Patriarch

Those of a patriarchal persuasion  unconsciously avoid taking responsibility for themselves.  A committed patriarch is generally unable to do this one essential thing that would enable him to justifiably claim an ethical position. He is too used to leaning upon others, psychologically and emotionally, to have learned the kind of rugged independence of mind (through reflection upon personal experience) that would lead to self-knowledge.

POSTURE:  He lunges forward with a crazy swing that decenters him, causing him to overcommit his punch. The obvious reason is he expects not to be hit back. His whole movement and posture is constantly  decentred. It is that lack of finding and using his own centre of gravity, located low and in the hips, that will easily undo him.

STRATEGY: Since the patriarch lacks grace of movement, the best response is to become a moving target. Wait for the overcommited lunging punch, which is as inevitable as fleas on rats, and then subtly transfer your place to the left or right of him. He is unlikely to register that he hasn't hit his target until too late. From your position to the side of him, you may choose to counterattack. If feeling unusually sadistic, you may choose to simply watch him making the same mistake again. If he keeps on doing the same thing, he will at long last tire himself out.  He is finished.

Art and shamanistic doubling

From this book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520038452

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"Good art teaching (and creativity itself) is dependent on a greater than usual tolerance of anxiety because of the need to work through one's total personality. This requires a more than average strength of the ego. It is wrongly thought that creative people thrive on neurotic illness. This is not so. The philistine can ignore his illness by living with only a part of his personality and can keep his illness from showing. The creative person faces his illness and its attending anxieties so that they noisily dominate his behaviour. But he is not more neurotic for this reason; rather the reverse is true. If satisfactory human relationships are proof of mental health, as is universally accepted, then the creative mind is healthy through establishing at least one good object relationship: with his own work acting as an independent being. He is able to accept what Adrian Stokes has called the "otherness" of the work of art. This acceptance requires the entire apparatus of projection, integration, and introjection, which is part of any good relationship." p 108

webs

The more I study, the more I realize that the problems many of my favorite texts had set out to solve are those that were created and developed by patriarchal shaman-dreamers.   I read, for instance, that it is now widely recognized that Freud's treatment of Dora was an abuse of the therapeutic relationship.   Although he found it impossible to determine what she wanted from therapy, it would not have taken more than a simple, common-sense appreciation of human needs and tendencies to realize she wanted his moral support. More specifically, she wanted his recognition that she was not going crazy, but that her family were making her feel as if she was, by lying to her face.

Patriarchal dreamers see nothing in a straight-forward way, hence Freud's treatment of Dora only reinforced her worst suspicions.   In order to dream his fantasy that wove his Oedipus theory, he had to deny her the meaning of her practical reality -- and she plunged downhill, from there.

Thus, patriarchal dreamers knit a web which many can't escape.

eternal recurrence and the shaman

There are a few different levels of interpretation of an esoteric text like Nietzsche's.  The karmic is one level of interpretation, but the shamanistic/affirmative idea is a deeper level.   You can lose your complexes through shamanistic regression, so there is no longer any error to be corrected. You and your unconscious are one.

Not many people can gain a genuine recapitulation through "facing death". Those who can say it are shamans. But paradoxically, they have had to pay for their freedom with their wounding. I am speaking in a neuro-psychological sense. This is far from mysticism. Those who have some psychological wounding (a radical change in one's society might do it to you, or certain forms of oppression/bullying) can often learn very quickly about the ways their unconscious mind functions. Their unconscious mind and their conscious mind are one. This is hardly true for most, and the lower one's spiritual status is, the less one will have access to the deeper parts of one's own mind. One can imagine the lowest on the ladder of the spiritual hierarchy having no idea what their unconscious is actually doing or what it wants -- hence back-biting and self-delusion, along with a general lack of courage in facing things directly. One simply cannot face that which one does not have the courage to know.

What they sometimes get through their suffering is actually shamanistic knowledge. The shamanistic formula is "facing death". Those who can face their own annihilation (represented as shamanic regression, leading to re-learning via temporary "ego death") will be healed. But one only seeks this kind of healing when life itself has put one under extreme duress. One would rather not do it. But if one has received an extreme psychological wound, one will often be able to regress to a very early level, and thus get to the origins of one's own identity in such a way that one can heal oneself.  For one to have the courage to go to this level is really rare, very rare.

So that is the most esoteric interpretation of the eternal recurrence. But the karmic interpretation will be true of many people. Perhaps we can see a spiritual hierarchy forming on the basis of how one interprets this puzzle of the eternal recurrence? Those who have healed themselves are truly free, but they are the few. The rest, who fear to go to such extremes of facing death (and it is an anti-intuitive thing to do under most circumstances) will have a karmic interpretation of eternal recurrence. Others still will see it as a sign of misery and condemnation:  unavoidable servitude or sameness due to the eternal recurrence of the same.

This other interpretation of eternal recurrence being eternal misery is most likely one to be made by people who are unable to experience shamanic regeneration. Eternal return then suggests no escape. That would be the logical conclusion if you cannot access your internal resources to create yourself anew.

Motifs of sacrifice in Nietzsche and Bataille

For Lacan, everybody is sick, without exception.    You are either a neurotic or a psychotic or a pervert.   To conform to the system means to adopt an impersonal identity -- but nobody can do this completely, without making themselves mentally ill.  Hence, we are all emotionally unsound and poor conformists. Bataille is a more complex version of Lacan, since whatever Lacan states in cynical, psychoanalytic terms, Bataille states in Nietzschean, paradoxical terms.

Bataille's conception of sacrifice makes clear his own view of the overwrought nature of the human condition -- at least as he and Lacan experienced it in 20th Century France.  Conforming is always a concession to impersonality, in both Bataille and Lacan.   Conforming preserves the bourgeois person.    The cost is impersonality; the benefit is preservation of oneself via creature comforts, bourgeois status and (impersonal) identity.   The practical opposite to this norm of bourgeois conformity is personal self-actualisation.    Herein is the Nietzschean paradox (and it also depicts what I call "intellectual shamanism").   To self-actualize is to give up the benefits of self-preservation:

I love him who reserveth no share of spirit for himself, but wanteth to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walketh he as spirit over the bridge.  (Nietzsche)

Bataille takes up a Nietzschean perspective when he associates self-actualization with sacrifice.   He is also Freudian (and was used by Lacan to develop his perspectives), for he views sacrifice in terms of psychological deviance, on the basis of one's circumstances being untenable (the need to represent impersonality in the workplace leads to an opposite, reactive attitude, once one has time to oneself).   In his essay in book form, Theory of Religion,  Bataille portrays the worker in a state of destructive reverie.   Bourgeois form and sobriety are sacrificed to despair.   This structurally determined polarization of the worker's consciousness is between the profane (one's experience of work) and the sacred (one's experience of free time,   expressed as a frenzy of destructiveness.)  Free time and money to spend purely to satisfy one's appetites are the worker's accursed share.

The Freudian influence on Bataille renders this reading of the worker and his behavior as pathological -- although, like Lacan thought, necessarily so.   Civilization is not experienced by organic and instinctively driven human beings as a natural condition, thus it necessarily produces its discontents.   Bataille's point is that society structures the psyche of the worker in terms of polarizing his consciousness, so that it swings between conformity and destructiveness.   Bataille's views are also Marxist.

Nietzsche's views are not at all Marxist in any way.  He expresses his views in terms of evolutionary proposals.   He expresses his ideas in terms of Darwinism.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.

This is a tragic view of the world -- that in order for humanity to make progress beyond its apelike origins, many who aspire to do something great will fall along the way and not meet their goals.  Their failures, however, are necessary, because they offer the basis for others to learn and thus succeed.

Thus for Nietzsche, sacrifice for the benefit of humanity is achieved by those who attempt -- (and perhaps fail) -- to self-actualize:  a "down-going" is also an "over-going".  A failure to do all that one had wanted to is nonetheless also transcendence of  humanity's existing ape-like condition.  One advances human evolution through one's attempts.   One sacrifices oneself to the future of humanity, rather than sacrificing the future of humanity to one's self to the degree that one departs from the script of an impersonal conformist who wants everything to stay just the same.

Self-actualization carries with it the risk of self-annihilation

4.

Zarathustra, however, looked at the people and wondered. Then he spake thus:

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss.

A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.

I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.

I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.

I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.

I love him who liveth in order to know, and seeketh to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeketh he his own down-going.

I love him who laboureth and inventeth, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeketh he his own down-going.

I love him who loveth his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.

I love him who reserveth no share of spirit for himself, but wanteth to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walketh he as spirit over the bridge.

I love him who maketh his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more.

I love him who desireth not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one's destiny to cling to.

Down "the alley", turn right.

THE ALLEY

Object relations psychoanalysis teaches us that as humans we keep many of the intra-psychological devices concerned with ego self-regulation, from our early childhood. As adults we defend our place within society by projecting, for instance, the qualities of masterliness upwards within a hierarchy, so as if to perceive our social context as if our own superior qualities were emanating from elsewhere, from those in the strata of social hierarchy above us. (Menzies Lyth). Likewise, to adapt to the logic of a pre-existing social hierarchy, we may be inclined to project onto those in the social strata below us our negative psychological qualities, being those we find less desirable in ourselves – in the terms of Menzies Lyth, we project downwards our incompetence.

To project upwards or downwards our emotional needs can end up with us losing touch with those particular elements. Along with the infantile but nonetheless adaptive tactic of projection, is the splitting of the self, so that parts of the self are acknowledged as being “really me”, because others are dissociated from, as being “other”.  The loss of parts of oneself – whether that be in the form of the sense of ones competency or the sense of one’s human fallibility (as the loss of the sense of this is also a loss in terms of self-understanding) comes under the contemporary or “new age” shamanistic rubric as “soul loss”. The restoration of the “soul” – that is, of one’s true self, existing in a form that isn’t compromised by social and political necessities – is the key to shamanistic healing. It is not just the person who is restored and made whole by virtue of “soul retrieval” [term: Ingerman]. Society as a whole needs restoration from the states produced by primeval splitting, to move from stress-related (pathological) modes of coping towards a healthier model of relating within the social whole.

“The Alley” is a play that deals with this issue of societal and personal healing, through an encounter with the split-off aspects of the self. The play examines the traumatic legacy of post-war Zimbabwe (post the second Chimurenga that ended in 1980). Marechera is keen to show how the dissociation from the past (and from aspects of one’s self), in post war Zimbabwe, leads to a mode of forgetfulness that is the forgetting of the self. In such a condition, one goes through life without the sense of who one really is, or how one got there. One needs to face the trauma of the past to affect “soul retrieval” – that is, in order to become who one is, again.

In “The Alley”, a black and white tramp struggle with their tendencies to forget, as they fraternize in the streets of Harare, unable to recognise the cause of their demise. They had both fought in the war of liberation on opposite sides, and they had both had the privileged status of career lawyers, before making their descent into the grey mists of fugue and loss of social status, entailed in living the hobo lifestyle. Marechera borrows from Beckett – in particular from “Waiting for Godot” – in his idea of exploring the life of tramps through an aesthetic and conceptual lens of forgetfulness. His approach involves more of a psychological and political study of post-war Zimbabwe, however, and not being concerned with an existential statement of the human condition, which is how Beckett has generally been read.

The complication that Marechera introduces in “The Alley” is the question of gender and how that impacts on how trauma and recovery are experienced. Whereas Beckett also subtly implies a gendered aspect to his play in naming one of his male tramps Estragon (which sounds like estrogen), Marechera takes the issue of gender further, in order to show that post-war trauma in his contemporary Zimbabwe of the eighties, had a distinctly gendered quality. His mode of writing is both slapstick – Cecil Rhodes is introduced as “Cecilia” – and tear-jerking. This tragicomic mode is designed to break down the current ego-defences of the audience, with their current stress-based and probably pathological adaptations to the social world. It is designed to guide us, through laughter and tears, to see the real tragedy of those whose lives and potential were sacrificed during the bush war. 

Only then, upon recognition of what was sacrificed and lost, can a real restoration of the soul begin to take place. As is common in Marechera’s writing, the aesthetics of the play are based upon the tacit psychological understanding that others often join with the “other” that is really a part of myself, and not something entirely separate from me. Just as we might be inclined to socially eschew the other for being black or of the wrong gender, so we are also socially invested in maintaining the normal state of affairs that keeps others at a hierarchical distance as the psychologically dissociated aspects of oneself. To be compelled to know the other, through tears and laughter, is to come to know the socially alienated aspects of one’s self – the aspects denied when one adapts to a social role, within what is normal in society: a social hierarchy.

Marechera’s work shows to us the link between psychological self-alienation and societies that are organised by political and social hierarchies. The cost we pay for the latter is in terms of the former. In terms of the patriarchal and socially conservative society that was post-war Zimbabwe (and as it still is to a very large degree), Marechera’s exploration of the gendered base of traumatic dissociation is very radical indeed. Marechera shows that Rhodesia, on the sides of both black and white cultures, has had a patriarchal history, and leaves a patriarchal legacy to those in the present. To fully heal, society has to face that which it has dissociated from – which is hidden behind “the wall” of consciousness, in the unconscious or semi-conscious parts of the mind. Marechera points out that where the black and white men fought each other like “dogs in heat” ( p 46) , redirecting their erotic impulses towards aggression, those who really paid the emotional cost of the war were women – specifically the daughter and sister of the black and white men (who are represented by the two tramps).

The traumatic spectre that hides behind the wall is the damage done by this excessive “sexual” self-indulgence of the bush war to the women whom the men had no doubt sworn to protect. Rhodes – the black tramp – has been given slightly greater authority by author in terms of the moral ground for fighting for his liberation. It is he who introduces his “other” – the white tramp, Robin – to the spectre of his sister, Cecilia, who was raped and murdered by the Rhodesian forces, and now abides behind “the wall” of consciousness.

RHODES: Your daughter, Judy, is right there with her. I can see them. They are kissing.

Robin’s daughter, in turns out, was also a victim of the war, raped and murdered by the black “comrades”. Only when the brick wall in the alley is struck, with determination to know what is behind it, does it give us these traumatic answers about the cause of the tramps’ pathologies. Surmises Rhodes to Robin, speaking again with a margin of greater authority than his colleague has the right to:

I used to suffer from world weariness, but the wall says that too was nothing. I cannot get away from you, though that’s the only thing I want from life, from the whole last ounce of the universe. You also want to get away, but like me, you can’t, and for the same reason. I am your wall, and you are my wall. And the game we tried during the war of mounting each other like dogs in severe heat has not yet been settled. ( p 46)

The way to healing is to face the traumatic and dissociated feminine aspects of these men’s identities, which lies behind the wall of consciousness.

Transcending superstition with self-knowledge

Perhaps it is 'the spirit' rather than 'the letter' of Antichrist that ought to be considered in forging a more humanistic ideology than those that are the most de rigueur today.

Let us have no more separation between what we really know (on the basis of science) and what we claim to know (on the basis of faith). In that way, we will be least like the Paul of the New Testament, making more out of a hallucination than his culturally informed empiricist training warranted.

An impediment to implementing that ideal as a practical reality on a large social scale remains, all the same. It's not just in our limited prowess in convincing people. There is more to it than that. My view is that we live in a culture -- this present day 20th century culture -- where we are not accustomed to knowing ourselves. Given that our age has embraced Kant's philosophical notion as a basis for avoidance of psychology (for we cannot know "the thing in itself", as postmodernist theorists are prone to teach us), and generally we are too busy to bother to know ourselves anyway, we have a problem. It is this: Since we are generally, as individuals, in no position to claim to know ourselves very much, we are also not in a very strong position to differentiate between what we really know and what we think we know. If we don't know who and what we are, as human beings, and as individuals, we might assume that we know all sorts of things (that we actually do not) since the limits of our knowledge are unknown to us.

This is why ancient peoples often mistook their dreams or hallucinations of some kind of reality. Our situation in the world today may not be so grave, in terms of the kinds of errors we might make in differentiating what is real from what is not real. We have access to all sorts of artefacts of the sciences and humanities, to help us along with this endeavour of knowing ourselves. Yet we are taught no psychological skills in schools these days, as teachers rely upon operant conditioning, dealing with the students at arms reach, which deprives them of the capacity for internal self-regulation, and in turn, deprives them of useful self-knowledge.

Due to the cultural conditioning we experience within contemporary society, so many of us assume that self-knowledge is either not desirable or not possible. In workplaces today, "emotionalism" is eschewed. Yet it is common to label anything that one doesn't like or understand as the "emotionalism" of the other person. That which one dislikes, one tries to get rid of, by labeling it thus. The approach of labeling as "emotional" that which one has simply failed to understand (due to lack of adequate training and capacity for reflection) is a moral blight on society today. The cultural enforcement of rigid social conformity (on the basis of psychological blackmail, that not to conform implies an out-of-place emotionalism), is founded on a lack of personal insight into oneself and others. Who are those who suffer from the hallucinations that are projected onto them -- if now those "cultural others": women, blacks, and those of another cultural origin. We claim to know them, when we emotionally resort to labeling them, but what we know is often only a figment of the imagination, a projection of the parts we dislike about ourselves. As a society, we have been sucked into a social mire,which does not differ, as much as we would like to think it does, from a more antiquated and benighted religious consciousness. We think we know the other type of person, but we betray that claim to knowledge when we do not use reason and attempt to investigate the nature of the psychology of the person whom we see as being different from us. Rather, we merely project something onto them, so that we become reason itself -- and they become the disliked parts of our mentality (our unreason).

The spirit of Nietzsche's Antichrist is heard in the demand that societies and individuals engage in the project of enhancing self-knowledge.

2009: This blessed year

I haven't had the killer instinct of late, since dealing with the finishing of my autobiography has been rather a masochistic project. It's like Marechera holding the bare threads of his words in his fingers and despondently proclaiming:


"Look what I have left of it: my life!"

There is much in this new version of the writing that I had been unwilling to face so directly, before -- so much that doesn't meet with higher standards for human experience, in a way that would give expression to some sense of human purity or transcendence of life such as it was and is. It's hard to express this sense of life's almost totalizing contingency that had me in its grips during the first part of my life -- and which set into place the chain of cause and effect relationships that has effected me until I was 40. There can be moral choices only when there is first knowledge, and secondly various options in place, apart from just one. These options are made accessible by predominating social values and by law. The Australian law that broke the very negative chain of cause and effect for me was that of the rights of a citizen to claim welfare payments. It was this that got me out of a situation of workplace abuse and home place dysfunction, without which, I would not be alive today.

So now I have knowledge, and despite the sometimes prejudicial or discriminatory attitudes that persist in society, against migrants, and against women, I am learning to recognise, once more, that I have freedom.

The best I can do is to share this freedom of mine, for however long it lasts. I know too well what it is like to have few clear or apparent options. My gifts are of a minor variety-- and this is what I get back:


"You are a friend in need and indeed.I just don't know how to thank youenough.Had it not been for you we would be six feet under the ground ."

It is not impossible to imagine that this state of violence is true in present day Zimbabwe.

I am inclined to feel very much that only those who have lived through some extremes can imagine what it is like to try to survive the extremes.

"Here's to wishing yu a happy 2009.We have been weighed and found worthy to enter this blessed year."

Embrace "nature"

Shamanism is an answer to a lot of people who embrace ‘the natural’ in a superficial way. Embrace horror, randomness and arbitrary pain, if you like. That pertains to what is natural. On the other hand,if you are not one of those who would romanticize "nature", if you have any depth to you at all -- it is very existentially useful to understand the baseline of human experience. For the real shaman-intellectual, it is useful to know that there are certain guiding principles governing our relation to nature and ‘the natural’, but these are not many. Understanding how few these are can actually be very liberating, especially if one is inclined to subscribe to dogmas of any sort.

The misogynist's mentality

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

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

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

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

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

Releasing pent up tension: moving the swamps

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

Thus the nature of so much of mass morality is to reward oneself for all of the efforts of delayed gratification by going on a psychologically bloodthirsty rampage in order to impugn outsiders -- those whom, presumably, have not conformed to the programme quite as well as Thou has.  Or maybe the masses vote out one governmental party and put another into power to express their moral indignation.

Being a person unto oneself

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

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

To be self-consciously at odds with oneself is much more interesting and allows character to form.   For instance, one may have a goal to move from one state of being into another.  Unfortunately, in the eyes of  bourgeois individuals, the primary 'things in themselves', (that is, they themselves), are deeply and interminably unknowable.

Got conformity?

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

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

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

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

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

Shamanism, identity and positive experience

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

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

A "metaphysics of presence" is fundamentally an wrong or "magical" way of seeing. It is erroneous because it oversimplifies what is actually there to be seen and understood. It is "magical" because this mode of seeing is creative and inventive, actively constructing what it claims to perceive, and not detachedly observing it.

The "metaphysics of presence" is unavoidably postmodern despite assertions that precisely the opposite is true, since the postmodernist must make initial reference to presences that "seem" real to him or her, before deconstructing these appearances through clashing them against other "appearances". The postmodernist, then, is involved in masking as well as unmasking, and plays the role of a magician. This is not a good thing, for what is lost -- psychologically and ontologically -- though the mutual clashing and splintering of opposed identities is not the firmness of reality as such, but the firmness of the boundaries of identity. It is these that shatter and fragment, leaving only the core of a vulnerable human essence (Note: not as an "absence" but fundamentally as a "presence" of core humanity, stripped of its identity postulates. This is the nakedness of the human soul that we encounter at the end of Black Sunlight.)

Shamanism resolves the crisis of identity, through a strategic restructuring of one's knowledge, whereas postmodernist thinking leaves it fragmented. Both approaches understand something of the illusory as well as fabricated nature of identity. In Marechera's shamanistic writing, the pure essence of human experience is on display, with the other signifiers of presence (such as race and gender) shattered and gone.

We are thus "wrecked out of our wounds", according to Marechera.  In this particular case, which is far from being postmodern, what wrecks us is also what redeems us. We rediscover our true humanity in the most solid form only after first experiencing the overwhelming imposition of the metaphysics of presence through a visceral meeting with our most potent image of ourselves. It is this encounter that wrecks us "out of our wounds", partly because we are then satiated, but also because we see ourselves from the outside for the first time, which makes us realize, probably for the first time, too, how we fit in with the grand wholeness of life.

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

*NOTE: Jungians see the early childhood level of consciousness as being  a realm of transformation and mystical consciousness.  Even as adults, we all have tendencies toward this, including the ability to see ourselves as part of life's  great oneness.

Repost from December 2008: the state of the wars on gender

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

Draft Chapter 10: my father's memoir

There had been no overt terrorist activity since the Mashona rebellion.  The country was very British with cultural connections to South Africa.  But there was an underlying awareness that once the blacks became more nationally aware, they could wipe out the whites in no time at all.  We were Rhodesians, but we hadn't declared ourselves independent at this point.   There was a feeling that the administration from Britain was heavy-handed and biased.   They were predisposed to see us as a tyranny, meaning we ill-treated the people we were in charge over.   If you took together all the incidents, it could look that way.  The locals were fundamentally quiescent and well-behaved, but poverty made their lives tough.  They were interested in listening to reasons to start an uprising.

The British newspapers were always severely against the Rhodesian establishment.   In the centre of Salisbury was Cecil Square,  a couple of hectares  surrounded by shady trees.  It had become traditional for the local populace to take their lunch to this park and lie on the grass to sleep it off.  Some enthusiastic photographer looking for trouble took photographs of this and they appeared in the times newspaper under the heading massacre at Cecil Square.

Instances of bias by British newspapers are too many to enumerate.   On another occasion, a terrorist group abducted three hundred school children and marched them off into the bush,  never to be seen again.  The army managed to keep pace with this group,  using helicopters. The British press were whipping up a storm of publicity sympathetic to the black nationalists.   Epworth mission was the school and initially there was an uproar against the terrorists because of this, but as it reached its peak, the British press proclaimed that the Rhodesians had committed a My Lai type massacre in Mozambique.  We didn't do it.  We did eventually go into  Mozambique later on.

The Selous Scouts went in there that time and they were all painted up to look black.   One of the African women walking by saw a little bit of white uncovered by camouflage.  She started calling out, "white!".  At this point all the others in the camp showed up and the Selous Scouts opened fire and killed six hundred.  That was an incident that was just waiting to happen.  Those on our side were too ready to fire and the others were too ready to mob. Once the soldiers' cover was blown and the element of surprise taken away, they would have been at the mercy of the guards in the camp.

Shamanistic transformation: Nietzsche

An encounter with one's childhood trauma leads to an overcoming of resentment for life's torments, and shamanistic transformation:

Had I ever heard a dog howl thus? My thoughts ran back. Yes! When I was a child, in my most distant childhood:
-Then did I hear a dog howl thus. And saw it also, with hair bristling, its head upwards, trembling in the still midnight, when even dogs believe in ghosts:
-So that it excited my commiseration. For just then went the full moon, silent as death, over the house; just then did it stand still, a glowing globe- at rest on the flat roof, as if on some one's property:-
Thereby had the dog been terrified: for dogs believe in thieves and ghosts. And when I again heard such howling, then did it excite my commiseration once more.
Where was now the dwarf? And the gateway? And the spider? And all the whispering? Had I dreamt? Had I awakened? 'Twixt rugged rocks did I suddenly stand alone, dreary in the dreariest moonlight.
But there lay a man! And there! The dog leaping, bristling, whining- now did it see me coming- then did it howl again, then did it cry:- had I ever heard a dog cry so for help?
And verily, what I saw, the like had I never seen. A young shepherd did I see, writhing, choking, quivering, with distorted countenance, and with a heavy black serpent hanging out of his mouth.
Had I ever seen so much loathing and pale horror on one countenance? He had perhaps gone to sleep? Then had the serpent crawled into his throat- there had it bitten itself fast.
My hand pulled at the serpent, and pulled:- in vain! I failed to pull the serpent out of his throat. Then there cried out of me: "Bite! Bite!
Its head off! Bite!"- so cried it out of me; my horror, my my hatred, my loathing, my pity, all my good and my bad cried with one voice out of me.-
You daring ones around me! You venturers and adventurers, and whoever of you have embarked with cunning sails on unexplored seas! You enigma-enjoyers!
Solve to me the enigma that I then beheld, interpret to me the vision of the most lonesome one!
For it was a vision and a foresight:- what did I then behold in parable? And who is it that must come some day?
Who is the shepherd into whose throat the serpent thus crawled? Who is the man into whose throat all the heaviest and blackest will thus crawl?
-The shepherd however bit as my cry had admonished him; he bit with a strong bite! Far away did he spit the head of the serpent:- and sprang up.-
No longer shepherd, no longer man- a transfigured being, a light-surrounded being, that laughed! Never on earth laughed a man as he laughed!
O my brothers, I heard a laughter which was no human laughter,- and now gnaws a thirst at me, a longing that is never allayed.
My longing for that laughter gnaws at me: oh, how can I still endure to live! And how could I endure to die at present!-

I've personally experienced this transformation.

shamanistic strength

A shaman doesn't regress because he or she is intrinsically "sick".  It is not that simple.  Strength of mind is also a vital part of shamanism.  So, shamans are more likely to be those of intrinsically strong minds if they do turn out to be shamans after all (ie. if they recover).

According to Anton Ehrenzweig, a lack of access to consciousness where the ego is de-differentiated signifies schizophrenia. One must be able to dissolve one's stress by temporarily de-differentiating the ego from the field of one's being, so as to regroup with creative resources, rather than pathologically splitting and projecting.

Social or political oppression, or unexpected violence causes the future shaman's temporary regression. They do not stay in a regressed state but learn about the depths to the psyche from their experiences.

It can also be an accident that causes the wounding (as per Frieda Kahlo), but generally shamanism is associated with the lower classes of society who may be subject to systematic oppression (see Michael Taussig and the situation of the Columbian indians). It must be an inbuilt mechanism of the human mind that when put under a state of extreme stress it aims to return to the safety of the womb. (The post-Kleinians make much of this, although not in terms of shamanism).

Forces of oppression can be seen to be responsible for keeping some members of society in a state of immaturity in relation to the dominant classes (and gender). This would give them automatic closer access to the magical pre-oedipal level of consciousness -- a realm of transformation and mystical consciousness. But the intrinsic strength of the minds of some of the oppressed classes would result in the strange occurrence that these individuals do not descend into madness never to return, but do return after this baptism, with all sorts of things like an insightful social critique, an enhanced imagination, and enhanced survival skills. That is because their "madness" was never intrinsic to them, but was caused by direct pressures from the outside.

Such pressures turn the otherwise healthy and vibrant mind inwards for a while, so as to get to know itself in all of its imaginative complexity, thus releasing blockages and repressions that would otherwise cause neurosis.

That is why the shaman's "wounding" is often so beneficial to himself as well as to his community. It provides them with insights as to the meaning and nature of the ills within any particular community -- and what can be done to remedy these ills.

Ego-deflation and its link to shamanism

Here is the key to Marechera’s shamanism: It is to be found in his ability to gain astounding insights whilst cognitively undergo a level of ego deflation (which, of course, emerges from a state of mind moderated by cognitive maturity). This is a useful state of mind employed by artists, that The theroetician of art, Anton Ehrenzwieg  terms “dedifferentiation” whereby one thing melts into another, whereby male and female, black and white identities no longer seem to exist. Once all the solid elements of reality have been reduced as part-pieces of a primeval oneness, the hidden relationships between these elements can be explored.

NOTE: Unlike those of the Kleinian schools, Jungians don't use the term, "pre-Oedipal" to imply evil or pathology as such. Jungians see this original,  early childhood level of consciousness as being simply different from the rational, adult norm. It's a realm of transformation and mystical consciousness. We all have components of that in us; the ability to see ourselves as part of life's great oneness.

According to Anton Ehrenzweig, a lack of access to states of mind where the ego is de-differentiated signifies schizophrenia. One must be able to dissolve one's stress by temporarily de-differentiating the ego from the field of one's being, to regroup with creative resources, rather than pathologically splitting and projecting.

Facing his environmental and personal relationships in their molten state of cognitive “dedifferentiation”, Marechera is able to see new alignments of the dynamic forces that make up identity, and to reintegrate the elements at will, into his artistic and Utopian political vision. What is shamanistic about this is that he appears to see, as it were, the spiritual counterparts of concrete social and historical identities. One is more than one's formal identity -- so much more.

The shamanistic departure from the adult model of crystalline identities is redemptive for one views those one comes across in terms of their unconditioned potentialities -- in Marechera’s terms, “all the souls that didn’t come out of the womb with you”, and not just in terms of their limits within the historically contingent sphere of actually existing reality. Indeed “probabilities” (as per the waves versus particles idea of physics elucidated by Bohm and Bion), and a deepening awareness of group dynamics See: Bion) are employed very effectively by this writer. Wave theory is unto particle theory as the unconscious is to the conscious mind. Work produced by a cognitively dedifferentiated sense of the world may be grasped by the reader not logically -- that is in terms of cause and effect, or in terms of a subject and his field -- but intuitively and holistically at a subliminal and visceral level.

Marechera’s contemporary shamanism involves first the breaking the ground of reality and next is rearranging the elements of cognition in a new artistic pattern in a manner that Ehrenweig describes as a reassimilation of the features created in the work of art, under the guidance of unconscious processes. This last ability lies behind the conventional acclamation of the shaman’s psychological “great health”, as well as the artist’s greater-than-average level of insight.

Shamanistic flows of life

I now understand that the problem I wanted to solve through writing my autobiographical thoughts was solved through shamanistic methods and strategies of recapitulating the past. It was not enough to write the thoughts down, but I had to eventually reach the point where I would be able to see myself objectively -- that is, to see myself from the outside. Up until this point, the memoir wasn't completed, at least not in my mind.

I had, for a while, a wish that others would complete it for me. My expectation was based on my social and cultural conditioning, which had been extremely idealistic, in the sense of believing that knowledge and power and goodness were absolute, and that I had only to keep struggling to be rewarded with the jackpot.

Looking back, I had anticipated that others generally knew more than I. For instance, I presumed I had only to mention a theory or a concept to any lecturer at university, and they would immediately be able to become a fountain of knowledge, filling me in on the aspects of meaning I had missed. I assumed, in short, that I was missing strategic bits of knowledge that others probably had.

This wasn't an issue of self-esteem, since I also knew that I had a great deal of knowledge in specific subject areas, which gratified me a great deal. Nonetheless, it vexed me that I seemed to be missing some parts of emotional and historical knowledge. It perplexed me even more that I couldn't figure out what these were.

This something essential being missing made my paragraphs seem awkward as I had to somehow cover over the elisions with words I thought probably approximated my intentions. Most of what I said I was entirely certain about, but there remained nonetheless some missing bits of knowledge -- aspects of meaning, and a sense of the likely impact of my words, of which I was uncertain.

Having to take a hit or miss approach to meaning unraveled me. I had to recover knowledge about what I didn't know -- but above all, I had to find out specifically what is was I didn't know.

I finally found out that a particular paradigm resonated with me deeply. There were others who had a similar goal and purpose in life, and were pursuing it in ways that made a lot of sense to me. Peculiarly enough, I also found that those who couldn't understand the meaning and value of this project intuitively could not understand it at all.

Misinterpretations of Nietzsche, Bataille and Marechera are common -- for instance, in the idea that they were simply acting up. I perceived that they were in search of their emotions to recover them. I was doing the same. The fact that I had missing bits of awareness deeply bothered me. I had to work my way deeply into the reality I had come from to learn what these pieces were. This process was constituted by writing and researching my PhD.

My PhD research finally brought me to an understanding of a paradigm that would facilitate my task. Descent into the past to recover one's identity is what I came to term "intellectual shamanism". The concept of Eternal Recurrence that is at the core of Nietzsche's philosophy is also concerned with recovery of one's self from one's historical accidents.

I also understood what defines and separates writers like Nietzsche, Bataille and Marechera from other sorts of writers is that they are writers who have some early trauma. In the case of Nietzsche, it seems to relate to his father's early death. Bataille's father used to beat him. Marechera was born into a war zone, and I entered one, psychologically, when my family emigrated from a war zone. The logic of intellectual shamanism is in the recovery of the parts of oneself lost to trauma. For those who do not have to face this task, this shamanistic paradigm will make little intuitive sense. The ability to restore one's sense of one's life into a whole, that one approves of, is the basis for Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence:  until one can effectively manage this, one keeps reliving the original trauma.

The effect of trauma is the numbing of emotions -- hence the loss of aspects of oneself to the historical past. To feel one's emotions again, whilst recreating the historical context in which they had become numbed, is to restore one's full sense of self, so that nothing is missing. The emotional and intellectual knowledge I'd been lacking due to episodes of numbing were restored substantially.

Still, I had not seen myself from the outside yet, which meant I retained a feeling of vulnerability in terms of overall self-knowledge. In the back of my mind I feared that there was something strange about me -- a feeling confirmed by the fact that many others could not understand my sense of the issues Marechera, Bataille and Nietzsche were trying to address through their philosophies. All three of these writers have come under intense fire by moralists who thought they were engaged in nasty practices. The bourgeois moralists considered Marechera simply and straightforwardly undisciplined, Bataille as having a meaningless, but not redemptive attraction to violence, and Nietzsche as being simply ideologically fascist. In my experience, these writers were my salvation, instructing me how to repair damage to my psyche.

Just a few days ago, I finally saw myself from a detached point of view as a result of continuing to pursue self-knowledge. Thankfully, there is nothing wrong with me -- except one thing: I do have a tendency to psychological numbing. I'm not always entirely present, although never out of control. At the moment of reliving an earlier trauma, I am intellectually and emotionally absent. This tendency is deeply ingrained, conditioned from childhood. The consequences of this early conditioned form of emotional self-defense is that I lose details from the present, very easily, if under stress. When my emotions temporarily switch off, I am no longer present. This in turn leads to another problem in that I'm not sure what the proper emotions or observations would be in relation to a particular situation, since although I was there, I didn't really experience the situation fully.

Intellectual shamanism helps me to overcome this tendency to emotionally switch off. One has to face "death" in accepting the fact that all is finite. By means of fearlessly "confronting death", one encounters reality in all of its unmediated immediacy. Shamanistic techniques thus manage to reawaken socially traumatized people's connections with reality -- which are then experienced as spontaneous flows of life.

The incubation tank of arch-conservatism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My practical education about the complexities of life could have filled a very tiny notebook.

The search for knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was nothing here to feel.  I felt nothing.

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

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

Rhodesia, sex and gender

There was no welfare system in the Southern Rhodesia of the 40s, so you had to be able to survive by wits alone. For men that meant being prepared to innovate, accepting guidance from authority, and if you were lucky enough to secure a foothold in commerce or government, doing as you were told. For women it meant retaining one's virginity until marriage. A single mother was looked down upon, no matter what the context. To have a child outside of marriage meant that you were charged with bringing up the infant all alone. Without the economic support of the father and husband, your chances of success were very low.

My father's dad was a radio man in a World War 2 support plane that was shot down over one of the great oceans of the world. His mother was left with a small child, at a point in her life when she desperately needed to start over again. What man would have her with another man's child in tow? Tragedies like this were never meant to happen.

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

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

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

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

He decided Jenny had gained a distinctly mocking tone in her voice when she told him all her friends were 'taking the gap' -- leaving the country.  Although she was only twelve and hadn't had much to do with him, she seemed to be mocking his very situation, the overturning of everything he had believed in (which is what regime change meant). She would certainly have to pay for her mockery by being taught some serious lessons about who was boss.  Her friends were going overseas and a new period of life would begin as she moved from primary school to high school.  Politics has never interested her, because it had never been explained to her in detail.

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

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

Children these days didn't understand the cost of freedom -- but his daughter was necessarily becoming, out of the changes wrought by her biology,  his enemy.  Like the situation in the country, she was now, symbolically, out of control.  The latest turn of political events had become unbearable to him.  That he could not easily forgive.

DOUBTING THOMASINA

My parents' hopes and aspirations that I would settle down and start a family devolved -- out of necessity, of course -- to the point where I would marry a communist and resolve to live life on the edge. There is a humorous side to everything, even the darkest nights.  I hadn't gone through all this pain and torment for no reason. Now that the end of all that was in reach, I had resolved to what advantages were coming to me, and actually enjoy my life.

Mike and I have a common sentiment that we simply love to share. It's that "communism is good."

"Hey, did you look at my essay and check my grammar?" I shout out from the other room.

"Yes. All done."

"And are you sure you weren't tempted to add anything extra?"

"I added one thing only -- that communism is good," he answers.

"Thanks."

It has been difficult for me, encountering the ideology that says I must adapt to cultures and attitudes that I don't feel. Everything that pressures me, that pushes me in one way or another, saying "hurry, and adapt!" has had its peculiar and complex effect on me.

I lost my health for many years, but it is back again. I think I nearly killed my father once -- or perhaps he did it himself, by trying to force me to become  without a mind of my own. It made for an impossible situation -- where survival was possible for one of us or the other, within the limitations of his ideological view of women, so the more he told me that I couldn't speak, or even think properly, the more I told him to go and die. Then he became manic and nearly drowned in the ocean  and an ambulance had to take him to the hospital.   I was numb to social relations by this time.   I repeated my mantra for survival: "Either me, or him."

Hate gets to the bottom of your soul eventually, and when you know that you are hated, you become ruthless eventually. The struggle for survival seems to sharpen on all sides in harsh relief, when you are surrounded by hate. You make absolutist ultimatums to preserve yourself -- and it comes down in the end to "Either me, or him."

My father had lost everything in losing his place in Rhodesia. His work place could no longer fund him, and his pay was diminishing with inflation, monthly. Perhaps his way of adaptation was to preserve in me a little retrogressive flavour -- a little island of Rhodesia. Survival said I didn't have the option to offer him that. "Either him or me."

Hatred has its way of going deep -- his constant attacks did that.  On morning I was sleeping in late, due to a virus.  9.30 am -- and he threw my bed over.  I scrambled to cover myself with a sheet, naked.   Right-wing and left-wing attacks on my identity now strike me with all the psychological force that sends my blood cold. This has gone on for so long.  The ideological onslaughts that command me to change because I'm evil are based on Western needs to label and combat evil identities in their midst.

Whites who come from Zimbabwe (or "Rhodesia", as it was known) are not, however, evil -- as Western liberals hold. And, Communism is not inevitably "good" either! Get to know our sense of humor, our interests and nuances, because conforming to your cultural norms (rather than being out of step and in a time-warp) isn't morally pure or all that intelligent either and adaptation is not the only meaning left in life after everything else in life has lost its meaning.

ugly pink poster

Marechera's feminist ethics

One way of looking at Scrapiron Blues is that many of the works contained within are attempts to give a semi-humorous articulation to realities that pass beneath our socially conditioned radars.

It is worth making an argument that there is a lot that we are conventionally predisposed to not see, to overlook and to disregard, especially when it comes to social justice. Reasons we do not experience parts of reality are many and varied. Our need to believe that we control our own safety and that our efforts in life will be rewarded leads us to invent a reality that rewards or punishes people in direct relation to their efforts. Therefore many Jews in Nazi Germany took heart that genocide would not befall them, but languished in their ghettos until it was time to die. The just world fallacy explains why we may not see the world the way it actually is, particularly at the level where political machinations affect us.

There are other psychological reasons of varying importance. Jung says that we do not see our "shadow side" -- which is those aspects of ourselves that do not comply with a positive self image. What is evil about our own complicity with injustice in the world we would tend to deny, according to Jung's theorem.

On a more trivial level, Lacan's conceptualization of the Real, suggests that we do not adequately process traumatic experiences since we cannot convey them in language. If this is so, the ethical consequence of this would be that we cannot warn others effectively about traumatic situations, so that they may avoid them. Even if we have experience and understanding of these traumatic situations, it is unlikely that we will be able to convey their significance.

So there are a lot of psychological reasons why a great deal about reality must be left unsaid. Yet there are ideological reasons, also. Our already existing psychological tendencies to overlook so much of reality has been enshrined in various right-wing dogmas as being in accordance with the most proper sort of behaviour. One should not appear to "whine", for instance. Why not? According to all dogmatists, talking about a reality that others do not agree to share is simply "fake". Ideological pressure forces a great silence to descend upon so much that is real.

By the time Marechera wrote much of the material in Scrapiron Blues , he must have had a pretty shrewd idea of how much people could or couldn't hear about reality, in general. He wrote many of his works in such a way as to soften the blow of the message by imputing humour regarding the aspects of history and personal reality that are hidden from our conscious minds.

Thus he wrote a pantomime about the traumas of war, and raises the status of women as perceivers of a hidden reality. In making women out to be in tune with what it not patently observable in the world, he recognises their position in society puts them closer to the experience of trauma than most men.

Madness and Nature « MUSTER YOU

Madness and Nature « MUSTER YOU

Going Home: to the wraith of identity politics

I'm now reading the Lessing book, Going Home (1957). I feel the book is a bit dated, ideologically, at least from my perspective. She really is very enmeshed in identity politics, and it seems to come across as a concern for 'authenticity' in the Sartrean moral sense, which I feel is incredibly dated, too. 'Authenticity' = one must obey what is true to one's essence (which, surprise, surprise, is defined by ethnic identity).

But where does this ideology lead but to entrenching historical roles along the lines of ethnicity.

"Africa belongs to the Africans" and Europe belongs to the Europeans is a rather savage line of thinking.

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There is another problem with Lessing's approach. Whatever it might have been strategically designed to do, the approach that objectifies and positions groups of people to experience the moral contempt of the rest of the world creates a class of untermenschen. This outcome could hardly be other than deplorable.

If a writer gives a generation of readers the idea that the situation and experience of those whites living in Africa necessarily falls under the rubric of "self-pity", then you do exactly what is required to dehumanize them.

Any emotions they have, any sense of sadness, regret, terrible loss, will only be viewed from now on as meaningless self-pity.

To put two and two together: it has been my common experience to find a lot of people behaving like robots in my company. I'm the colonial in their midst, to whom they are required to show little empathy. Therefore, they are devoid of human sensibility, the human capacity to empathise, and above all, humanity. Whereas they act as if they already know me as well as they would like to, they do not take time to find out what I actually think. My introduction to the world of those who think in morally correct terms has been an introduction to a world of zombies.

This is what it is like when somebody doesn't empathise with you as a human being. You don't see the humanity in them, either. (And neither can you, for humanity is not there to be seen.)

After many years of this, I joined the military with the wish to kill somebody -- anybody, as long as I could get the accumulated tension of being so dehumanized out of my system. (This is the effect of being dehumanized over a long time - you learn to expect very little from others apart from a basic principle of kill or be killed.)

I became rigidly rational and aware of my dire circumstances. I would save myself at any cost to anybody else at all.

I also knew, by this time, that I had experienced a lot -- a lot of stuff that was considered meaningless or trivial. It wasn't -- and my certain knowledge that I had experienced a great deal of subhuman treatment made me hold others to the standard at least to which they had held me.

Whenever tears emerged, I would look at them, having learned to tolerate pain by being harsh-faced-- and apply to my enemies the same principle I'd learned to apply to myself.

Having adjusted to stoicism as a cultural norm, I would say, "What idiotic self-pity!"


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Should this surprise you?