Thursday 30 June 2016

The historical mediator: full context of my story

Children & Americans: both excommunicate power relationships





In fact this two-tone quality is exactly what I noticed in the works of those I call "intellectual shamans". You have helped me conceptualize it still further, and it is interesting that after all this time, I am finally able to produce the tone that I had noticed in my mentors. My reason for calling these heroes "shamans" is because it seemed to me that life gave them a real bashing and put them at a disadvantage. Constitutionally, they became weakened by this bashing. As a consquence they had to exploe, and deploy every mechanism available to them just to survive. Thus, in the tone of an "intellectual shaman" we can hear two things: One is the echo of the bashing and the constitutional weakness this produced. The second is a very, very strong will to life, courage, force of character, and knowledge as to the complex meanings of life. All of these are acquired as a result of individual determination and resolution of the difficulty. They are completely unique to the person who forges their recovery. Most people who get a bashing do not survive, but turn into narcissists or cut off their knowledge, and compromise with death to live a lowly and truncated existence. A shamanic character is far more rare, just as it is far more rare to have something in the character that chooses to fight the forces of pathology -- and succeeds. Nietzsche, Bataille and Marechera all follow this pattern, as far as I can tell.

Courtly manners that are confused with modern narcissism

Tuesday 21 June 2016

Beach experience according to Mike

Marechera & the schizoid's grin (sheepish, apologetic) - YouTube

Marechera & the schizoid's grin (sheepish, apologetic) - YouTube:



'via Blog this'



"His father died in primary school
His father rose again to run the factory"
Extraordinary. As watching for the plane (in your beach video--and, by the way, how was that NOT philosophical?), another pass <>or two<> is wanted.
The deep sighs, more than words; MINUS THE MORNING, almost too excruciating. For all the whittling, you didn't "succeed" by much. I suspect that (like me) by the time you say "ow" you're near passing out or going into shock. I may be wrong. I am often that way.
Jennifer Armstrong 
It is strange the way Marechera melds perspectives, so that it seems as if it were his father who died in primary school. This makes it all the more rending, if one has an ear for it.
As for myself, I did not feel pain, and that was a problem. I think this was the result of sporadic beatings by my father. They were arbitrary (unrelated to any action I may have done) too. I turned my aggression against myself and stopped feeling. That strategy went along okay until people began to beat up on me anyway, because "Rhodesia", even though I had effectively erased myself. It turned my self-annihilation into rage, because after all I had erased myself to avoid pain, and others were not keeping to that pact.
After I was destroyed the second time (by workplace abuse), I couldn't even afford the little emotion I had allowed myself until then, because they shame I felt was too overwhelming. I told myself that at least if I had done something to deserve the second beating, I would be able to hold my head higher, or at least make sense of it all. But all I'd done was try not to exist, so now I was lower than the low.

Monday 20 June 2016

Beach at winter solstice, with retro plane and a bee

Vlog 123 Healing - YouTube

Vlog 123 Healing - YouTubeJennifer Armstrong12 seconds ago (edited)

This morning I awoke with an understanding that the reason that they can't put themselves in another's shoes is their rigidity. This is harder to express than the clarity of my vision, but if you are very, very rigid, you cannot see context. You can't see, for instance that a child is scared because there is a large dog standing in her path, or the man is listless because he just got fired from his job. A very rigid personality will be unable to conceptualize that it is possible to be scared one moment, but not the next, or listless at a time of crisis but not throughout one's whole life. The narcissist only sees what appears in the here-and-now, and believes this is the whole character of those he is observing. In fact, so confused is his reasoning that he believes if he can get the child to act scared, he is revealing the true essence of the child's nature, once and forever. Likewise if he gets a man fired from his job, he is just revealing to the world the fundamental listless nature of the man, which is why the man deserved to be fired from his job. Everything the narc does is a human service -- an uncovering of reality as it really is. That's why he cannot understand why others are not more grateful to him. In his own mind, he is merely pointing out the truth about things that others do not want to face.
This may be also why he waits until you are vulnerable to attack you, so as to expose what he thinks is the real essence of your being, once and for all. Once again, he is performing a social service, by warning others about you. He was the only one to see through the masks you put up to hide your true personality. Only he had the genius to notice that the child wasn't really happy-go-lucky and capable of enjoying life, and that the man was really so listless than nobody in their right mind would employ him anyway. He saw through the whole facade they were putting up, and returned things to their proper order. Everyone ought to be thanking him for his insights and moral rectitude. After all, children who are fearful will never grow up to be strong adults, unless they are told how sick their characters really are, and made to realize what is wrong with them. And somebody who is listless is not facing up to life and simply getting a job. Weak and phony people like those he notices all around him deserve the vilification of all.

Saturday 18 June 2016

Vlog 119 Healing - YouTube

Vlog 119 Healing - YouTubeJennifer Armstrong1 second ago

The narcissist believes that your control over your situation is their lack of control. This video is good.
I had a dream some time ago, where there was a woman who had a lot of zest. Bear in mind that I am not a soapie fan, but my brain sometimes runs short of material (and my husband is such a fan). The dream was about a TV star who also played the role of a kind of proto-feminist.
http://tinyurl.com/zfkn52g
In it she was smiling and jubilant. French philosophers call this "jouissance".
But then two narcissists wiped the smile off her face. After that she wore a glass mask, like an astronaut, and had to spend many years working through the trauma. The look on her face was erasure, trauma, the sense of needing many years to recover from it and break through the glass and the fog.

Marechera & the schizoid's grin (sheepish, apologetic)

Thursday 16 June 2016

How the wheels of western culture fall on and off

Western anti-colonial ballet sequences - YouTube



Thursday&#39;s Child 
Once again, bull's eye. Yes. Western anti-colonialism is deeply and insidiously imbued in modern western thought, or what passes as thought, even at the most fundamental level. I recall, in an introductory course in cultural anthropology at university, noblesse oblige being vilified by the professor, and it seemed that all around me my classmates (although I could not call them peers) were already on board. Not until listening to you have I begun to realize that the single most struggle of my life, the central point of contention, the source of interpersonal conflict, has been against that very vilification. I know myself to have power and obligation, and I am generally hated for it--whether for simply knowing it or for admitting it, I don't know. Might it be that because power and noble obligation do in fact carry the full weight of moderation and obligation that they are so vilified? You say adolescent . . .
Thursday&#39;s Child 
(Continuation) . . . I say infantile. With so many abdicating power, and even knowledge of power, western culture seems a baby nursery, everyone crying to have their needs attended to, but no adults to get 'er done. I see a great rush and noise about rights, but there is a deafening silence about power, duty, and obligation. Gosh Jen, this video is chockablock with gems. I've begun to take notes. "Pre-humiliation." Lots to think about. Also, I jumped in impulsively with three minutes of your presentation remaining . . .
Thursday&#39;s Child 
+Thursday's Child (And an absence of poise. Makes my heart ache with longing. Poise requires knowledge, self-possession, and * backbone*. Since one is hoping for the moon [hope, usually long-drawn-out disappointment] I will add graciousness to the list. 🌿)
Jennifer Armstrong 
It has been the biggest bone of contention for me as well. I feel that Western culture is deeply anti-natural, because when I am happy to be alive, I want to reciprocate. I want to give more to others and I want to respect those higher than I in power, status and capacity. I want to honour noble sacrifice and even noble mistakes. But everything about my needs is distorted. Not only that, but made to look like the opposite, as if I were crouching down and waiting to spring on others, offering suspect motives.
I will always feel, though, that with any trace of power comes obligation. I don't know why they are vilified, except that they represent a form of transcendence of any pain, in a stoical manner. People dislike and vilify the stoical manner. They see that you are not wallowing in guilt and pain, as they are, and they see this as a way of cheating death.
Jennifer Armstrong 
It is indeed infantile, although the adolescent pose is preferred to deflect criticism.
Jennifer Armstrong 
Yes, it is very ugly. Not sublime.
Hide replies 

Western anti-colonial ballet sequences

Tuesday 14 June 2016

Nietzschean laughter, which is divine, kills narcissism - YouTube

Nietzschean laughter, which is divine, kills narcissism - YouTube:Thursday&#39;s Child 

I was so glad to see this topic pop up. Thank you. I really enjoyed hearing you talk about this. Your demonstration just made me smile. Perfect. I had all but forgotten about divine laughter as a mode that I haven't always known. I said it here once before, Nietzsche saved me. A little scrap of me, thirteen years old, badly wounded, physically; poorly bandaged, no doctor, and all tucked in and concealed (as it would be for years to come), but staring it down with great swells of insuppressible laughter. That laughter has never left me and never failed me. Life and death stuff to be sure. It also built me a bridge (if that makes sense). Again, too close to the bone emotionally for me to express well, but you just made my day (for tomorrow).
Jennifer Armstrong 
Yes, saved me as well
-- much later in life. Puts you into a mind of a switch of consciousness, that
really makes all the difference, so that you can see that the originally-seeming
seriousness of others .....in this case in the workplace, because I coudn't
take any more of the micro-management and changing the goal posts, and constant
almost daily formal reprimands and inquisitions into minutiae, which seemed to
have a deeper agenda than getting workplace practices refined or fixed,   (offloading some
people's self-disgust onto their workplace inferiors) ..... was not so serious
at all, but just a cosmic play in which some people get to demonstrate and act out
their limited perspectives.

Cultural barriers to objectivity