Draft Chapter 12: my father's memoir

Next door to us lived Leslie Tiffin. She was the same age as me and I was always over there visiting. My uncles and aunts used to tease me that she was my girlfriend. They used to say am I going to marry her. the thought of marriage, at the age of seven, hadn't even occurred to me. The mother was very relaxed. She left her baby out in a pram in the rain and it nearly drowned once. The pram filled with water. Nel Tiffin would not let anything bother her. I was so often at the Tiffin's house that I was a bit like another brother. There was a hedge between the two properties and we cut a hole in the fence and just went through.

Nel had adopted two children from a distant relative. The boy, whose name was Rollo, was an outright bully and his eldest sister Verna was his main target. I once saw Rollo beating Verna with a large bamboo stick until it broke. He used to beat her around the legs. She had a lot of personality, and I would have thought that on occasion she would have answered straight back at him. They were both from one family. It was after the war so it might have had something to do with that. He wanted to be the boss man in the family group. Nel was very easy-going.

Because I was part of the family, if they went anywhere, they used to take me with them. They went to see Snow White at the movies. They walked out and I followed them. One minute they were there and then, they disappeared. They became mixed up with the crowds of people walking past. To me, they just vanished. So, I walked up and down the road outside for a few minutes and a woman asked me if I was okay. I explained my problem. She said I'll take you home. I as eight, and had no clear memory of how to get to my home. I managed to remember enough of it to find my way to the back of our property. There was a pathway through to my house. The lady followed me back. Then I tried to find my mother, but she too had vanished. When I found her, she was working in the garden. I called out that this lady had brought me home. She just looked up and said okay. I do not think she understood the situation. my mother didn't notice much of what I did.

Leslie and I used to walk up to a kopje at the back of her house. This was made of big boulders on top of each other. It became our secret play area. We were lucky we never saw a snake. One day we were playing round the rocks, Verna arrived on the scene, and she suggested we should do something different from just playing around on the sand. We should take our clothes off. Feeling slightly bored, we decided to try it. It gave us a feeling of uninhibited freedom but nothing else. Sometime later we were up at my house, playing around a new dog kennel that dad built. We were rather bored, so I suggested to Leslie we try the 'clothes off' thing, again. My mother found us and beat the hell out of me. We would have been about seven. I realized it was better not to hold a grievance. It stays with you, if you do.

Many years later at boarding school, matron told me to go outside and put my jumper on. So I walked outside followed by matron hurling abuse because I didn't have my jumper on. When the housemaster, whose name was Vanasvegan pounced on me and sent me up to the sick bay. I think that was just a convenient place for him. Then he went out the room for a moment and came back with a stick. He told me to bend over and he hit me twice with it. On each occasion, he knocked me over. The stick he used was a cane wrapped in rawhide. He was hitting me for not having a jumper on as the matron had told me to. He should really have been reported, but there was no point in holding a grudge. The whole situation was disgraceful in many ways. The stick had cut my bum, causing an open wound. I do not know if other kids were getting hit.

It was a slightly sick world, but then it is a slightly sick world even today. In Australia these days, people would notice that something was wrong. later on, when some fairly innocent event happens, your subconscious is going, what if someone takes it in their head to start beating you again, then you don't sleep and start to get nervous. There are many situations in life where you get very nervous and not altogether logically nervous. When you get nervous, it steals life from you. Life can be good, but if you are nervy, it's stolen from you.

Leslie and I had many good times, even after I was beaten for playing in the dog kennel. We would play hide and seek with her brothers. Roldy was the younger brother. When I was ten, he would have been eight or nine, he had an elder brother John. They were okay but a bit immature. Roldy was the sort of bloke you'd play hide and seek with end he'd disappear and you'd eventually find him crying somewhere. He thought he'd been abandoned.  (Roldy wasn't the one left out in the pram. That was John. Nel had left him under a tree when a huge rainstorm came. When my mother got to him, his nose was about the level of the water. Nel had gone to town. My mother told the story repeatedly, to illustrate how things were more relaxed in the olden days. My mother thought it was okay to be relaxed, but not quite that laid back.)

In the meantime, life went on. We had horses and the Tiffins had a few too. They decided to go into it in a big way and they bought a farm at Umwinseydale. They decided to ride their horses to the farm. They asked me if I wanted to go along for the ride, so I said yes. In the mean time, they built a house at the farm. It took them a few months. I went to stay with them the farm until they were ready to ride the horses there. It would have been a couple of months.

One morning at the farm, when I was starting to develop a crush on Leslie, it had been raining. The sun was out and hot. We walked down to the stables. The Tiffins kept twelve horses and five cows. The servants had been told to collect all their dung and pile it up. When we got to the stables, there was a pile about six feet high. Despite my protests, Leslie ran up this dung heap to the top. The heap had gone all mushy inside, with an outer crust that promptly crushed when Leslie got to the top. She found herself up to her armpits in cow dung, whereupon she begged me to join her, but I could not see the sense in it. Nowadays, I would have run up and joined her at the top: you can get more out of life by sharing than by being safe.

Amazon.com: Jennifer Armstrong Profile: Reviews

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TRAINING 30 MAY 2012

 I'm kind of back on track with training. The recently inserted Mirena device means there is still some swelling in the abdominal region, but generally I feel healthier.

BBC News - Can a hallucinogen from Africa cure addiction?

BBC News - Can a hallucinogen from Africa cure addiction?

As far as scientists understand, ibogaine affects the brain in two distinct ways. The first is metabolic. It creates a protein that blocks receptors in the brain that trigger cravings, stopping the symptoms of withdrawal.
"Ibogaine tends to remove the withdrawals immediately and brings people back to their pre-addiction stage," says Jeewa. With normal detox this process can take months.
Its second effect is much less understood. It seems to inspire a dream-like state that is intensely introspective, allowing addicts to address issues in their life that they use alcohol or drugs to suppress.

What Does the Term “Patriarchy” Mean to Me? « Clarissa's Blog

What Does the Term “Patriarchy” Mean to Me? « Clarissa's Blog

I am helping my father write his memoirs -- and all the tragedies and disruptions in his life appear to have been caused by patriarchal processes. Let us start at the beginning.

1. His newly married father goes to war (WW2) and is killed. My father, a young baby, is left without a male parent. War is a patriarchal activity, whereby men prove their courage by serving the empire.

2. His single mother, suffering from grief and denial, has no patriarchal breadwinner. She has to find another man to take care of her fast. There is no social welfare system in the colony, only the patriarchal system.

3. She marries quickly, in order to resolve her unhallowed status of being a single mother, and to obtain the patriarchal breadwinner as soon as possible.

4. She is unhappy in the marriage. The newly appointed husband turns out to be very cold towards her son and keeps reminding him he is “adopted”. He shows no human emotions. The mother feels resentful against her son for putting her in a situation where she had to get married to someone who wasn’t wholly suited to her needs.

5. My father is sent to boarding school at the age of five. He experiences this as rejection.

6. He grows up and gets married himself, and things go okay for a number of years, but there’s something not quite right. Deep down, there is a bitter and seething resentment against women. Sometimes this erupts as angry aggression against my mother. I recall one instance where he refused to allow her to have her name on the outside of the family property, along with his, since he said this wasn’t in accordance with his beliefs about “holding the family together”.

7. There are unpredictable bouts of anger whenever he feels like we kids aren’t cooperating with his expectations. Sometimes these expectations are reasonable, such as washing dishes. At other times, they are unreasonable, such as his expectation that we read his mind and automatically know what we should do in an entirely novel situation, without being told.

8. My father develops hostility to me around the time the country falls apart. His mind also falls apart. He begins accusing me of things I haven’t done. My mother also becomes extremely anxious and suspicious of my spending too much time alone. Teenagers are not to be trusted.

9. We migrate to Australia in 1984 and things are quiet for two or three years. Then the religious persecution starts. “The family is falling apart!” — Yes, well, I was reaching maturity, and trying to understand the world on my own terms, which meant leaving the Christian religion.

10. My father decides to stop my independence by whatever means, in order to “keep the family together”. He engages in shaming, threats, attacks on my identity and occasional physical violence. He starts hearing “messages from God”. His behavior is unpredictable and frightening — moreover, he has managed to convince others in my family that I, being the only atheist of us all, had somehow managed to cause his behavior.

Anyway, so far as I can see, these outcomes were all linked to his original trauma that had to do with his mother not being able to take the time to marry the man of her choice, due to patriarchal moral and economic pressures.

You can also see what I had to overcome in order to turn out okay.

ANALYSIS: THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA

Nietzsche is a psychological thinker.  Sometimes he extends his psychology into political theory, sometimes in a way that seems to give psychological insight to political movements. More often than not, his psychology cannot be generalized into political statements, although Nietzsche wants to do this.

In his book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he is at his best since he is a psychologist and not a social critic. (Where he dabbles too much into issues of politics and gender, he is inclined to err.)

Nietzsche's Zarathustra is a prophet for a secular era. It's very interesting how much the ideas in the book parallel those later discovered by Wilfred Bion, especially in terms of the psychology of group dynamics. Nietzsche had insights into the ways that groups unconsciously coördinate their members to reinforce conformity and compliance. There is no place for a self-reliant person where there is a "herd". Creativity is even less respected by the "herd", because it disrupts the unconscious mechanisms of herd organisation. Without needing to have any intellectual grasp of a reality outside of the herd, those who partake of group dynamics are still capable of annihilating anyone who thinks and acts differently from the group. The attacks by the herd against the one who stands alone and the counter-struggle for survival have psychological origins at a subliminal level.

Nietzsche makes visible these otherwise hidden phenomena: he shows that generally those who stand alone are destroyed, that nobody has to say anything for these attacks to begin to occur. They happen automatically without overt provocation. It's group psychological dynamics at work.

Nietzsche's solution to those who are likely to be attacked for their qualities of independence is that they should prepare for this to happen. They should also throw all their weight into the creative side of their characters, and forget about conforming. If you have intellectual qualities, or creative qualities that distinguish you from the herd (not in your own mind, but in theirs), you may as well invest in these totally, even if it means willing your own destruction -- because the greater your ability, the more likely you are to disquiet those who have chosen to relinquish their independence for the sake of being protected by the group.

Self-Esteem Gradations « Clarissa's Blog

Self-Esteem Gradations « Clarissa's Blog



I must say that, not discounting that there is a psychological dimension to self esteem, I see it primarily as a cultural issue. I’ve had too many strange encounters with the Western ideology of self esteem to be able to feel confident with it.

For instance, issues which are not related to self-esteem, but are practical issues, are often deemed to be self esteem issues. Self-esteem becomes a magic formula, whereby the more you increase it, the better you are supposed to do.

I’ve found this ideology to be totally counter to my actual needs. For a very long time, I tried to cater to the idea that I had to be very careful about how I spoke to people, as I might damage their fragile self esteem. This made me tongue-tied, emotionally numb and resentful. I had no idea how to speak to those sorts of people whom I thought might be susceptible to complaining about my too-direct ways. (My original culture is extremely stoical and inclined to black humour.)

Then I got the job I now have. I expected to be walking on egg shells, but nobody had the self-esteem ideology, and everything progressed okay. After several years, I eventually learned that the people I was talking to had not only a similar sort of stoicism to me, but a dry sense of humour. This makes me very comfortable indeed.

I think my stoicism and black humour often appear incomprehensible to people, and before I realised there were cultural differences, I didn’t exercise enough caution with them. Stoicism and humour are absolutely fundamental to my personality, so I can’t really deny them without really having a personality to offer. Interestingly enough, when I spent a very short stint in the military, I encountered exactly the same stoicism and black humour together in one place, and this made me ecstatically happy.

My current job has also reassured me that I’m absolutely normal — that so long as a weird ideology does not intervene, all people really require is to be treated in a sincere way. It’s when self-esteem becomes emphasized as an issue that everything goes to pieces, as the underlying characters of those involved become difficult to discern.

Self-esteem

Self-esteem discourses have no meaning to me. Certainly, had I not passed my PhD, it would have an overwhelming meaning, but because of the way things turned out, it doesn’t. It’s like I’m safely on the other side of any nagging self-doubt, nowadays. Above and beyond this, my training is such that I don’t believe in a self that can lose or gain value on the basis of external changes. At least, that’s the way I feel. Someone can approve or disapprove of what I do, and everything will remain the same. I may experience clouds of unhappiness, or even abject misery, but fundamentally, I will not change.

I’m not sure I ever felt that I had anything to prove to anyone other than myself. I’ve never personalized my experiences to the point that I felt they constituted my essence. I’ve experienced too much change in life to engage in that sort of naivety.

I don’t think I’ve ever “worked on” myself so much as tried to find ways to indulge myself and reawaken myself. I’m looking for a project right now that will do it, but all I can come up with is sleeping in the new swag overnight, whilst it is raining.

I’ve found that I function at my best when I don’t have to think about issues that perplex me, like self esteem or identity, or other phantoms. On some fundamental level, I really don’t know what these mean, so I don’t respond effectively to others who have these concerns. If I start to question myself as to why I can’t understand these issues, I become disturbed. It seems that generally a certain amount of stoicism is a solution to these problems, at least that is what I would prescribe, but I dare not intervene in situations that I cannot grasp.

I live pretty well these days.

Theo Dorpat's analysis of Freud

Theo Dorpat gives a really good critique of a tendency I've been noticing for a long time now (I would say toward the second half of writing my thesis, when I really began to look more closely at psychoanalysis).

The tendency to view conditions of trauma as being made up of nothing more than psychological perceptions was a large part of the problem with Freud's paradigm.

QUOTE:  In his introduction to the Dora case history, Rieff, (1963) takes into account social and interpersonal factors when he concludes, "[Freud's] entire interpretation of the case...depends upon limiting the case to Dora, when, in fact, from the evidence he himself presents, it is the milieu in which she is constrained to live that is ill" (Quoted by Dorpat, p 143).

A few pages later, Dorpat discusses "Shaming as a Method of Indoctrination".  "Freud attempted to shame Dora into submission by the way he discussed Dora's alleged homosexuality and her masturbation.....Though Freud did not view homosexuality or masturbation as sinful or evil, he did view them as manifestations of psychiatric illness." ( p 153)

Clearly, Freud was treading a thin ( non-existent?) line here between preaching about moral fiber and taking care of his patient.

Dorpat says:  Freud's observation that Dora was "anxiously trying to make sure whether I was being straightforward with her" should have alerted him that issues of trust, fidelity, and integrity had an urgent priority over any explorations of the early childhood origins of her libidinal development.  ( p 155)

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MY NOTE:  Dorpat seems to make a good case for my view that Freud was treating Dora's symptoms of trauma as a sign of lacking moral fiber.  [That term is my own, which intends to give historical context and meaning to Freud's strange behaviour.]

Trauma and Recovery

This book was instrumental in providing me with a lot of insights that changed the way I understand misfortune.

Many intellectuals who borrowed from psychoanalysis, including Erich Fromm, Kleinians and others I read whilst studying for my thesis, implied indirectly that the symptoms of trauma were a result of moral failure. Indeed, I was only reminded of the nature of this association last night, when I watched the World War One drama, DOWNTOWN ABBEY. What can be worse that being killed? To be killed for cowardice. So a household servant is informed that her relative died in the war, but it was "worse than that". The ideology of "moral fiber" that is central to the 19th Century has not been overturned by the early part of the next. Rather, there was a notion that some possessed moral fiber (See pp 271ff) whereas others did not..

You would be able to see this ideology regarding the all-conquering character who makes no excuses, in Nietzsche. I'd like to think that my thesis on Marechera, who also has much of the Nietzschean spirit of wanting to conquer the world, but in an entirely different context, which did not permit permanent or definitive success, corrects previous suppositions about the structures of the psyche. The ability to persist in dangerous situations is certainly laudable, however, in contradiction to the 19th Century view we must now assume that such determination to persist when all the odds are against one will take its toll on the mind. This extraction of a cost nothing to do with anyone's innate capacity to follow through on an extremely difficult task. Rather, as we know today, everybody, even the strongest, has a breaking point. Some people may last longer than others under extreme duress, but more those of more rational views would frame this as a psychological issue, not a moral one*.

Judith Herman puts everything into context when she shows that those who suffer from trauma suffer not from their own limitations but from the limitations of those who should be part of their nearest communities. To take a brave risk is one thing, but if your community doesn't back you up, you are probably going to suffer from psychological trauma. Herman is certainly not suggesting a hippy-dippy attitude, where "community" is the answer to all wrongs. Rather, what she seems to suggest is that we are all interconnected. If you withdraw the human connection -- that is, the lifeline -- from somebody who has taken a risk, they are going to feel more in danger. The betrayal of trust will compute, at a psychological level, as trauma.

So it's not that the particular individual from whom you withdrew your moral support has some intrinsic moral lack.

The origin of the trauma is that you withdrew your support.

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*These days we seem to have flipped into biologism which, on the surface at least, seems exactly the opposite of the 19th Century view. In other words, biological "reasons" are invoked for people to take various chemicals to make them "normal". The problem is no longer a moral one, but one pertaining to one's unique, individual biological make-up. This view is as false as the 19th Century one -- even if it seems to offer the sufferer less difficulty in the short-term -- because the demand to unquestioningly conform to social norms remains as an unethical pressure.

Thinking/Maturity

Many are the benefits of maturity.   One is in realizing what one had failed to recognize before -- that people often have readily identifiable propensities that having no relationship to what it means to be an individual.

Social psychology is more important to know that individualistic psychology,  if you want to make your way through everyday life.   In the past I was under the mistaken impression that everybody around me was an intellectual who thought very deeply about every sort of issue.   Many people represented themselves that way to me.   I later learned that intellectuals are not that great in number.   They are those who can generate an original thought, rather than reacting to the world and repeating what they've heard.  To be assertive is not the same as generating original thought.   One really has to have thought it through.

Other myths I've managed to shrink over time include the idea that one necessarily stands out as being more intelligent if one's life follows a smooth and easily managed path.   There's no logic behind this supposition.   One cannot account for all the variables influencing our existences with such a trite formulation.

I've also developed a much better understanding of the two enemies of shamanistic thinking:

1.  Identity politics, which has an agenda to morally reform the world.   Moral reforms are hopeless.  Genuine change has to be willed and has to come from within.

2.  Biologism.   There are many forms of biologism on the left and the right.   Essentialist feminism and biological determinism both are detrimental to intellectual development.   You cannot be open about the future if you are working within deterministic systems or within categories of pre-defined identity.

Far beyond and above this, the most important insight I've had in my life to date is that most people, when they seem to be addressing you, are really addressing an idea of you based on narrow, categorical assumptions.   That is, most people don't rely upon direct perception.

That makes sense when you later understanding how many social constraints act to condition us against direct perception.   One sees people in terms of categories, as one is trained to.   One doesn't see the behavior, the  tendencies, the nuances.  It is particularly Americans not to take the time to see these, for Americans are the ultimate sales people, and one doesn't make a sale unless one seizes up the prospective buyer in the first few seconds of interaction.

To have an accurate perception is difficult, since one must constantly clean the windows of the psyche to reduce effects of cognitive distortions and mental projections.   Otherwise, one sees the world precisely as it isn't.  Most people don't have the basic strategies in place to achieve visual hygiene.   They can be great people, but don't expect them to perceive anything accurately.   This they cannot do.  It's not because they're bad, or mean or wrong.   They just don't have the necessary training and awareness.

MARECHERA'S VIEWS ON THINKING/MATURITY

Marechera talks about trying to find his way out of Harare's Maze, but the "maze" is also -- which we know from previous metaphors and allegories in his work -- his mind.

MINDBLAST, OR THE DEFINITIVE BUDDY.

This "definitive buddy", or one true friend seems to represent the doppelgänger of the civilized and culturally conformist Zimbabwean -- the one who is living the authentic life on the streets, in touch with his true self, yet languishing because of it. (Well that is a symbolic reversal of the Kleinian position, it seems, which is typical for Marechera, who called himself an insider, when ironically, he meant "outsider" -- "Inside-out is outside-in, insider!"). But the psychological struggle at the pre-Oedipal level, and the threat of the intrusion of Minotaur of paranoia (due to the psychological harshness of living life on the streets) is Marecherean and somewhat Kleinian (p 596 of the article). Anyway, every person that Marechera meets in his journal is "maze unto himself".

"

There are a lot of guys right here who've got the maddest notions in the world and each day all they are waiting for is to act out their weird descriptions. Just like I am doing. You look them in the eye and that's that. You've had it. It's like looking the Ancient Mariner in the eye. Afore ya know the yarn you already It. No escape from their mazes. No exit from Brooklyn. [a reference to Sartre's "No Exit"?] Only the Sartre nausea. Only the mesmerizing outsideness with Albert Camus shouting: "Seconds out. Round twenty-first century!" and you know you gotta fight and fight till you're down and the chips and the odds and the neuroses are hanging out like your intestines after the knife fight. There they are hanging out like nothing in the bloody world. [...]How enticing, the notion of uniqueness -- suddenly dispelled by the raucous voice, the shrieked insult, the horrible truth under the fine skin of humanity. Were I a pathologist, a forensic scientist in the police murder laboratory ... What the means? Why the irrevocable? How the exit of these Hararean mazes?"

NOT IDEALISM 

Let us start with Freudian idealism: It seems to me that when the "aggression of the self it mislocated [into a hostile other]" (p 597), that repeats a tendentious  error, based on a right-wing moral tradition, to make it out that all forces are by their nature psychical and immaterial. Rather, for Freudian logic to be more consistent with itself, it is necessary to consider that the forces that impose a response of psychological retreat (and concomitant feeling of anxiety) are themselves MATERIAL forces that have real material power, and not forces of the imagination that have only imaginary power.

Let us view things from the perspective of a more humane philosophy. We can then assume  that the active force of one's imagination comes to terms with the material nature of the power of unconscious interpsychological forces, and it does so in terms of rearranging its mental structures to accommodate its maturing understanding that political force is in fact real force. Whether this knowledge is later repressed (or not) will determine the degree to which one conforms to society’s requirements for conventionally “civilised” behaviour (the specific nature of which will vary from culture to culture). Trauma (and shamanic wounding) tends to open a window of the mind.   If one's mind is strong enough to observe it both from near and from afar, it enables one to reconsider the nature of power, as well as its effects upon the arrangement of one’s psyche.

http://musteryou.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/notes-on-mindblast/

Biologism

The capacity for intellectual shamanism is based on having superfluous energy to spend on exploring inner, psychological dimensions.   The prerequisite for engagement puts intellectual shamanism at odds with many, perhaps most, other philosophies of life that demand one's time and commitment in other ways.  Even holding other implicit philosophies, such as a prevalent one of our age -- biological determinism -- moves one several steps away from understanding how intellectual shamanism is expressed.  Those whose purpose in life is sex and reproduction will not find anything of value in this paradigm.

Somebody whose life is guided and determined by biological imperatives would experience intellectual shamanism as only threatening to take them away from their allotted tasks.   A typical misunderstanding I have found in those who read Nietzsche is in the idea that one can use one's reading as a means to gain the kind of "wisdom" that would enable one to fully express one's innate biological urges.   Yet, the desire to move in a direction that fulfills one's needs as a creature of one's biology is exactly opposed to the desire to further one's knowledge about subjectivity and inner worlds.   To follow a biological deterministic path requires a calm and yielding disposition.   Any emotion or sensation that is not in this vein is a threat to one's determined destiny.

By contrast, with regard to shamanism a lot of actions may be done and a lot of words spent, which have no biological purpose whatsoever.   The meaning of looking into one's inner worlds is not to lament anything, but simply to look around at one's leisure.  There is nothing to win or lose here, in terms of any sense of necessary or inevitable destinies.   One has all the time in the world to waste and no purpose to achieve except that intrinsic to looking.  One can scream and shout all one likes.   This is actually encouraged.

At the same time, those in a hurry to take things in the opposite direction will, of course, not find anything here.

Irrationality is roughage in your diet

Irrationality is not the enemy of civilization, but is its closest friend..   Rationality is not the enemy, either, as those of postmodernist persuasion have been convinced.   The lack of any dialectical relationship between the two is the enemy of human, organic life.   Where one does not acknowledge and integrate the irrational parts of life, one runs the danger of ill health.   This is where shamanism differs from contemporary ways of thinking.   One cannot continue to make everything about life more efficient, more protected, more controlled, without running the risk of losing the very essence of what makes life meaningful.   Those aspects of life that are not anticipated, not devised for one's experience by a superior power, which involve possible danger or hardship, provide far more of the substance of life than managed and efficient thinking.

You can't protect life too much without destroying it.  One can eliminate certain hardships and it is rational to do so, but never deny yourself or others the chance to engage with aspects of life that you cannot control because they are unpredictable.

Too much refined sugar in one's diet leads to heart disease.   Too much containment and control leads to a diseased spirit. Humans were meant to run around and experience novelty, not be confined to a desk.

Falling through the cracks

It's been a long time since I equated happiness with success. I remember vaguely wanting my life to be "a success". I had no real notions of what would form success, but a more general hopefulness that I would know "success" when it came about, because it would make me happy. 

I gradually learned this formula was self-defeating. One cannot set out to seek "happiness", because seeking happiness as such assures that it will elude one. One has to seek what one wants out of life instead, and then happiness appears. 

Because I had this formulation back to front, I was very miserable for a several years, particularly in my early twenties, when life seemed to stagnate, and I waited for "happiness" to pull me from my dormant state. 

Christmas after Christmas, this guest refused to simply arrive. My family had brought me up with Christian values, which suggested that life rewards you in its own time and in a "natural" way. There was nothing to do and nothing that could be pushed along. This ideology in itself was depressing enough

What was I doing wrong in seeking happiness? I had no maturity -- a fact I'd come to recognize, when it came to understanding my place in the world. I had no skills to analyse anything, so I didn't know where I ought to fit in. Being a migrant of several years had much to do with my experience of anomie. I had longings that seemed to be answered only by returning to an African environment. 

All of this time, I never felt, "perhaps I'm falling through the cracks?" Instead, I just assumed that fate was tricking me by leaving me behind in unrewarding twilight zones. I was very angry and very sad about this, but I hadn't any words for either of these strong emotions. I had no means to conceptualize why things had ended up as they had. They just had. It was fate -- and fate had no explanation for it. 

Gradually, I gained an education. But progress was slow. I had a lot of mental blanks to fill. Also, people were generally hostile when I told them I had come from Africa. I had no idea what this meant. I was trying to find some traction in life, and I had no notion that I had a controversial "identity", because of where I had come from. I was trying to find those old emotions -- the ones involving being "one" with the organic world around me. I also wanted the thrill of imminent danger as these were the sensations I had grown up with because of the war. 

Now, my feelings had totally abandoned me, and I was looking for the sort of environment where we could rendezvous again. I couldn't find one. Everything was green and sealed over -- not the sort of environment I was seeking. 

This distressed me beyond words.


My breakthrough eventually came through reading Nietzsche. Through his writing, I gained access to some of these older, familiar emotions. I used his ideas to structure new meanings. My life gained inner purpose for the first time since I'd left Zimbabwe, back in 1984. 

My path to salvation has been slow. I've learned how much a person can adapt to very different circumstances, and when she should retire from the fight -- not in a spirit of resignation, but with respect for knowledge about where the boundary lines are that preserve the self.


I've found that pleasure is not too hard to find, especially if one awakens old robust states of mind. Sources of happiness appear.

Shamanistic paradox

If you're not prone to categorizing reality in order to understand it, you will have altogether different sorts of insights as to how all the parts of experience fit together, how cause and effect work, and how systems function or fail to function effectively.

The barrier to this fundamental level of understanding is the categorization of reality into seemingly discrete and separated categories.   Thus, in the past, people upbraided me with the objection, "You can't say anything authoritative about how systems work, as you're the wrong gender!"

I responded, from my altogether different paradigm:  "Yes, but you can't even observe the nature of systems, or how they work or do not work, because you have divided everything up according to gender.  This means you are still working at the level of hypothesis and haven't tested anything yet."

Siblings in distress

It's a joke, mind!

Here I am,with my other three siblings.  I always find it strange to view and interact with those who have marched onward in their allotted roles.   It's not even an issue of my having directly rebelled (although I certainly did that).   I just couldn't figure out, intellectually, the purpose of reproduction and going to churches.   I had expected the others would have fallen as much out of the loop as I had.   Logic and cultural context might have suggested this scenario.   Nonetheless, I am the only atheist, the only one who finds conservatism nearly impossible to comprehend.

My sister, second left, is a Christian of the mainstream, evangelical sort. Her position is quite extreme on matters of religion. The third youngest (next in line) is sympathetic with certain tenets of Islamic ethics, having stayed in Dubai.   It's unlikely he is entirely joking.   The youngest, last in line, has just come back to my home city to have his second child "christened".   All three are conservative:  married, with children.

I might have been dreaming, but the minute I blink my eyes, someone is putting a child into my lap. It's very robust, kicks around like you would not believe.   Imagine having that stored in your belly for nine months -- the sort of cramps it'd give you.

I assure everybody that I'm really not "getting it", these days.  It's worse than usual.  

Priestly prescriptions

Another aspect of getting older is the realization that one must relinquish the desire to see certain aspects of society change.   In one's earlier, optimistic years, it had seemed the very little would be required to tweak the system to function in a better gear.    A naive supposition is that one need only point out a better way of doing something for others to concede, "This is true!" or "You have a point!"

There are all sorts of reasons why this doesn't happen.  One is that any change is fraught with risk.  Another is that the system generally serves the majority of people adequately enough for them to embrace.   A third reason is that easy solutions are easily adopted, whereas difficult solutions are adopted only with great difficulty.

I reflect on this as I read of the ways in which external conformity to societal expectations is enforced through ideological and medical means.   A difficult solution to the problem of ADD would be to check the diets of children to make sure they are balanced and not contaminated.   It would also include encouraging children to play, for the larger part of the day, without adult supervision -- thus children would learn their limits and burn off steam.   It would necessitate that society become simpler, less contradictory and distracting, so that society's demands were easier to understand.   

This is of course self-evidently true and I "have a point".   Nothing will be done in this direction, all the same, because it's difficult.

To me, difficulty is a very good facet of life, because it makes us human.  To others, it is not so good, because it hinders progress.   The more difficulties can be avoided, the more progress one makes.  To what does one make progress?  For what purpose?  Those who do not address these questions must necessarily trust in divine intervention.

So we live in a society with an increasingly religious and mystifying face.  Experts of all sorts are supposed to help us avoid facing difficulties -- and, if your difficulties persist, shame on you -- for you have a trust issue.  We live in a faith-based society.

As I get older, I realize that most people resort to faith.  Whether the advice they're given turns out to be right or wrong, they're happy with that.   It's the priestly admonition that brings satisfaction, not the soundness or unsoundness of advice.

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Sometimes it's hard to see the improvements

 Modest hormonal fluctuations, with sometimes deeper dips, are my lot since the IUD insertion in late April.   I used to be able to ride the hormonal waves better than I'm doing now.   I used to use them as creative highs and lows.  The highs give you a chance to see the world from a position of ecstasy, whereas the lows remind you of the nature of hell, where humans are at their most heroic battling dragons.  

Now everything is more even.  There's some instability, at a level just below sea level.   I'm not as focused or ambitious as I normally am.   The low level pain is not the issue -- I'm just not riding waves the way I used to, which means I can't experience my dexterity or plan ahead or feel fully in control.

It is important for me to ride waves with skill. I pat myself on the back and congratulate myself for a job well done.   I like that sense of taking pleasure in my capabilities.  It's a doubling of self that gives me insight.

Morality lessons

So they captured me and put me on their boat -- me with my sunflower head and they with their advanced industrial culture. "You must learn new ways," said the Odysseuses. "We insist!"

I was alone and away from my home. What other option did I have, but to oblige them?

Odysseus Number 1 was more insistent than the others: "You are to refer to me as Nobody, as I have previously mentioned," he said. "You are to learn new cultural ways. Advanced format."
It was not sociable to yearn for my cave, and yet I did at this point. How could I learn new cultural ways at this advanced stage in my life? Yet all of them insisted. "Row for us and we will explain. Unique individualism. Fine format," they uttered in unison.

I wanted to know more. These people were truly mysterious. Perhaps they could help me after all, just as I was willing to lend my services to them?

The suggestion that I was willing to go along with their mysterious plan seemed to make them smile -- in unison.

"First we teach you advanced cultural way," they said. Then: "THWACK!" One of them had hit me upside the head. "This will help you to learn quickly," he added for my reassurance.

Since I really wanted to learn from them, pain was no object for me. I would learn as quickly or as slowly as they required.

"Advanced cultural way. Number one lesson. Your culture is very evil. You too!" screeched the one whom I had dubbed Odysseus 7.

I agreed with him implicitly. What else was I to do?

Contemporary ways and up-to-date morality were the first few things I knew I had to learn.

"THWACK!!!" came the warning stick, lest my attentions were being driven from the task at hand.

"Number one lesson. You are colonial practitioner. We disagree this practice in contemporary era!!" yelled the Odysseuses in my cauliflower ear.

"THWACK, THWACK!" came the stick, teaching me another resounding lesson.

"We have high minds," whispered one of the Nobodies in my ear, consoling me that all the torture would pay off finally.

"We can't stand evil in our midst," admitted another, sounding vaguely Dickension. I wondered, though, whether or not he might be crying crocodile tears for me.

"We believe in higher moral practices," consoled a third. "It's only right. We are willing to take you in and admit that you are the same as us, but there are just a few rules you have to abide by, first."

'THWACK" came the stick again -- reminding me that we were not back on the island any more. Here were people with true values to profess. I was encountering the internal shock of my first real encounter with serious people of real moral fervour.

These people meant well, but there was surely something strange about their manner. I wanted to know more about them and their ways.

"We have gentler, better ways of organising ourselves," said one of the creatures, matter of factly. Your ways are comparatively crude and barbaric. Ours are advanced, intelligent, and highly intellectual, too."

I thought that what this Odysseus said to me must be true, if only because he sounded so sincere about it.

"Tell me more!" I insisted.

(A smile came over their collective face.)

"We'll teach you how to leap when we say leap," they said. "However, this will take some time!"

Looking Back (to War)

I'm undergoing a midlife crisis -- only not in the normal sense of things at all.   I've never been one to mortgage my emotional life for any benefit I hope to gain from the future.  This means there's little need to resent the way I've spent my past   I've made all the right decisions in life so far, and now I gloat over these with the satisfaction of an aging Zen warrior.  I'm through to a higher level in the game of life.   This is what I had been aiming for.  This is what I have achieved.  I have become wholly myself -- and the lines, although few, tell a story of how much I have conquered by facing directly, rather than turning away from it.   I would have cross-hatches by now had I been indecisive.

I had chance to meet an old man for an article I was researching many years ago. He thought he could see "spirits". His face was cross-hatched in all different directions, like he's been lying face down on some tightly woven wire mesh.  Everything about his face was going in a different direction, with no focal point to pull it all together.  My face reveals the opposite -- a legacy of working through one particular intellectual and emotional problem:  my historical legacy of war.

I've just dispensed with the issue of taking care of a historical legacy. Although I did not realize it before,  the issue that has preoccupied me has been war.  World War Two and how it affected my family and of the legacy of the civil war in Zimbabwe were mine.   I learned what it means to be a child of a number of wars and to inherit an emotional legacy that is defined by war.  It was very important for me to understand the nature of war and of warriors, so that I could come to terms with this legacy.

That circle is now closed.   I've defined the problem, analysed it back and forth, and finally understood it.   I behold that the weird intensity of my nature also came about through having this legacy of war in me.   It's unlikely to go away, although my Buddhist sense of self-satisfaction increases.   Self knowledge produces a sense of security in oneself that youth does not afford.   Once again, there is a certain amount of enjoyment in knowing that my face tells this story.   It would be hard to project negative qualities onto my face, because my emotional habits tell another story.   I've become more real than before.   My appearance reveals me as I am.

I've realized, too, that I have limits.   I'm keen to understand complicated issues, but not keen to socialize.  I've never felt the need for "family" as a means to achieve something in the world.   What others gain from having children really puzzles me.   I can't get into the inside of this one.  I don't feel that developing a nuclear family  is advantageous.   I'm sure I echo my grandmother in this, as she seemed to feel some resentment about her hardships, which included family responsibilities.  To fall into the same trap as my grandmother would be to undo all the self-knowledge I've worked so hard to develop.

The circle is closed, once again.   I'm not in a position to make the same mistake.  The door is shut.  The offspring trap is an impossibility.

I've won all my battles and I've won them fair and square.  From my new vantage point, the only regret if I have one is that I took the advice of people who said you must adapt and change to other cultural perspectives.  I took my own advice -- it was both right and wrong in many different ways.  One doesn't always understand that others may have hidden agendas in wanting you to "adapt".  Adaptation is a form of exploration but it must be done on one's own terms, not on the terms of others.

I now understand what level of adaptation is possible for me and what isn't.   Experience has taught me some simple facts -- if I don't feel an internal drive to achieve a particular task, this is indicative of my not being able to develop the skill-set to achieve it. Quite simply it is not "in me" to take on certain roles that don't already have intrinsic meaning for me.  It's intrinsically meaningful to me to help others solve intellectual problems, but it is not 'meaningful' for me to take care of young children or to help mold them into any particular shape.   I don't have any feelings either way and I can't manufacture what isn't there.  I feel I have a traumatic brain injury from trying to go down this path too many times.   I'd thought of it as "adaptation": get a job and fit in.

Life doesn't work that way, because you can't manufacture emotion.   You have to start off with the correct emotions for the particular job, which are then easily transformed into a particular skill set, suitable for that sort of job.  As a rule, if you're not already engaging in a particular task, you probably won't be able to develop the skill set to do it.   There's no act of will that can force the issue.   You have to be already emotionally attracted to the task to the point of active engagement with it.  If this is the case, the task will seem easy.   There will naturally be a period of adjustment when one takes on anything new, but "adaptation"   should never be necessary.

One ought never to push a situation to the point where one is "attempting to adapt".   That always spells out that something unnatural has occurred.   Humans are not that flexible that they can adapt to anything.   Each is more suited to some sorts of tasks and less suited to others.  Those who try to push the issue of adaptation, rather than assisting with adjustment, are generally trying to develop a sadomasochistic relationship with you.  It's important to be alert to this and resist such attempts to break down your character at all costs. Adjustments are acceptable, but "adaptation" ought not to be necessary for adults -- and bending to the point that one breaks is never going to be helpful.

I'm at the stage in my life when I've realized my limitations.   I know where I end and the other begins.   I want what I have, and I want these to a higher degree than I presently have them.   My skills are thinking and writing, in that order.  I'm not that personable, unless you love a laugh a minute:  I am wry.

I'm not burdened by the past anymore, so I may just walk into a wall.   Something's shifted.  If it's not me, it's you.

Bataille and historical gratitude

Bataille had learned a lot from Nietzsche, and was big on making the legacy of history work for him, even when it seemed to be negative.

Thus, he understood the position of the worker as in some ways more advantageous than that of his employer, since the worker had knowledge of the nature of material reality in the way the employer didn't.

Thus, also, he took the nature of oppression, including the internalization of oppression as superego, as a providing situations laden with potential for exploration and gratification. He labeled these tendencies, to explore and self-gratify under circumstances that were oppressive overall, as "transgression".

The courage to go beyond (what is allowed)

THE NATURE OF 'THE TRAGIC'

When I began researching my thesis, I believed in psychological weakness. By the end of it, I didn’t. I thought, “Every animal, including those that are human, fight for their survival with everything they have.” To succeed or fail is only defined by circumstantial weakness, I concluded, rarely inherent weakness. This is related to a particularly Nietzschean insight, where creativity is viewed as tending towards the tragic, as it is directly related to a tendency to go beyond circumscribed limits -- and thus to lead to uncontrolled outcomes.  Another way to say this is that failure at the point of extreme courage is all the more likely than failure whilst playing it safe, but this is not, at all, the same as “weakness”.

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.

Mistaking culture for nature

Karen Lea

The perception is to compete for attention etc to WIN in a discussion because it is painful to fail to do so...competition for nonmaterial things...emotions being something very dangerous to start competing over...yes,we are not chimps.Some of our more basic responses are however,very much the same.
I must think more about the advent of something that didn't evolve biologically....it tends to be a big basis of my discipline to analyse the world that way...to look at human culture and ascertain the biological parameters that may have led to its cultural development..other wise one would have to say most humans are just bat crap crazy.I guess i am comfortable with that too.

Jennifer Frances Armstrong Thing is, I ask Karen Cronje or Helen Riach Thom or Sandra Lewis to tell you about our schooling and upbringing, you will see it did not have this weird emotional competitiveness about it that you seem to think is universal.

Jennifer Frances Armstrong Say, something, Sandra Lewis. Did we used to bicker and manipulate or fight in any way? Was that part of our socialisation or culture to do that?

Karen Lea

If the culture YOU grew up in does not experience it doesn't mean it isn't one of a range of human behaviours...for millions of Australian,UK and AMerican girls at least if not SA/Zim.
I said it isn't universal but it is a range of human behaviours which CAN be expressed..as in the primary comment you posted in fact.If not in yr upbringing then certainly in others.

Jennifer Frances Armstrong So? Mass murdering is in the range of human behaviours that can be expressed. Genocidal behaviour, etc. Shall we make Rwanda our model of human behaviour?

Jennifer Frances Armstrong I think it is a feature of capitalist thinking in industrialized societies.

Sandra Lewis

No, I do not remember having experienced any of that when I was growing up and going to school at Borrowdale Junior School in Zimbabwe. We were also respectful to one another and I don't recall any name calling or swearing either. The first time I heard bad swear words was when I started school in Australia! I look at the young kids now a days and it disgusts me how they treat one another and speak to one another and the bad language they use at a very young age. It makes me want to wrap Chloe up in cotton wool and bloke her ears so she doesn't have to hear any of it!

Sandra Lewis ‎*block her ears!

Jennifer Frances Armstrong Thanks, Sandra! My first experience of swearing was about Form 3 in high school, when one of the girls had returned from Europe and was using some experimental language to see how we would react. That whole thing of being nice to each other's faces whilst undermining each other behind the scene was never part of our upbringing.

Sandra Lewis I totally agree Jennifer! I am so glad it was not part of our upbringing. I remember everyone at junior school as being just "nice" and there was none of this two faced business, bitchiness or emotional competiveness!

Sandra Lewis That is including the boys! They were all nice to!

Jennifer Frances Armstrong Yeah, the culture and its mood were just different. People find it hard to believe that it's not human nature to be nasty. They think I must be idealising my earlier experiences, but this was not so.

Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm's ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM merited a re-read recently. I'm down on bathroom reading -- particularly books that haven't become victims of my intellectual shredding.   Fromm's book doesn't avoid some ripping asunder for its being a little moralistic and preachy.   Clearly, his writing doesn't aim to be as sophisticated as Nietzsche's writing, in that he doesn't appeal to the implicit desire of his readers to  want to be something better than they are, which would be a means of communicating without preaching.
Fromm is a social scientist, not an artist or philosopher, so he simply tells his readers where they fall short of authenticity.

Apart from style, his analysis is plain and accurate. He sees that we eschew "emotion" to our loss, in order to be considered sophisticated. We accept the ideology that it is good to be "employed". The etymology of the word is already self-evident, as Fromm states, for the word, "employment", already tells the whole story about the status of the average human, who is a tool to be used.

It seems then that we're still prone to psychological self-deception in the same manner that we were  in 1941, the year the book appeared. At the same time, we are less lonely.  We deceive ourselves not so much about who we are, but about climate change, about whether our lifestyles ought not to be radically altered to cater to our own needs, rather than to the task of adaptation to a broken and defunct system.  And so on.

MAY 16 PART 1

New home away from home

BACK INTO TRAINING 16 MAY 2012

Crossings

My orientation to the world before now was strange indeed.  I now understand the origins of that orientation and why it was misunderstood by others,   who could not have understood the origins of a profound drive in me I did not understand myself.

It comes back to my father and the way he used to speak to me on two levels, simultaneously.   On the one side, he spoke to me as his angry, rejecting step-father had spoken to him.   "You are no good. You don't belong. You have to conform to the capricious expectation of every stranger, or else you are unacceptable."   This way of speaking to me filled me with shame. Being unacceptable, one does well to hide oneself from the world.   At the same time as he spoke, he spoke in an opposite voice.   This voice said, "Watch out!  Don't listen to the angry father, who was my step-father.   Submitting oneself to the arbitrary will of others leads to a hell that I'd like to see you escape.   Don't really listen to the words I'm saying, but to the emotional tone underneath:  I'm warning you about what not to do, if you want to be happy.

I am certain -- not just on the basis of logic, but on my father's testimony -- that had I listened to the overt voice, rather than the subtle and implicit tone of his disavowal of his angry father, my life would have been ruined.   One must ignore authority and go one's own way, he was trying to tell me.

How does one take from this mode of communication a meaning by which one can live one's life?   Clearly, the child that remained in my father was asking for much by way of protection from his vicious step-father.   This was a request for redemption -- and it became my quest to find the key to redemption of the historical past.  My memoir was in aid of this.  My thesis, even more so.  I had to find a way to address the request for help.   Otherwise, the angry father would keep screaming and screaming.   The child would be continue to be hurt forever.

My ultimate construction of a system of "intellectual shamanism", was a way for me to solve the problems I'd inherited through my family.   I had to address my father's childhood trauma, because if I didn't, I would still know about the emotions he'd experienced, which were unresolved.   One does not walk around expressing an attitude that problems are resolved when they are not so. That is to fall into trap set by a step-father who demands outward conformity without regard to inner emotional states.   That was what my father had warned me against -- the path that leads to unhappiness and emotional self-destruction.

What the three writers who predominate in my thesis have in common is insight into this thinly expressed understanding that I gained from my father.   For Nietzsche, to engage in any activity without the cooperation of one's heart and soul was a "recipe for decadence".  For Bataille, "inner experience" was paramount.   And, Marechera considered it more laudable to sleep under hibiscus bushes than to submit oneself in any way to an authority's draconian designs.   In pursuing a path to inner experience, I was fulfilling a request I had received from my father.   I was to redeem history.   Although I didn't understand it at that time, this became my imperative.   I put everything I had -- all of my intellectual and emotional resources -- into solving the problem.  I seemed to conclude that the "child", the double of the angry step-father, had to cross a bridge back to his emotional self in order to restore his state of being.   He lacked the emotional strength for the task, and I had been baptized into this role in his stead.

A shaman restores the state of well-being by "facing death" on behalf of others.   So, I defied, relentlessly, the will of the angry step-father.   Each time, I regained a bit of ground for emotional use.   Each time, the principle of conformity died with me.  The terror entailed by disobedience to the primeval law increased.

Finally, I was exhausted, but I had fulfilled what was necessary for me to do, by defying the primeval law and opening up the space for intellectual contemplation of emotional issues and matters previously hidden.

I still feared the strangeness of my father and his unpredictability, but I took immense pride in the fact that I'd tried with all my might to bring redemption to the situation.

A few months later, my father had his stroke.  Intuitively, many of my family felt that he'd been holding onto life by such a slim thread anyway, that he should be allowed to die.   They saw nothing but a linear continuity of life, where character remained the same or worsened with each blow.   I had been studying shamanism, however, and was convinced by now that brains were quite adaptable.

We held his one hand for the next few weeks.  The other side of his body was immobilized by the severe damage to the right side of his brain.   I told him he had brought me up well -- which was certainly not a lie in  relation to the early years of my life.   The specialist said the best case prognosis would be that he would be able to speak "a few words" (which somehow I took metaphorically, rather than literally) and would walk with a stick.   Nowadays, he speaks fluently just as before, but is far more forthcoming about the nature of his experiences (due to less right brain inhibition).  He also walks and jog and can use his left side, although sometimes awkwardly.   He expresses a great deal of gratitude and jokes a lot, but I haven't seen him angry.

Once again, this is the reverse of the prognosis that he would become deeply depressed, frustrated and angry due to his disability.

How to tell if you are psychologically projecting

If the world were not given a false coherence by means of your unconscious projections, you would see yourself as being equal to every other individual, whilst not possessing any essential characteristics that you consider to eternally define your overall identity.  This true capacity for spontaneity applies to few -- and even then, not always to these few.

The regressive part of our consciousness is particularly adept at bringing us into conformity with power hierarchies by re-proportioning parts of our personality so as to be able to accept our position within them as "natural". We project the sense of self-competency upwards in the hierarchy, and the sense of our own incompetency downwards towards those who are defined as lower than us in the social/political hierarchy. The altogether human tendency to project into others is so ubiquitous that one would not do justice to the human mind to label this dimension as always and inevitably pathological.

In some cases, the "pre-oedipal field" (the part that is involved with belongingness and hierarchy, as well as psychological projections) can also have a positive value if it is not entirely immature but has developed towards appreciating the existence of others. Shamanistic initiation ought to bring about such a sense of the nature of Being as a quality of sharing one's existence with others. To empathize also involves projecting, only we project our understanding and sensations into situations that are not purely ours.

ADDENDUM: this is not a plea for a rigid form of 'equality', but rather conforms to the Nietzschean view that when you are as spontaneous as can be, you will rise or fall to your level.

Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane | | AlterNet

Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane | | AlterNet

QUOTES:

 When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.

***

The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—although they were not always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty including the mutilation, torture and execution of captives—did not subordinate the sacred to the technical. The deities they worshipped were not outside of or separate from nature.

***

The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction. The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor.

***

Walter Benjamin argued that capitalism is not only a formation “conditioned by religion,” but is an “essentially religious phenomenon,” albeit one that no longer seeks to connect humans with the mysterious forces of life. Capitalism, as Benjamin observed, called on human societies to embark on a ceaseless and futile quest for money and goods. This quest, he warned, perpetuates a culture dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing. It enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages, subservience to the commodity culture and debt peonage.

***


[EMPHASIS ADDED]

Change & passivity

I made mention recently that passive consumerism is the new psychological condition that has become rampant. Many people strongly resist the notion that they are passive consumers. They like to see themselves as moral arbiters instead. They've now realized that anything to do with "change" is trick, perhaps even a force for evil.

The discourse of the left has become less practical, more resigned and moralistic.   "Don't you realize that our original trusting natures have been traumatized by too much politics?"   Such original natures were no doubt pure and discerning, but lost their purity and capacity to distinguish right from wrong the minute they accepted novelty or innovation.

The only way to restore the purity of the original nature is by a reinforced will to embrace passivity.

Otherwise, trauma and disappointment lie around the corner.

But, trauma and disappointment also follow those who embrace a sense of nothing as their morality. Not voting, in order to prove your moral purity, is a sign of being dead in the head.

The market, adaptability and false challenges

A most nefarious aspect of late Capitalist society is the idea that people ought to work on themselves to change to be more effective.   Of course there are many ways to analyse, see and be better at what you do. This is different being exhorted to adapt and improve to respond more effectively to the demands of others.    A problem with accommodating the demands of others is that they have not been screened to determine their rationality, freedom from malice, capacity to perceive accurately, ability to be free from prejudices, and so on.  Adaptability thus becomes a spiritual meat-grinder.  

To refuse to pass through the meat-grinder gives the impression that one considers one's present state to be all too precious.   After all, others have happily passed through it, or so it would seem.   To pass through the grinder by accepting public opinion means that one is changed.   In a fundamental sense, one has altered according to the needs, demands and emotional requirements of others.   These others are a black box of consumerist needs and qualities that are defined abstractly.   Tomorrow, they may have different demands.

Adaptability is demanded by an unstable economy, and capitalism is the quintessence of economic instability, since its principles of success demand constant change.  Although economic systems are, in themselves, without moral meaning, people nonetheless assume that adaptability has a moral meaning.   To fail to adapt when change is demanded of you seems to imply retaining the aura of an unethical stance.   After all, others demand it and your own well-being (in the short-term) depends on it.   The situation you are commanded to adapt to may be amoral, but you stance sure as hell isn't.

Responsiveness is a market need and anything else is not self-preservation but selfishness, for the market eats all of its children -- and it eats them again and again.

Perhaps it is due to the hollowness of market demands that many these days now refuse to be anything other than what they "are", maintaining that if they have any deficiencies, these are surely biological and unchangeable. The market for psychiatric drugs increases, as many fall back on the position that there is nothing they can do to change themselves.   At the same time, everybody recognizes that acquiescence to market forces is necessary, no matter how illogical or harmful their impact on the person.

So contemporary society poses the problem:  "Change is impossible (because it's never enough) -- but it is necessary for survival."   It is no wonder that most people's responses to its demands for adaptability remain incoherent.

Giving children psychiatric drugs is an example of a typical non-response.

Theoretical postulates

I just received this ancient biology book with a symposium article in it by Paul D. MacLean. Obviously, he writes on R-complex and the triune brain. Among other things, he defines R-complex behaviour as "nonverbal" communication.

Initially I had been wondering whether or not Lacan belongs in my thesis, since I was not sure whether his paradigm has been overly culturally influenced by mid 20th Century European cultural formulations. Similarly, I had some (lesser) concerns about Bataille, since he involves some strongly cultural elements in this construction of his shamanistic paradigm -- the French Catholic notions of human sacrifice, as implicitly (culturally) linked to spirituality, for instance.

In the case of Bataille, his reversal (in some senses) of Nietzsche's metaphor of transcendence (going up) with immanence (going down), parallels the actual neurological structure of shamanism better than Nietzsche's approach does. (For, in shamanism we return to our neurological roots, in terms of the kind of consciousness and 'thinking' that we access during shamanistic "journeying".)

In terms of Nietzsche's views, we "transcend" our current consciousness..  At the same time, Nietzsche's wants us to come to understand the unconscious as the source of a fully integrative "will to power", working in us beneath the level of consciousness. To view this in relation to actual brain structure, one would logically have to go "downwards" {towards the archaic parts of the mind}.

To get back to Lacan:   he makes a great deal of verbal versus nonverbal levels of psychical development. He also perceives a fundamental leap of consciousness (which, if I am to understand him right, radically and irreversibly alters us) as we move from a level of development that is nonverbal, towards one that is verbal. To my mind, the nature of this transition that Lacan detects suggests a movement from one system of brain processing to another -- that is from an infantile reliance on R-complex mental processing, towards a state of being where the higher levels of the brain take over executive functioning. So Lacan's emphasis on a transition from nonverbal to verbal reasoning may be precisely right, in terms of the neurological structures under-girding human development.

Even the Lacanian formulation that this process of development implies "castration" makes sense, if we juxtapose it with Nietzsche's own equation of the unconscious with "will to power" (and of course, using MacLean's formulation of the triune brain to forge a conceptual link between the Nietzschean " unconscious" and the part of the brain -- R-complex -- that is, according to MacLean, concerned with posturing in terms of "power".) So, rereading Lacan in this light, "castration" is the loss of a direct subjectivity when the executive powers of the brain become centred in a higher part of the mind.

Shamanism, of course, restores this broken link between the higher and lower parts of the mind. It is clear in Nietzsche's formulation that Zarathustra's “going under” is a “going over” or transition, übergehen, from human to superhuman. Creativity requires a downward movement (“going under”, towards the lower part of the mind).  This is not to say that one regresses.  Not at all, rather one links up two parts of  consciousness as a bridge.  The ancient part of the brain and the higher mind become no longer separated.  The communication channels are opened up. This outcome of uniting the two parts of the brain is the “going over” towards the "superman".

On diagnostics

No, I think you really have misunderstood my tone, which is not at all moralistic, but a bit provocative. I'm not a moralistic person. Also, my interests may not coincide with yours, which doesn't mean that you don't have valid points to make, only that I, personally, don't see any value in having a recognizable "disease" like adhd in the world. I don't see the utility of it. Or, rather, if I had the choice, I would work around it, rather than define others in a category, to pathologize them. My objection is just different from what you appear to imagine. I have the view that many deficiencies could be found, in all sorts of organisms, according to what tasks we might expect them to perform -- but I have no interest in finding such deficiencies. Also, I think we need to embrace our own solutions to problems, rather than create general rubrics. /// Looking at if from the perspective of the kind of interaction we have, what benefit would it be to you for me to acknowledge the objective existence of a disease? I'm not a doctor. I don't particularly have any relationship to the issue. You should just let this one go. I have my views about how society ought to be, and they do not fit a diagnostic model.

Go USA!

But no organ meat for me, please.

More from May 2012

Getting back into training after some setbacks

Framed

draft chapter eleven: my father's memoir

Many influences were those of my early life.  I kept coming up against that my name depended on who knew who I was.   For example my step father would say that my name was Peter Francis foster Armstrong, and that was because I was adopted - the foster part.   The point is that young kids need stability.  They need to know what they can rely on.  Don't tell them stuff they can't rely on.  It's no use to them at all.   Then,  my father decided I ought to go to boarding school, a very English habit,  although not exactly Rhodesian. Boarding school is a bad place for people who are insecure.   Every single kid in there hated it.    They coped by becoming very aggressive and beating up anyone weaker.   I looked around for something to give me a feeling of permanence and all that seemed permanent was my depression.   I clung to my depression.

Achieving permanence of some sort became my philosophy for a while.   I became very gloomy.  If I felt lost, I would just revert to my sadness.   When you're at boarding school,  you're getting knocked around all the time.  It's not hard to find something to be sad about.   Just being left at the boarding school, away from home, wasn't a good feeling.  Even at home,  I felt I couldn't rely on my parents.   They were both unpredictable. My father could be very hurtful.  He was a bit messed up.   My mother would suddenly start beating the hell out of me.   I can only guess she was feeling uptight.  She'd had a hard life.   When she remarried, and I don't think it was a very happy marriage.  Dad insisted on taking control and he was a very negative person,  pedantic, perfectionist and fastidious.  He was verbally abusive.  Mum used to hit.

After school,  I would walk around our garden.   We had five acres.   My parents had put a lot of work into the garden and it sort of contained their personalities in the garden.   I noticed that as I walked around,  I'd come across the water pump,  pumping water out the ground.   As I looked at it, I would remember all the agony they'd undergone to put it in there, and in a way the water pump became filled with their personalities.  If I wanted to relate to my parents,  I would look at the water pump.  Since I found I could get stability from objects,  in a trivial way,  I took to stealing. I would help myself to sticks of a chalk as I wanted those colours.

In boarding school you had to have a rest every afternoon.  From our lunch, which would be about two o'clock,  you had to go lie on your bed,and no talking was allowed.  You had to be there until three o'clock, at which time a bell would go and you could get up and do your thing. I read books.  I actually remember the day I realised I could read.  The teacher was away and I was sent to another classroom.   I sat down with a book and I went though all the processes of sounding out the words in my mind, and slowly began to make sense off all the words.   When I got to the end of the first story,  I was excited.   The mystery of the disappearing cat.  From then on,  I started to read.

I learned to link certain situations with experiences I had.  If the story involved Christmas,  I visualised my family at christmas and built the story around it.  For me,  reading was a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle.  If the story was too exciting,  I'd get all wound up,  because I'd become part of it.  Almost every story became exciting. By the time I was ten or twelve,  I thought I could fly a plane,  since every time I read a book about flight attendant Bigglesworth,  I would envision myself flying all these planes. By contrast,  arithmetic was absolutely awful,  because if couldn't visualise myself in it.   In a book about a world war two guy who escaped in italy, he was shot.  In my mind,  I made it so real,  that I woke up with vomit down my side.

When I was about eight my parents next off some place and left me for about four hours. While they were gone,  I suddenly saw flames on top of a hill next to us. These flames were twice the height of a house.  The only time I'd seen smoke coming off from anything was a train.  When my mother came back,  I told her there was a train going over the top of the hill.  It was a bush fire,  but it could have been a train,  as I used to hear train noises at times.   There was plenty to cause fear.

I was sent to bed at eight and the noises would start.  One was a steam train in the distance.    Our house was an amateur building job with a thatched roof.  The thatch was laid on wires.   There were lots of geckos.  During the night,  the temperature changed and the wires would strum like guitar strings.