my basic arrogance / calling society's bluffs

It is necessary to honour my bloody-mindedness for without it I would certainly have no life at all. It is how I came to survive this long, by thinking, “It is very likely that the people who are bringing all sorts of accusations against me are merely mistaken.” My father’s cause against me was that I was not the perfect daughter and Rhodesian woman. These were true, because I’d had my own matters to contend with – how to make sense of an environment and a culture which had almost no meaning at the moment when I first arrived in it, aged 16. I was not the perfect Rhodesian woman because I didn’t know what that was, and all my father’s blustering and reprimanding were not going to turn me into that. My society had me as it had wanted me – the perfect Rhodesian child.

So when people turned their backs on me and shuddered when I tried to tell them of how much I’d lost, I learned to just accept that as their way. These people of this new terrain were as unknowable as the Kantian “thing in itself”. They seemed to know what they were doing but I couldn’t find their soul. Talking with them was like a game of roulette, placing your bet as to what kind of responses would come out. Sometimes it was a condemnatory response for my seeming to glorify the past (in fact, I was merely mourning it). At other times it was indignation that I was asking questions that I should already know the answers to, and that I was up on my high horse, wasting everybody’s time and effort. I got a tightness around my throat after a while, when I learned not to speak my feelings or ideas.

But somehow my bloody-mindedness – “maybe these people are wrong?” – pulled me through all of it, until finally I learned that it is not as terrible a thing as one could imagine to be considered evil, because of where you’re from. People are naturally afraid of evil, even when they grant unwitting concessions to it by crediting it to be where it isn’t, where it wasn’t previously, before they saw it there.

So I became “evil” and tried to figure out what a fascist looked like, and behaved like, so that I could turn into one. At least that way, I would be getting something back for all that people had considered me to be. “Might as well be hung as a wolf, rather than as a sheep,” I said, gaining renewed confidence in myself through this idea.

Now, everybody could know that I was evil. And when I introduced myself, it would be as good as saying, “Hi, I’m evil. How do you feel about that? Can you deal with that, then?” That way, I’d avoid being ambushed by people who pretended to be friends, but were merely waiting for a moment to condemn me for my nefarious colonial characteristics, the moment I did something unexpected or stepped even slightly out of line.

This solution worked for quite some time, and bought me rare intensive moments of great peace of mind. Meanwhile, I would hit the books – any books: Sartre, in the initial stages, and then Nietzsche – to try to work out what things meant.  Also the Frankfurt School.  Finally, Bataille, Marechera, shamanism. By means of these, I reached myself.

In the womb of innocence

My story starts in the womb of innocence – a cosy and comfortable womb, as every womb is, and ought to be. It was an extremely innocent time – we had … (this “we” presumably included me) just declared war on our black population in Rhodesia. It was UDI, a time of proclaiming our independence from Britain. I was the unborn, not yet, as the saying goes, a glimmer of lust in my father’s eye. Unilateral Declaration of Independence – that was on everybody’s mind before I was born. It had meant that the gradual transition to black majority rule would not be taking place. Instead, “we” (and that presumably meant me, once again), would fight through thick and thin to preserve our colonial heritage of Christian decency and civilisation. The blacks, too – the ones who thought about it deeply or were otherwise coerced to join the war -- would fight us through thick and thin. We would fight eachother that way, back and forth. That was our destiny.

In 1968, I popped out of my mother’s womb, to face the world. By this time, UDI was three years old, a sibling of mine, who shadowed me in every direction and who I would later get to know. I’d popped out of my mother’s womb, but in a way I’d never really left it. This illicit sibling was, in large part, responsible for the fact that I was to remain inside – that is, within the womb of innocence, for nobody ought to know about the coupling between my parents’ minds and the mystical belief in an enduring form of Christianity long after the medieval era was pronounced dead.

Children – especially females – had to retain their innocence unto a ripe age. That was what a neo-Victorian morality dictated. And I was born female – so that, in fact, meant me. So I stayed in the womb of innocence, in the realm of shapes and colours, noises and sounds, beautiful music to my ears. UDI, meantime, got all of the parental favours. His special needs were cared for, over and above his actual requirements. He was given pure censorship, lest the ruckus of global politics and condemnation should reach his fragile ears. He received positive adulation and genteel congratulations as to his progress, even when he was not making any such progress at all, and was, in fact, regressing. UDI lapped it up and became the favourite son of all of us. We slapped on Rhodesian flags here and there in annual celebrations in his honour. We wore our association with him proudly.

However, I grew up within the womb of innocence, sucking on umbilical fluids hungrily. It was, after all, my right to suck in this way, and in any case, I didn’t know any differently. “Why was everything so wonderful?” I used to muse, at the perfection of it all. The footprints of Honey, my horse, in the magical accretion on the early morning frost, an firm out of the world shape in electrically green lawns – summed up for me everything that was wonderful in my life. It was Nature, in hter finest regalia. The images, the shapes and colours that surrounded me were magic in its essence. I was very glad to grow up in Rhodesia, with its magic and its open spaces. There I would be free to roam for the first 16 years of life – so long as I had made the implicit promise never to leave the womb of innocence (a promise I immediately made, knowing no differently).

So, I grew up very happily within this womb, attached to the umbilical cord of Nature. She was my mother, and I did everything she said, reverently, with great delight and joy to be around her. I didn’t know my parents so much as I knew her. There was no “family romance” which I later heard spoken of in intellectual Freudian circles. Or if I had one, it was quite subdued. My father, after all, was away in war much of the time. “After the age of three when I was called up for six months, we lost connection, and I could never have the same relationship with you again,” my father once confessed to me, much later in life, in a moment of rare frankness. So, I remained at the level of the pre-Oedipal, fathers being outside the scope of my attention for the most part, as I suckled on Nature’s fluids, and enjoyed living on a day to day basis, never thinking of the future.

My father meanwhile, and my mother, went along in their own directions. They knew about UDI, but they didn’t tell me very much about him, just that there were duties to be done when his needs or requirements called them to commit their energies to him. He was their son, and it would have been wrong to do anything other --- the less said about it the better. So, he grew up alongside me, until I was twelve and he was just 15, when he met with his fatal accident, after which the grieving processes never seemed to cease, and I was merely in the way, an impediment and obstruction, in my innocence, to the natural processes of grieving.

Since I never knew UDI, except through whispers and strange gestures, I was never allowed to grieve him. Somehow his loss became a source of resentment towards me, all the same. My parents had to move, now that UDI had been lost. It was my entire fault that, after they had sacrificed so much of their own blood and energies, they had to sacrifice once more “for the children”. We had to move to Australia and settle down, and I had caused it, because I had been in the womb of innocence for all this time, and hadn’t understood the sacrifices and the suffering. It was now important for me to realise that I had been contemptuous of the inherent value of UDI all along – especially of its significance for Christian civilisation. The rest of the world was irretrievably morally corrupted, and I would have to atone for UDI’s premature death by living up to his standards in all respects. It had been decided that my father would bring me up properly, despite the moral contamination of contemporary Western values that would no doubt enter my bloodstream through association with others in the modern world. I was to be brought up as a Rhodesian female, only in a more extreme sense than I would have been had I remained in either Rhodesia (as it was) or Zimbabwe (as it became, after 1979-80). I would learn to have a long-suffering disposition, and I would also learn atonement for our losses, particularly in terms of loss of belief in the possibility of a civilising project for humanity (as Colonialism was thought to be). As a female, however, I was not to know too much that would allow me to make my own decisions, which could cause me to depart from these accepted standards – standards of atonement and of loyalty to family and to God, and of moral and sexual purity in deed and thought.

My father knew that he could justify UDI posthumously, if only I would take his place and be the standard bearer for everything that he had thought. It was, after all, the female role, to be the sacrificial beast for all of male postulations, journeys and antagonisms. Before my father had got married, he had been a regular conscript of the armed services, serving his country in little skirmishes within the bush, defending against unarmed village uprisings. Military life was brutal, the province of the lower middle classes and the uneducated within the colonial ranks. The gentler part of my father sought a different mode of life and a different system of order. He had volunteered to go beyond what were considered at that time to be the nominal amount of call-up duties for the Rhodesian male. He had done extra. But now the stern gaze of the sergeant major was calling him to make one more sacrifice – one more tour of duty. It was getting hairy out there now. The natives now had weapons, courtesy of Russia and China. The bush war was fully on. My father panicked. “Go and have a word, with him,” said my mother. “You’ve already done more than they’ve asked you to do.” So, my father went, and did something that he was always loathe to do --- face an authority directly. “I’ve just got married,” he said. “And Glenda is terrified of me going anywhere without her. She’s so worried that she’s going crazy, like a woman. Is there some chance that I could be stationed locally – within the city?”

The ruse had worked, and my father’s guilty conscience melded to warp the facts, to convince him that Glenda, rather than himself had, after all, been shaking in her boots. My father had found a use for women. Perhaps, among Rhodesian men, he was not alone in this.

patriarchal regression viewed as contemporary colonial depravity

After many years of experience, I learned that what my father said about the women around him and what they felt was really just all about him and how he was feeling at the time.

If he said to me, as he once did, “Jenny, you are terrified of everything,” what that really meant is that he was feeling terrified of everything at that time. If he said, “Your mother is deeply anxious about the whole situation with this family and whether we will hold together,” it really meant that he was deeply pondering that issue, and unsure of what to do about it.

He made women express his feelings and concerns. Sometimes this was just by stating, “Your mother feels this,” or “You feel that.” Other times, he had to literally stand over us to try to make us feel it. “You are afraid of everything!” You are not coping! You cannot face reality!” he once boomed, standing over me, whilst I was quietly working away at the computer. “You disgust your me and your mother!” By that he meant that he was disgusted by the part of his own mind that he felt wasn’t operating properly, which is to say “not facing life.”

At first, I didn’t realise the gravity of the situation. My father was just having temper tantrums like he always did. These would surely blow over, like they normally did. Only now, he was truly trying to make us feel his terror, which seemed to carry with it the vulnerability of a two year old’s anguish had it needed to confront the world alone. I spoke cautiously to friends and neighbours: “My father said this to me: You are afraid of everything. You are not coping. Only, I think I am coping. What do you make of it?”

I was playing a game of Russian roulette, divulging this weapon to my acquaintances – and the pistol was firmly pointed at my own head.

“He said that about you?” they would go, humming and hawing, as they mulled over the depths of morality depravity of the young female colonial type. “Hmmm,” they went. “Hmmmmmmmm …..”

So it was very difficult to get help in relation to my father. It seemed to me women had little status in this culture – not like where I had come from, where I suspect I would have found people who would have listened.

biting the wrong dog

In Perth, we had a dog called Raffie. I liked her a lot. We’d got her second hand, and she was half rottweiler, half German shepherd. She was very loyal, too. Our other dog was called Shamwari, which meant friend. This dog was a really smart dog, and really tough, too. Once, he had come in through the window, knocking out the flyscreen on entrance, head covered full of blood, like some red plastic shield or mask. It’s how he looked without the hair upon his forehead. My mother said he must have had a collision with a car, a near miss, but he had come home, shaking it off, as if nothing had really happened. In truth, he was probably just dazed and following his instincts. Sham was a really smart dog, but Raffy not so much. It was a danger to feed them close together, because as they snatched up the cubes that had inevitably fallen out of and around their dishes due to their frenzied eating, their noses would eventually meet along the trail, and, getting the fright of their lives at such a close encounter, hair would fly as they laid into each other with the most ferocious antagonism.

Sham was half bull terrier and half an Australian cattle dog, a blue heeler. He knew his way around and didn’t miss a trick, often scratching and whining on our bedroom doors first thing in the morning, until one of us opened up a door to let him in. Once inside the bedroom of the weary occupant, he would walk resolutely up to the head of the bed, hop up onto it, with one bound, like a cat, and proceed to burrow his way to the bottom of the bed, under the blankets, whereupon he would curl up and immediately go to sleep.

As Sham got older, he got into a few fights, and Raffy was always there behind him, but she didn’t always help him. One day, he encountered a dalmation in a small park at the bottom of our road. It was being taken for a walk by its owner, a fearsome local vet. Sham and the dog were suddenly going for it, the minute we had turned our heads in another direction, momentarily distracted from our civil task of dog watching. Rafferty, adrenaline triggering her to the very hair ends of her tail, bounded forth, not sure what to do, but keen to join in the excitement. She grabbed the back of Sham’s neck and started biting into it, participating fully in the dog engagment to the extent that her instincts had demanded. Only she was biting the wrong dog.

As I went home and lay in bed that night, I thought about my father – good intentioned, but driven by instincts. In moments of stress and excitement he, too, would bite the “wrong dog”. I didn’t like the way my father attacked me whenever he was feeling uncertain about whether I was able to succeed, or about his place in the world.

Melburnian dream

I had a dream last night that black Zimbabweans were lying on the road in Australia, as protest against the conditions in their country.

Another dream earlier in the week had to do with a Germanic mansion, full of light and glass. I was crawling on my hands and knees to try to get inside the glass doors before the building was bombed. (I think this had to do with the Mumbai crisis at the hotel, the murder of Melbourne backpacker Britt Lapthorne, in Dubrovnik, a seemingly Germanic town, at least to my twisted mind (it had a follow-up story on TV whilst I was in Melbourne), and the fact that a fellow post-grad student at the conference was studying Heidegger.

Germanic nursery rhyme music simultaneously mocked me and invited me to enter the substantial building. I crawled inside at last, and although the building was going to be bombed, I would be safe. Only I wasn't safe at all, because that minute a black alien-zombie was walking its way towards the glass of the door. I wasn't safe at all, and woke up in a hurry.

What did the black zombie represent? -- the feeling that black academics might be selling themselves short by adopting too much of the Western way of doing things.

Back in the USSR

Hi Jokes and Folks

I'm still in Melbourne. Hopefully this won't be my last email to you unless prane clash!

psychological vampires

Vampires have little energy to sustain their emotional lives, and thus lean on others to energize them. As they lean, however, they extract the energy of that other life.

This leaning can be very subtle. Those who try to extract some of your energy by leaning will often, quite literally, lean in towards you, if they happen to be standing nearby. If they are walking, their path will meander closer towards yours, until they almost collide with you (and yet seem oblivious that they are doing so!) Such people are used to drawing energy from those around them, and they are used to producing very little energy that could drive them to settle and reflect upon their lives.

Many many be wealthy and yet try to create the sense of their emotional victimhood to draw your energy from you.   They will make out that everything is actually going against them, that the flow of life shows no sympathy for their urgent needs.

Psychological vampires leave you feeling weaker and less certain upon their departure. In their tendency to take a shape in relation to their attraction to power, they absorb energy and form but do not give any back. Yet their leaning allows them to adopt the forms that would be easily associated with convention and normality, perhaps whilst attributing to you the notions and identity of their irregular self.

Psychological vampires seem to be giving something by their very gestures, but actually they are taking something -- warmth and life. The psychological vampire, whilst outwardly successful, has no inner life of his own.

the redeemed Son of Nietzsche

The key point that Nietzsche's Antichrist does not address is what is to fill the cultural space left by the removal of Christianity. This may seem an odd way to put it, as the metaphor of space may not be quite what is needed. Humanity itself does not allow for an empty space, but for conditions of relative well being or unhealth. So, the quite obvious answer is that good health replaces bad health.

It's not so easy as all that, though. There are so many traps for the unwary. People tend to gravitate towards ideas that are polarised as sets of opposite values, as Nietzsche, in this book, so joyously celebrates. Thinking in opposites, he seems to imply, is the opposite of Christianity, which can think only in terms of sameness.

Watch out though with your opposites! To divide the world up into stark polarities, and think only in terms of these, is a sign of a pre-Oedipal disorder. Contrary to Nietzsche, the childish temperament does not think in an undifferentiated fashion at all, but in terms of good and evil, hot and cold, man and woman. The childish temperament -- which is very often a Christian one -- is unable to think in shades of grey. Rather, everything must be cut and dried for him, prechewed and predigested, and preferably bestowed from "above" according to the Führer principle. Perhaps it is because his own mind is indeed unable to differentiate right from wrong that such firm moral delineations are required to be imposed from outside or "above".

The Nietzschean, if there is such a thing, who takes his marching orders from a book, is as likely to fall into a trap of seeing things in opposite ways as his fellow Christian does. He doesn't want to be womanly, after all. He is undergoing his special training by the book, in order that he might be perceived as being a man. By careful practice and appropriation of the words of wisdom, he hopes to derive his being from a book. What he leaves behind, and casts off, is after all the opposite side of his polarity, the part he doesn't like, the part he would rather identify with somebody or something else. Having undergone this purification by the Word, he feels redeemed of his originatory sin, and now demands to be treated as a Man. He is, indeed, the Son of Nietzsche, come to give a redemptory message: "Thou shalt cast off that which is womanly; and be men."

Such a fellow is as likely to cast off green in order to be red, or high spiritedness in order to be sombre. He wants to occupy only one part of the rainbow -- and it is not the gay end.

IN the end, the Nietzschean and the Christian are pretty much alike. Having cast off his complexity, in order to become simple, this one-dimensional entity which is all masculinity and yet has nowhere to go with it, is in much the same position as the Christian, who loves his God but has nothing to show for it. That is how life ends up when one sits in a one-dimensional spot, as pure as can be. The variable and gradated qualities of life are not permitted to enter into this dimension, which must be kept pure at all costs. Noli me tangere, says the redeemed Son of Nietzsche.

Do not touch me.

to live as if living didn't matter

In The Antichrist, Nietzsche refers to those who live as if living didn't matter. He says this is the message that they have received from their Evangel.

That phrase sums up the impression I had by my high school in Perth. It was as if everyone's life had been subdued, frozen, to a level of only just breathing. I saw goldfish in the restaurant pond today who looked around in a similar fashion. The lack of life up in the hills, where my parents live is quite astonishing. It's rare to see anybody outside doing anything up there, although the homes are small and tidily kept and seem far too exposed to everybody else's homes. (I have recently reflected how much being an open book is considered to be a primary Christian virtue -- thus no fences, and no switching off the computer screen whenever one should leave the room. Toilets with no doors and the prohibition against wearing clothes come next in this line of Christian logic.)

One should be an open book, in all ways, if one is to be presentable to Christians. However, if one should write a book, or read a book, then whatever the content of this book is will not interest any Christian. They only read one book -- and do not know it very well.

Lesmurdie, Kalamunda, both must be the home to so many people who desire to live as if living didn't matter.

Where I live is a different matter. I'd consider it to be one of the few places within the suburbs where people appear to live as if living mattered. It is amazing how actually caring if one lives or not, and being in an environment where other people care about it, makes everything seem more alive. There were a thousand rainbow lorikeets flying around today, and various parrots, white and black. Animal life is attracted to places where life matters, because the land is divided in such a way that promotes a feeling of wellbeing and the vibrancy of life.

Nietzsche's flawed presuppositions

The inclination to bring disadvantage to women in order to look relatively good, and to gain power over women has always been a key part of patriarchy and how it functions. Consider the female genital mutilation that has been practiced in extreme versions of Islam over the centuries, and you will get an acute picture of what I mean. As I say in the post below:

Instead of people looking to the nearest woman and thinking, "If I take away your peace, your pleasure, your ability to achieve, I will make myself very masculine," what if there were males who thought, "Let me see what I can make of myself, and let me have the guts and the confidence to do it on my own."

It is regrettable that this strategy of patriarchal power has not been well enough understood or analysed until now. Those who rise to the top on this basis are not the most well deserving and the best but the most craven and dishonest in terms of acknowledging what their power is actually based upon -- the deprivation of liberty of the Other, along with a false self representation that one has achieved success on the basis of one's own effort.

Under the rules of patriarchy, one has merely stolen the success of another to pass it off as if it were one's own. Her deprivation becomes your source of power -- but what sort of power is that? It is temporarily dazzling, but insubstantial and ultimately unsatisfactory. The ongoing descent towards greater and greater brutality and criminal oppression of women is the only thing that will satisfy one who has become addicted to patriarchal mores. Since his achievements are objectively of no worth, he must continue to convince himelf of his superiority at a purely subjective level, by taking more and more from women.

I have just glanced at something written by Herr Nietzsche, who is, of course, wrong that avoiding pity will allow for a natural order or hierarchy of human values to take the place that had been left by the ostensibly Christian morality of pity. Since patriarchal mores offer such a dazzling array of strategies for extremely decadent people to take control of those who are by no means their inferiors, there is no reason to think that Darwin offers a better ideology to advance humanity than does the most regressive type of Christianity. Both approaches in fact guarantee that decadents come to the top.

Who, in social Darwinistic circles, can resist the opportunity to beat up a woman and to take from her that which is hers? Who can pass by that opportunity for animal superiority, when nobody else is looking? It seems to be so ready for the taking by those who delude themselves that regressing to the level of raping and pillaging marks them as the fittest.

 Is this decent into bronze age morality, this brutal, but automatic outcome of a social Darwinistic creed equivalent to the level of intellectuality that Nietzsche proclaims as being the opposite of Christianity and its values? The two approaches are at root the same thing -- self deception dressed up as higher values, the demeaning of humanity and its prospects dressed up as its salvation.

the restoration of masculinity?

And so I had a nice dream about the restoration of masculinity, although the imagery was a bit strange. Wouldn't it be interesting, in the post-Bush era, if such a thing were to be restored?

Instead of people looking to the nearest woman and thinking, "If I take away your peace, your pleasure, your ability to achieve, I will make myself very masculine," what if there were males who thought, "Let me see what I can make of myself, and let me have the guts and the confidence to do it on my own."

Out there

I realise that I am at the end of an era with a certain section of my writing. It is good to move on. I am looking forward to a very interesting conference in a few days time.

I've researched so much, and I've found that despite what I had learned, perhaps incorrectly, in my undergraduate days, it is possible to take a standpoint outside of ideology. One can do so if one regresses far back enough, into one's previous states of consciousness, from which point it is possible to rebuild one's awareness, and even, to some lesser degree, perhaps, one's sense of identity. I agree with Wilfred Bion that the splitting of one's psyche and personality is something possible from events in adulthood. I think it is the basis for our capacity to creatively adapt actually. So it is not all bad, or pathological, even.

But I'm so finished with the topic of the pre-Oedipal for the time being. Donald Meltzer wasn't wrong when he referred to it, in its pathological aspects, as The Claustrum. To regress too far is to risk entering the Claustrum, perhaps never to return fully. That is why shamans are masters of, among other places and things, the "underworld", and have to train to know its risks. But I don't want to be a shaman, not in this sense of deep dabbling in the Freudian unconscious. I have another life to live.

This one.

And so I turn to better and brighter things. I turn to training, and to the feeling of the sunlight, since summer is arriving.

I've explored more than most people would, on a nefarious subject.

Now, let's see what else is out there.

the key to happiness

It's weird -- there are some things I am happy to do in public and some things that I am not. One of those things I am happy to do is sparring, anything to do with martial arts.

But things get creepy when they get patriarchal. To counteract the patriarchal feeling of a wedding, I dressed in a new martial arts gi and got married in that. I made sure to use minimal make-up.

Some things I am happy doing and other things make me cringe a little on the inside. The whole deeper feeling is: "Is this me? Is it possible to be me doing this, or must I then somehow become another, with a perspective overlayed from history or from expectations, but in either case, not my own."

The key to happiness is knowing who and which of these you are.

Meltzer and Bion: post-Kleinians

My initial studies of the works of Donald Meltzer and Wilfred Bion give me the greatest certainty I've ever had that people who operate at the level of moral feeling impose upon others the antithesis of actual cooperative group ethics.

Identifying me as a nefarious social element because of where I'm from has the same psychodynamics as the latent homosexual going out to beat up some gays. I never have been racist (Note for Freudians: this doesn't mean I am racist; it's not a confession that I am racist, which would mean I am not racist, unless I'm concerned about being called racist, in which case I am, or I'm deliberately ignoring the issue, in which case I also am) however, it assuages some people's consciences (and concern that they, in fact, might be implicated in racism in some way) to treat me as if I am. And nobody says anything or intervenes. Obviously it so good way for too many people to relieve their self-doubt and stress that it inhibits them from seeing that any victimization is not ethical.

marechera's burning in the rain

click for larger image

thought for the day

21st century homage to Eichmann

There are those who see dedication to duty as the essential characteristic that determines whether somebody is civilised or not. I'm not so sure.

A bifurcated mode of thinking about ethics and morality will tend to posit that there is either, in any person, a commitment to duty and work, or alternatively there is an antisocial character at large. But, common wisdom will proclaim, it is not possible for a fundamentally antisocial character to be committed to their socially expected duty, by any means. The character of Eichmann should have taught us otherwise - that an extreme commitment to duty can be mixed with an extremely antisocial disposition. But still, we are reluctant to learn, or all too ready to forget. We expect duty and the antisocial character to be at opposite poles from each other. We pronounce it so.

My father is one whom, it seems to me combines the two poles into one body, one personality. Perhaps in a sense we all do so (he only more extremely so). We all have drives -- the id -- and also a superego to manage those drives. Inbetween that, however, is the ego, which is sandwiched inbetween the internalised force demanding social duty and the perverse energies committed to bringing the drives into material expression.

My father is one in whom there is no inbetween state to mediate between the urges of the drives or the commands of superego. He is a man almost entirely without ego. Yet, he fulfils his social duties, working hard and taking heed of ceremony.

Underneath the force of superego, he is seething. There lies id, and avarice, and deep resentment that has been too long repressed. Suddenly, he will act on his instincts, and pronounce something -- either incoherent or cruel. He has no idea of what he's saying and tells himself he's not responsible for it. Superego is already punishing him for it, most probably, but he has reeled under its own particular cruelty for so long, that he can no longer bear to differentiate between one blow from superego or another. All the lashings he's received from superego all feel the same to him now. He is capable of learning nothing.

To speak to him, one will either encounter the competitive drives of id, seething at not being rewarded enough for endurance of life's hardships, or one will encounter his superego, representing him in a mode of uncertainty and deep self doubt. One does not, in fact, seem to encounter ego. Ego isn't home. So reason has no home in him, either. One cannot simply say to him, "I would prefer you didn't do this or that," as this will either trigger an intention to overwhelm you with sheer force, or will trigger superego, which will lash out, making him temporarily ashamed, but in such a way that he will soon forget the reason why he felt that way.

One deals with superego or one deals with the instinct and the drives, but all and all, there's no-one home.

And yet, this man is full of duty.

on client centred practices and child centred learning

(from larval subjects):

Wilfred Bion seems to do quite a good job of learning from his patients. See: http://www.human-nature.com/free-associations/glover/chap4.html

I would be a bit worried, however, about a patient centred therapy practice, just from a theoretical point of view. It sounds too much like the “child centred” educational practices of late, which allow the children to remain just as they are in terms of their inherent nature. That is, they project onto female teachers the image of their mummy, and onto male teachers the image of their authoritarian fathers — and never the twain shall meet! If female teachers do not behave much like their mummies, in a nurturing, and pacifying way, then they will have no natural authority over such children. And that is a shame. Because women have so much more capacity to be something other than mummy figures, but the return to nature trend of Western culture tend to reinforce these patterns of gender as the only stereotypes that “work”.

Marechera's weird times

anti-oedipus is the key to reading Marechera’s writing – ie. regarding those who are aware enough of the lures of the oedipal but resist it on the basis of freedom and sometimes, paradoxically enough, conscience. It’s an adaptation not to have a supego when you belong to a category of person with whom there is no social contract.

Perhaps it is not so much preoedipal (although it is that) but anti-oedipal

the terror and disorientation of BS is pre-oedipal; the humour is anti-oedipal

FURTHERMORE: The superego – in its embyronic form – seems to already exist at the level of the pre-Oedipal. It seems that what the character of the father gives us is the EGO. Maybe this is not from the mother, and not from the mirror stage, but the real bestowal of patriarchal society.

Superego is not just “conscience” but it is fear of doing the wrong thing and being punished. It is the categorical imperative – AND the letter rather than the spirit of the law, according to Michael Mack. Therefore those whose behaviour is strongly guided by superego may be nothing more than more fearful and dependent individuals, compared to those whose behaviour is governed less by superego and more by other considerations.

theorising the pre-Oedipal

The pre-Oedipal states need not be considered either pathological or regressive if they are not counterposed against an Oedipal, or post-Oedipal norm. In other words, if there is no ascent up the mountain, if the villagers are happy to peruse the foothills and to smell the roses there, then there is no possibility of some catastrophic fall into a chasm somewhere. The self that is not egoistic, or barely so, is free to wander where it might, without pressure, since it is not bound to the structural limitations of ego. Furthermore, the pre-Oedipal self may be more normal without the development of ego to command it and give it a shape. Those who see the world in terms of dichotomies of absolute goodness or badness, absolute maleness or femaleness, have probably harnessed the pre-Oedipal self and its visceral capacities for perception to an unhealthy cause. Thus ego creates out of remnants of the pre-Oedipal self a veritable chasm of negative ideas.

non-Oedipal and pre-egoistic types

This following quote seems to be largely my position with regard to Marechera, and indeed, with regard to myself in a way. The pre-industrial context that Marechera and I found ourselves in (and I wonder, perhaps this was less so for the white males of our culture?) led to individuated personalities which were, however, not premissed on an Oedipal development and resolution very much. In fact, I would say that I developed an Oedipal condition rather late indeed, upon adaptation to migration, and then promptly undid it as I didn't like the feeling it gave me, of being trapped.

My father rarely makes sense to me and so I do not attribute him with having many insights, but he has mentioned, once, that after the age of three, he was called up for military service, and upon return had "lost touch with me" and our relationship was never the same. So perhaps this is also part of the basis for my lack of Oedipal conditioning. In any case, Marechera, too was without a father after the age of 11. Mike was without one after the age of 5. This is the character structure that I can most relate to, which makes subjective sense to me.



*****************


"Critics have always emphasized that the basic experience of Malte [of Rilke's novel], the 28-year-old artistocratic Dane who comes to Paris with artistic and intellectual aspirations and begins to record his life crisis in his notebooks, is one of ego-loss, deindividualization, and alienation. Often this disintegration of the ego is attributed to Malte's city experiences alone, and his childhood, which also features dissolutions of self, is said merely to foreshadow, to anticipate the later experiences. Not only is such a narra-teleological account not tenable, oblivious as it is to the much more complex nattative structure of the novel and to the always problematic "inmixture" of past and present in narration, but the very thesis of disintegration of self, of Ent-ichung, actually presupposes a stable self, a structured ego, a personality in the sense of bourgeois culture and ego psychology that could then show symptoms of disintegration under the impact of the experience of the modern city. What if Malte has never fully developed such a stable ego? What if, to put it in Freudian terms, the id/ego/superego structure, which after all is not a natural given but contingent on historical change, had never fully taken hold in Malte so that all the talk of its disintegration was simply beside the point? What if the fixation on the ego, which the late Freud has in common with traditional non-psychoanalytic notions of self, identity, and subjectivity, was simply not applicable to Malte? What if Malte represented a figuration of subjectivity that eludes Freud's theory of the structure of the puschic apparatus and that cannot be subsumed under Freud's account of the oedipal? Perhaps we need an entirely different psychoanalytic account for what has usually been described as disintegration of self and loss of ego in Rilke's novel." ( p 109, Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking time in a culture of amnesia.)

swallowed alive

short paper I'm still working on

The Claustrum

I've spent a couple of days reading this book:

The Claustrum : An Investigation of Claustrophobic Phenomena


It actually relates to the negative aspects of having parts of one's mental and emotional functions trapped in a regressive mode in terms of the pre-Oedipal condition. Those who act from this place see the world differently than those who do not -- and there are varying degrees of trappedness, with different parts of one's emotions or mind becoming victim to this underworld. The general state is of a paranoid-schizoid mindset, but with a sensation of omniscience and omnipotence, and a feeling of being an initiate into a hidden world. (There is nothing shamanistic about this, since the initiate is, and remains, a victim to hidden forces, which he or she is unable to tame.)

It's very interesting, especially the metaphor of being in the bowels, and having an attitude which views all sorts of human relations cynically, in terms of power, rather than in terms of genuine expressions of emotion. The reality that is experienced when stuck in the bowels of the mother is by no means the only reality there is -- but from the perspective of looking out from the Claustrum, it seems as if it is. That is why there are often arguments -- that take the form of misunderstandings -- about what the real reality is, when talking to those who more or less succumb to the lures of the psychological underworld. It is as if to the degree that they are trapped, the superego collapses into the instincts, so that there is only superego's authoritarian commands and drives, but no mediating ego. That is in the case of those who do not become merely mad, but become "double agents" who can still function quite effectively in the real world, except that their relationships are based on dominance and submission, rather than communication. Life with them is like living in an eternal authoritarian bootcamp-- no reprieve.

It seems some people are stuck in this Claustrum, where they know only how to manipulate rather than to relate to others (They *ACT ON* on rather than *communicate with* with others).

It seems that language of power (by which people are unconsciously manipulated) and the language of communication are two worlds at odds -and that one stuck in the Claustrum might well give the impression to others of charisma, but they're actually functioning without certain aspects of themselves, which they've either killed, repressed, or projected into others.



2 a positive side to the pre-Oedipal?

On the other hand, not everything about the way we function in a dependency structure has to be seen as negative -- unless society itself is perhaps negative, and we should all be alone as isolated individuals, lest we infect others with our "sinfulness".

The way "the Claustrum" can be renewing (as per Jung) is it that is focuses the primeval level of the mind on learning (or in the case of the adult, relearning the emotional values of a culture), as per Bion [ http://www.human-nature.com/free-associations/glover/chap4.html ] This is the relationship of the infant learning the meaning of its identity and the meaning of what it means to be human, from its mother's reactions, who interprets the infant's emotions into an intelligible form through her expressions or words.

So, I will suggest that the Claustrum (in a way that the author does not address in his particular book), could also be in principle, a zone of relearning, and potentially, therefore, a temporary zone of experience that can lead to healthy psychological and social reintegration.

However, for some it becomes the only way to be, or think, or to imagine the world. These people remain permanently locked within the Claustrum, which is like a permanent bootcamp of authoritarian discipline for them, from which they are able to take nothing (since unable to use the energy of ego to re-emerge).

Marechera's burning in the rain

click on images to enlarge

Cephas Mashakada-Samson

Zimbabwean harmonics

This is not posted for its religious message!

sleeping dream

In this dream, I'm watching from a close range, as a small plane (about the size of a single engine cessna) approaches the airport (actually located where Perth train station is). It's coming in too low not to miss the bridge and the highway running on it, I think. Also it's slowing down. It's not going to meet its destination.

The plane, however, lands quite neatly, like a helicopter, vertically, upon the road along the bridge. I'm at the swimming pool, planning to train in my swimming endeavours, and having a party. The old woman arrives there, and offers me a lift home. "I had no idea whether I was at 10, 000 feet or higher, or whether I was quite low," she explains.

"What? You didn't have an altometer?" I enquired.

"No," she told me.

I'm being driven back by her now, and she has all those discarded and broken golden sandals scattered in the back of the vehicle. They are about the size that would have fit a very large doll.

can't' gettanuff of your love baby!

let us not slow down, let us speed up

It seems to me that Protean tendencies are inimical to dominating hierarchical systems. These always want to trap you into a particular form, so as to make you useful by being limited, definable, calculable. The genie must stay in the bottle to be used as needed.

When I consider how I have experienced processes that would treat me as "feminine", when I analyse exactly what the political construct of femininity means to me, I understand that femininity is the outcome of social pressures finally managing to fix one's form once and for all.

A woman of the same age, however, often frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchangeability (Freud, 1933, p. 134). ...

To suggest that this outcome is not the aim and desired outcome of patriarchal systems -- to fix women in their places so that their libido doesn't move or stray -- is hardly credible.

The transition from a protean girlhood to a rigid and fixed womanhood is exactly what old fashioned property laws (with the wife construed as the property of the husband) and abstinence before marriage were designed to produce.

Similarly today -- women are captured by the system and used AS WOMEN [ie. as 'the feminine' mesh of society] to the degree that they can be made to slow down, and ultimately to stand still.

Enn your own Gram

Thanks to Hattie, I am looking once again as Mister Enneagram, to wile away the lazy afternoon.

My tendencies have generally approximated the outlook of a seven. However, the flighty and prone to disintegrating character of the seven in its worse stages is definitely not me. When I hit rock bottom, I generally find something entirely other than the mood of giving up -- rather, I find a firmer will, the determination to succeed. Since opposition energises me in quite significant ways, (such that I often seek out genuine oppositional disagreement as a tonic), I would seem to have much in me that is like the eight.

It seems that I need difficulties and exposure to significant problems (which I will attempt to solve) in order to feel grounded. To be denied engagement with with hard nuts to crack, not to be able to challenge them, would actually be the recipe to send me insane. However to tackle something that is palpably hard, complex or confusing makes me feel engaged and real, like nothing else can. This is the mystery ingredient I need in life in order to survive effectively.

Finally, I am somewhat like the five, but once again not so detached from an active embrace of life as they are described as being. In my case if someone challenged my knowledge in a certain area, I would be disappointed at first -- but ultimately I would be driven by deeper sense of purpose than before, to pour in the amount of energy required to prove them wrong.

sleepy bise

It is very hard to relax, because first you have to destroy yourself to do so. How does one do so? Let me count the ways.

The most preferable way is through intense sparring. That way, you transcend all your little brain traps, all your narrow mindsets that keep you grounded. You fly free.

The other way is with up to a bottle of good wine.

The former way is most beneficial for thinking, for creativity and for a sensation of self-power. What it is not too good for is to help you to sleep deeply in a way that is relaxed. Your muscles want to stay away to bound around to implore energy to come into them, for they are tight and hostile to a free blood flow.

A bottle of good wine is better for sleeping, but one awakes with pollen in the brain, in the earlobe, in the nostril nattering, in the face. The headache explodes you from one world to another, from this one to death in tights.

There have to be other ways to get a good night's sleep.

Hyperbo-Fear XXX Redemption!

2008:  I feel that the state of culture may start to improve now, in the zone of Hyperbo-Fear XXX.

I am looking forward to the changes. Hyperbo-Fear XXX has been reeling under many negative influences for quite a few years. The Bush regime made stupidity an enshrined condition -- normative and desirable. The Howard regime in Australia made a petty-minded viciousness, a feature of a lower-middle class mentality, into the cultural norm. Both did the humanity of those in the zone of Hyperbo-Fear XXX a disservice, by undermining its potential and throttling Thinking and Morality in their respective cradles.

I have been reflecting on how much ego seeks to find its own identity in the mirrors that are placed around it. A frail ego, which doesn't really understand the human spirit in all of its energetic complexities, will look for a reflection that somehow inflates and strengthens its appearance. In searching for a leader, it will choose a reflection of its own inner shallowness -- only stronger looking, more palpable.

We seem to always be in search of images that reflect ourselves - a fact that advertisers have long known. When we see a flattering image, we gravitate towards it. An unflattering image in a text or image will just as soon push us away. We cannot stand to see ourselves reflected in that way!

And all other people are mirrors, too. We take from them what we can, in terms of a flattering self-image and discard the rest. (For this reason, I've been arguing, in the past few months for a deflated ego position, which arguably should be able to see more by discarding the narrow lens of personal self interest.)

As I write this, I am full of hope. Those of Hyperbo-Fear XXX@SectorUSA have voted in for president a man who is regarded as black! The world must stop in its orbit.

I have a good feeling that this is a step to overcoming the indictment of the liberal conscience that impugns them for being implicated in various forms of racism.

This could turn out well for me, if they can overcome the guilty consciences that make ugly a large part of their self-image.

abandon hope

so you know the way to advance?

My feeling is that in the intellectual sense the Rhodesian culture was a completely pre-psychological one: Pre-Freud, pre-Jung. (No wonder Marechera was excited to discover these!)

Yet, in the sense of having a feeling for moral decency, it was in some ways -- although quite unevenly developed -- more advanced that much of the contemporary culture I've experienced.

To say to someone of my mother's age: "Please help me. Speak to this person X. He's is suffering so much from his condition of being human that he has become emotionally and physically abusive," and to get a response that is straight out of the slimy moral incoherence of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party is to experience cultural destitution and unwitting savagery.

For future reference, those who wear their modernity and Christianity on their sleeve: If I say that someone is being abusive, that is not a call to fantasise about a totally different character structure that would give you hot times in bed. What I'm saying is that there is a problem here, and that you need to switch off from your self-indulgence for a little while, to pay the smallest amount of moral respect to what I am saying. You need to act as if information actually means something.

It is a morally regressive culture that cannot act as if information means something. This is why I continue to oppose various aspects of postmodernistic thinking quite virulently.

If I call for your aid in a particularly harmful situation, I want to feel as if I'm actually saying something -- not pointing out for you an opportunity entirely in the opposite direction to anything I've said.

The old Rhodesian ladies -- think about this -- would have understood me.

more burning in the rain

Marechera Burning in the Rain

I loathe and detest administrative work

It gives me a sense of unreality, and it takes many escapades and the passage of a few days for me to return to a non-numbing feeling.

Ushering in a New Era

And so we can start to say good-bye to the institutionalisation of cowardice, values purported but not embraced, and avarice cast as The Common Good (the logical consequence of 'trickle down economics' taken to its duplicitous conceptual limits).

Above all, I now say good-bye to those whose mode of thinking, being and morality has no link up to their own behaviour, but who rely upon claiming their higher status through encouraging and inviting the human foible of projective identification. By winning various contests, they expect to arrive at the condition whereby their negative aspects can be cast down upon you (to appear to be yours, in fact) whereas your positive aspects they claim as intrinsically their own. Thus to these empty-heads, without merit, plan to stay without merit whilst seeming to emanate pure merit and nothing besides. (It is your merit they are claiming as their own; it is their own laziness that they are attributing to you, for not being top of the sandcastle, alone.)

Goodbye to all the trolls patrolling feminist sites, whilst attributing all the hard thinking and the tokens of pure merit to themselves. Good-bye to all phony Übermensch who have never done a day's hard thinking in their lives.

Goodbye to those who wish to earn their fame and power by using other people's projection identification as a foil.

ON NATIONAL IDENTITIES

'The enforced introjection and use of such defences also interferes with the capacity for symbol formation... The defences inhibit the capacity for creative, symbolic thought, for abstract thought, and for conceptualization. They inhibit the full development of the individual's understanding, knowledge and skills that enable reality to be handled effectively and pathological anxiety mastered' (pp. 74-5).

I have quoted this passage - one which will be familiar to many - not to review or to bore you but to invite you to reflect on the appropriateness of this description for understanding how a person comes to think and feel like a racist or a virulent nationalist or a member of a street gang or a religious or psychoanalytic sect. I believe that the mechanisms are the same and that the process of taking in the values as 'a given', adapting one's own primitive anxieties to that group's particular version of splitting, projection, stereotyping and scapegoating, leads to the same kind of impoverishment that nurses experience - of the ability to think and feel with moderation and to deal with reality and anxiety. It is projected into the structure or the Other and given back - not detoxified, but - as an injunction to behave inhumanely toward patients, Lacanians, Jews, Armenians, 'the Evil Empire' or whomsoever. It is by this means that I became certain, without thinking about it or meeting many, if any, of the people involved, that Germans are sadistic, Japanese cunning, Italians sexist, Mexicans lazy, French romantic, English decent, Scots dour, Canadians boring, Swiss efficient, Dutch tidy, Scandinavians cold, Spaniards romantic, Russians passionate, Turks depraved, Arabs fanatical, Jews avaricious, Hawaiians friendly, Australians gauche, Chinese inscrutable, Africans rhythmic, White South Africans racist and authoritarian. I have been sure of all these things all my conscious life, but I do not recall learning any of them (psychoanalysis and racism are discussed further in Young, 1992a, Ch.. 5).

http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/paper3h.html

facing the stress of it (reality)

Those who do face the reality of the mechanisms of projective identification are extraordinary, and kind of shamanistic .  Here is what you may have to combat in yourself if you are susceptible to weird things from your infancy:

--
Bion says of the group, 'My impression is that the group approximates too closely, in the minds of the individuals composing it, to very primitive phantasies about the contents of the mother's body. The attempt to make a rational investigation of the dynamics of the group is therefore perturbed by fears, and mechanisms for dealing with them, which are characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position. The investigation cannot be carried out without the stimulation and activation of those levels... the elements of the emotional situation are so closely allied to phantasies of the earliest anxieties that the group is compelled, whenever the pressure of anxiety becomes too great, to take defensive action' (Bion, 1955, p. 456).

http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/paper3h.html