The ontological question

The preoedipal stage is therefore the stage at which one solves the ontological question -- Do I exist or not?

This is why it is shamanic -- because the question of existence (including what form such existence) might take -- is up for grabs. Since the very nature of one's existence is diffused and uncertain at this stage, it is easy to imagine (project a fantasy) that one might be a deer, or a lamb, or an osprey (perhaps each in turn, or all together). Phenomenologically, a return to the preoedipal stage is a return to the world of 'spirits' -- a grey world (ontologically speaking), wherein one is not quite living, although not quite dead. It is a creative world of possibilities, however, whereby fantasy can guide and determine what turns out to exist and what doesn't. This, therefore, is the realm of the see-er and of the creative poet.

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When I said, once, taking a stab in the dark, and not yet having an understanding of this preoedipal field -- at least not by name -- that Marechera wrote "beneath language", I was not wrong, technically speaking. (At least not in all ways -- despite the fact that obviously he was quite clearly using language to speak in this way that I had insinuated was "beneath" language.)

That which I had a sense of, was that he was depicting a phenomenology of experience that preceded the firm sense of reality that maturation into full ontological awareness gives us. The use of language itself moves us towards a kind of positivism -- whereby objects are acknowledged automatically in the fullest sense of by virtue of being NAMED (and by virtue of the convention of not arbitrarily changing names, once something has been given a particular name.)

Marechera, however, changes names and identities seemingly arbitrarily, throughout the stream of consciousness novel, Black Sunlight. His disregard for the conventions of language in allowing identities to remain FIXED is what I had picked up upon, and which I had thrown my descriptive term at, by saying his approach was "beneath language". (Of course, this term only made sense to me at the time, and not to anybody else -- so I also had my problem trying to label the phenomena that I had seen, in terms of conventional linguistic usage.)

Anyway, it is now quite transparent that the pre-oedipal stage in a child's life (and the vestiges of it that remains with us at the adult stages of development) are concerning with the question of how it is that one might come into existence. One operating within this field certainly does not take the fact of one's existence (or the even the particular nature of it) for granted. Rather, it is a question that still seeks an answer. As I have indicated earlier, the question of non-being is that to which the shaman is traditionally driven in his or her confrontation with death (and, of course, with the 'spirit world')