Saturday 31 January 2009


Eros so long.

From the point of view of evolutionary fitness, doesn't the strong patriarchal adherent send the following message to his prospective mates?:

"Beware of me, for I suffer from all sorts of deficiencies. I cannot make it in this world on my own steam. I need a system to remain in place that would facilitate my success by imposing a handicap upon my competition. Without a patriarchal advantage, I will surely fail."

Of course, one really doesn't know if anybody truly thinks in this way, it's just a guess based on circumstantial evidence.

What really needs explanation is how contact with patriarchal notions removes Eros from the picture -- at least it does for me.

Friday 30 January 2009

what ails the right wing

(You will know who I am talking about if you are this particular kind of right winger.) I don't think those of the right wing have any conception at all as to what it would be like if society as a whole gave in to their programmes. I'm speaking specifically right now about their agenda concerning women. They cling to the notion that we are humans without bodies and that power is immaterial. Gleefully they pat each other on the backs -- the more power we take from women, the more we have for ourselves, they consider.

The world itself does not function on the basis of such a crude mechanism -- even basic economics should teach you that. What are bail-out packages and other "stimulus packages" other than a tacit acknowledgement that the harm that befalls one sector of the community is likely to befall the whole?

Yet still right-wingers hold onto the idea that the more "woman" is whittled away, the more personality he will have for himself. The idea of whittling away at her even feels clever -- it's a formula reckoned not to lose, since building oneself up whilst chopping her down seems the best way to assure that she will gravitate over to your side and come and live in your pocket.

The truth is other than this -- just as no ethereal women-concept can actually be embodied by a real woman. Material reality dictates that if somebody is whittled down, they do not fall into your pocket, but become ill, physically and mentally. Their capacity to participate in life becomes diminished. You have whittled them away.

Is there something romantic about cholera (love in the time of..?) Is there something romantic about malnutrition and an early death?

The right winger thinks there is --- and that is why he and his ideas should be eliminated.

Thursday 29 January 2009

the world in flux

To the see the world as being in a state of flux, as if one were separated from it in a transcendent position  -- instead, watching its material vicissitudes, is this not the key to the paranoid-schizoid position of early childhood?

Contrarywise, to see the world from an integrated position, peering out at is from the point of view of one who has claim to some identity or other that is publically recognised and reinforced -- is that not equivalent to the depressive position of the social realist who has accepted society's shackles of the mind, and is now part and parcel of them: person and shackles in one?

Marechera speaks thus from the first position in critical analysis of the second:

What has not been done in the name of some straitjacket?’My soul a neat shirtfront; these star-studded galaxies. Ashtrays on the desk overflow with stubbed inventions. Night and sky are refuges on a quay; the world debris piled at the edge of neat memoranda. White pebbles on a white beach dazzle the eye towards the lighthouse; a spurt of flame is the whiteman shooting grouse. Orion smiles at cracked tiles on Brixton roofs. The mirror flinches. Torn commandments of clouds shroud the sky from me. Time and space enclose me in their fetid rooms.

Wednesday 28 January 2009


pre-oedipal defined

If Marechera'as "pre-oedipal" self has any revolutionary significance, it is in the sense that he observes its machinations from a transcendental or detached perspective. Its machinations appear, in this light, contingent, subject to change, conditioned by arbitrariness and apparently in a state of flux.

By contrast, the opposite way of viewing things has become generally enshrined within contemporary culture. We tend to see through a lens of pre-oedipal differentiation of the world into opposites, wherein never the twain shall meet. We think we see fixed essences of identity -- male versus female, and good versus evil (classical splitting). We impose upon the transcendental quotient of life a sense of fixed definitions, which somehow strikes us as resonating with a quality of the eternal (which is so because we impose our own arbitrariness of vision on the world as transcendental definitions -- or eternal 'essences').

The pre-oedipal remains what it is -- a developmental stage that leaves its mark on adult modes of perception. Yet one can learn to see it through the lens that fixes it as arbitrary and contingent (looking down on "fixed" as identities which wrongly believe themselves to be eternal and immutable).  One can adopt the perspective of an eternity detached from (and genuinely transcending) that which lies below it in the form of thinking processes that have their own vicissitudes, which form and deconstruct 'identities' as an ongoing process.

Tuesday 27 January 2009

and far to go before I sleep

The postmodernist dream is a nightmare for some -- for me.  I want to wake up from this dream.  I will return to my African life.

Monday 26 January 2009

TONDERAI'S FATHER REFLECTS

FROM “THE CONCENTRATION CAMP” – “TONDERAI’S FATHER REFLECTS”

To suffer martyrdom is a fate that falls upon some, taking them outside the arena of rationality, to a place where death casts its irrational shadow. It is the destiny of Tonderai’s father to endure martyrdom for the sake of freedom, in Zimbabwe’s Second Chimurenga or war of liberation. Mr Murehwa is the father of Tonderai, a boy who had been taking food to support the guerilla combatants. In the three page soliloquy by Tonderai’s father, he commits to denying the torturers of the Rhodesian forces any information. Rather, he seals up his fate, along with the refusal of his words, in the metaphoric form of a burial ship that will take him to his death:

Well it’s done
Across this stuttering tongue of sea
My ship, The Wordhorde, sails
My burial ship, wrought from tough hardwood word
Sails … (p 195)

The writing is intra-psychological, dealing as it does with Tonderai’s father’s encounter and reconciliation with his superego, which he recruits to the side of his fight for liberation, using his memories that evoke hatred of the Rhodesian forces to enable him to face death in a manner that is “hard” in the sense of being unwavering and resolute.

From afar, listing into view,
The Towerman cometh; cloud and spray,
Rent apart, reveal
The Towerman’s glisped visage! (p 195)

This encounter with superego is destructive – not least because it involves reconciliation with what is right to do, rather than with what is merely comfortable and acting in compliance with the status quo. It would be easier to deny that deny that the Rhodesian forces really meant to do harm. It would be easier to defer to those who were already in power. So the reconciliation with his superego produces a tearing apart of mind and body – the body must submit to what the mind has commanded.

Like ‘lectric feather drop’t
From thunderbird’s tearing flight
(Darkness visible!) memory’s very light
Baptises the Towerman’s exilebroken
Return …

The “light” of memory (and the capacity of resolution that the recollection of hatred brings) enables Mr Murehwa to recruit his own superego for an appropriately warlike response to the war waged against him, despite his humble needs and desires.

The rest of the soliloquy reads like a “soul journey” of shamanistic dissociation. It is clear that the formlessness of the “ocean” forms the basis for the partial release of Mr Murehwa’s body from his mind, as he undergoes torture. The sea “stutters” (p 198), but does not speak. It is formless and “oceanic”, for it carries the victim away from the shores of reality and the victimisers who reside there.

This shamanic soul journey of dissociation enables the subject to transcend himself, so as to embrace his mysterious destiny to become a freedom fighter, although in a material sense he is merely a slave to circumstance:

Whose on the trader’s forearm these teethmarks?
A sudden mist
Casts mystery upon the cradle. ( p 196)


It also unites him in life and death with a transcendent image of eternity as the embracer of both good and bad fate – “This deep black-blue sky”, from which “no breath in hope’s breeze will blow her image.” ( p 197) The dissociation that enables the “soul journey” – the “sailing away” is facilitated in traditional shamanistic fashion, facilitating dissociation by the sense of a beating of a drum:

Only this drum
Of gloom and din
And gross dream
Wrought from tough hardwood word
Sails. ( p 197)

Pain takes on a rhythm of its own that enables the subject to endure his torment. Tonderai’s father reflects upon his wife writing an obituary in the newspaper after he has gone. ( p 197). He forecasts her endurance in an alienating cityscape after his death, and her meeting him there after they have both become ghosts. It is a place that uses up the poor as manual labour, and gives them only coldness (and nothing for the soul) in return.

Only this drum
Skyscapers of steel and sinew
Cement, plateglass, and workers’ blood
The Towerman’s sneer as wide as Fourth Street
Down which I walk hand in hand with the ghost
Of her who sailed the stuttering sea …
My burial ship, The Wordhorde. ( p 198)

Sunday 25 January 2009

Marechera's The Alley

THE ALLEY

Object relations psychoanalysis teaches us that as humans we retain many of the intrapsychological devices concerned with ego self-regulation, from our early childhood. As adults we defend our position within the status quo by projecting, for instance, the qualities of masterliness upwards within a hierarchy, so as if to perceive our social context as if our own superior qualities were emanating from elsewhere, from those in the strata of social hierarchy above us. (Menzies Lyth). Likewise, in order to adapt to the logic of a pre-existing social hierarchy, we may be inclined to project downwards, onto those in the social strata below us, our negative psychological qualities, being those we find less desirable in ourselves – in the terms of Menzies Lyth, we project downwards our incompetencies.

To project upwards or downwards elements of ourselves means that we lose touch with those particular elements. Along with the infantile, but nonetheless adaptive tactic of projection is the splitting of the self, so that parts of the self are acknowledged as being “really me”, whereas others are dissociated from, as being “other”. The loss of parts of oneself – whether that be in the form of the sense of ones competency or the sense of one’s human fallibility (as the loss of the sense of this is also a loss in terms of self-understanding) comes under the contemporary or “new age” shamanistic rubric as “soul loss”. The restoration of the “soul” – that is, of one’s true self, existing in a form that isn’t compromised by social and political necessities – is the key to shamanistic healing. It is not just the individual who is restored and made whole by virtue of “soul retrieval” [term: Ingerman]. Society as a whole needs restoration from the states produced by primeval splitting, in order to move from stress-related (pathological) modes of coping towards a healthier model of relating within the social whole.

“The Alley” is a play that deals with this issue of societal and individual healing, through an encounter with the split-off aspects of the self. The play examines the traumatic legacy of post-war Zimbabwe (post the second Chimurenga that ended in 1980). Marechera is keen to show how the dissociation from the past and therefore from aspects of one’s self, in post war Zimbabwe, leads to a mode of forgetfulness that is the forgetting of the self. In such a condition, one goes through life without the sense of who one really is, or how one got there. One needs to face the trauma of the past in order to affect “soul retrieval” – that is, in order to become who one is, again.

In “The Alley”, a black and white tramp struggle with their tendencies to forget, as they fraternise in the streets of Harare, unable to recognise the cause of their demise. They had both fought in the war of liberation on opposite sides, and they had both had the privileged status of career lawyers, before making their descent into the grey mists of fugue and loss of social status, entailed in living the hobo lifestyle. Marechera borrows from Beckett – in particular from “Waiting for Godot” – in his idea of exploring the life of tramps through an aesthetic and conceptual lens of forgetfulness. His approach involves more of a psychological and political study of post-war Zimbabwe, however, rather than being concerned with an existential statement of the human condition, which is how Beckett has generally been read.

The complication that Marechera introduces in “The Alley” is the question of gender and how that impacts on how trauma and recovery are experienced. Whereas Beckett also subtly implies a gendered aspect to his play in naming one of his male tramps Estragon (which sounds like estrogen), Marechera takes the issue of gender much further, in order to show that post-war trauma in his contemporary Zimbabwe of the eighties, had a distinctly gendered quality. His mode of writing is both slapstick – Cecil Rhodes is introduced as “Cecilia” – and tear-jerking. This tragicomic mode is designed to break down the current ego-defences of the audience, with their current stress-based and probably pathological adaptations to the social world. It is designed to guide us, through laughter and tears, to see the real tragedy of those whose lives and potential were sacrificed during the bush war. Only then, upon recognition of what was sacrificed and lost, can a real restoration of the soul begin to take place. As is common in Marechera’s writing, the aesthetics of the play are based upon the tacit psychological understanding that others often constitute the “other” that is really a part of myself, and not something entirely separate from me. Just as we might be inclined to socially eschew the other for being black or of the wrong gender, so we are also socially invested in maintaining the status quo that keeps others at a hierarchical distance as the psychologically dissociated aspects of oneself. To be compelled to know the other, through tears and laughter, is to come to know the socially alienated aspects of one’s self – the aspects denied when one adapts to a social role, within what is normal in society: a social hierarchy.


Marechera’s work is anarchistic in that he shows to us the link between psychological self-alienation and societies that are organised on the basis of political and social hierarchies. The cost we pay for the latter is in terms of the former. In terms of the patriarchal and socially conservative society that was post-war Zimbabwe (and as it still is to a very large degree), Marechera’s exploration of the gendered base of traumatic dissociation is very radical indeed. Marechera shows that Rhodesia, on the sides of both black and white cultures, has had a patriarchal history, and leaves a patriarchal legacy to those in the present. To fully heal, society has to face that which it has dissociated from – which is hidden behind “the wall” of consciousness, in the unconscious or semi-conscious parts of the mind. Marechera points out that whereas the black and white men fought each other like “dogs in heat” ( p 46) , redirecting their erotic impulses towards aggression, those who really paid the emotional cost of the war were women – specifically the daughter and sister of the black and white men (who are represented by the two tramps).

The traumatic reality that hides behind the wall is the damage done by this excessive “sexual” self-indulgence of the bush war to the women whom the men had no doubt sworn to protect. Rhodes – the black tramp – has been given slightly greater authority by author in terms of the moral ground for fighting for his liberation. It is he who introduces his “other” – the white tramp, Robin – to the spectre of his sister, Cecilia, who was raped and murdered by the Rhodesian forces, and now abides behind “the wall” of consciousness.

RHODES: Your daughter, Judy, is right there with her. I can see them. They are kissing.


Robin’s daughter, in turns out, was also a victim of the war, raped and murdered by the black “comrades”. Only when the brick wall in the alley is struck, with determination to know what is behind it, does it give us these traumatic answers concerning the cause of the tramps’ pathologies. Surmises Rhodes to Robin, speaking again with a margin of greater authority than his colleague has the right to:

I used to suffer from world weariness, but the wall says that too was nothing. I cannot get away from you, though that’s the only thing I want from life, from the whole last ounce of the universe. You also want to get away, but like me, you can’t, and for the same reason. I am your wall, and you are my wall. And the game we tried during the war of mounting each other like dogs in severe heat has not yet been settled. ( p 46)


The way to healing is to confront the traumatic and dissociated feminine aspects of these men’s consciousness, which lies behind the wall.

Jaded

My dreams these days are jaded.

Friday 23 January 2009

transcending Nietzsche

TONY AND JANE CHRONICLES

The consciousness of appearance.— How wonderful and new and yet how gruesome and ironic I find my position vis-à-vis the whole of existence in the light of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, and to infer,—I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the conciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish: as a somnambulist must go on dreaming lest he fall.—Nietzsche GS


Tony and Jane are clearly dreamers – a pair of cultural somnabulists – caught up in the ramifications of living in their post-liberation-war contemporary Zimbabwean culture. Tony clearly has aspirational desires, initially to keep his head above the water. He is a dreamer of a conservative sort. Such is the nature of his dreaming solely within the conservative paradigm that he cannot see that nature of Jane, or of her dreaming. Her dreams take her outside of the cultural paradigm of conservatism, in which Tony resides. The nature of her dreaming exposes her to animistic dangers that Tony, with his limited scope on his own life, is unable to protect her from. The conservative male dream that one becomes the head of the suburban household by toeing the line at work and by embracing “rationality” in one’s life’s goals is shown to be severly undermined by the daemonic forces brought into play within the nice suburban home, on the basis of Jane’s dreaming. Tony and Jane – or Tony-Jane, as the author occasionally refers to them, for their dreaming is compensatory of each-other’s shortfalls with regard to full participation in life – are participating in life as products of their society and culture. Only a shaman can enter their world, through dream-states, in order to appraise the situation they are in for what it is. Only he can truly laugh, and critique the absurdities that ensue because of their blind cultural participation in the status quo. The shaman passes between dream states of cultural normality into an alternative state of consciousness, and in so doing he reflects tacitly the degree to which a life which they could fully call their own is not within the reach of Tony and Jane.

what is wrong with Paul?

BLACK DAMASCUS ROAD

Jentsch believes that a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny feelings is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one.
http://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/uncanny1.htm


What is wrong with Paul, the character of this short story, other than the fact that he cannot reach his own depths – enough to know what he wants or does not want from life? Zimbabwe is not “his” in a true sense – he lives a dream life, neither fully awake nor fully asleep, but inbetween. Perhaps is is the nature of his enduring somnabulism that causes him to finally “pull the pin” on life as he has come to know it?

A sheer delight.

I feel good about myself right now these days. I've cracked the puzzle! (The puzzle that is indicated by the image on the front of my book.) In cracking the puzzle, I know myself, and have no need for social approval. I've discovered who I am.

Last week I enjoyed two private sparring lessons, and improved my tactics ten-fold.

Today, I will do my best to rest -- to rest and write. The Earth holds me in its little paw. A sheer delight.

Wednesday 21 January 2009

the oppressive double-bind: demand for perfection


One of the ways authoritarians of all sorts manage to get control is through a particular double-bind that they are specialists in achieving.

1. They demand and expect perfection in every way.

2. They create exactly the sort of environment in which perfection is not facilitated but undermined.

This method was used against Rhodesian blacks. They had to be magically perfect, since every expression of life from them that was imperfect was taken as a sign that there was something inherently and irredeemably wrong with them. On the other hand, they were given none of the means by which they might express the levels of cultural and intellectual perfection that were demanded of them.

Caught in this contrived double-bind that demanded evidence of whiteness to advance, they were kept down. The evidence that they could not do perfection was used against them as evidence that they did not deserve to have the means by which they could achieve cultural and intellectual perfection. The increase in stress quotient, due to constantly failing to meet the mark set for them to show that they were deserving, would have made things even worse for them (but not for their colonial rulers).

Many use this same psychological justification against migrants, to prevent these from receiving equal treatment  (Their level of perfection -- e.g. education, moral conformity and spoken English) is not already exemplary, therefore they cannot be given the equal treatment they requested.

Present day xenophobia also thrives around this psychological double-bind.

Zimbabwe is ours

Marechera’s skill is to be able to express, using a number of quite diverse literary techniques, including irony and humour, the hidden aspects of social injustice, which are experienced as this existential discontinuity and disruption of selfhood. The measure by which social justice can be estimated is, of course, by the ability to assert in a convincing way, that one’s environment is genuinely one’s own. Since this is the metaphysical measurement that Marechera brings to bear, within his writings in the book, it is clear that the approach he uses has radical social and political implications – one might say that they were anarchistic in design.

The metaphysics governing Marechera’s writing is thus a notion of selfhood that is affirmed at the greater social level: an existential sense of being that would give the affirmation to the concept that “Zimbabwe is ours”. In fact, his writing in Scrapiron Blues is highly ironic, for there is an inevitable discordance between how the characters see themselves and whether the author’s sense of organic truth -- as an underlying ontological foundation with its own way of catching and holding the vibrations of human life -- actually agrees or disagrees with the characters’ self assessments. The membrane that we hear echoing with a true or false note as pronouncement of a moral judgment says much about the characters relation to authenticity. There are characters in Scrapiron Blues who have been effectively pushed out of normal, everyday existence, to inhabit a spirit-realm. Here their ghost selves serve the truth through the authenticity of their personal testimonies. Compared to those who remain in a conventional relationship with life – that is, without the alienation that makes them into ghosts – Marechera’s spirit characters are on higher moral ground. Their voices echo with the sense that Zimbabwe is not yet theirs. Their cries, thwarted in their lifetime, but resonant in the spirit world, concern their right to participate fully in life as human beings who are not alienated from society at large. Their legacy to those still living is to catch them in their false notes in relation to authenticity. It is to put them back on course towards an authentic kind of living, in accordance with which they will be able to honestly pronounce that Zimbabwe is theirs. In Shona spiritualist terms, there is an unbroken chain of connection between the future and its well-being and the moral integrity of the past.


The aesthetics of moral discordance in Scrapiron Blues is a sign to his readers that there is more work in transforming everyday reality to be done. Marechera’s short stories for children were criticised for having a similar quality of discordance about them: “Publishers found the stories ‘unsuitable’ because of the disparity between the child-like narrator and the sarcastic, older voice which permeates the writing.” (p xiii). In terms of typical Marecherian sense of humour, those who embrace reality as it is without questioning it, in particular those who haven’t been pushed out of life, to live a shadowy liminal existence, are the least intelligent and most comical of characters. (The rest of his characters are involved in some tragic circumstances or other.) Thus it is the author’s cat, and not the author himself who can affirm reality as it currently is. For the author’s cat, it is the structure of archeological ruins of previous Zimbabwean civilisation that is to be applauded. What of Zimbabwe itself? The question is studiously avoided, for the cat can be pleased with that which the author, in his higher knowledge, cannot be:


My Cat looked at Great Zimbabwe.
“It’s huge! It’s very old.
“It’s made of great big stones!” my Cat
exclaimed.
“It’s ours. I am proud of Zimbabwe!”
said my Cat on the way home. ( p 224)


Marechera as the author of this piece is herein playing his part as mediator of the knowledge held by those already dead (the freedom fighters who fought for a better Zimbabwe) and those half-pushed out of life (those living in a mode of political and social alienation in his contemporary Zimbabwe). He knows the truth, but it is difficult to say it within a context of political censorship. (His last book published when he was alive, Mindblast, goes into more details about his censorship. Its contents caused a political furore.) The discrepancy between the “two voices” adds, in any case, an aspect of aesthetic complexity to the writing. Children may not understand sarcasm of this sort, but in due course they are able to understand that adults address them with different tones of voice, which have different meanings and repurcussions for them. A child can therefore grow towards understanding the meaning of Marechera’s text in light of his political critique and complexity.

Monday 19 January 2009

reichwing men for girls!

click on image to get the full size.

answer to google keyword search

www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=when did patriarchal society finish %28what year%29&meta=


the last day of 1982 at 5pm

and still.


I'm still digesting my own memoir. It's the horror of seeing myself reflected back by it so perfectly that I can hardly stand. Is this life? Is this my life? I recoil in perfect recognition. I cannot stand it.

Yet I'm in there and I can see so closely my actions and responses.

I'm no longer so close to it that I am still reacting in the way of "Blah! The suffocation of so much contingency." I now see the action and reaction -- that the reaction was mine alone (and not an aspect of contingent "fate".)  I've now, out of boredom, turned the lens to observe the opposite angle of double-sided reality.

And still...

Saturday 17 January 2009

Scrapiron Blues


According to psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who examined psychological states as aesthetic modes of experience, the paranoid-schizoid position is the one that imparts visions – one is never truly an artist unless one can retain the element of hope and “immaturity” that would enable one to access to it; whereas, a “mature” psychological position is the attitudinal position of ordinariness. To move between both states of awareness is the artist’s lot.

One can imagine how the evolution of this more “mature” philosophical perspective would have affected the author’s sense of his role as a writer and his capabilities as someone who might influence the political situation of his time. The maturation of his perceptions towards seeing the ontology of the social world as psychologically and materially founded, but not influenced by metaphysical postulates would have led to an exceeding disappointment. This attitudinal posture is akin to the “depressive position” described by Bion. As an artist one communicates one’s “paranoid-schizoid” visions – (meant figuratively so, for an artist is creatively at odds with social norms, that is if he or she has any worth) – to the world at large but with the realisation that there are limits to one’s communicative reach, since one’s visions are not postulates of a general human intersubjectivity. This realisation involves embracing reality in the “depressive position”. One sees that others will automatically see things in a different light from how one experiences one’s visions. The “maturation” of the artist to the point of seeing reality in this light could logically lead to his movement out of an artistic perspective altogether. Marechera’s maturation as an author, seen in Scrapiron Blues, sees the beginnings of a permanent movement away from an extremely visionary approach to one that is more ordinary.

The greater degree of skepticism concerning the possibility of political change on the basis of visionary motifs was a useful turn for Marechera, since it enabled him to speak in a more ordinary (less esoteric or “elitist”) fashion about Zimbabwean social reality.

PSYCHOLOGY – YOUR DAILY DOSE OF MORAL FIBRE

These days, we are not prepared for life by the kind of culture which has any sort of psychological orientation. Even my upbringing in right wing Rhodesia was kinder to the proletarian --- which is to say, my education had more of an emphasis on psychological knowledge and psychological affirmation of others, compared to what is generally given in the educational systems today.

Why should we even care about psychology? What does it mean to us anyway?

Worker – it is your life and bread, your living or your death that is at stake.

The way I came to be a revolutionary was not through the ideological muttering or rhetorical flourishes of those of the left, who would attempt to persuade others with their words. I did not one day conclude that I would embrace a certain ideology over all others, until death do us part. My need to engage in revolutionary activity has to do with pure psychology. I have learned what makes me function effectively in this world. I have learned what kinds of factors and influences make me feel ineffective. I do what I can to reinforce my feelings of effectiveness. I avoid the situations that destroy my self confidence and undermine my ability to act. I embrace the reality of myself as a psychological creature.

When I speak about psychology, I am talking about your right to make decisions for yourself on the basis of self-knowledge. What kind of work is right for you? What kind of work is simply soul destroying, and must be refused at all costs?

We have been taught by our system of education to be humble, all too humble, when approaching this matter. We have been taught to ask for very little – only not to be kicked too often, at least not more often than the next dog … er, human being. All in all we lack character. Perhaps I have forgotten to mention it? Psychology is the basis for self-knowledge. Without self-knowledge, we cannot have character. Or, as those of the Australian Army like to put it: We are without “moral fibre.”

So, now we see how all these things I have been talking about are interlinked. Without moral fibre, we are unable to choose which situations we want to work with. Without moral fibre, we lack character. Having character is the same as moral fibre. Without psychological self-knowledge, we can have no character. Without self-knowledge, we can have no moral fibre.

As I've said since I encountered apes disguised as humans, condemned as it was, the educational system of Rhodesia nonetheless gave me the power of control over my self, because I was instructed in the art of thinking of myself as a psychological being, living alongside others who acted towards themselves and others on the basis of their moral fibre. Bells of alarm would ring in my head when, later in life and long out of school, I came upon people acting out of a feeling of necessity, rather than choice. Such people had been put in a very bad situation with regard to life and their acquiescence to the impossible nature of their situation meant something even worse. People who accepted the dehumanising situations imposed on them had been given no ways of thinking by the mentors in their school systems that they could have turned into moral fibre. They were lacking in the fundamental quality of self-knowledge, which would have forced them to speak up for themselves.

Think about how the rules and regulations of bourgeois tutelage – as system of complying with the bosses – undermine your character. You are told not to see many things that you do, in fact, see. You are warned not to consider what kinds of workplace situations would be damaging to your health and well-being, as compared to which would be supportive of those things. You are taught, in fact, to act without discrimination concerning the kinds of situations you put yourself in, and even what the outcomes mean to you. “Don’t think about that,” you are told. Instead, “Concentrate on proving your compliance with the system through a lack of adequate psychological discrimination and self-knowledge. Accept any sort of job. Don’t consider what it means to you. Only consider that there can’t be any questionable gaps within your resume.” The psychologically adept person immediately asks “why not?” The psychologically knowledgeable boss replies at once: “A gap means non-compliance with the will of bosses.”

Only the boss does not reply like that of course. It is not in the interest of a boss to school you in the meaning of the system that has been imposed on you. A psychological perspective isn’t meant for you, but for others.

You are not meant to have the kind of moral fibre that would enable you to resist a situation that is not in accordance with your will, for that would make you independent. If you don’t know why you are complying with the bosses, except for out of fear, if you don’t know what a human being is, and how it differs from a dog, if you accept what the educational system tells you, without deeper psychological reflection, then you have been deprived of your fundamental human essence. The one aspect to your existence that should have been of the utmost importance has been taken from you. Without psychology, you can have no humanity.

Friday 16 January 2009

bourgeois individualists...

.....cannot be moral. Even if they want to.

They cannot because they cannot know themselves. They are the unknowable thing in itself, separated forever from self-knowledge since they are, on principle, separated from their bodies as sources of meaning and knowledge.

Since they cannot know themselves, they are subject to all sorts of social manipulation. They are conditioned by forces outside of their consciousness.

You cannot trust them.

They seem reliable and logical enough -- up to the point that they blow up and attack you.

Why?

For reasons that they do not know.

Thursday 15 January 2009

Sexism is founded on regressive psychological dynamics

I am now convinced that pre-oedipal dynamics are used in order to maintain gender roles. The male asserts itself as the infant does against its mother: "You are are my waste matter. I insist on dominating at your expense."

What keeps women down is that they constantly receive the message: "You are are my waste matter. I insist on dominating at your expense."

old work

This was my old investigation into the meaning of shamanism:

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/CONTEMPORARY%20shamanismLAST%20VERSION2.htm

Remember me not


Bourgeois ideology creates the basis for postmodernist consciousness. The reason is its mind-body dualism. To have a real identity, within the bourgeois system, is the moral and phenomenological equivalent of being caught loitering. The body is the concrete aspect of the self that is capable of giving us a real sense of being. However, under bourgeois ideology, the body is necessarily divorced from the mind. Freed of its anchor in the real world, the mind is left to wander, moving from one mental state to another, without a consistent feeling of having any particular underlying identity. The disembodied mind thus believes that it has freed itself. Such freedom is a moral imperative -- not to be bound by the "body" and its memories, which are believed to pertain to a lower aspect of life. Those who remain attached to concrete aspects of the self, including bodily knowledge and memories of self-identity, appear to be spending too much time in one place. Morally, they are suspicious, for they link their sense of self to their bodies in a manner that bourgeois folk would consider quite unseemly.

Those who remember who they happen to be loiterers and spiritual offenders, from the point of view of bourgeois thinking.

OFFICIAL International Solidarity Commission of the IWW resolution on Gaza

OFFICIAL International Solidarity Commission of the IWW resolution on Gaza


Saturday 10 January 2009



The International Solidarity Commission (ISC) of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) condemns in the strongest possible terms the military attack by the Israeli state and IDF on the 1.5 million Palestinian people living in the Gaza strip. This attack has included sustained indiscriminate aerial bombing of urban population centers, schools, mosques, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure. Hundreds of civilians have been killed and injured, and homes have been destroyed. This attack is a form of collective punishment by the Israeli state against the people in Gaza. This attack on the people in Gaza is barbaric and represents an attack on the working class in all countries.

The ISC condemns the 18-month siege against the population in Gaza which has prevented food, electricity, medical supplies, and other basic necessities from reaching the people of Gaza and crippling the economy. This form of collective punishment against the people of Gaza is barbaric and represents an attack on the working class in all countries.

The ISC condemns rocket attacks fired into southern Israel by various factions in Gaza. These attacks have killed and injured Israeli civilians. This form of collective punishment against the people of southern Israel represents an attack on the working class in all countries.

The ISC recognizes the urgency and massive scale of the current attacks and mass murder against the people of Gaza by the Israeli state.

It is estimated that 850 Palestinians in Gaza and 13 Israelis have died so far.

The IWW is a revolutionary international industrial union that works to build unity of workers and working class people across all borders, occupations, industries, religions, races and nationalities. The IWW stands, and has always stood against all wars. Wars are caused by capitalist governments, and anti-working class leaders and movements, for the economic and political benefit of the ruling elites. We the working class are made to fight each other against our own interests.

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.

The working class have no borders. An injury to one is an injury to all.

The ISC extends our total and unflinching support to the people of Gaza and will work within and without the IWW to organize and mobilize support against this military aggression. The ISC will do all in our power to find ways to provide practical assistance to the people of Gaza.

We extend our hands of class solidarity to all our brothers and sisters in the region in occupied Palestine, Israel, and everywhere.

The ISC will continue to build links of solidarity across the region so that we may all help each other in our local struggles.

Only when we unite together, and shake off the chains of oppression and injustice that divide us from each other, can we build a world with no bosses and no masters.

All wars are bosses wars. Victory to the workers and people of the world!

Wednesday 14 January 2009

desperate to survive?

Really, how do you relate to someone who genuinely thinks that they are "struggling for survival"? I've had people backstab me for no reason other than to eliminate one element of their competition -- when, in fact, I was by no means their competitor, but was actually watching their back in many ways.

How do you deal with those who are that fearful and that desperate that they think everything that happens threatens to put either your neck or theirs on the chopping block, but not both?

Such people are functioning regressively, with a very primitive mythology, and if they're hinting around me that they want to be the fittest to survive, I would most likely give them as wide a berth as possible.

Tuesday 13 January 2009

Go ahead, and struggle for your mere survival.

Ultimately those who want Social Darwinism should have it. I would never consider withholding it from them. Perhaps, in a subtle way, they have selected themselves out, for all people, to embrace this particular theory, and the Darwin Award rightfully belongs to them, above all others.

If the best come to the top of society, then that is well and good. I'm not going to hang around to see if the particular defenders of Social Darwinism are going to make it. It doesn't matter to me. But I am not the issue here, since the giving or denying of my approval from the ideology of Social Darwinism is unlikely to make any difference to the actual outcome of any particular person's success in the world on the basis of Darwinistic principles. So let them struggle to survive, in whatever way they choose to.

Just don't expect to receive either my recognition or moral approval of any apparent success. After all, that would be to take things too much at face value -- which Nature doesn't do. Nature, raw in tooth and claw might well be giving certain people the illusion of success only to demolish them a little later. Nature withholds her final judgment from all stakes of "struggle for survival" until the last man or woman is left standing. Even then, she is probably just playing some sadistic joke -- for only one to be left standing means no perpetuation of the human race. And to fail to perpetuate one's genes is the quintessential definition of failure in Darwinistic terms. But such is life, viewed in its purely naturalistic sense. You're just not that important as a person, viewed in Darwinistic terms. Your demand for moral approval of your Darwinistic stance involves a logical contradiction which may or may not serve the species -- indeed, as humans we will never really know the final judgment as to whether we are deemed by Nature to be the most successful of all humans.

But go ahead, and struggle for your mere survival.

I, like Nature, will look the other way, and will withhold my moral judgment until the end.

Sunday 11 January 2009

ACT WITHOUT DENIAL

Zˇizˇek does not recoil from relating our time to Stalin rather
than to Lenin. Of course, we no longer adhere to Stalinist
doctrines, nor do we suffer under a similar terror, but
our
post-modern certainties – those that tell us there are no certainties
– nestle just as much in their own pretensions
. Although
it considers every ideological battle over, it nonetheless
shamelessly functions as a real ideology, and holds each every
revolutionary e´lan or truly political act at a great distance.
The consequences are even no less drastic as in Stalinist times,
except that, seated at the rich Western table as we are, we
never feel it that way.
We leave that feeling to our fellow
world-citizens in the ‘South’. They personally experience what
it means to live in a so-called post-revolutionary world, freed
from all ideology. In other words,
they feel directly how the
one and only dominant capitalist ideology maintains its
totalitarian grip on the whole planet, and how terribly difficult
– if not simply impossible – it is not to become the victim of
its perverse tricks and ruses.


MARC DE KESEL
ACT WITHOUT DENIAL
Slavoj Zˇ izˇek on Totalitarianism, Revolution and Political Act

-----

Consider the issue in relation to contemporary Zimbabwe and ZANU-PF's 'incomprehensible' stance.

Wednesday 7 January 2009

http://home.iprimus.com.au/scratchy888/SHAMANISM%20AND%20MARECHERA.htm

nice to know......

These are some attributes that apply to your personality:


i1) Achievement attitudes: goal-oriented, initiative, motivated, persistent, resilient. You are also obsessive, compulsive, ambitious.
i2) Emotional temperament: confident, happy, joyful, patient, secure, stable, vocal. You are also content, composed, hedonistic, cheerful.
i3) Energy level: active, energetic, fast.
i4) Intellectual factors: alert, attentive, creative, imaginative, inquisitive, intellectual, intelligent, observant, studious, talented. You are also logical, perceptive.
i5) Material attitudes: Conflicting responses: spiritual. You are also rich, a hoarder.
i6) Maturity: educated, knowledgeable, mature, resourceful. You are also experienced.
i7) Philosophical attitudes: introspective, positive. You are also a specialist, flexible.
i8) Physical attributes: physical, sane, strong, youthful. You are also healthy.
i9) Risk attitudes: Conflicting responses: adventurous, cautious, daring, fortunate, progressive. You are also calculating, careful.
i10) Task performance attitudes: decisive, hard-working, methodical, precise, prompt. You are also disciplined, accurate, impractical, adaptable, organized, conscientious, a planner, reflective, thorough.
http://www.scientificpsychic.com/cgi-bin/zamtst1a.pl

New Year's Revolution

This year I plan to do at least one grading in martial arts, although preferably two.

I plan to join in revolutionary activities to overthrow the defunct and putrifying mugabe regime of Zimbabwe.

I plan to try to save some money -- but not if others need it more than me.

I will celebrate, with Mike, the year of 2009.

Tuesday 6 January 2009

I am obliged


Apocalyptics Anonymous II says "go forth and multiply". So here I am obliging...

So here are the rules of Tagging:

1. Link to the person(s) who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they were tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

6 Random things about myself:

*For twenty long years (about 10 of which were profoundly reflective on the matter), I thought I had lost "my culture" because the Zimbabwean white culture had disbanded, left their source, and many of them had become weird or ill because of the diaspora. To my astonishment, during the past few months, I've found that black Zimbabwean culture is still alive with many of the cultural aspects I've been missing up until now.

*Pigeons sometimes look at me through my office window. I gaze back.

*Now that I've finished my memoir, I wonder what all the fuss was about. What was that intellectual problem that I really had to try to solve, again?  Oh yeah, it was the issue of my emotional numbness, due to too  much parental hostility.  I didn't have the space to reconcile my own feelings with what was demanded of me:  I've got that now.

*If I had not become an intellectual, I don't know what would have become of me. It is unlikely that I would have become mad, but perhaps dead?

*I simply can't read any more material from African memoirs without feeling inwardly sick. It's as if I'd eaten too much ice-cream pudding, and can't stand ice-cream anymore as a result.  The saccharine.  I don't think this is present in the low notes of my writing.

*I once thought I craved the limelight. Now I find I only want a peaceful -- very peaceful --life in some backwoods somewhere. I would be pleased to be a hermit for the rest of my life.

---------------

I tag anyone who wants to do this (suckas).

mike's birthday tomorrow

Predictably Irrational

Predictably Irrational, a book by Daniel Ariely, is an offering from the late capitalist mindset, which presents its thesis with mindboggling simplicity: "If humans had internalised no social values whatsoever, except for those of capitalist materialism, how might we expect them to behave?

The answer -- wait for it -- is obvious, as it is the title of the book that Ariely has written.

Ariely finds these tokens of irrationality everywhere. He finds them in the fact that college males' values shift towards denial of the need to concern themselves with contraception when they are aroused (as compared to the values that they emote when they are not turned on.) He finds this irrationality in the disinclination of his wife to enjoy an epidural-free childbirth, despite having stuck her hand into some icy water for a long time, in preparation for confronting the labour pain. (As a skydive instructor once said to me, when I suggested to him that I could learn to skydive by working my way up, jumping from a 10 metre board, "don't bother. The two sensations are entirely different!") He finds irrationality in that some people are easily tricked into buying products or services they really don't need, if they think they're getting something extra, in the bargain, for nothing. However, Ariely holds, if they are getting a discount, they feel like they're not really getting something worth cherishing. They are thus "predictably irrational".

The examples he has chosen might well be considered peculiar, no less the conclusions he draws from his experiments, about "human nature". Ariely doesn't see fit to tell us, for instance, why it is that a woman might choose to go without an epidural during childbirth, in the first place. This we are presumed to already know. Perhaps we can emotionally attune ourselves to this poor woman's motivations by using the universalism that is somehow waiting readily within our "human nature" for just such interpretative tasks.

Ariely finds that people prefer the middle of the range value in terms of cheating (they will steal a little, but not much) and when it comes to buying objects for sale (they will choose the goods that are priced between the highly priced object and the low costing object). When it comes to cheating in tests, people will, however, tend to cheat less if they are forced to think about the "ten commandments" just prior to the testing. However, they may not know what the contents of the ten commandments are, Ariely says. What is happening, in effect, is that an alternative value system from that of the hegemonic one -- capitalism -- is simply latching on to minds and taking hold of them. To introduce the bible into human interactions might be a good thing, thinks Ariely. (At least we can be reassured,on the basis of all that Ariely has been trying to tell us, that such an introduction would be merely irrational -- and hence, presumably, inconsequential -- just like everything else in a system that is organised on the basis of capital.

People -- the author seems to be trying to tell us -- are irrational things. This goes for their morality and everything about them. We might try to tweak things here or there to make them seem more moral on the surface, however genuine ethics, as well as genuine education and thinking about things in a way that doesn't change with every shift of the emotion, is impossible.

I think that Ariely should have admitted that he is speaking only of what he has known, and his overview of how the denial of thinking is taken as "human nature" under capitalism gives us a great deal to feel angry about.

Sunday 4 January 2009

The death of patriarchy

The demise of patriarchal values is facilitated by none more than the patriarchal adherents themselves.

Trolls of a patriarchal flavour may frequent my blog less often these days, but they, and others of a hostile, antifeminist mindset, have already done much to undermine the credibility of patriarchal systems as being worthy of universal embrace.

Imagine if you invited an esteemed friend over to your house for dinner. Imagine that when you had to step out of the room for a few moments, the esteemed guest, believing that he is worth more than you are giving, and believing you to be on the retarded or oblivious side, goes to your pantry, in order to load himself up with whatever he feels like, because "she won't know the difference." Believing you to be unable to register what has taken place, he finishes his meal, and then makes off with your goods loaded in his vehicle. You do, in fact, register what has happened (for you are no fool). You are also naturally furious. However, when you try to take the issue to the police and others, you are told point blankly: "Human nature isn't like that. Nobody comes to your place and takes things that do not belong to them, especially if they are your esteemed dinner guest. Only someone who is so unpleasant that it is impossible to imagine them would do something like you describe." Your righteous anger knows no bounds.

This is the effect of antifeminist trolls and others like them on people who have, until a point, remained naive about just how wretched and antisocial most patriarchal systems are.

White sanity

I read, last night, a riproaring hilarious little ditty that I had received free from Lulu, as somebody's short literary offering. It was called "White Madness", which I presume to have been a variation on "White Mischief". Anyway, it was a brief 28-page not-exactly-treatise on the days of sanity in Africa, marked by the efforts of a trigger-happy redneck of the Rhodesian forces in shooting a baboon and the necessity of retrieving its tail to prove that it was no longer suffering. We know "Scotty" is redneck because the author tells us so, in these exact terms:


Here he is perched as a product of Britain and tends to burn red rather than tan as we locals do. Scotty burns more noticeably around the neck and shoulder region as red now glows with perspiration.
The settlers to the Rhodesia’s are actually known as ‘Red Necks.’ It’s a name the Boers of South Africa gave British settlers for the very reason of burning bright red. I now turn a by now rather stiff body in direction of the baboons. As if getting in some aiming practice, Scotty lifts his rifle in direction of the gathered tribe.


There is a problem with the confusion of metaphors and literality, as "communist principles" hover here or there, as if they were jamming the airwaves so as to undermine Rhodesian "sanity".

Still, the text appears to leave us with the haunting question: What can anybody in their right minds hope to do about this spectre, hovering?

Friday 2 January 2009

Scrapiron Blues


SCRAPIRON BLUES OR “ZIMBABWE IS OURS”

Mugabe insists 'Zimbabwe is mine'
Friday, 19 December 2008 BBC NEWS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7791574.stm

Mugabe: "I will never surrender"
President Robert Mugabe has said that "Zimbabwe is mine" and rejected calls from some African leaders to step down.

This chapter will look mainly at four pieces from the book of Marechera’s posthumously published works, compiled and edited by Flora Veit-Wild and published in 1992, five years after the author’s death. […plus more here about the general content of the book] In these works I will be examining, the author examines question of evil as the repressed Real in the Lacanian sense (via Zizek). Evil is imposed as political and social repression and expressed via narrative disruption and dismemberment of the narrative continuity. Its presence separates those marked by its effect, cordoning them off into their own worlds where they see and experience things differently from others, as those marked out for a special, esoteric kind of knowledge. We are in the company of  the wounded healers of society, who perceive the world magically.

The lens through which the question of social evil can be examined is in terms of a phrase that claims possession of its own social reality. “Zimbabwe is ours,” is just such a phrase, for it expresses a sense of seemless continuity between ‘what is me’ and what is mine.  The statement is patently untrue.

The Marxist complaint about the alienation of the worker from the product of her or his labour is grounded in a structural discontinuity between ‘what is me’ and what is mine, which robs life of its deeper meaning.

Migrants undergo a similar experience of alienation, as a baptism of evil, experienced as being separated from social and political environment of the nation by an inability to possess the new environment in any deeply felt and meaningful sense. The disruption of self that is experienced as a result of not being able to interpret the local or national order as “mine” can often lead to a sense of being set apart by fate, for a particular purpose. It is a subtle form of shamanistic initiation; as it produces the effect of “double vision”, spoken of by DuBois, for how others see you is never quite how you see yourself. This disruption of ones’ selfhood at the level of communication and a sense of efficacy is experienced in isolation, rather than publically, for it is the relative strength and certainty of the public discourse as hegemony that creates the recoil and alienation on the private level.

The spirit rather than the letter (of The Antichrist)

 My view is that we live in a culture -- this present day 20th century culture -- where we are not accustomed to knowing ourselves. Given that our age has embraced Kant's philosophical notion as a basis for avoidance of psychology (for we cannot know "the thing in itself", as postmodernist theorists are prone to teach us), and generally we are too busy to bother to know ourselves anyway, we have a problem. It is this: Since we are generally, as individuals, in no position to claim to know ourselves very much, we are also not in a very strong position to differentiate between what we really know and what we think we know. If we don't know who and what we are, as human beings, and as individuals, we might assume that we know all sorts of things (that we actually do not) since the limits of our knowledge are unknown to us.

This is why ancient peoples often mistook their dreams or hallucinations of some kind of reality. Our situation in the world today may not be so grave, in terms of the kinds of errors we might make in differentiating what is real from what is not real. We have access to all sorts of artefacts of the sciences and humanities, to help us along with this endeavour of knowing ourselves. Yet we are taught no psychological skills in schools these days, as teachers rely upon operant conditioning, dealing with the students at arms reach, which deprives them of the capacity for internal self-regulation, and in turn, deprives them of useful self-knowledge.

Due to the cultural conditioning we experience within contemporary society, so many of us assume that self-knowledge is either not desirable or not possible. In workplaces today, "emotionalism" is eschewed. Yet is is common to label anything that one doesn't like or understand as the "emotionalism" of the other person. That which one dislikes, one tries to get rid of, by labeling it thus. The approach of labeling as "emotional" that which one has simply failed to understand (due to lack of adequate training and capacity for reflection) is a moral blight on society today. The cultural enforcement of rigid social conformism (on the basis of psychological blackmail, that not to conform implies an out of place emotionalism), is founded on a lack of personal insight into oneself and others. Who are those who suffer from the hallucinations that are projected onto them -- if now those "cultural others": women, blacks, and those of another cultural origin. We claim to know them, when we emotionally resort to labeling them, but what we know is often only a figment of the imagination, a projection of the parts we dislike about ourselves. As a society, we have been sucked into a social mire,which does not differ, as much as we would like to think it does, from a more antiquated and benighted religious consciousness. We think we know the other type of person, but we betray that claim to knowledge when we do not use reason and attempt to investigate the nature of the psychology of the person whom we see as being different from us. Rather, we merely project something onto them, so that we become reason itself -- and they become the disliked parts of our mentality (our unreason).


reviewing Nietzsche's The Antichrist

As I have suggested, there is a lot of which to be extremely wary when it comes to Nietzsche's polemic, The Antichrist.

The crude idea he had of using Darwinism as a kind of intellectual dynamite to blast away religious edifices was always going to be fraught with a hit or miss dimension, since as Nietzsche himself knew, science itself, in its objectivity that stands apart from human subjective mores, cannot give us a system of values. Rather, it is the necessary for philosophers to interpret science in a way that makes it relate somehow to human subjective values -- or in more exact Nietzschean terms, science needs philosophy to give it its purpose.

Darwinism, depending on its interpretation, could mean a great deal socially speaking, or nothing, in terms of its bolstering the atheist's position. There are creationists who consider that human biological evolution could have been a guided one, under the auspices of a superior power. This notion of some of the more sophisticated religionists is, at least, on no worse an epistemological footing than conventional social darwinism -- which also goes way beyond the evidence that is materially available to us, in proposing hidden mechanisms that drive things (which we are expected to accept without the evidence to back it up.) Both positions are ideological, and entail an element of explanation that is occult (hidden) from scientific investigation. Social darwinistic thinking, with its conceptualisations of natural superiority and might makes right, is far from proven as a theory that supports the facts of human existence and the nature of social formation beyond any reasonable doubt. As a sytem of faith, like religion, it shares to much in common with some of the crudest and most anti-humanistic forms of religion (such as fundamentalism) in order to really be in a position to oppose this kind of religion as such. "Many are called but few are chosen" articulates the position of social darwinistic posturers exceedingly well. However, it is the principle that is beloved of the Calvinists -- one of the most punitive and joyless strands of Christianity, which asserted that by your success in the world or not, you would come to know retrospectively, whether you had been chosen by the Lord to be forgiven and blessed. Social darwinists obtain their kudos on the same basis of whether they just happen to receive more material blessings, and to experience more affluence than their brothers and sisters in the third world who work just as hard as they do, if not more so. Such are the mystifications of social darwinism, which reflect its religious origins and nature.

fresh shoots


The dream last night was a tangle of aspirations for the future. I was sleeping on the couch since Mike was snoring.

I was reading (among other things) an article on memoir-writing from an academic point of view, yesterday. Ms Buss has much to say about it, as it appears, including that "women end in this way" whilst "men traditionally end in that," in general terms.

Buss, Helen M. Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women. Toronto: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2002. 232 pp. ISBN 0-88920-408-X, $39.95

Now, it seems to me that my memoir does not wish to renegotiate any kind of relationship at all. It is a book that demands a final sense of closure (with no interventions from its readership, please.)

My writing is not open-ended, as I had expected it to be when I first started writing. It is very definite about its demands -- and they are, from a bourgeois perspective, rather large demands at that. "I do not wish to be troubled by any further perspectives. I have made my estimations, and I am now fully done with this."  One has to cut and store.

Editor X had requested me to put more in about relationships -- and I have done so. Buss says that women writers underestimate their relationships with their mothers, but not with their fathers. I was reluctant to put too much in about either parent. Yet now, I have a great deal of information in there about my father (less about my mother). And it is far from all I know. My writing is not intended as a machine for evisceration. I would be disappointed if this is how it ended up.

In last night's dream, I'm dragging my mother on a travel-trip with me. There are weird things happening at the hotel -- I have been given a token to spend more than $700. Yet I can't work out why I didn't use this token. It is too late, anyway, as I am in Perth. Now I have gone back to Melbourne to see what it was all about. "Ah-- a fight show, but it's sleazy. No wonder I turned it down."

My mother is hardly aware of these complex questions going on inside my head. She is just there for the trip. Only now, she is lamenting the cutting of the lucern for winter. I have ordered that it should be cut down really low, so that the storage sheds for winter should be full. But she wants the tender shoots cut only half down. What sentimentalism!

They are beautiful green shoots, and as we harvest them, Robert de Niro is in the background going "You talking to me? You talking to me?" and I break into song, designed to carry all these other peasant worker women along with me: "I will survive!"



This blessed year

I haven't had the killer instinct of late, since dealing with the finishing of my autobiography has been rather a masochistic project. It's like Marechera holding the bare threads of his words in his fingers and despondantly proclaiming: "Look what I have left of it: My life!"

There is much in this new version of the writing that I had been unwilling to face so directly, before -- so much that doesn't meet with higher standards for human experience, in a way that would give expression to some sense of human purity or transcendence of life such as it was and is. It's hard to express this sense of life's almost totalising contingency that had me in its grips during the first part of my life -- and which set into place the chain of cause and effect relationships that has effected me until I was 40. There can be moral choices only when there is first knowledge, and secondly various options in place, apart from just one. These options are made accessible by predominating social values and by law. The Australian law that broke the very negative chain of cause and effect for me was that of the rights of a citizen to claim welfare payments. It was this that got me out of a situation of workplace abuse and homeplace dysfunction, without which, I would not be alive today.

So now I have knowledge, and despite the sometimes prejudicial or discriminatory attitudes that persist in society, against migrants, and against women, I am learning to recognise, once more, that I have freedom.

The best I can do is to share this freedom of mine, for however long it lasts. I know too well what it is like to have few clear or apparent options. My gifts are of a minor variety, and this is what I get back:

"You are a freind in need and indeed.I just dont know how tothank youenough.Had it not been for you we would be six feet under the ground ."

It is not impossible to imagine that this is true in present day Zimbabwe.

I am inclined to feel very much that only those who have lived through some extremes can imagine what it is like to try to survive the extremes.

"Here's to wishing yu a happy 2009.We have been weighed and found worthy to enter this blessed year."

Thursday 1 January 2009

Mike's birthday

It's Mike's (Mike Ballard's) birthday on the 8th of this month
(ie. while it is still the 7th of January in the US)


He will be turning 64



...Will you still need me
will you still feed me...


Please make him feel happiness...
~~~~~~~

Cultural barriers to objectivity