"Doctored ... that really isn't a very nice word at all," he uttered upon reflection. His recent experiences with a health condition no doubt bore testimony to this -- but he had also spoken of a more general truth, namely that writing a doctoral thesis will in fact do something seemingly unalterable to your mind, whilst at the same time assuring that you will not willingly open a book again -- at least for a very long time to come.
(I should hasten to add that I have actually opened several books, since completing my PhD, only my experience with them is quite different from what it had been prior to finishing my thesis. These books no longer have the radiance of revealed truths, but rather represent a limited perspectives and blind spots and arguments with holes in them. I clearly have been "doctored": my critical thinking skills have outgrown my sense of enjoyment of a text. Instead, I immediately see where the author's range of experience fails him, how the parameters of his argument are a form of self-limitation that ultimately makes the pursuit of knowledge itself a restricted enterprise: I have been "doctored".)
But, I should write something about my trip to Zimbabwe. It was, in a way, a descent into blissed-out sensations, for me: A wild and woolly Utopian catastrophe of an experience. I was in Zimbabwe for June and July of last year. The best I can say about Zimbabwean people and their culture was that I encountered the praxis of the left libertarian attitudes I had been preaching on the Internet. I was riding in an overcrowded and musically enhanced minibus, making the four hour journey to Mutare from Harare, when it dawned on me: "These people really get how to live in the most spontaneous and jubilant way, although nobody in particular has imparted this as a philosophy to them." That's when I realised that sometimes people just 'get' what is necessary for life -- and, articulating moral formulations whilst contending for one's piece of turf isn't always necessary, not when people can already 'get it'.
In truth, the worst aspects of my Zimbabwean trip were quite small in comparison to this revelation of people 'getting it'. They had to do with the extreme religiosity of the Zimbabwean populace (about 99.99999% of whom are overtly Christian). American evangelism is the new form of colonization of the Zimbabwean mind. The American Gothic posters, with the overly made-up American ladies promising 'Christian revival' took pride of place along the main streets of suburban Harare. Mini-buses (the main form of transport in Zimbabwe) also offered up their share of ideological clutter, which was often of a religious variety (see below).
Wishful thinking: Matthew 6: 33. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
In the weeks after I had safely arrived in Mutare (despite the bat out of hell ride on potholed streets at night time), after I had taken to getting taxi rides with a delightful friend of a friend, I discovered, one woeful Sunday morning that this otherwise quite charming man, who even happily shared his sadza and boerewors with me, had an audiotape in his taxi (which he played at quite a level of decibels) of the kind of hellfire and brimstone preaching that would make a grown woman want to completely obliterate all Sundays from this world for a long time to come.
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