the sacred

the sacred

DETACHMENT: shamanic knowledge versus Meltzer's "object relations"

I now conclude that the "epistemophilic" instinct, spoken of by Meltzer, is something very different from shamanic knowledge, at least as I have studied it in Marechera. The epistemophilic instinct leads to the generation of an ideological framework. You look at the world in terms of ideology -- but an ideological framework is really only a framework for an abortive/masturbatory epistemology. Ideology is an a claim to knowing that doesn't come in touch with the real world. It believes it does -- and yet it doesn't.

Shamanistic knowing may encounter the seduction of essentialism (like the epistemophilic instinct encounters in order to produce its ideological outcome -- which is overgeneralising about ideologically pre-formulated 'natures'.)

Tellingly, the perspective of the shaman who RETURNS from natal or  early post-natal experience is defined by a capacity for detachment from objects, rather than a state of immersion in them as the object relations school would have it . Thus, shamanistic experience produces a state akin to Buddhistic transcendence of the subjective social relations (i.e. it ultimately transcends the early infant's consciousness that psychoanalysis describes as "object relations").

MINUS THE MORNING

Minus the Morning is concerned, primarily, with a primeval hunger for knowledge about the world -- a hunger that the author is happy to say has now been satiated by writing her PhD. THE KEY to my book is that it doesn't employ ego psychology.

This doesn't mean, by the way, that I lack an ego, or that I am unaware that ego psychology exists, and that it facilitates most of the social interactions in contemporary Western culture (although it doesn't appear to be quite as prominent an orientation in many African cultures).

I didn't write the book on that level of demonstrating ego. The book explores, rather, a kind of pre-oedipal psychology and psychological relations (as I have given hints concerning in the introduction). What I have done is ripped off the skin of ego, and shown you something very different -- another layer of psychological interactions going on underneath the surface of consciousness. This is a level of an interchange of psychological forces, across the boundaries of individual egos.

Therefore, in order to see causality in this book, you have to think not in terms of individual egos and their manner affecting each other, but in terms of dyadic (pairing) relationships, whereby one element of the dyad affects the other one directly but unspokenly (to be precise, unconsciously).

Once you start to think in these dyadic terms, you can see a lot of causality in terms of relationships and how they pan out. You can even start to decipher a narrative within the text. Unless one changes one's level of thinking, from an oedipal perspective to a pre-oedipal one, a narrative will be hard enough to read.

Mine is an experimental piece of writing -- I'd like to emphasise that point once and for all. It is far from the case that I deny that ego exists. Ego psychology is a great way to respond to the world, more often that not. We should proclaim our individual existence for all that it's worth!



It is important to note that being able to experience the world in non-egoistic terms if vital for our psychological health:  according to Anton Ehrenzweig, a lack of access to consciousness where the ego is de-differentiated signifies schizophrenia.

I'm putting on the brakes

Life -- it is going a bit too fast.

Really, I don't care

Really I don't care if anything of mine sinks or swims. This is how much I am lacking in maternal drives. I feel as if I'm trying to press myself to care and yet I do not. I might have got this harsh streak from my father -- a natural tendency to disown in his case; in mine, to emotionally detach and narrow my focus. I would like to cut loose from all my projects -- and yet I am bound to them by a common history. What strikes the heart with turmoil is my strong need for detachment. I don't want parts of me, that are "chips off the old block" flying around -- unless they're me. There's so much sense in keeping all of one's aspects together.

I feel the need to break memories of all blood ties, blinding the eyes with blood and horror.

I want a clean break

I want a clean break with everything, everything, everything.

I do not want to think my old thoughts anymore. I want a clean break from them.

It is the success of these thoughts that allows me to leave them behind. No more reworking for those that have broken through the earth and must grow up alone.

I want a clean break, cutting everything off and leaving everything behind.

I want to look at what I have anew and to embrace what I have in a totally new sense.

I want a clean break.

It's the weekend!

And it should be relatively pollen free.

I pronounce pollen season over!

Seriously, it has been hellish.

Today, however, my energy is up. Yesterday I walked past a flowering wattle tree without feeling actively threatened.

Things are looking up.

therefore let us rejoice

Shamanic knowledge is ontological, rather than epistemological. That is, metaphorically, it evokes the idea of intellectual synesthesia, whereby one “hears” with the eyes and sees, as it were, with the ears (like Bataille’s “pineal eye” which “sees” in terms of the body’s visceral registers, rather than in terms of literal vision). “Black sunlight” casts a light which immediately retracts itself from conscious memory. Yet the effect of “black sunlight” as shamanic experience – as having transformative powers at the level of being – remains. As if it were the memory of an apocalyptic solar eclipse, the shamanistic initiatory experience casts a shadow upon conventional notions of being, by opening up the ears and eyes to different aspects of experience, which seem to come from the “spirit world” (although they come from the parts of the brain that have merely been submerged and repressed by conventionalising patterns of consciousness). One apprehends the sacred through these unconventional means. Just as Don Juan’s apprentice routinely imbibes hallucinogenic drugs in his quest for self-knowledge, “Christian” – one of the main protagonists in Black Sunlight – has inadvertently swallowed “Chris’s psychiatric drugs”, which facilitates his entry into the realm of shamanic experience and experiential otherness.



The very existence of a sacred realm at all is premised upon there being various divisions or compartments in the mind, to which entry is restricted or forbidden. Colonial society, with its unusually extreme policies of segregation on the basis of a relatively fixed and immutable conceptualisation of public identities, would have conditioned the author’s mind, as the mind of a black colonial subject, to develop mental compartments that represented forbidden aspects of selfhood. For instance, it is forbidden to see one’s choices in life as unconditioned by the possession of a categorical black identity. Therefore, forgetting the absolute nature of one’s identity, acting as if it were wholly mutable and able to enter or leave bodies at will (in terms of the subject’s experience in Black Sunlight) evokes a sense of the sacred through transgression of the socially conditioned superego’s demands (that one stick to the one, narrow identity that society has allotted one.) The author’s determination to lose that one identity through his deliberate self-immersion in a field governed by pre-oedipal psychological dynamics – such as dissociation, splitting, projective identification and magical thinking – is an attempt to facilitate spontaneous self-healing of the damage done to him through the imposition of a narrow and unsuitable (in any case, not desired for its limitations) culturally black identity.



It is as if the writer had returned to the primordial soup of pre-identity – a state of being before individuation, and before the political characteristics of identity had become fixed. Self healing and a shamanistic overthrowing of the existing social order is a different strategy for dealing with an identity that is socially deemed inferior (such as, conventionally a black or feminine identity), as compared to the identity politics of the new left. It is, indeed, a radical, rather than reformist approach, which intellectually harmonises well with Marechera’s anarchistic politics. That the loss of identity is expected to be regenerating and transformative in a superior way is not in any doubt in Black Sunlight. In the novel, there are socially outsider female characters, who cannot find it within their natures to adapt to the strict kind of femininity that a strongly patriarchal society makes necessary for their acceptance. Rejecting their allotted feminine identities, (in the same way as the author is rejecting his politically allotted black identity), they undergo an identity transformation, becoming “changelings”. They fulfill their sacred duties as militant anarchists creating a new sort of society that will be fit for them. The thoroughly well-recognised (by now) anthropological notion of shamanistic death and rebirth is described by the writer of Shamanism: The neural ecology of consciousness and healing, Michael Winkelman, as reflecting “perinatal experiences” ( p 81, 82) and the restructuring of the ego:

The death-rebirth experiences frequently result in dramatic alleviation of psychosomatic, emotional, and interpersonal problems resistant to previous psychotherapy. ( p 83),

The rejection of one’s allotted identity thus allows for the choosing of one’s own identity, and the acceptance of a sacred role of furthering society’s development. Thus the death of the author’s persona at the end of Black Sunlight, also prefigures his own spiritual rebirth, as he looks into the mirror and sees him physical self as subject to the vagaries of his historical time and place, as a whole self, that is nonetheless subject to life’s contingencies. Despite the despair that the author’s image of himself evokes in this closing scene, there is also a sense that the writer has recognised the processes of life in himself as being universal, and has spiritually and emotionally transcended his sense of life’s limitations through the sacrifice of his ego via his experiences akin to shamanistic initiation. His life-satiated, anguished but transcendent gaze into the mirror indicates that he is ready to accept that it is the very contingent nature of reality itself that forever makes it Sacred.

the mystery

Perhaps the best place to start in terms of understanding Marechera from a shamanistic point of view is from his own words in a typewritten journal that was reproduced in part in a posthumously published set of his works, Mindblast:

My father's mysterious death when I was eleven taught me - like nothing would ever have done -that everything, including people, is unreal. That, like Carlos Casteneda's Don Juan, I had to weave my own descriptions of reality into the available fantasy we call the world. I describe and live my descriptions. This, in African lore, is akin to witchcraft. My people could never again see me as anything but "strange". It hurt, for the strangeness was not of my own making; I was desperately cynical for the descriptions were the only wierd things I cared to name "truth". They were the heart of my writing and I did not want to explain my descriptions because they had become my soul, fluid and flowing with the phantom universe in which our planet is but a speck among gigantic galaxies. [Marechera, p 123, Mindblast].

Here we have a very clear, and indeed overt, reference to a perceiving the world in terms of shamanistic sensibilities – for the cult books of the 60s by the American, Carlos Casteneda, featuring his shamanic apprenticeship by a Yaqui (Northern Mexican) master of estoeric knowledge, don Juan, are concerned with an experience of traditional shamanism. Yet it is less the traditional mode of shamanism that I am concerned with regarding Marechera, and in terms of the scope of this paper.

There are profound resonances with the Continental tradition in a novel like Black Sunlight, the name of which echoes Julia Kristeva’s work, Black Sun (albeit published after Marechera had died, in 1989) and Bataille’s conception of the “solar anus” (a short, surrealist text published in 1931). Marechera’s sense of the sacred is qualitatively different, however from those of the Continental tradition I have mentioned. Conceptually, shamanism requires a notion of the Sacred, and Nietzsche, Bataille, and indeed, Julia Kristeva, all offer, through their work, different conceptions of where the sacred is located. In each case, as it seems to me, the allocation of a particular place for the Sacred, and indeed the necessity of the Sacred, is produced paradigmatically, through the drawing of a line that psychologically separates the individual from states of mind that are, according to regular social mores, forbidden. Nietzsche, for instance, felt it to be verboten to depart from Christian moral standards where everybody was each other’s “nursemaid”, in order to achieve a sensation of transcendence “where the air is pure and free” [see Zarathustra, etc]. His transgression of Christian norms is precisely what lent to the feeling of self-overcoming a feeling of the Sacred. Bataille, finding that “transcendence” had acquired a rather sterile and disengaged quality during his time -- no doubt because it had become the normal aspiration, rather than the exception – sought to find his sense of the Sacred in the opposite metaphysical position to that of Nietzsche. He sought to sacrifice his normative condition of middle class masculinity in the space nominated as “feminine” – the field of experience denoted as “immanence”.

Kristeva was a more recent arrival than Bataille on the Continental intellectual scene, and a Bulgarian transplantee to France who learned under psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. She saw in the child’s original close relationship with its mother, the basis for our poetic sensibilities. Yet it is the child’s primeval sense of closeness with its mother that orthodox approaches to psychoanalysis consider in a negative context, as representing a stage of immaturity within a broader context of definitively patriarchal social relations. Kristeva’s writing is transgressive within a broader patriarchal intellectual and social context, since it highlights the benefits of a state of mind – dependency on the mother – that is later in the process of development forbidden by conventional (that is, patriarchal) social (and hence psychological) strictures.

Such is the nature of the Sacred.  One experiences it as the field of psychological experience that is forbidden according to conventional social mores, which may sometimes be related to a particular historical time and place. Marechera’s writing had its own ideas of the Sacred – and that is what I am suggesting, regarding Black Sunlight, in particular. Yet, to return to the original text, quoted earlier, it was Marechera’s father’s death that made him into a sort of shaman. I don’t believe I am taking the text too literally when I make the connection between the author and the psychological structure of shamanism – for all that I have read on the matter indicates to me that it is via a “wound” to mind and body that one first becomes a shaman; that is, first gets access to the spirit world.

The “wound” that changes Marechera forever is a wound caused by the “mysterious” death of his father. It  sets him apart from the rest of the community, as he has said. More than this, however, the nature of the wound – experienced as psychological trauma – has created divisions within his mind, between what is socially acceptable and what is not. A large part of his personal experience, given that it is traumatic or at least traumatically separated from other parts of his experience in his mind, has been allocated to the field of the Sacred. Henceforth, he may not speak of these experiences in a direct way, or in a normative social context, since they no longer belong to this sphere, but to the field of knowledge that is separated from the field of conventional knowledge. To this kind of awareness of the incommunicable sacred, George Bataille attaches, mysteriously, the term, “non-knowledge”, whereas Dambudzo Marechera elects to use the word “mysterious” in more ways than one, to describe not only his feeling about having only sketchy details of his father’s death, but to allude to something sacred in terms of the meaning this death had for him. The meaning, as he has said, is that it induced him into the world of shamanism.

There is more that can be said about how this originative wound, which creates a shamanistic sensibility, functions to enhance self-perception and perception of the world around one. It seems that one may pay a heavy price for it, and even though healing may be attained – to a level of psychological health greater than one had previously enjoyed, due to the levels of awareness being enhanced, the “corrosion of the brain” that is due to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder may continue to lurk in certain cavernous passages of the mind, to assure a marginal social status, no matter how gifted, perspicacious, or giving one might be. Nietzsche’s shamanistic formula, “The spirits increase, vigor grows through a wound,” does not therefore tell us the whole truth of the matter, but it does tell us a large part of it.

Marechera’s early demise was despite his internal vigour and increased spirit of awareness, and mostly likely due to his radical lifestyle on the streets that had triggered his earlier PTSD. The two aspects of his mind and health are not separable, but only compartmentalized – it was, without a doubt, the wound that gave him his shamanistic insight that also led to the marginal status that finished him. Yet, before that, he tried in various ways to communicate with us in a shamanistic vein.

In Black Sunlight, the shaman as writer seeks to exert upon us a downward pressure upon the psyche of his readers. He wants us to experience the part of our psyche that thinks about identity in a deeply visceral, not just emotional way. He wants to guide us through a way of thinking that encounters the Sacred in a way that is both transgressive (along the lines of Bataille’s approach to the Sacred) and also socially and psychologically re-integrative.

In order to demonstrate the ways in which we mistakenly attribute “essences” (in terms of ideas about enduring characteristics determined by race, but one could argue, in terms of gender, too) to particularized human identities, Marechera constantly uses, as literary devices, the universal psychological capacities we have that draw from a lower part of the mind, to practice ego-defence. He utilises conceptions known as “splitting, projective identification, magical thinking and dissociation” to show us that the person whom we take as a unified and integral “self” is not what it seems to be, but merely an assumption of self-identity based upon primitive ego-defensive capabilities.  It's as if these innate human tendencies to make dividing lines between one's tribe and those of others are exhausted by the end of the book, at which point one no longer is so prone to seeing the world divided up, but views it as an intricate whole.

Far from splitting his authorial self in the writing of Black Sunlight, he reveals the underlying, socially systemic unity between one’s self and the selves of others – who could, but for an accident of fate and philosophically arbitrary conditions relating to human birth and identity circumscriptions, all have come out of the same womb with you.

Marechera’s Black Sunlight, with its splitting and its multiple authorial identities, does not reveal, as per postmodernism, the shattering of the authorial self, but rather the fact that there is an underlying unity of meaning in terms of what it is to be human and to experience the necessity of relating to the other, in a historical time and setting that one has not chosen. It is a novel that continuously evokes the transgressive (and hence, necessarily Sacred) knowledge about identity – that personal identity is not in fact chosen, but is actually contingent upon such things as historical accidents and features of life that are beyond one’s own control. To acknowledge such is not to deny self-responsibility, but rather to face the reality of one’s sacred responsibilities towards others.

It is necessary for the reader to experience a pressure on one’s consciousness, a downward movement towards the level of consciousness whereby one relates to others in a reflexive way, that causes psychological splitting, and a confusion about where one’s own boundaries end and another’s begin – the state of mind described by Melanie Klein, in object relations psychology, as pertaining to an infant’s general psychological state – in order to “remember” one’s primeval origins in relation to the Mother.

Through the shamanic mediation of the writer, one is taken back, via psychological regression, to the state of mind that is infant dependency. Here, one is able to recall that one’s experience of life is not premised upon such things as one’s natural goodness or inherent characteristics that seem to derive from the self alone, but from the nurturing facility and good will of the Mother.

 One is facilitated by the shaman author to remember, as it were,  that life and the qualities pertaining to it are not “deserved’ so much as given as a gift. A shaman-facilitated mental recollection of the early origins of consciousness furnishes the basis for a different kind of social and political life.

working definition of shamanism

The shaman applies the downward pressure on the mind of the subject to be healed, along with the guidance and mediation necessary, to enable him or her to access parts of their mind previously unknown directly.

ALSO NOTE: To piece the bits of the shamanistic puzzle together more precisely than I have done previously, the value of the primitive "object relations" level of the mind is to faciliate a reintegration of the ego at a level that incorporates more knowledge, self-awareness, adaptation, etc. than had existed previously. Thus the deployment of these mechanisms at an adult level is not necessarily pathological, but rather can be reconstructive of the self in a positive way.

See Anton Ehrenzweig on this, and how being unable to collapse into a dream state at night, or into an artist's state of fugue, is a sign of pathology.

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why I am not a schoolmarm

“A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

I'm very averse to that which is tame -- including tame theories of pedagogy / epistemology. That is the primary reason why I am not today a schoolmarm. I cannot feed you, like a mother bird, the bits of worms and dregs you need to grow up to be a healthy swan.

Pedagogy as a form of motherhood requires that one is well established in society -- if not as one of its cornerstones then at least as one of the immovable bricks in the wall. The notion of firmness and stability as a feature of knowledge are imparted by oneself being firm and stable -- by not being subject to much change. The experence that knowledge changes one is alien to conventional notions of pedagogy.

Getting tired at the apefest

There is something about the pinnacle of a mountain I am meant to pursue. I see companionship ...cameraderie... at the little oak cabin -- space enough for three -- developed at this height.

In the meantime, I'm exceedingly bored. To address this, I will focus on passing my next grading. Seems I've figured out too much.

the right wing paradox

As a young adult, I was as idealistic as everybody else. Perhaps even more so, since a right wing culture (which is what Rhodesia was) tends to engender a "spiritual" rather than materialist perspective on the world around. Thus I assumed that the world was organised on the basis of a moral hierarchy, with venerable authorities at the top. My upbringing had taught me that both men and women were worthy of veneration (something that later I did not encounter in Australian schools, especially with regard to women). You could rely on either male or female teachers to lead the way towards the higher moral ground, and restore order -- specifically, moral order -- when it was disrupted. This was the way that I was trained to experience the world.

There is, however, a paradox involved in the maintaining and preserving of an idealist's perspective on the world. The use of force of any sort tends to break the spell (namely, the idea that the way the world is organised in terms of its hierarchies is "natural"). Put a different way: To manifest force in order to maintain the nature of the social order reveals that the social order isn't natural, but requires material force to maintain it.

This explains in a nutshell how it was that I have tended to believe in the system and its mode of functioning so long as the system -- or elements of it --- were not intent upon attacking me. However, once the attacks start, the invisible mechanisms of force that were once hidden from me start to become more than apparent.

It is at this point that I have always withdrawn my support from whatever was attacking me.

This = all.

Did a few practice rounds today -- mostly just moving around practicing footwork and ducking and weaving.

That was all.

random thoughts

I enjoyed my private lesson at the gym on Friday, training to duck and weave like Archie Moore:



I am a little disappointed in myself that I have little natural athleticism (everything I have and do is hard-earned) and that I will never have, you know, a public fight and all.

I'd like to live that kind of life, with that level of challenge.

Nietzsche

Another problem with Nietzsche's philosophy, as it plays out in the 20th Century and beyond, is that it favours the point of view of the uneducated.

Although this consequence has been founded on a fundamental misunderstanding of the writer, who would have liked nothing better than to keep some ideas about reality esoteric and hidden from all but a few, in practice, Nietzsche's philosophy has come to favour various boorish and simplistic notions of reality that force a psychological regression in the writing's adherents.

See the following from Twilight of the Idols:

How the "True World" Finally Became a Fable
The History of an Error

1. The true world—attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it.


(The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")

2. The true world—unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents").


(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible—it becomes female, it becomes Christian ...)

3. The true world—unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it—a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.


(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)

4. The true world—unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? ...


(Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)

5. The "true" world—an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating—an idea which has become useless and superfluous—consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!


(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)

6. We have abolished the true world: what world has remained? the apparent one perhaps? ... But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!

(Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)

Nietzsche's point in illustrating "the history of an error" is that we should live life as if we were participating in reality right now. We should not put off living a real (authentic) life until after we die.

Unfortunately, however, many of his staunchest disciples have fallen into an interpretation of Nietzsche's view which goes along rather different lines than he had intended, thus entrenching epistemological error by conflating objectivity with their own subjectively based reactions to things around them.

They take what they see as Nietzsche's injunction -- to act upon the world as it appears to them to be -- and they immediately lose their capacity for any reality testing that would enable them to correct presumptions that happen not to be correct.

Those who respond to the world as if "how it seems to me to be" is in fact "how it is" experience psychological regression to the stage of maturity prior to a child's ability to understand that its feelings about things in the world do not always accord with how those things actually really and truly are. Pre-oedipal strategies of forcing the object "out there" to come into the hoped-for mode of relationality with the feeling subject (on the basis of the subject's felt needs), are utlised at the stage of development that precedes the ability to acknowledge that the mother object "out there" hasits own independent identity and raison d'etre, separate from the needs and desires of the infant (who experiences the dependency structure of the relationship quite differently).

Similarly, those contemporary Nietzscheans who are unable to distinguish between "the world as I desire it to be" and "the world as it actually is" try to force others to attend to their needs, without first discerning whether it is the other's genuine desire to do so. Particularly in terms of gender relationships, we see the male contemporary Nietzschean assert that things are merely "how they seem to be." They use pre-Oedipal strategies (such as projective identification) to compel the other to fall in line with how they fantasise reality to be and prefer to try to force their idea of a positive relationality between the subject and his object, rather than trying to find out something about the independent identity of the other, and how he or she functions.

Nietzsche's enlightenment

NIETZSCHE’S RELATIONSHIP TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT ( NIETZSCHE’S POSITION ON RELIGION IN THE ANTICHRIST).


Nietzsche was not a rationalist philosopher like Voltaire, but belonged in the camp of the irrationalists -- although it may be considered very rational to point out how and where and why humans deviate from logic, reason and common human decency.  He may be considered reasonable, then, in observing the limits of the human capacity to be rational and drawing a line.   (He stated that rationality was the one thing humans were not capable of, due to their irrational drives._) Rather, for Nietzsche the irrational elements of the human psyche were to be harnessed to the optimum effect, by the kind of culture that would enable the best of the best to express themselves supremely, whereas those whose natures made them the worst of the worst would be denied expression, and would serve at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

In The Antichrist, Nietzsche speaks of using already existing religious systems, such as the Hindu “Law of Manu”, with its caste system, in order to furnish the basis for a different kind of value system than that of Christianity. He thought the hierarchical basis for society provided in terms of the Hindu caste system would have allowed those who were intrinsically better endowed by Nature to flourish best, whilst preventing those who lacked positive attributes in a Darwinistic sense from getting in the way of the others. Christianity, he thought, encouraged the opposite – the social dominance of those who were, in evolutionary terms, “botched and bungled”. Christianity, he thought, gave too much scope to dominate to those who had a kind of inner illness which made them unable to enjoy life and therefore made them want to suppress other people’s enjoyment of life.

The key aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy that makes him an “irrationalist” in the pejorative sense, according to my view, is his tendency to essentialise – to view people in such a way that their attributes seem to spring from “Nature” alone, rather than from other complex factors as well, such as social conditioning, freedom of opportunity, and socialisation.  I speak only of his small blind spot --- his seeming inability to grasp the nature of social class and gender.  In these areas, Nietzsche’s seeming assumption that our characters spring from our “essence” that is given to us by Nature is extremely one-sided and starkly incongruent with the rest of his views, and discounts a great number of the social variables that go into making us who we are. It would be too simple to say that Nietzsche wants to replace Christianity with the religion of social Darwinism, but that is the direction in which many of his followers have taken his subtle analysis of cultural and social movements and his provocations – much to their discredit.

Nietzsche is at his best when he uncovers the large-scale psychological dynamics that go towards creating a religion like Christianity. He is at his worst when his followers turn his undeniable rhetorical power to blaming the victim:  The events of the 20th Century, if they can teach us anything, remind us that brutality and a noble essence are not automatically conjoined and that Nietzsche’s reliance on Darwinism as a mechanism to sort out the sheep from the goats was more than a little misplaced.  After all, he assumed that was noble throughout the ages would have been consolidated to the extent that higher order activities (like those of the intellect) would retain their value in the face of social Darwinism.  But this ideology has proven to be on the side of those who do not think or feel too much beyond the average, not on the side of those who want more from life.

the brain is active

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Marechera's unbound universe

If Freudian psychology teaches us anything about the world, it is that patriarchal value systems go hand and hand with the sense of a bound universe. That the Earth was the centre of the Universe was the prime article of faith when the patriarchal system was at its greatest, mystical heights. The medieval (and earlier) era of church domination brought us the fantasy of a Universe ordered by a supreme being who kept everything within its proper sphere, which was thought to be determined by the thing's ascribed 'essential nature'. The boundary limits of reality were determined theoretically by the mind of God the Father. Practical reality was limited, in turn, by the head of the extended family household -- the human father, who laid down the law concerning not only what was allowed, but what was to be considered to be knowable. For, what was outside the sphere of what was known by the household father was not considered to be worth knowing, if the father was to hold his position as the supreme human knower -- the one most in touch with the mind of God.

Despite cultural and historical claims regarding the omniscience and omnipotence of the Christian deity (or, indeed, with regard to any patriarchal deity), the force of such claims did not lead to a veneration of knowledge as a direct link to the sacred. Rather, the claims concerning the attributes of God the Father placed a heavy weight of fear upon the population that was gripped by the fantasy. As Nietzsche teaches us in Genealogy of Morals, a feeling of indebtedness to a power greater than oneself produces guilt. From Freud's teachings, we can likewise deduce that introjection of the image of an all-powerful father figure (God) would produce a superego of proportions that would go beyond the kind of superego generated by the putatively normal resolution of the oedipus complex in relation to the laws laid down by one's human father. The overall effect of succumbing to belief in God the Father, is thus a superego that binds the universe shut in such a way that obedience to "law" rather than search for knowledge becomes the guiding principle of life. This social and psychological limitation to stay within the boundaries of "the law of the father" and not to question it, or go outside of it (in order to explore further) was what bound the universe into a limited, secure, and theoretically already-known sphere of human relations -- a bubble of meaningfulness securely pinned-closed by God-the-Father clasping it all together, circumscribing the upper limits of the mass fantasy.

What would it be like if the fantasy of that-which-is sacred came to Earth -- not as transcendence (which is mere suggestiveness of an idea), but as integral, experienced reality? The loss of a father at an early age might trigger such an explosion of knowledge of the sacred, as "God" becomes immanence again, and all things take on an animistic hue (imbued of the sacred). Then the Universe would continue to expand in an unbound way, its meanings and purposes stretching out to limits that God-the-Father can no longer put a lid on. The sense of being safely enconsced within a limited, but already-known Universe would be all gone. Death would take a step closer to the observing and questioning subject -- whose existence is no longer metaphysically assured. (One would have to get to know death intimately, and to live along with it, as part of life.) Yet life itself, and eros and the sacred would also come crowding in. In all, the fantasy that concerns the meaning of life would become more complex.

This is, I'd suggest the nature of the shaman's world -- and it is also Marechera's:

My father’s mysterious death when I was eleven taught me – like nothing would ever have done –that everything, including people, is unreal. That, like Carlos Casteneda’s Don Juan, I had to weave my own descriptions of reality into the available fantasy we call the world. I describe and live my descriptions. This, in African lore, is akin to witchcraft. My people could never again see me as anything but “strange”. It hurt, for the strangeness was not of my own making; I was desperately cynical for the descriptions were the only wierd things I cared to name “truth”. They were the heart of my writing and I did not want to explain my descriptions because they had become my soul, fluid and flowing with the phantom universe in which our planet is but a speck among gigantic galaxies. [ p 123 Mindblast].

functional analysis of myself

When I reflect upon what I want from a book, it is a map of reality and its boundaries. That is all. If the nature and form of the boundaries suggest  a frontier for me to explore, then that is all the better. Nothing excites me more than the notion that there is something out there wild -- as yet unexplored. The list of books that have intrigued me in the past have done so because they have suggested something about the nature of conventional reality and the means to bust out of it. My favourite authors/intellectual schools all give me tools I need to bust out of the rituals of convention -- or at least for contemplation of such:

1. Dambudzo Marechera
2. Judith Lewis Herman
3. Friedrich Nietzsche
4. Georges Bataille
5. GWF Hegel
6. Beckett
7. Luce Irigaray
8. Ortega y Gasset
9. Kleinian school
10. Bruce Lee


As an emotional skeptic, I see language as a precarious scaffolding on which I am compelled to do my balancing acts. Because of the emotional inflexions we subconsciously attribute to words, a particular word will not mean the same thing to you as it does to me. That is why I value a philosopher like Quine, who makes linguistic issues clearer. He's one of the good guys, in terms of the way he went about promoting clarity.

A skeptic about  immediate feeling sensations seeks accuracy of interpretation above all. An intensity, a feeling, is necessarily a sign of something other than the emotion itself. What is it trying to get at? (If one believes that the answer is immediately clear, then one is assuredly not a skeptic about emotional matters.) My memoir took me eleven years to write because of this emotional skepticism. Not just any answer would have done -- I had to have the right one. I had to discern and interpret reality accurately. Failing to have done so would have jeopardized my personal growth and knowledge of the world around us in its true and essential form. Reality can't just mean anything at all, and not just any answer will do. Only the right interpretation of reality suffices to make maximal sense of it.

Although I process emotional material remarkably slowly, I enjoy undifferentiated emotional experience, where I am not required to interpret accurately. Wherever emotion may be permitted to be the mere epiphenomenon to the real event taking place, and its meaning, I enjoy emotion immensely. In all honesty, I have never felt more in my cultural element than when I was with a group of skydivers. I am also happy enough with martial artists, since their thick skin normally does not demand too much of me in terms of fine-tuning emotional nuance. I do not need to switch on for them a part of my brain that trembles in the face of needlework too fine for me to see.

I feel very at ease with research work, and can work hard and relentlessly at it, since it does not need me to meet people. It is truly my vocational element. If I had to spend a tenth of my time dealing with those of immature minds, working over things at the level of emotional issues, I would not have even a quarter of my current amount of energy left, to devote to research work. For the same reason, I have difficulties (in terms of energy allocation) in dealing with Western consumers -- who are generally very emotional -- and their issues. I automatically dismiss emotional content that does not promise an intellectual harvest, which I can find enjoyment in. I cannot process that kind of material as if it were real, in the true sense of what is real to me, since consumer complaints just seem to be a short-circuiting of reality, rather than pointing to a reality that is greater than themselves (ie. outside of themselves), and therefore such complaints don't seem to interest me.

Zimbabwe Refugee Projects in Johannesburg needs your assistance with regard to furniture, computers and other supplies.

ZIMBABWE REFUGEE PROJECTS
79 pritchard /small cell
+27 84 501 7947
Johannesburg
fax +27 11 333 3254
South Africa

tafie69projects@gmail.com

zimbabwestarvationproject@yahoo.co.uk
………………………………………………………………………………………
i will let you know anything that will be happenning ..the programme
that we will be doind will be done under the zimbabwe refugee projects
an organisation that we formed as the refubees that are currently
staying at the methodist church ...we are still struggling but we are
managing coz we managed to few individuals that are willing to work
with us and at the moment we are facing office furniture problem
becausev we are still using the church properties and we dont have our
own computers we use internets to communicate with people so that are
some of the challenges that are faced by the organisation.

a functional analysis of Marechera's shamanism

If the ego is strong enough, and one operates at a level of danger, anxiety may become a catalyst to knowledge and to thinking. Conversely, if the ego is weak, and one operates at a level of danger, anxiety may lead to ego disintegration and confusion.

That is why the shaman is one who walks a fine line: entering situations that provoke anxiety that he may learn from the experiences, on the one hand; and on the other, attempting not to be overwhelmed by those situations to the degree that his ego falls apart. To master "spirits", there must be at least some risk in mastering them, and the greater the danger, the greater the prestige that accrues to the one who conquers the unknown.

"Terror" is therefore indispensable to a shamanistic figure, as is is a "totem of truth". By the determined tolerance of anxiety in the face of terror, one sees more clearly that which others resist seeing (in resisting the anxiety of seeing more than is comfortable to see.) The capacity to see more is a burden that partly (or completely) submerges the viewer in a world of part objects. The "manfish" is himself only a part object in his role as seer, since he sees relationships between things (specifically, he sees "politics" as half-concealed forces of pressure, in the raw), but does not see the other aspects of people that make them unique. He must ascend from his Paranoid-schizoid position in this waterworld in order to make sense of his experiences below the surface. If he can, then the terror he has endured has been of use, as he has been able to tame threatening and disturbing spirits. The chance is always that he will not return, if the anxiety proves to be too much. Then he might succumb to a spirit that counsels disbelief in one's self, leading to death.

The "manfish" is the manifestation of the human who cannot bare to be such, having experienced too much violence (a reference to Marechera's post-traumatic stress syndrome). It is the primitive R-complex (colloquially known as the "reptile mind") that faciliates an experience of oneself in an altered form. The "reptile mind", concerned with ruthlessly surviving, not surprisingly turns the subject into a crocodile in defence against the possessive ferocity of his lover's father:

Yesterday I met Barbara's father in the valley:

"I'll get you in the end, you rascal!" he screamed.

But I bit the silver button and turned myself into a crocodile and laughed my great sharp teeth at him.

He instantly turned himself into the mist, and I could only bite chunks of air. When I was cursing him, a voice I did not recognise said:

"You thought it was all politics, didn't you?"

But there was no one there.

I sneered.

"Isn't it?'

And I sullenly turned myself back into human shape.

I have been a manfish all my life. Maria, you did well to leave me. I must go.

It is the acknowledgement that life isn't simply "politics" that causes the subject to return to human form. The dream, recorded by Marechera in one of his stories from The House of Hunger, depicts a shamanistic "crossing of the bridge" from death (as the schizoid, submerged form of humanity, where a different, shrewder kind of knowledge presides), back to life again. It is the idea of a woman that enables him to resume human shape, although begrudgingly (for he is least protected by his dissociation in the schizoid state). Yet the schizoid link to "politics" remains, so that each crossing of the bridge brings back with it some knowledge about what is hidden from conventional view in the subterranean depths.

mindblast 2

The attraction to redemption through destruction must seem odd from the point of view of a different time and place. From the point of view of today's time and place, when it is vital to hang on, defending against a constantly encroaching sequence of disasters (or is it a chain?) -- global warming, economic crunch, fires, floods. Today one wearily stays on one's feet to do battle, whereas there was once a time, once a place, where a sense that a disaster had already taken place catastrophically allowed one to lie down and rest awhile to contemplate its meaning.

Marechera's MINDBLAST reflects the Zimbabwe of the early to mid eighties. Harare of that time is the scene of catastrophic change. History still marches on -- but in terms of irony (or farce), for the tragedy (of war) that was has already been superceded. Many have had their minds "blasted" by the decade and a half war years. They are the relics of humanity found on the city streets, holding together what remains of soul and body.

The best part of their lives have been used up by the intensity of rapid change. The monster of the psyche lurking in the city square is the measure of how much the threat of death has presided over the form and process of their lives. Now that the tragedy is not longer a part of life's process, it is sorely missed. Another lifeform springs up -- that of the bohemian and rastafarian. It casts a fragile look around, casting roots deep into the cracks appearing in the concrete of the past. What can one perceive -- unless infinity -- with minds that have been used up?

Marechera's complaint, having "seen too much", was an argument against society for having changed more than he could handle. "Let me remain at the very edge of this tragedy and mark its spot, as a monument to the meaning of catastrophic change," is his statement. The inner corrosions of the mind returned from war are threads that lead towards the meaning of the human soul. Threats from muggers on the streets and the secret police are inevitable but add nothing more spectacular to reality than everything that one has seen before. The craving for a brilliant new experience that could take one out of the corroded mind is met with violence, which for all of its effects, has an impersonal sense about it. How can it reach the inner soul?

The inner soul has its own self-determinations, based on the shape of cracks and previous corrosions. It is unlikely that anything new can be added, although certain experiences may cause the cracks to shudder -- the mind to recall.

Zimbabweans try to maintain their cheer whilst struggling for aid

The Central Methodist Church in Joburg, South Africa

There are over 3500 people currently staying in the Central Methodist Church building and the number is still heaping up as the UN is providing transport for the zimbabweans from Messina (just across from the border) daily. So the number is about 3600, with about 35% being children and another 25% being pregnant women. The rest are men. They are being fed twice a week. Over 1000 people
are also sleeping outside the building due to the unavailability of space
...they dont have blankets they just sleep on the pavements

Lizard brain

The only overt reference to shamanism that Marechera makes is to Castaneda's don Juan.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castaneda

Nevertheless there is a link between primeval consciousness (at the level of the lizard part of the homo sapiens brain) and early levels of consciousness mapped out by schools of object relations. Both involve efficient ways of communicating that are beneath the level of rational consciousness.

Lizards even have a role within the don Juan narrative. In effect, if you get a pair of lizards and sew up the jaw of one and the eyes of another and set them free, they can become your spirit messengers. What does this suggest, other than that one can learn to experience reality as through the (in some ways more efficient) lizard part of one's brain.

The lizard part of the brain is cold-blooded, lacking in emotional nuance. Perhaps this is the key indicator I have been looking for, for example, when I perceive that there is something hyper"scientific", something transhumanly objective, in looking out at the world in this way. You see various actors and players in the human arena for what they are, rather than having your perspectives influenced by shades of emotional meaning. This detached and cold-blooded way of looking at the world, our through the lizard brain, enables the "seer" to contemplate the interactions of other lizard brains, occurring beneath the surface of human rational consciousness. So it lends a different perspective -- based on awareness of instincts that are geared towards survival rather than being geared towards processing emotional nuances.

From personal experience, this lizard brain part of the mind does in fact exist. I have operated within it, when I suddenly saw that it was not possible for me humanly take any more emotional abuse, or to reason with it. At that point, the mammalian brain switched off, and I began to operate from the lizard brain. (It is hard to describe how efficient this lizard brain is, in a fight for survival, only you feel really, really calm, as if human nuances do not matter, as if only one goal matters. Time slows down, and you see things happening in slow motion, but you don't feel anything.) In my experience, the lizard brain is what facilitates the killer instinct.

Somehow knowledge of the functioning of the lizard brain in humans is linked to shamanism. I would say it is linked at the level of understanding the preconscious roots of power relations. I think that it is the cold-bloodedness of this level of consciousness that gives it its objectivity, enabling the subject to extricate herself from conventional modes of power relations, whilst developing a masterful knowledge of how they function.