NOTES ON MINDBLAST

Marechera talks about trying to find his way out of Harare's Maze, but the "maze" is also -- which we know from previous metaphors and allegories in his work -- his mind.

MINDBLAST, OR THE DEFINITIVE BUDDY.

This "definitive buddy", or one true friend seems to represent the doppelgänger of the civilized and culturally conformist Zimbabwean -- the one who is living the authentic life on the streets, in touch with his true self, yet languishing because of it. (Well that is a symbolic reversal of the Kleinian position, it seems, which is typical for Marechera, who called himself an insider, when ironically, he meant "outsider" -- "Inside-out is outside-in, insider!"). But the psychological struggle at the pre-Oedipal level, and the threat of the intrusion of Minotaur of paranoia (due to the psychological harshness of living life on the streets) is Marecherean and somewhat Kleinian (p 596 of the article). Anyway, every person that Marechera meets in his journal is "maze unto himself".

"

There are a lot of guys right here who've got the maddest notions in the world and each day all they are waiting for is to act out their weird descriptions. Just like I am doing. You look them in the eye and that's that. You've had it. It's like looking the Ancient Mariner in the eye. Afore ya know the yarn you already It. No escape from their mazes. No exit from Brooklyn. [a reference to Sartre's "No Exit"?] Only the Sartre nausea. Only the mesmerizing outsideness with Albert Camus shouting: "Seconds out. Round twenty-first century!" and you know you gotta fight and fight till you're down and the chips and the odds and the neuroses are hanging out like your intestines after the knife fight. There they are hanging out like nothing in the bloody world. [...] How enticing, the notion of uniqueness -- suddenly dispelled by the raucous voice, the shrieked insult, the horrible truth under the fine skin of humanity. Were I a pathologist, a forensic scientist in the police murder laboratory ... What the means? Why the irrevocable? How the exit of these Hararean mazes?"

PSYCHOANALYSIS AS PHILOSOPHICAL IDEALISM

Let us start with Freudian idealism: It seems to me that when the "aggression of the self it mislocated [into a hostile other]" (p 597), that repeats a tendentious  error, based on a right-wing moral tradition, to make it out that all forces are by their nature psychical and immaterial. Rather, for Freudian logic to be more consistent with itself, it is necessary to consider that the forces that impose a response of psychological retreat (and concomitant feeling of anxiety) are themselves MATERIAL forces that have real material power, and not forces of the imagination that have only imaginary power.

Let us view things from the perspective of a more humane philosophy. We can then assume  that the active force of one's imagination comes to terms with the material nature of the power of unconscious interpsychological forces, and it does so in terms of rearranging its mental structures to accommodate its maturing understanding that political force is in fact real force. Whether this knowledge is later repressed (or not) will determine the degree to which one conforms to society’s requirements for conventionally “civilised” behaviour (the specific nature of which will vary from culture to culture). Trauma (and shamanic wounding) tends to open a window of the mind.   If one's mind is strong enough to observe it both from near and from afar, it enables one to reconsider the nature of power, as well as its effects upon the arrangement of one’s psyche.

 “Turning inwards” to observe the structure of one's psyche, as Marechera saw “the horrible truth under the fine skin of humanity”, which was humanity’s general psychological complicity with  institutionalised power.