ‘colonial’ (like they assume mine was). They know better. They would never do a thing like colonialism, not them personally. It’s not that they would feel comfortable speaking to an actual black person — they wouldn’t — they just think that I should learn better manners when making reference to them.

There are specific forms of jargon that one absolutely needs to be able to refer to “the other” in a way that separates one from seeming to have any mean, colonial intent. I have to learn this from these good people, otherwise I’m still among the great unwashed.

Identity as a function of political opportunism

I studied how identities are formed a great deal in my thesis. Identity formation commonly comes about through projective identification --that is as a result of others projecting their demands as well as expectations onto you.

I came to believe that this is the most decisive way in which our identities are formed, because it is really almost impossible to resist a particular identity if a large mass of people are projecting that identity onto you. In effect, they are requiring you to play a certain role for them — and my memoir is an exploration of this. For instance, in terms of white, Western culture, I am the dishonourable “colonial”, whom others can automatically use to mark their own superiority. For my father, who was bound to extremely antiquated and rigid standards of masculinity, I was his “emotion” and means of coping with his loss of his country. And then there are the secondary levels of interpellation and distorted interpretations, whereby my efforts to explain this situation is also seen to be a confirmatory sign that I am merely “whining”, for that is what women do, unless they are happy with the status quo, which makes them unhappy.

I am now resigned, but  happily so, in that at least I understand the mechanisms behind identity attribution.  I have therefore ultimately disowned my subjective connection to the identity depicted in my memoir by means of an extreme kind of mockery of it at the beginning and in sections of the last few pages.

This  was my intention as a wrap up to my memoir: to rupture and a break from the past through an act of destruction:  shamanistic destruction involves destroying the identities that others have projected onto you, in order to be more fully yourself.

The subject matter of colonialism nonetheless remains too emotionally raw for many people. I have quite a lot of confidence that in greater historical perspective,  it will be much easier to see that I am making fun of the ridiculous ideas of my identity that had been projected onto me, rather than quoting them because I thought they were true.

The foundations of intellectual shamanism

I used myself as a guinea pig for much of my investigation into the realm of the psyche.   My understandings were founded on the fact of my very strange subjectivity.  That is to say, I found my subjective states very strange because they didn't seem to match other people's states under various circumstances.   Most of the time, they were the opposite to other people's expectations.   For instance, where other people took situations very personally, I didn't -- I saw what I perceived as wrong behavior as being a consequence of larger social and cultural dynamics.  I took very personally my inability to fully comprehend or come to terms with these dynamics.   I would sequester myself from the rest of the world for hours -- and days -- on end, to try to understand the meaning of these broad social movements that led to the adoption of conventional subjective postures.

I remained puzzled for an inordinately long time.  I'm sure I would have given up after a few years, had not my sense of having an alien subjectivity spurred me on.

My first break-though came about after reading an article by a Jungian, which spoke of "pre-Oedipal" states.   There, I encountered, for the first time, the concept of "projective identification".   This concept suggested that we do not have permanent or fixed identities, but rather identities that are permeable by others.  Another person may project into us parts of themselves.  We subconsciously accept the projection, perhaps out of fear or love, but most often out of necessity, in order to feel we are conforming to societal expectations.   Another book, written in the style of childish analogy, offered further elucidation of this extremely complex and sophisticated psychological dimension.   This was Soul Retrieval, by Sandra Ingerman.   As a student of literature and cultural studies, one learns to draw knowledge and information from all sources.   One doesn't necessarily interpret a book at the intellectual level of its typical reader: one looks for any commonalities it shares with other texts, and discards whatever isn't useful.

Ingerman's text outlines how one may form emotional attachments to others in a way that leads to losing aspects of one's own identity in a fundamental sense.   One can also leave parts of oneself behind in the past, if an emotional relationship with a location in the past is so great that it replaces the meaning of the present.

I immediately diagnosed myself with "soul loss" -- having lost parts of myself to the past.   My emotions had certainly not moved into the present, through no fault of my own.   The rupture with the past had been so sudden that my sense of identity had become scattered.   My problems were cognitive as well as emotional.   I simply couldn't understand the present, and my emotions, being scattered to the past, gave me no inroads into the present, as they were inaccessible to me.

The metaphor of looking for my lost soul made enormous sense to me.  I dedicated the time spent writing my PhD to this particular task.  I saw myself as an intrepid hunter on its tracks.

My first breakthrough came with understanding that typical gender relations are most often a feature of projective identification.   This finding was extremely relevant in terms of ongoing communication difficulties, where I'd often been intent on pointing out that some situations I was in were unworkable.   I received gender-based responses, along the lines that my suggestions that any situation was untenable or had to be changed was simply unrealistic.  I was left with the untenable situations.   It was as if I hadn't bothered to communicate my views.

I later understood that this non-responsiveness was a result of others viewing women as being primarily creatures of emotion and fantasy.   Not only were we seen to be making up statements on the basis of nothing at all, we were deemed, in a sense, not to exist.   This was a result of males projecting their fantasies and emotions onto women.   We could no longer be taken seriously as a result of male projective identification.

The more I began to understand my experiences in this light, the more they began to make sense.  I'd finally understood the way that gender was constructed in contemporary Western societies.   I should have felt pretty self-satisfied at this stage, but there was still something awry.   I sought confrontations in order to discover the lay of the land.   For some reason, every disagreement I had with significant authorities ended with a sense of clarification of my identity.   The illogical nature of reality was capable of being straightened out  whenever an authority revealed his (or her) actual motivations.   This was fascinating.

If I had lost a great deal of my "soul" to others through being brought up in a typical patriarchal society, I was now getting it back.  Even the hostile responses to my inquiries about the nature of the world were extremely instructive.  They allowed me to see more starkly the difference between other people's perceptions of my motivations and my actual sensibilities.   Thus I took back from hostile and antagonistic forces a little more of my "soul".

In Western society, it is generally assumed that if one projects something onto others, this must necessarily be the ugly or unpleasant parts of one's character, which one wishes to deny to oneself.   In my case, I was unconsciously engaging in the opposite behavior. I was projecting all my goodness into those I deemed authoritative.   My original society had been authoritarian, with some legitimately fearless and sincere authorities.   I had no idea that I had internalized the cultural dynamic in such a way that I was losing my very center of gravity by projecting insight, knowledge and benevolence into certain others, whose help I could have used.

The fact that these others inevitably let me down through displaying a very high lack in all of these characteristics should have given me a clue.   It was my typical experience to be let down by the authorities in whom I had invested my implicit trust.

It took me a long to realize what I was doing, mostly because the messages were so mixed. Projection is actually encouraged by this society, in order to reinforce hierarchical norms. At the same time, people view any sort of projection or mixing of boundaries as pathological -- although the fact is we all do it all the time. Our very societal structures of gender and many facets of social hierarchy are founded on the necessity of psychological projection. Without this, they start to crumble and are gone.

My advanced understanding of the inevitability of projection,  as well as its political nature, gave me much of the basis for my theoretical platform of intellectual shamanism.

Women = maliciously powerful (but only if you have no self esteem) « MUSTER YOU

Women = maliciously powerful (but only if you have no self esteem) « MUSTER YOU

The Zimbabwean Children’s Liberation Festival -- D Marechera

There was a bear in the garden
Playing piano wires in its teeth
A sparrow on the triangle echoed the burden;
The cat on violin clawed out its kin & kith.
Owl’s brassy eyes sleepily clashed like cymbals
While the rat in owl’s beak shrieked in soprano calls
Cricket & Cicada’ steel brush on silver drums
Dappled the scene with a jazzy farewell to arms.
Little Lulu pulled the pin of a gall she found
And BOOM! Lulu burst out of life into the bass drums.
Her mum on the trumpeters screamed & screamed all
round
While the bear in the Festival Garden
Clawed the piano wires in its jagged teeth.
Fatboy let loose a cello sound from his behind;
Violet the violincello sneezed into her mama’s skirts;
Little Farai squeezed Shona juices out of his brown eyes
And, with a flourish, burst into God Bless Africa.
“Bless you,” Fatboy murmured asweat with sweet
mankind.
But little jeering faces leapt onto the sets
Holding Farai down, sang Baboon Go Home
And sneered at Fatboy for a kaffirlover.
Fatboy’s fists swung like windmills facing Dover
Meatball, his expat teacher, dragged all apart:
Tweaking into reluctant ears the art of nonracism.
BOOM! Lulu again burst out of life into the deep bass
drums.
The bear thumped a grim growl from the piano muzzle
Over his jaws.
“Ma, Shakespeare’s girlfriend was a nigger. Fatboy
Said so, “ said Peter the Pants.
“hush.”
“Ma, Othello’s wife was a white girl,. Fatboy said so, “ said
Violet the violincello.
“Hush.”
“A nigger was an Emperor of Rome. Fatboy said so.”
“You don’t want us to know the United Nations or the
OAU. Fatboy said so.”
“Ma, are you a boer?” “That means I’m also a boer.”
“Did you really kill Farai’s parents at Sharpeville,
Chimoio & Nyadzonyia? Fatboy said you did.”
Fatboy’s parents are white like us. But he says you
jailed them for years and years. Why did you?”
“SHUT UP! These brats ask too many questions.”
“But teacher said to ask.”
“For that I’ll take him to task.”
Bootsie, The Ghetto Boy, chewed his lip.
His dusty buttocks showed through his khaki pants.
With paper & comb he played his soul, hoping for a tip.
His brown moth face, his brown moth wings all vibrant
Toward the spotlight, he played hoping for a tip.
In the background of Bootsie’s thin ghetto strains and
frame.
Grimfrown the Beat rested his chin on the great bass
guitar
And with hairy clawed fingers thrummed a slow judgment
BOOM! Lulu thundered out of life into God’s wrath.
“Fatboy says those who take the gap are cowards.”
“Fatboy says Smith and Walls should have been hanged.”
“Fatboy says reconciliation only works when justice is
seen to be done.
Otherwise all whites are lumped with the killers.”
Fatboy by the fountain fought down a great yawn.
The blistering sun sucked bitter sunlight from his fatty
brawn.
Little Farai had his can-opener head stuck fast between the
rails.
BOOM BOOM Lulu detonated again and again.
Bootsie sang:
I got nothing to tell you
That’s not skin off my back.
I got every
little thing to hide
And win respect a mile wide.
But I don’t do nothing
for nobody
‘Cos nobody does nothing for me.
The cat, furious, screeched demented arrows at the
vanished moon.
Lulu BANGED! BANGED! BANGED!
Prefects like hyenas drooled and drew nearer.
The rat in teacher’s beak squealed expressionist poems.
Alice bleeding from the smashed looking glass bit her lip.
She thought the Zimbabwe Festival “very curious”.
Three staffroom typewriters chattered in tune
Thought Fatboy a future minister or bloated monster
Deemed Farai a prick and Lulu too fargone
And declared the Festival a resounding disaster.

Freud and Marechera « MUSTER YOU

Freud and Marechera « MUSTER YOU

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Judeo-Christian assumptions versus intellectual shamanism

I've stated often enough before that intellectual shamanism may appear to use the same vocabulary, at times, as those who inhabit a Judeo-Christian framework, but nonetheless our meanings are far from being the same.

DIFFERING WORLD VIEWS

Let me start by stating the different ways of viewing the world, that pertain to these paradigms.

In the Judeo-Christian view, the world was created once and for all by a primeval entity -- the Judeo-Christian God.   Since reality has already been created, there is no more creative work to be done.   The very best one can do is to operate realistically within the framework that divine providence has created.   There remains, of course, the possibility of acting "unrealistically" within the world that the deity has formed.   Any unrealistic behaviour is sinful and is deemed to be destructive of the pre-established divine order.   Irrationality is definitely an offence against the deity and against what has been created.

This describes the world view that is most prevalent today.   Underlining it is the assumption that conformity to pre-established systems is necessary in order to prove oneself moral, realistic and not crazy.

By strong contrast, the shamanistic system I have uncovered is not founded on a myth of divine creation.   Rather, according to intellectual shamanism, the world is not yet fully  created.   Some aspects of the world have clearly come into being, but other aspects are still in the process of being born.   Still other aspects are incubating and waiting.   They may never come into being -- or, they might.   Their chance of survival depends on the creativity, insights and will power of the people presently existing.

DIFFERENT CONCEPTS OF HEALING

When one speaks of healing in contemporary culture, one often inadvertently invokes notions of falling short of a particular standard of well-being from the outset.   In terms of the Judeo-Christian paradigm, the Lord made the world perfect and then humans fell from grace, into sin.   "Healing" is therefore the work of the sinner, the one who has fallen short of normality and wishes to atone for that.   In Western culture, the term, "healing", is also often invoked by the New Age flake, who feels out of touch with nature and is trying to get back some sense of the organic nature of reality.

Intellectual shamanism, by contrast, does not see that we humans do anything else other than following an inevitable trajectory that involves destruction and healing.   Our cells die and the body renews them.  The very ability to develop greater physical strength is premised on the tearing of our muscle fiber, which achieves greater strength every time it is destroyed.  This is not to imply a metaphysical formula, whereby one can be assured, "What doesn't kill me [necessarily] makes me stronger."   In some cases, one weakens and dies.   This is also an inevitable part of human experience.    To realize when to fight and when to yield is shamanistic wisdom.   Both attitudes are neutral and neither of them imply original sin.

A-THEISM VERSUS THEISM

It is necessary to say just whom we regard as our antagonists: theologians and all who have any theological blood in their veins—this is our whole philosophy.... One must have faced that menace at close hand, better still, one must have had experience of it directly and almost succumbed to it, to realize that it is not to be taken lightly (—the alleged free-thinking of our naturalists and physiologists seems to me to be a joke—they have no passion about such things; they have not suffered—). This poisoning goes a great deal further than most people think: I find the arrogant habit of the theologian among all who regard themselves as “idealists”—among all who, by virtue of a higher point of departure, claim a right to rise above reality, and to look upon it with suspicion.... The idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries all sorts of lofty concepts in his hand (—and not only in his hand!); he launches them with benevolent contempt against “understanding,” “the senses,” “honor,” “good living,” “science”; he sees such things as beneath him, as pernicious and seductive forces, on which “the soul” soars as a pure thing-in-itself—as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word, holiness, had not already done much more damage to life than all imaginable horrors and vices.... The pure soul is a pure lie.... So long as the priest, that professional denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is accepted as a higher variety of man, there can be no answer to the question, What is truth? Truth has already been stood on its head when the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its representative....[Nietzsche]

DROPPED STITCHES

Whereas the predominant “masculine” expression of societal order might be the grinding mechanics of The Categorical Imperative (“submit yourself to the machine or else”), the basis for the “feminine” resides more predominantly in treating every little manifestation of self expression as if it threatened to be a dropped stitch in the social fabric. Huge sensitivity is required to earn a living by maintaining the taboo against free thought. I do not have this sensitivity — and hence, when I am hired for a job and later find that my success depends upon my “femininity” (even in the military this happened slightly), I can be relied upon to rage like Polyphemus, because of the headaches given by very little dropped stitches.
—
I search for a place in the world where I am not liable for dropped stitches. I don’t want to have to tear my eyelids from my eyeballs, stretching them in order to focus, against the possibility of dropped stitches. Oh the blinding headaches of shortsightedness, the urge the will to see, to exacerbate perception as a purely mechanical device, avoiding the mad consequences (but not the dislike) of dropped stitches. Oh, the terror of the overlooked link, the mild emotional connection unmade which blows up into a firestorm and smites my face. Oh the angst and anxiety of stern looks, big eyes, subtle then more vicious reprimands on the basis of my dropped stitches. Oh, hell freezes over and I continue to drop stitches. I scratch myself in madd’ning self abuse, for I have no good answer on the matter of dropped stitches, or the why or wherefore, merely that they drop. Oh the self contempt that bends like an arrow of light only to strike me, metaphysically dissolving my body, rendering me out of work in my astonishment at dropped stitches. Oh the radiant sky, the feminine contempt, mine eyes being purely blinded. The masculine realm registers and shudders. Stitches, stitches, little stitches in your eyes, your souls, your minds. I call them Western, but for you they make up the essence. Stitches, stitches which I cannot see. Stitches! I tore apart mine when I visited your fair shores – came to you naked. Girt by sea the rage of my lost stitches. And you delicately plod, your little binding hands, undergirding all your stitches, pointing out my errors for political ploys, wreaking vengeance through the ‘universality’ of the stitches in your own eyes (but somehow not in mine). Oh stitches and the ploys of stitches. I will drop them in the fields and in the schools and manage to rejoice. Your invisible web of ‘culture’ is the negation of mine!

Shamanistic knowledge

Shamanic knowledge is ontological, rather than epistemological. That is, metaphorically, it evokes the idea of intellectual synesthesia, whereby one “hears” with the eyes and sees, as it were, with the ears (like Bataille’s “pineal eye” which “sees” in terms of the body’s visceral registers, rather than in terms of literal vision). “Black sunlight” casts a light which immediately retracts itself from conscious memory. Yet the effect of “black sunlight” as shamanic experience – as having transformative powers at the level of being – remains. As if it were the memory of an apocalyptic solar eclipse, the shamanistic initiatory experience casts a shadow upon conventional notions of being, by opening up the ears and eyes to different aspects of experience, which seem to come from the “spirit world” (although they come from the parts of the brain that have merely been submerged and repressed by conventionalising patterns of consciousness). One apprehends the sacred through these unconventional means. Just as Don Juan’s apprentice routinely imbibes hallucinogenic drugs in his quest for self-knowledge, “Christian” – one of the main protagonists in Marechera's  Black Sunlight – has inadvertently swallowed “Chris’s psychiatric drugs”, which facilitates his entry into the realm of shamanic experience and experiential otherness. 

The very existence of a sacred realm at all is premised upon there being various divisions or compartments in the mind, to which entry is restricted or forbidden. Colonial society, with its unusually extreme policies of segregation on the basis of a relatively fixed and immutable conceptualisation of public identities, would have conditioned the author’s mind, as the mind of a black colonial subject, to develop mental compartments that represented forbidden aspects of selfhood. For instance, it is forbidden to see one’s choices in life as unconditioned by the possession of a categorical black identity. Therefore, forgetting the absolute nature of one’s identity, acting as if it were wholly mutable and able to enter or leave bodies at will (in terms of the subject’s experience in Black Sunlight) evokes a sense of the sacred through transgression of the socially conditioned superego’s demands (that one stick to the one, narrow identity that society has allotted one.) The author’s determination to lose that one identity through his deliberate self-immersion in a field governed by pre-oedipal psychological dynamics – such as dissociation, splitting, projective identification and magical thinking – is an attempt to facilitate spontaneous self-healing of the damage done to him through the imposition of a narrow and unsuitable (in any case, not desired for its limitations) culturally black identity. 

It is as if the writer had returned to the primordial soup of pre-identity – a state of being before individuation, and before the political characteristics of identity had become fixed. Self healing and a shamanistic overthrowing of the existing social order is a different strategy for dealing with an identity that is socially deemed inferior (such as, conventionally a black or feminine identity), as compared to the identity politics of the new left. It is, indeed, a radical, rather than reformist approach, which intellectually harmonises well with Marechera’s anarchistic politics. That the loss of identity is expected to be regenerating and transformative in a superior way is not in any doubt in Black Sunlight. In the novel, there are socially outsider female characters, who cannot find it within their natures to adapt to the strict kind of femininity that a strongly patriarchal society makes necessary for their acceptance. Rejecting their allotted feminine identities, (in the same way as the author is rejecting his politically allotted black identity), they undergo an identity transformation, becoming “changelings”. They fulfill their sacred duties as militant anarchists creating a new sort of society that will be fit for them. The thoroughly well-recognised (by now) anthropological notion of shamanistic death and rebirth is described by the writer of Shamanism: The neural ecology of consciousness and healing, Michael Winkelman, as reflecting “perinatal experiences” ( p 81, 82) and the restructuring of the ego:

The death-rebirth experiences frequently result in dramatic alleviation of psychosomatic, emotional, and interpersonal problems resistant to previous psychotherapy. ( p 83)

The rejection of one’s allotted identity thus allows for the choosing of one’s own identity, and the acceptance of a sacred role of furthering society’s development. Thus the death of the author’s persona at the end of Black Sunlight, also prefigures his own spiritual rebirth, as he looks into the mirror and sees him physical self as subject to the vagaries of his historical time and place, as a whole self, that is nonetheless subject to life’s contingencies. Despite the despair that the author’s image of himself evokes in this closing scene, there is also a sense that the writer has recognised the processes of life in himself as being universal, and has spiritually and emotionally transcended his sense of life’s limitations through the sacrifice of his ego via his experiences akin to shamanistic initiation. His life-satiated, anguished but transcendent gaze into the mirror indicates that he is ready to accept that it is the very contingent nature of reality itself that forever makes it Sacred.

The trials and tribulations of dissociation as a cure for patriarchal boredom

The other day Jane had a fight with a dream that refused to come. The dream was critically injured and when Jane took it to hospital she could not understand why the doctor and all the nurses could not see the severe injuries and gave her a sedative and phone Tony to come and take her home. But Tony said he was too busy washing the blood from the walls to be able to come and the doctor drove her home instead. Was there a one-plus-one somewhere?

And there was the other dream that had an accident and she had to phone the garage for the breakdown truch. The breakdown truck driver arrived within five minutes. Jane was delighted.
“You are very prompt,” she said brightly.

The truck driver wildly looked around. He croaked: “But ma’am, where … ?”

Jane pointed. The driver turned. There was nothing but the brittle, bitterly cold winter night. Hairs standing on end, the driver leapt back into his truck and with a scream of gears and shriek of tires backed away and was soon a glo-worm speck screeching down the road. Jane shook her head in disgust, puzzled. ( p 6-7)

d MARECHERA

MUSTER YOU

MUSTER YOU
Nature is not undifferentiated. So there should be no way of speaking which does not go on to speak  about very specific aspects of nature. After I have forged connections with one place, I am fond of all its aspects.   Only in the place that I have forged connections  do I have bonds. Elsewhere these emotional bonds do not exist for me — I might feel repelled by certain aspects of which are not “mine”. Never have I liked the meloncoloured sun, although its not offensive. It’s just not for me, and more than that, I wasn’t born with its rays touching me,surrounding me — so much more is it an emblem of my alienation.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Chapter 7 Draft: my father's memoir

Chapter 6B

…cont.   (I went to Llewellyn barracks in 1959, when I was 18.) 

Inevitably, the army would raise its standards by having kit inspections, which meant spending any spare time cleaning and polishing.  Just as you got the floor of the barrack room looking like glass, someone from an adjacent barrack room would take the lid off a tin of brassy and roll it across your floor so that you didn't wouldn't look so good in comparison to them.  Everything had to be sparkling.   Your blankets and sheets had to be laid out in perfect symmetry and you were issued with boards to fold your blankets and sheets around.  Repeatedly, every morning, your kit had to be laid out on your bed with these boards wrapped inside them.  Everything in the barrack room had to be cleaned to the penultimate degree.  Broomsticks had to be sandpapered down to make sure there were no marks on them.  Our broomstick ended up the width of a pencil.   On one occasion, trying to outdo the other barrack rooms, we bought yellow dusters and put one in each boot, rather like a sock,  which caused the sergeant major on inspection duty to use a lot of expletives.   They were bright yellow dusters, which did not fit in with the grey mood.

If a staff officer considered we weren't trying hard enough,  they would come into the barrack room and throw all the kit into the dust out the windows.   The other technique they used was to come in at 4 in the morning and throw a dozen thunder flashes inside.  You would wake up with a jolt.  The staff corporals would do that to make us uncomfortable, liking throwing a bucket of water over someone.   Another aspect to kit inspections was that all your kit had to be washed and ironed immaculately.  Since nobody had the time to do this, African staff from the local township would come into the barracks at night, grab your toe and shake you awake and say batman sir.   You would then give him your washing and ironing, hoping you would see it again.  Sometimes your kit would be confiscated by the regimental military police.   You are supposed to do it yourself, but also because you cannot have strange people walking around the barracks all the time.  A couple of nights after the batman had collected your kit, the batman shaking your foot and demanding money would wake you up.   In Britain, every officer had his own personal batman.

These batmen used to do an extremely good job.   They would take your number one kit - bush jacket and shorts, wash, iron and starch them, so that your uniform would stand up by itself, the creases ironed to knife edges.   The number one bush jacket had about a dozen brass buttons on it, along with the crest of the Rhodesian government.   By the time all these had been polished up,  you looked like a chandelier.   It was very difficult to get into this kit without damaging the creases.   There were also hose tops and putties.   Hose tops were socks with the feet cut off.  Putties were strips of felt about two metres long, that were wrapped around the hose tops.  They were to protect your ankles in a skirmish.   The boots didn't come up your ankle very high.  .  

There's no doubt that a soldier dressed in number one kit with a bush hat on, with all his shiny brasses and boots cut an impressive figure.   This dress was copied by the police force, except that the Askari used to use leather gaiters (chaps).   My grandfather used to wear them.   I would we him sitting on the veranda with a device like a crochet hook doing up the bottoms. 

One day I heard bustling in the house.   I followed it to see my grandfather sitting on a chair.   My mother was wiping him down with Dettol.  He had come off the horse and his whole head was bleeding.  

My grandfather used to drink brandy heavily.  He would sit in his chair, smoke his pipe and talk me to death whilst working his way steadily though the bottle of brandy.  He would try to leave some for the next day.  He would sometimes come up with a philosophy and my grandmother would say, don't take any notice of him, Peter.  It's just the brandy speaking.  He had the view that there was going to be another war.   He thought there would be a third world war.   He had an old ford with a dickie-an extra seat stuck where the boot is.  It also had running boards.   You could hop up on the side, put your arm through the window arch, and hold on.   You could open and close the gate that way.  

My grandfather had quite a difficult time, as I don't think he had many interests and my grandmother would have been a hindrance rather than a help.   Her worldview was very different from his.   She was conscious only of her family.  I used to stay with my grandmother from the age of six.   I was desperately afraid of her, as she would barge into my life.   When I stayed with my grandmother, my uncle Charles was always there.   He was a motorbike gang member in the making:  he was his own motorbike gang.

 I used to sit at my grandfather's feet in the evenings when I was seven, whilst he smoked his pipe.  He was always trying to get another match into bowl of the pipe, trying to make the tobacco go further.  .My grandfather used to pick me up from school and take me home for horse riding on a Sunday afternoon. My grandfather was dignified and I loved him dearly.  I did not realise I did until he died.   It took his death to bring out the emotion in me, and when he died I suddenly realised there was something missing in my life.  I solved it by wearing his old shoes.  

Reflections for Women's Day 2012

I wasn’t brought up with any particular sense of gender roles. There were formal ones, but I never figured out that there was anything I was supposed to internalize in terms of personality, to make me more clearly one gender than another. Even in high school and as an undergraduate, I had no particular impression of gender roles.

When I had my first real job, however, the attacks started. They came from a strange place, because they were coded with gendered meanings I didn’t understand. There were significant problems in this workplace. I learned that when a person in a structurally weak position is trying to point out problems to those who may have more structural power than she, anything she says is dismissed as merely “emotional”. Not only does this silence her criticism and subdue her intellect, most people find the rhetoric that some people are merely “emotional” to be extremely convincing.

Also, if there are men who are unstable, people are less likely to believe they have a problem if they can point to a woman very close by and suggest: “It’s just her perception of me. You know, women — being what they are — can’t see anything straight. They’re very emotional!”

People feel very comforted by this sort of reasoning, as it means they don’t need to do anything about a particular situation. After all, what could they do? Women are going to be emotional and mess things up, because, after all, women are that way in their essence (emotional and messing things up).

This was how I learned how political behaviour has a gendered structure in Western culture, whereby men are innocent and women are culpable.

As for emotions, I wasn’t even aware that I had them. I was deeply repressed. I was behaving so absurdly rationally in a sequence of situations where I was deemed to be culpable for everything that could go wrong. That was when I woke up and began to investigate what emotions I had. I found I had repressed a profound sense of rage, primarily linked to having to leave my homeland, but more generally related to being treated as responsible for other people’s actions.

It was an unusual experience for me to introduce elements of emotion into my behaviour, but I began to turn on the tap of my passions.

Of course, I did this very rationally, with many a strategy. I thought, “What would confuse them most?” and I did that. For instance, I figured out there was an office spy (something I hadn’t figured out before, as my emotional awareness was switched off). I gave her contradictory emotional information in the same chain of speech. “I told her, “I really admire our boss….. But above all, I have no respect for him.” I became unpredictable and the strategy worked. I was able to stop people using me as a scapegoat for what went wrong.

Later, I learned more about the political tactic of calling women “emotional”. It’s designed to get women to play a role of re-connecting alienated and inauthentic men to an entirely different realm of spontaneity and open possibilities.

So, I shut the valve by refusing to be a conduit so that random males could feel their emotions.

Therapy for trauma « MUSTER YOU

Therapy for trauma « MUSTER YOU

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

MUSTER YOU

MUSTER YOU

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

Gender politics and projection « MUSTER YOU

It only dawned on me in the more recent years that a lot of my problems in life have come through projecting the better parts of my character out of myself and into others, particularly onto men. This is because I was brought up with the idea of the heroic male, a view which in many ways reflected reality fairly accurately. The men were all in the military and there was a war on, and many of them took great risks.

Somehow, I had essentialised this hazy childhood understanding of the world into the idea that men were necessarily fearless. I also projected out other extreme and false overestimations. I thought that people were generally truth-seeking and trustworthy. So, these were my own projections and they led to me not putting enough trust in my own capacity to be daring and honest, and trustworthy.

Now that I have reclaimed my own qualities back, I feel fully myself, more confident.  Gender- polarized society had encouraged the projection of my positive and the introjection of other negative qualities, based originally on a formal division of labor.

I learned that once we combat what has become polarized in our identities, we can reclaim these alienated qualities for ourselves.

Why Do Some People Castrate Their Existences? « Clarissa's Blog

Why Do Some People Castrate Their Existences? « Clarissa's Blog


A castrated existence must be very common — hence the logic of psychoanalysis, which I have never been able to understand, as it seems not to apply to me. The assumption that no matter what somebody is saying, they are lying, would apply as a general principle if everyone castrated their existence.

What I really don’t get is why there is no therapy for those who choose not to castrate their existence. The decision to move in the opposite direction is not without its problems, pitfalls and potential for chaos. Now that I’ve just written that, I realize these are precisely what I wrote my thesis to investigate. There are huge problems with choosing absolute freedom. Alternatively, you could re-interpret absolute freedom to mean the freedom to fit in, to make a buck and to get along with everybody . In that case, you probably wouldn’t encounter so many problems.

Anyway, the refusal to change is weird to me and, since I am rambling over my morning coffee, I will go on to say there are a number of reasons why I feel this way.

One is that I’m of a cultural group of individuals who selected themselves as wanting to live on the boundaries, to explore the unknown and to take risks. Those were the kind of people of whom colonial society  was made up. Secondly, I had no option but to start again, existentially from scratch, when my family pulled up roots and I was 16. So, normality and stability — what are those? I can genuinely say I don’t know how to take my references from any idea of these. More conservative people think I’m trying to put it on when I remonstrate that I have no experience of ‘normal’, or they assume this is a sign of internal instability. Nothing could be more wrong.

To be afraid of life — yes, I can understand that. I’ve often been afraid of certain facets of it and was traumatised many a time by overestimating others, because I have had a tendency to project my own characteristics into those around me, leading me to vastly overestimate other people’s capacity for change.

Any overestimation of their abilities can cause some people to get upset and attack like you would not believe. I guess some people feel uncomfortable to be held to standards they have not chosen.

Cultural subordinates

My upbringing has predisposed me to a hostile and suspicious attitude towards many authorities.   I'm calm enough when reassured that standards of civilization will be observed and that I'm not in Africa, again, but if I am under unusual pressure, my old Africa psychology immediately asserts itself again.

If my African self knows one lesson, it is how to catastrophize.  This catastrophizing tendency is perfectly natural and appropriate for many situations in Africa.   Don't go to hospital, because the hospitals are likely to be unsanitary and you are likely to die.  Don't get thrown in prison, because ditto.  Don't question authorities, but negotiate with them in a smooth and efficient manner and maybe you reverse the flow of reality that's taking you in a direction you don't want to go.

These days, I am extremely fit -- let's say, for my age.  I work out at least three times a week.   I eat well and I rarely work.  I play a lot.

All the same, I fear having the diseases of old age.  It's not so much that I believe I have them -- I feel and understand that the possibility of my having them is profoundly remote.   Nonetheless, I'm of the view that the doctors might succeed, in contradiction to my actual condition, in pinning what I don't have onto me.

This paranoia goes way back.  We used to have school nurses periodically examining us.   About every two years, the ordeal would begin.   We'd line up, during normal school hours, to be thoroughly checked out.  Our general physical appearance and eyesight would be examined.

Along with this, there would be difficult, perplexing questions.   The matron stopped the queue and looked at me, for I was the current specimen under examination:

"What's wrong with your legs?  Why are they covered in bruises?"

I had no answer to this question.  Were my legs covered in bruises?  I looked down to notice, as if for the first time, that there were a number of bruises in various shades of repair, on my shins.

"um..." I said.   "Um," was the expression you used in an authoritarian culture when you were buying time.  The equivalent expression, used by a few of the black servants of the time was, "It is not me.  I am not the one."

"Um..." I said.  "Are they?"

I didn't pause to consider that I'd been slamming my shins with the back of the pedals every time I stepped on my bike to travel to and from school.  That would have been too easy an explanation -- and, after all, I was bruising easily.  There could be no explanation for that, apart from the TRUE one, the MEDICAL one.

"Um..." I said, "Maybe it's because I went ice-skating?"

I didn't expect them to buy my "excuse", which was just as well, because the nurse would hardly be persuaded.

"You have a very rare disease," she announced, after writing something in her notebook.  "It's hemophilia."

She moved on to the next student in the queue.