This is a culture wanting to have pleasure without roughage in their diet, that is experiencing anything discomforting. The quick fixes for psychological disturbances, the desire to identify oneself with the process of consumption (but not with the condition of being a worker -- for that would involve pain), and indeed, the vulgar white British takeover of African Safari Culture in the new family television series, Nondescript Life, (taking place on a private wildlife park in South Africa), shows that a frontier mentality is certainly NO LONGER needed to conquer "primitivism" and the African wild. (This is certainly how things were viewed before!) All that is needed is the ability to smile haughtily and yet somehow endearingly at the natives.
Contemporary culture wants its pleasure without pain, and now that evil has finally been removed from the world (in the shape of white colonial agents), it is pleasure only that we can expect to have recourse to -- never pain.
My plea is for a reinjection of a much broader scope of organic reality into contemporary consciousness. I am certainly not pleading for the manufacturing of pain -- which contemporary society tends to do mechanistically, in any case, and without reflection or reason.
I don't think Marechera's works are understandable without this, and I also think there is no muscle growth without a process of breaking something. No healing without pain.
2 comments:
It was only a 2% incline and, you have to admit, it did cause your calves some pain. ;p
I prefer class struggle to pain. Challenge your corporate masters and their State, organise in the One Big Union of your class, the I.W.W. Google it now while there's still time. The carbon dioxide is building by the moment and the oceans will soon turn too acid to support life and that means a very painful end, indeed.
I think you have a better idea of what I meant than your reply lets on. You, too, like to struggle against the existing reality, and it is an encounter with the limits of reality that makes us feel alive.
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