Patriarchal formulations: a mathematical approach

Patriarchal ideologies are rife with smoke and mirrors, to a degree with can be measured by the logical inconsistencies of these ideologies.

Working out how the system of patriarchy is structured requires a logical, almost spacial form of reasoning. You have to figure out what sorts of acts, events or attitudes are included within its system and which are excluded. Secondly, there is an algebraic aspect, whereby if something is added to one side it is excluded from the other side. I had a lot of fun exploring the patriarchal proposition, “men are intellect, but not emotion.” Patriarchy excludes emotion and makes reasoning without emotion into its definition of the active principle. At the same time, we can see that males, like any creatures, are emotional.

So, the question becomes, apart from these patriarchal formulations that state men are never whimsical nor emotional, where does emotion come from and where does it disappear to? Also, an entirely different question: Where does PATRIARCHY say the emotion comes from and disappears to — and what MUST it be bound to say if it is true to its own internal logic about active and passive principles?

new hat

On the advice of a Zimbabwean friend, I will pad it around the jaw using some nylon pantyhose.

The fragility of life

Dead Man (1995) - IMDb

Here's a review from the IMDb regarding a shamanistic movie:

Storyline
Dead Man is the story of a young man's journey, both physically and spiritually, into very unfamiliar terrain. William Blake travels to the extreme western frontiers of America sometime in the 2nd half of the 19th century. Lost and badly wounded, he encounters a very odd, outcast Native American, named "Nobody," who believes Blake is actually the dead English poet of the same name. The story, with Nobody's help, leads William Blake through situations that are in turn comical and violent. Contrary to his nature, circumstances transform Blake into a hunted outlaw, a killer, and a man whose physical existence is slowly slipping away. Thrown into a world that is cruel and chaotic, his eyes are opened to the fragility that defines the realm of the living. It is as though he passes through the surface of a mirror, and emerges into a previously-unknown world that exists on the other side.Written by Anonymous  

I find it more than interesting that the most lasting impression I had after reading Dambudzo Marechera's most shamanistic book, Black Sunlight, was that it conveyed the fragility of life.

Nip it in the bud and say you're sorry

The comments that follow relate to this article:

How a Woman's Orgasm Can Save a Man

If males feel that there is an implicit load of female anger they cannot handle, why do they necessarily feel so?

Freud may have the answer, although we should understand that his purportedly universally applicable notions about gender and sexuality are true only within narrowly patriarchal cultures. Luckily for Freud, most cultures are indeed that way.

Freud somehow alighted on the idea that women were "castrated" men. One would have to ask in what sense that were true and whether any of the possible senses in which it might be thought factual are meaningful. Certainly, modern medicine does not see reality in that light, so any meaning still attributable to the term must necessarily be non-biological and metaphorical, symbolic or perhaps simply psychological. In my view, it has a psychological and social meaning.

I have no wish to reread the entrails of the article to try to determine what has gone wrong with the American psyche. I can tell you that the idea of the new therapy for men is that women should say sorry to men for holding that males do not have the strength to endure the power of female sexuality and anger. Men, in turn, can recover from their sense of wounded masculinity by giving women prescriptive clitoral rubbings, possibly in group sessions.

What lurks in the shadows is the Freudian meaning of this bizarre spectacle of ideas, which like the whole of Freudianism has nothing to do with women or actual female sexuality, but relates to men alone. There are men who feel guilty for patriarchy, as they implicitly understand that patriarchal systems have castrated women -- that is, robbed women of their natural power.

The clitoral rubbings may therefore serve to reassure said males that women are not, in fact "castrated". At least, not always in sexual terms. They can still be turned on by you; there is still something going on in terms of women's sexuality. Socially and politically, nonetheless, patriarchy still continues to castrate them. In terms of communication, they may often be silenced, humiliated and hence "castrated" by patriarchal mores. But sexually, this is not necessarily always the case.

Of course, their orgasms will be subdued to the degree that women's self-esteem is undermined by systematic patriarchal oppression. That is why women don't really have a mind-splintering orgasm in the context of this new therapy.

Anyway enough of that and here's a joke:

The mortuary received a dead body it was marked jj as the name. The person who attended the corpse was fascinated with the size of the corpse's penis which was abnormally huge to the extent that he hadn't seen such a thing in his life. He cut it off and showed everyone at the bar and they were shocked. He went home with it and showed his wife.

The wife said: Oh, my god, my jj is dead.

Blind trust

Our early cultural experiences count for something right until we die. Sometimes we get our sense of normality from them and sometimes we rebel. I think I'm very different from my sister, who tends to lean toward community and feel defined by it. My character has always been structured in an asocial way -- in a sense of wanting to sniff the air and catch its vibe, like a dog with its head out the window of a car going as fast as possible.

My migratory shift from an exciting situation of war and freedom to one where citizens were genuinely law-abiding was the worst experience of my life. To me, the move from Zimbabwe to Australia was from an adult state to an infantilized one, where nobody actually trusted themselves to make their own decisions, but instead looked to the law to tell them what to do. I'm sure much of the problem was private property. You couldn't camp just anywhere you wanted to. You couldn't build a fire and be trusted to put it out again afterwards. You weren't allowed to do a great deal. Also, the TV news was extremely dumbed-down compared to the very serious news we had been used to experiencing, which concerned war and death and stoicism in the face of enemy hostility. Instead, we learned that somebody's dog had gone missing, but had been returned.

The spirit of lawlessness still prevails in Zimbabwe, thankfully. One takes the responsibility for dealing with one's own safety and is entirely responsible if the outcome isn't what you'd hoped for. One would never blame others if a project one had set out to complete hadn't worked out. In Australia, they do, though. It's second nature. "If I obey the laws that are in place to protect me, society has to make sure everything goes according to my plans, otherwise heads will roll! (I will find someone to blame)."

I found this more civilized Australian attitude to be incomprehensible. It seems to imply the desire for a social contract based on blind trust.

A successful ape

Bourgeois lying: when you do not lie, you "lie".

I was a latecomer to the game of bourgeois self-fashioning with an altogether different frame of reference, which frankly wasn't bourgeois at all.  Precisely, I didn't grow up to believe that the purpose of my life was to compete on a market by using my image, skills and energy as currency to be traded for status and personal possessions.

My grasp of circumstances relating to exchange-based culture has always been through guesswork.  Performing guesswork is very tiring to me, since working constantly with the ideas of exchange is not deeply ingrained.   When I switch off from an exchange-based mentality and just become completely myself, I run into trouble with those who think I'm trying to imply something about their exchange value.   It's impossible, of course, for me to know what I'm meant to have implied when I just lapse into being myself. The bare truth of it is that I engage with others for reasons apart from their exchange value. Or,  I engage with them through a sense of obligation to try to conform to bourgeois mores, even though I don't understand enough and can only comply with normal bourgeois behavior through a mighty effort.  The effort I expend to comply with conceptions of my exchange value in relation to others is always wasted.  I don't believe in the game myself, and this is bound to show.  Then when I mellow out, people think I am attacking their identities although nothing could have been further from my mind.

It's been a long time since I believed I had to make a reputation that would assure me status and market value.  That's a bourgeois value I'd picked up, which has shown itself to make little sense.   Successful marketers know that having capital and then an effective business plan is fundamental to success.   Identity and image are the products of wisely directed capital, and do not exist without it.  Those who wish to play the bourgeois game of life, but lack the monetary worth to do so, are deeply cynical about identity and image, mostly because their own images and identity have been successfully refuted so often.  There should be a lesson in that, perhaps, in that those with financial backing seem to be able to do what those without it cannot seem to do -- which is to develop an identity into which others want to invest capital.

Many subscribe to the dream of being attractive to wandering capital and that's why situations can seem to have a sub-text, defining every individual's value.     Perhaps switching off, to the extent of not allocating a value to others in one's vicinity, can seem like the worst insult of all.   Still, I've never had the ability to be able to fully switch on to bourgeois evaluations.   The time I can focus on anything in this odd way is limited.

The allocation of moral worth in bourgeois society is also very foreign to me.   I have reasons to like or dislike someone, to view them with respect or otherwise, apart from any evaluation of their moral worth.  The ability to remain "in character" -- by which is meant the ability to retain a bourgeois character mask -- is the fact most defining of a bourgeois individual's moral worth.   Quite some while ago, Prime Minister Julia Gillard was caught out in a bourgeois error when it became clear that she was cooperating with the advice of an image consultant, in order to appear more professional and polished.  The opposition party then raised the question of whether there was a fake Julia and a real Julia.

The Prime Minister's error was not in getting an image consultant but in acknowledging she had one.   Her honesty as to what went into the production of the bourgeois self was her fundamental mistake.   Her espousal of her knowledge as to how bourgeois society constructs identity led directly to the accusation that she was deceiving others.

Bourgeois society punishes guileless honesty, but rewards adoption of identities so long as this process is seamless.   Adaptability with plenty of seams -- my kind -- does not get liked at all.  I give away too many secrets when I act according to my nature.

And this is where shamanism comes in...

In terms of a healthy alternative to the following not atypical bourgeois state of being:

Chapter 12:
12.1. Self-pleasing in despair
The suicide is undoubtedly a victim — but this observation is a very stupid ideology when it gives no information about what he is a victim of. In any case, it is not “social conditions” that guide the suicide’s hand: for even with the greatest wretchedness and misery imaginable, what matters is the conclusionthe person affected draws from it. And it requires a fairly crazy logical consistency in order to proceed from whatever starting point and arrive at the result that one no longer belongs in this world. After all, the suicide is not merely executing on himself the feeble judgment that life is not worth it anymore, since being dead surely ought to be a lot less worth it. With radical narrow-mindedness, the suicide candidate measures his life against a most personal idea of certain conditions, only under which his life would be worth living at all. Whatever reason he may cite for his death sentence — from the failed exam, the darling who ran off, the wayward children, career-related failure or the fear of being busted for crooked dealings in business or marriage, to the impending or actual end of his accustomed way of life, or a general lament about the unkindness of the world — it becomes a reason for ending his own life only by his taking it as an argument against himself: as evidence of the inadequacy of his own person in the face of a standard of fitness he wants to submit to completely. So it is not simply his own circumstances or the will of other people that have made his life is a failure: the suicide candidate deems his most personal moral life agenda, in which he alone wants to be pleasing to himself, to be a failure and unworkable from now on — but without in the slightest losing faith in the criteria for the character mask that he solely wants to accept himself as, and even live as. It is thus an idealism — taken seriously without compromise and without the usual qualifications of fitness for bourgeois life — of a perfect moral character, an idealism whose crazy demands the candidate sees only one chance of standing up to; namely, by freely sacrificing himself to this idealism: this is the only way he likes to be pleasing to himself. This logically consistent moral stance is easily the equal in brutality to the National Socialist program of “euthanasia” in the interests of preserving the racial purity of the national character; turned against himself, the suicide’s logically consistent cruelty serves as his last and utmost means for proving the validity of hisideal of successful self-assertion against its practical refutation in his own person, and thus for saving the madness itself, in which he has placed his entirehonor.
Bourgeois individuals from all classes and social strata, political or ideological “camps,” “unemancipated” nuclear families or “progressive” shared households — all are equally capable of such logical consistency in submitting to their self-fabricated character program. For the basis and content of the plan to remove oneself from the world is the general moral idealism of class society. And the fact that everyone subscribes to this idealism in his own special way, which he is God only knows how proud of — and which he above all has no problem regarding as a very superior criticism of the prevailing “lack of principles” and “double moral standards” — is the best guarantee that everyone, proudly believing he is taking quite a unique journey through life, can also work toward the not-at-all unique logical conclusion of murderous self-criticism, which is included in all moral idealism, but also follows only from moral idealism.

It is quite interesting to become animal, apes, just don't go in for that pointless murderous self-criticism.

It will get you nowhere.

Richard Rorty

I had a near miss with Rorty, since I was supposed to use his text (as follows) to write my honors dissertation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingency,_Irony,_and_Solidarity

Looking back, it was a good thing I withdrew at the time, since I would not have understood the argument he was making, nor the cultural context of the argument. Also, it would have been extremely *ironic* if I had to be in a position to give USA liberals “hope”, when my right-wing society had been demolished and I had no hope of my own.

Rorty is not a very good philosopher in my opinion, making the typical move of Postmodernists in combining Nietzsche with Christianity. Nietzsche was inimical to Christianity. The USA philosopher that makes the most sense to me is Quine.

Clearly, though, Rorty understood his USA liberal community’s desire for “hope”. You’ve got to keep hope alive by not making devastating critiques of authoritarianism like those made by Orwell. Barack Obama sought election on that ticket. Hope.

The whole idea is very American, self-indulgent and Christian in its idealization of “community” and “hope”.

The "I" and the imagination

I've learned to be cautious when speaking of fantasy, the imagination and sources of inspiration to those who have accepted doctrines of bourgeois normality, because of misunderstandings stemming from the implicit use of different paradigms.My experience of the imagination is that it provides a protective atmosphere to nurture and maintain the self (diagram 1).


However, the theory of the imagination in much of contemporary industrialized culture is that imagination is a thing apart from us (see diagram 2).


In reality, imagination has the role of  representing things not as they are, but as they might be.  When animals play, they are testing themselves in the realm of the imagination.  What works will be retained and will become part of the core self.  What doesn't seem to work out whilst enjoying the act of play will be discarded as not part of what that particular animal's repertoire. A human cannot fly, but does so in dreams.  Such dreams may have been the origins of aircraft and space travel.


People educated within Western, industrialized cultures view the imagination as a danger and a threat to presently existing reality. In diagram 2, imagination isn't a realm of actual possibility, nor is it a realm of nourishment and safety.   Rather, here it represents the self's illusions about reality; its incorrect judgments.  To the degree that one is imaginative, one is held to be representing the world as the opposite to what it is  (in diagram 2) , rather than representing an extension of what it is (in diagram 1).


Sparring with Mike, I try on a number of different techniques.  In a recent video, I see how I tried chasing after him in reverse stance, and came unstuck.  My imagination had said, "do it!", and it was certainly worth a try.   My knowledge of myself and the world is nourished by such experimentation.  This attempt represents one of the thin, blue lines on the first diagram, extending to the outer circumference of my potential for knowledge.


Imagination doesn't corrupt us, it teaches us.  In the second model of the "I" and the imagination, the self is separated from the imagination.   It relates to it as its opposite, its shadow, its inverse reality.   Such an imagination doesn't nourish anything, and it is no wonder that psychiatrists and school teachers feel justified in putting children on corporate drugs in order to try to break the blue network connections between the individual self and its ideas about potential that can never be fulfilled.  Following from this second model, "play" only leads to broken arms and sad faces.   Reality is what one can see and touch.   Reaching out for more just leads to emptiness.


The second model, therefore, may appear more rational on the surface, but its views of human nature are that it is broken. The model itself is consequently also broken.

The crocodile in the swamp

In the past several months I have been inscribing my father's memoirs.  This involves asking him to speak on whatever subject he chooses, whilst occasionally asking questions to fill in few more details or to give a personal, subjective side to the factual basis of his narrative.

Thirteen short chapters so far show the structure of an extremely old-fashioned personality.   One rarely finds  such an identity represented nowadays.  Even "Bear" Grylls caters to modernity in the way his shows are structured, so as to makes his adventures look accessible to anyone who wants to take them on.

My father's mental imagery from dreams was slight yesterday.  He mentioned only that sometimes he saw a pond that looked like he could swim in it,only it turned out to contain an unexpected danger in the form of a crocodile.

I went to sleep and had dreams of my own.  I was drinking coffee in a poetry house, when I suddenly left and took my collection of books with me.   The airport alarm sounded at the door and I smiled then immediately turned  back as I deduced I must have taken a book belonging to another in error.  It was a miniature, but brightly-colored book on the very top of the pile.  It was a book for a one-year old or two-year old.   Every page contained at most one word, for that was all there was space for.

"The book on the top was yours. I took it inadvertently," I stated.  "The rest of the books are mine."

A small women, in modest, middle-aged attire made her way to me.  She seemed to be wearing a white towel that had been turned into a robe, with blue flowers embroidered into the sleeves.

"Don't worry," she said.  "It only a very small book."

She looked at the rest of the books.  Those belonged to the coffee-house, too.  I gave them back and the women -- for there were now five -- cuddled me, like we were long-lost friends.  We were going to go shopping together, but actually I wanted to escape from them and return home.  I began walking faster and faster until the voices of the nice ladies began to echo in the distance.  Just then, I dropped down into some construction works on the first floor platform of an overpass.

Immediately, I reached out for a foothold, but alarmingly there was nothing beneath my feet.  I was going to sink into wet mud and die in a construction work and nobody would know I'd even been there.

I began to scream out that I'd fallen into something deep, but my voice let out an almost silent scream.

Two silent cries and the realization that the pit was bottomless, the poles that made up the construction now appearing higher than they used to be.  I knew I was breathing my last  -- then, I woke up.

Art

To me there is only truthful art or untruthful. If it’s untruthful and moral, that doesn’t interest me at all. If it’s truthful and amoral, that interests me substantially. Fiction that is bizarre or immoral doesn’t intrigue me very much, but factual writing detailing strange ways of thinking can be very artistic, in my view. This book, for instance, details the psychology of violence during a war:

Pamwe Chete

One could say one shouldn’t read that kind of material as it is immoral, but this is the typical attitude of liberals who continue to retract into tinier bubbles of consciousness, whilst condemning the realities of the outside world.

Draft Chapter 13: My father's memoir

Part of the training was drill and you had to stamp your feet,  which used to cause your socks to fall down about your ankles.  In cadets,  you had to wear garters.  On this one occasion,I'd forgotten my garters,  so I tied my socks up with a shoelace.  I suddenly found myself lying on the Tarmac.  I fainted because the blood couldn't circulate.  Fifteen years later,  I was in the regular army and sergeant major Griffiths came around and said your socks are falling down. You need to use string, not elastic. He put me on a charge for using elastic instead of string.  I appealed to the company commander and got off.

Griffiths would walk around and if he saw your socks coming down a bit,  he would push them down with his pace stick.   If they went down,  he would decide to charge you, as you had the wrong support.   He wanted to be nasty so that people would respect him.

We also had a regimental sergeant major,  RSM Erasmus.  Erasmus's claim to fame was he had a very loud voice.  Erasmus was quite capable of telling the sergeant major off on the parade ground.   Erasmus was marching us around the parade ground and suddenly you heard a voice shouting,  staff,  staff,  third man in the front row is wearing jewellery.  That was me with a watch on.

The army training taught me that on occasions there are things you have to do.   It did teach me to deal with obnoxious bastards.  You just suck it up and keep going.   All my life I've had these obnoxious people arrive from nowhere.  One obnoxious person was a foreman here in Australia.  He wasn't in charge of me,  but I was supplying the stuff.  He constantly out up blockages to make you have to crawl on your hands and knees to get anything done.   I would walk in and he would say did you go though reception? He would always hound me like this.

He undid himself over a period of time,  in that he got so many people to hate him that eventually all the workers got together and said we're not going to work for that guy anymore and he got the sack.  This was back in the 80s and he used to go to army surplus and buy camouflage and drive a Hummer.  One day,  our product was defective and he said, "look at this, look at this." I said we're not going to pay damages,  because the bloke I was working for would not pay damages on any occasion.  I'd been saying "Yes,  yes, yes," to him all these years,  but it was time to say no.  I had to try to increase sales, but I wasn't going to do it by going though him.  The look he had when I said "No" was incredible.

There have been lots of people who have been like that.  I think it makes them feel good to be able to put someone down.  Every time I've taken revenge on someone, it's never worked out.  You can't fly at someone.  I have an instinct for some things.  If I've put a product into a company  if I felt it was doing okay,  it was going okay,  but if it wasn't, I also felt it.  Then, I would rush around and try to fix things up.

I still dream of work.  Sometimes I dream I'm back in Africa and sometimes I'm having to fight my way out of a situation.   Fighting isn't always necessary,  but when it comes around,  you don't want to be unprepared.   I find I'm out somewhere and there's a pool of water and I think, right, I'll have a swim in that.  Then I look on the far side and there's a crocodile.   This indicates danger in places where you wouldn't ordinarily expect it.   Some of the meaning of dreams is to convince yourself you're not afraid of anything.

When I was in hospital after the stroke,  I had dreams about being in a place you don't want to be and you just have to accept it because there's no way out.  

half speed analysis

sparring

Getting back into the zone. Please excuse the minor pre-menstrual bloating.

Just desserts

Psychology has not developed very much in Western society.  By thorough contrast, in Zimbabwean society, people are natural psychologists, but in Western society, identity as a moral category stands in place of any organic understanding of the structure of human relations and its consequences.   Above all, people want to be assured that you're in the right category, that you understand what category you're in, and that you're not laying claim to be in a category you lack the moral right to be in.

For the most part, Zimbabweans don't view reality in these terms.  Those terms above are quintessentially Western.   Rather, Zimbabweans try to gauge your political stance by watching your behavior.   They're extremely responsive to what seems to be implied by one's actions, and will respond immediately to any sudden changes in behavior, such as moving from aggression to amicability.  In all, it's one's behavior that matters, rather than one's self-proclaimed identity.

Westerners, though, want to be moral arbiters of human rights.   They want to be in a position to determine whether or not you deserve your rights, and to what degree.  Their decisions are not based on actual behavior, but on the assumption that identities are fixed, some wholly righteous, others infinitely evil.

The Westerner's role as moral arbiter is to make sure those he or she deems evil should suffer their commupance, whilst those who deemed on the side of good should receive their rewards and recognition.

Unlike the typical Zimbabwean, the average Westerner has come into the world to teach us something.

Or

The shamanistic endeavor I've embarked on is my own.  The origins of my invention took me from making my own emotional investigations, through putting myself in the shoes of Marechera, via my own African experiences.  Along with this, I simultaneously moved from Nietzsche's notion of viewing one's life in terms of power to Bataille's notion of inner-experience.  I superseded, but did not erase the previous ways of looking at the world.   My exposure to those first authors gave me ideas, methods, certainties and questions, which I took on through to the next level.   More definitively as regards "intellectual shamanism", I also brought my own needs and questions to the issue of how meaning is established by my own departing from what was already known and attempting to go beyond the theoretical structures of Nietzsche and Bataille as well as the structures of meaning implied by Marechera's creative formulations.

575. We aeronauts of the spirit! All those brave birds which fly out into the distance, into the farthest distance it is certain! somewhere or other they will be unable to go on and will perch down on a mast or a bare cliff-face and they will even be thankful for this miserable accommodation! But who could venture to infer from that, that there was not an immense open space before them, that they had flown as far as one could fly! All our great teachers and predecessors have at last come to a stop [...] it will be the same with you and me! Other birds will fly farther! This insight and faith of ours vies with them in flying up and away; it rises above our heads and above our impotence into the heights and from there surveys the distance and sees before it the flocks of birds which, far stronger than we, still strive whither we have striven, and where everything is sea, sea, sea! And whither then would we go? Would we cross the sea? Whither does this mighty longing draw us, this longing that is worth more to us than any pleasure? Why just in this direction, thither where all the sums of humanity have hitherto gone down? Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering westward, hoped to reach an India but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity? Or, my brothers. Or?

[Nietzsche, THE DAWN THOUGHTS ON THE PREJUDICES OF MORALITY]

I've gone as far as I can go. I've established "the void" as a feature of intellectual shamanism.  This also defines the proximity of my mode of thinking to Buddhism.  In the process of my flight, I've learned that there are many ways of thinking that circumscribe the realm of experience, so that we are certainly not free to investigate the world on one's own or determine what one's morality should be.   Priests of all sorts shield one from this direct experience of the world.   One's conclusions, if derivable from authorities, are not able to be made through an encounter with nothingness, which is the blank canvas on which on draws one's own meanings.

Or.

Lust and love

Philosophical idealism is inherently ungrounded in reality, so it collapses in the face of lust, which is grounded there. That is, if the two are brought into opposition.  Herein is a typical theme that I see in many Western writers, for instance in Sade’s JUSTINE and in Nietzsche, whereby it is deemed necessary to trash the ideal of the feminine, which is deemed to have been put on a pedestal due to religion (pagan in the first instance, and Christian in the latter).

The new value trying to be tested is to destroy reverence for women as such, so that the (male) writer can experience his lust. The problem with this solution is that it starts from a psychological projection — women are deemed to represent some essence of transcendence/mystery/love — and then seeks to destroy the women, via the mode of expressing lust. But it does not destroy the projection. It does not even begin to tackle the root issue of the problem, which is the conceptually-derived opposition between the mind and the body.

Misogynist solutions to sexual inhibition only destroy the container of the self-hatred that is projected “out there” -- projected as a result of being inhibited about one's sexuality. That is the Sadean solution and it is to some extent Nietzsche’s. For instance, Nietzsche thought women had been granted far too many courtesies by Christianity, and that it was time to institute a warlike, that is (in his view) realistic form of society, that would give no quarter to female pieties.

Anyway, these are male philosophers philosophizing. The construction of an absolute opposition between mind and body has not originated in women’s philosophizing, but it is a male problem and one the male philosophers have difficulty in figuring out.

What is needed is better integration of the mind and body. It’s an obvious solution, but one that has been generally avoided.

READING NIETZSCHE

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an extremely confusing text for a beginner to read. It has nothing but Biblical language and references to the Bible, but it is presenting a naturalistic approach to religion and morality. Many of the philosophical conclusions are extremely negative or satirical. The literary style and the pessimism make it very hard to grasp.

 “One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author’s intention — he did not want to be understood by just ‘anybody.’ (Nietzsche, GS 381)

People may have different reasons for making their writing complex. In the case of Descartes, it has been suggested that he wanted to throw the religious guys off his trail by using words in slightly misleading or convoluted way. Nietzsche’s motivations were only slightly different, in that he wanted to make a substantial critique of the ideologies of his time, without being denied a voice or labeled as crazy (the usual silencing tactics).

ape gives advice

http://asktheape.blogspot.com.au/

Receiving criticism

In individualistic cultures, you are taught to believe that you have a certain amount of inherent genius, AKA “potential” that has to be liberated. Instructors thus become the means to liberate that mysterious, precious, hidden capacity.

A very different way of looking at the situation -- my way -- is that each person has an inherent value, but this is not in what they can do, but in what they already are. Their ability to walk on the face of the Earth is the fundamental miracle, irrevocable and perfect in itself. Beyond this, what a person has to do is develop a skill, a field of knowledge, some capability. An instructor helps you to do that. Understanding it in this way, no matter how harsh the criticism, it ought not to impact on the ego.

This is the state of mind that I am returning to, having been brought up with it. You do need to accept your inherent value as a given, and then work on improving what is wrong. The alternative idea, of working to gratify or establish your ego, puts too much at stake and makes improvement psychologically fraught.

It’s also perfectly fine to say that something you are doing or have done is crap. It’s better than the sadomasochistic surprise when suddenly people alight upon you and proclaim that you might have thought you were great, but really you are crap. Communication opportunities shouldn't go wasted.

One of the main problems with contemporary, Western society is too much of our involvement being ego-based, rather than skill-based or knowledge-based at their core. I always want to be told how to do something, but in contemporary culture it’s always too little and then too much. There are only two roles available for anyone. You are either “the consumer” who must not be criticized, or you are the provider of a service, who can be criticized to death. There are no gradations and no other optional roles. This means if you are providing a service, say some sort of education, you don’t get to criticize those receiving the service, even if it is constructive criticism. You will lose business if you slightly overstep the lines. Service providers are afraid of taking initiatives, because they know they are being policed by the consumers. Consumers don’t really get what they are paying for, in turn, but at least they keep their egos intact.

But what about egos anyway?

In my experience, an ego can be kept intact even despite harsh criticism if the criticism is delivered in a measured fashion and with good intent.

The psychological terrorism of identity politics

My problem is, and always has been with the constant mind f*k that is left wing and right wing identity politics. People led me to think I was saying or doing something offensive, something wildly off-base or insensitive, when really I was being projected upon.  For years, now,  people have been playing out their identity politics issues with me. It has also taken me literally years to realize that this had nothing to do with me as an individual, but was psychological projection. If only I had realized this earlier, I wouldn’t have kept doubting my sense of reality.  I became traumatized by my sense that what I had to say was completely unintelligible to others, or that it would turn out to have the opposite meaning to what I’d intended. It has become safer not to speak or at least to avoid speaking wherever identity politics issues were involved.

The structure of ideology

IDEOLOGY makes appeals to the idea of an invisible, essential identity. It is thought that women are, by nature, dependent. Therefore, if they act independently — which is to say, “as they are not” — they must necessarily be acting masochistically. It’s interesting how the very function of ideology, as such, is to get things back to front. There are a very few people who seem to realize that ideology functions by reversing cause and effect and making things seem the opposite of what they are. Most people don’t see how this works, and thus you have such abominations at the Men’s Movement, whereby thoughtful men try to correct ostensible female masochism, by demanding a return to Kinder, Küche, Kirche.

Cool Girl: Myth or Reality? « Clarissa's Blog

Cool Girl: Myth or Reality? « Clarissa's Blog


I had experiences with some US guys, who must have thought I was playing this game of trying to put on a tough image to get in with them, or something. Much of the experiences occurred on the Internet. As I’ve always stated (because it always seems to bear repeating), I come from a different culture, so my attitudes are different and I’m never really sure what games I’m deemed to be playing.  I am what I am.  In some ways, I could be considered very tough and generally insensitive to social mores, since from my early childhood, I did not feel the need to rely on social approval for my inner nourishment.  In terms of environments and quality of air, I am extremely sensitive.  I also respond a lot to changes of light.

Metaphysics doesn't abide complexity, so it has to reduce it into something simpler.  Consider a child painting inside the lines of a prescribed figure.  The figure is that of a unicorn, or a donkey or a teddy bear.  Any color that falls outside of the lines belongs to "not Teddy", because what falls inside the lines is "Teddy".  Here, we don't have complexity, we have a binary vision, divided into states of being "is" or "is not". In this way,  presumably I was deemed to be playing a tough girl game,only to be playing it inconsistently, such that I let down my guard every now and then to show the “real me” — presumably the ultra-sensitive girl underneath that “cool girls” really are, despite the fact that they’re pretending not to be. (After all, it would be wrong for US types to let go of their gender essentialism in recognition of the women who seem to be exceptions to a rule.)

It seems really, really hard to put it across to some US types, that all humans can experience the world positively and negatively. If I experience some things positively and say so, I am deemed to fall on the “cool girl” side of identity. If I acknowledge some negative things, then this is deemed to be “my mask slipping”. Thus gender essentialist ideas (that women are all really weak and only pretend to be cool) are reinforced, whilst the real individual and her actual experiences are stripped of meaning in deference to some concept of categorical consistency (something quite different from characterological consistency and even inimical to it).

Such an insistence on reifying concepts of identity is why I think much of USA culture is insane.

***

Some people invest their egos in their reified identities and some don’t, and to some degree whether one does this a lot of little can be down to cultural factors, engendered in one's youth.  A reified identity is one based on an abstraction about masculinity of femininity, and not on something like lived experience, or real subjective states.

My concept of Western culture, for a long time, was that it consisted of investing your ego into a reified identity concept. I tried, with all my might, because I intended to adapt to Western culture, for otherwise, people would keep accusing me of inconsistency for being naturally myself according to my earlier cultural conditioning. Now, finally, I’ve given up. I have to be consistent with my own views, but inconsistent from the point of view of those who believe people automatically fit into categories.

Just metaphysics

A predominant metaphysical perspective is that we all have some kind of inner self-determination or free will that others are free to engage with or reason with, in such a way that if you are really sincere, or really logical, of you have merit, others are bound to get into synch with you, and thus you become very dominant, or very beloved, and you reap lots of rewards.

Actually, there is nothing in the universe to indicate that it is internally structured in this way. Not even is the universe structured to assure good communication if we use the same words or have good intentions. Rather, there are deeper structural factors pertaining to each individual that can prevent good communication, even where there is good will to communicate effectively. As well as this, people can and do get upset if you step on some aspect of who they are that isn’t fully formed yet (hence vulnerable).

apes

In praise of femiNAZIS

Parallels between Nietzsche and Sade.

See below how both use the same sets of imagery as a basis for propounding the same naturalistic philosophy of morality.

NIETZSCHE:

That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no ground for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: "these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb-would he not be good?" there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: "we don't dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb."

To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect - more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a "subject," can it appear otherwise.

[GENEALOGY OF MORALS, FIRST ESSAY #13]

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

SADE:

"The man I describe is in tune with Nature."

"He is a savage beast."

"Why, is not the tiger or the leopard, of whom this man is, if you wish, a replica, like man created by Nature and created to accomplish Nature's intentions?  The wolf who devours the lamb accomplishes what this common mother designs, just as does the malefactor who destroys the objects of his revenge or his lubricity."

"Oh, Father, say what you will, I shall never accept this destructive lubricity."

"Because you are afraid of becoming its object -- there you have it:  egoism.   Let's exchange our roles and you will fancy it very nicely.  Ask the lamb, and you will find he does not understand why the wolf is allowed to devour him; ask the wolf what the lamb is for:  to feed me, he will reply.   Wolves which batten upon lambs, weak victims of the strong: there you have Nature, there you have her intentions, there you have her scheme.

[JUSTINE, GROVE PRESS, p 608)

Just apin'

Caffeine, trauma & emotions

These days I have a certain problem with coffee. In effect, it makes me insane -- although there may be a benefit in going deep into this madness it produces. Unlike so-called "depressants" like alcohol, which take you lower into the self and the emotions, a stimulant like caffeine acts to block off my emotional awareness. This is not at all a good thing, as when I cannot access what I am feeling, I suspect that certain aspects of my environment may be getting out of my control.

The horse (my sense of being) beneath the seat of my mind may be walking, trotting, cantering -- but I have no sensation of the reins, hence a sense that I have no control over my decision-making processes. I wouldn't know if I were pulling too hard or not at all. I'm not quite sure what I'm feeling about anything. In times like this, I exercise perfect control and say nothing at all. I won't be able to tell until the adrenaline or stimulant wears off and the flood gates allow my sensations to move through again.

Caffeine triggers a traumatic center in my brain. Since I am unable to draw sufficiently from my emotional memory, I jump to negative conclusions about the-nature-of-reality-itself. Reality seems very sordid, rather scary, deadly whilst refusing to show its layers.

An occasional drink of wine on the other hand, is not just beneficial but practically essential for my health, for otherwise, with caffeine or no caffeine, I tend to lose touch with what I need to recognize to keep up my mental well-being. I can reintegrate my emotions by going deeply into them in a positive way, whilst building plans and formulating my ideas. This is what a glass of wine achieves for me. Not engaging in this ritual, however, returns me to my early adult self. My 16-20 year-old self had repressed everything to do with emotion and feeling. This was the effect of post-migratory trauma; also of the tactics I'd developed from a very early age to deal with emotionally confusing and disturbing experiences. I switch off.

It has taken me years to realize the damage I was doing to my health in not maintaining emotional awareness. I had no idea I was so impersonal and detached from everything, until a crisis made me realize I had repressed a huge amount of sadness and anger. I made a tremendous effort, from then on, to switch on to my real emotional states. My physical health immediately improved in tandem with my self-understanding.

My ongoing tendency is nonetheless to switch off and to become a mystery to myself again. I hold my breath and hope nobody asks me what my motives and intentions were, because likely as anything I will not be able to know -- until I have consulted with myself. And, who knows how long or short such a consultation with one's inner being might be? It could take forever. Or a very limited time. Still, one has to begin the query first and then, wait and see.

Because of my tendency to hold my breath, I sometimes need to learn what I've experienced retrospectively. I haven't really been taking it all in. I've been waiting for someone to take a clear and obvious stance -- and then I'll deal with it. I handle crises of most sorts and people behaving like asses very effectively -- because it's this I have waited for. I can think extremely logically and unhindered by any emotion or doubt, once I've decided to take action. My views and values become sharpened, so much more decisive in a crisis. It's just the regular stream of life where I often can't get enough emotion to flow through to think clearly. In a situation resonant of my trauma, it is difficult for me to "be myself".

I retain an odd, Rhodesian personality -- which I have, nonetheless, modified to some degree.

I take time to decompress, to feel what I have experienced. I have developed a higher capacity for emotional integration than I had in those early days of post-migratory trauma. Despite this, I'm never going to be an "emotional person" or even a very personal person, because focusing on feelings in their own right, rather than as building blocks of culture, puts a huge strain on me. I genuinely can't understand the importance of having emotions that don't supply substance for analysis.

It's only the resulting analysis that counts as the source of every deeper pleasure.

After training

Sorry, no sparring at this stage

Marquis de Sade, atheism and Nature-as-a-Deity

Taking nature as a deity isn't just peculiar to those atheists who perhaps once had been culturally attuned to Christianity.   It's also very Christian.   Hippies and assorted spiritists may choose to follow a natural way in eating, giving birth and taking care of diseases (e.g, via vaccination avoidance).  

Women are not permitted to use contraception under certain brands of Christianity, and diseases must follow their course. Atheists, religious types and those who are directionless and searching for their meaning in life may all turn to Nature (capital N) to give them their guiding principles.  There's nothing wrong with that, if meant in earnest.  Be fruitful and multiply.  

Nature ought to be your teacher, however, not just your authoritarian bureaucrat, making you suffer for no reason.

I'm reading the Marquis de Sade who is a typical inversionist Christian.  Bataille has some similarities, but converts his Christianity into a set of culturally proscribed attitudes and behavior, which he must transgress against.   Bataille uses the ideological structure of Christianity to get his psychological highs, just as Sade does.  

Bataille is an atheist, whilst Sade is inclined to paint his Nature in a very Christian light.

What is Nature and do we need its law-giving properties?

The idea that there are underlying principles of life, to which we must submit, has a certain basis in experience to it.   For instance, one does not go "against nature" by planting crops unsuited to the season.  One waits on nature, patiently attending to the times when it is ready to yield its fruit. One does not cut down trees prematurely.

Humans throughout the ages have  been attuned to have a certain amount of discipline imposed on them by the force of nature.   The discipline takes the form of behavior management:  If you pick the fruit before it's ready, you will get an upset stomach -- best wait for Nature, who provides! Sade takes this principle one step further.  In the absence of God, Nature tells us what to do.  

Sade's "Nature" is precisely the elements of human behavior and sexuality that Christianity would suppress.   "Nature" becomes a justification for human perversion.  Paradoxically, what is being viewed by Sade as Nature is by no means nature at all  -- not even "human nature".   To the contrary:  It's what nature turns into when it has been long suppressed by Christian mores.  

 Only then does it become Nature the Sadist.   Apart from this, nature is not sadistic, but more aptly, as Nietzsche noted, indifferent.

Those who want us to avoid contraception because they think that God-through-Nature commands it are simply submitting to nature's indifference.   They are welcome to be an object of nature's designs, since nature doesn't care if they are one.   They are also welcome not to be an object of nature's designs, since nature isn't going to notice if they aren't one.  God, therefore, doesn't notice such inclinations to submit or to avoid submitting, either.  The wish to submit to Nature, so as to receive benefits is purely human in origin, not divine.

The view that nature has something sadistic to say to us (and not meanings that are merely cyclical or in line with certain organic principles) is fundamentally Christian.  Dionysus, the Nature god of ancient Greece, says everything destructs and regenerates, so drink the fruit of the vine, self-destruct -- and enjoy!  The reason monotheistic religions view nature in a much more negative light is that they are referring to human nature tortured under patriarchal constraints.   

A terrier abused as a puppy is vicious and lacks the capacity to trust as an adult. By contrast, the nature of the beast is different when it's not abused -- although never, in the Christian, moral sense, "perfect".

Intellectual shamanism also has a view on "nature"-- indeed, a profound interest in engaging with it.   The difference is that ongoing interactions with a reality unmediated by Christian mores will incline one to an increasingly more thorough-going skepticism as regards divine forces.   

Shamanistic experience that is reflective urges one to see that everything one experiences has its origins within one's mind.  External reality exists -- but it is indifferent generally.  Sometimes reality is hostile, sometimes beneficial, but in all instances, there is indifference to both these aspects.

Intellectual shamanism nonetheless requires engaging with these generally indifferent forces of nature, to discover that there are no laws to which one can give oneself, apart from very general ones relating to self-preservation.  

Adopting intellectual shamanistic practices can only enable you to deepen an already profound atheism.

Rhodesian discipline and punish

I was supposed to be an extremely conservative young lady, very oriented toward the family and warm and deferential -- conservative.  Oh, and dutiful.   I have the opposite personality, which would have meant trouble enough, except that my parents (especially my father) also attached profound importance to bringing me up all Bible reading and unreasoning.   I'm convinced this was because of the war and what it cost him.  This was how the war has started:

"We have struck a blow for the preservation of justice, civilization, and Christianity; and in the spirit of this belief we have this day assumed our sovereign independence. God bless you all."  http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1965Rhodesia-UDI.html

So, Christian belief and a certain idea of "civilization" became a huge factor in my parents' consciousness, whether they were aware of that.

When we migrated I was fifteen.  That was when the battle started to keep me on the straight and narrow.  I had entered a society that was much more liberal in many ways, and I'm sure this represented the "communism" my father had fought against, in the war, to keep outside of our borders.

As a funny aside that confirms my thesis, about five years ago, I came across a badly written  blurb on a free publishing site a while back.   The writing was by an ex-Rhodesian, who spoke of "Communism hovering on our borders".  Actually, the phrasing was worse than this, something more clumsy and funnier.   So amusing was it that I used the sentence in my Facebook update and immediately some guy living in Johannesburg (in exile from Zimbabwe's poor economy) popped up in chat and said, "It's me!  I'm the communism lingering on the border!"   This was how I got introduced to the members of the Zimbabwean Revolutionary Youth movement, who turned out to be two in number.

It seemed to some people, including myself, that I may have become the betrayer of the war and everything "Rhodesia" stood for, the more I adapted to liberal ways.  My parents waged a really strong psychological battle against me.   It was quite extreme, involving physical "discipline" at times, but mostly chasing me around and attempting to undermine my self-esteem by telling me I was "grotty".

Such is life.

Shake the peaches down

The Bar-Stool Edible Worm (Dambudzo Marechera)
I am against everything
Against war and those against
War.
Against whatever diminishes
Th'individual's blind impulse.
Shake the peaches down from
The summer poem, Rake in ripe
Luminosity; dust; taste. Lunchtime
News - pass the Castor Oil, Alice.

Here's some more stuff by Americans, which I barely comprehend.  The eyes grow dim in old age and one simply has to speak up if one wants to penetrate an ear drum.  This never happens to me anymore.   I try to listen but the words I come upon are much too square and rigid to produce a coil into the inside of my head.

When I was growing up, I cared no whit about establishing myself in a career or gaining financial stability.  I had only one desire and that was to have an initiatory experience of some sort.   I knew I wouldn't have the knowledge and experience to enter the next stage of life unless I had it.   It wasn't that I was so keen to enter another stage of life either. I just had a need.  Like a mother eats all sorts of bric-a-brac to furnish the processes of gestation,  like birds get restless prior to suddenly migrating,  I had to have the kind of mind-rocking experience that would make me wake up and appreciate reality.

I spent most of my twenties in search of this. My investigation of extreme ideas and extreme experiences had not ended until my early forties, when finally I'd taken in enough of life to be able to feel satisfied and satiated.

For now.

USA feminism and gender wars

I've promised to make a post on American feminism and how it differs from my own, more African variety of feminism.  Communication styles differ from one place to another.

Having engaged very heavily in political and ideological debates on the Internet since around the time of its inception, 1996,  I've come to the conclusion that my communication style is a world apart from the manner of interaction most commonly observable in the American "culture wars".

Quite simply, the majority of Americans just have a very different way of looking at the world.  What I've actually written, and what those words I've written are commonly interpreted to mean, are entirely opposite in many instances.  I wrote recently, for instance, that my man, my ape, my significant girl-fling was "a man with a warrior mentality".   This was taken to mean that my ape was a male in shining armor, who could rescue me from any panic-stricken moments of distress.

The opposite is true.   The American who responded to my statement presumed it meant I hadn't evolved in 50 years.   Actually, I've been evolving all 44, and my pronouncement ought to have been read along much more Sadean lines in that I enjoy a male as he is, have no desire to domesticate him and appreciate him close to Nature.

American anti-feminism wants me to say something else, though -- and so much so, it puts words into my mouth.   Those are the female-haters.  On the opposite side of the fence, American self-nominated feminists won't talk even talk to me.   Both are grinding their axes in ways that I don't fully understand, after all, what is the point in talking past each other or addressing each other as though one had encountered statements that were mentally deranged?   There's no way to get to the bottom of someone else's reality in that way.

Americans seem to attempt to define motives in terms of stereotypes.   The gender wars are defined by people aggressively expressing what they need, whilst fending off the opposition as a mere caricature, an ogre, a gender identity from a children's fairy book.

Quasi-religious ideas about moral purification also run through the gender debates like a network of blue veins in smelly cheese.  Should it be pointed out that one has "unearned privileges", one is supposed to purify oneself from within, via a pirouette and three mea culpas.   This often doesn't suffice to purify one's public identity, but no matter about that, there is the afterlife, the feminist future, if the inner penitence is genuinely pure.

African feminism is, by contrast, simpler.   We don't want to be treated as merely "emotional" creatures, or to be beaten up or to be deemed patriarchal property.   We're united with other women on this opposition to patriarchal culture.   At stake are political and practical issues, rather than the moral status of the individual man or woman after they have undergone inward sanctifying rituals.

Typically Americans engage with each other to demand that their needs will be met.  They require that strangers, whom they have barely even met on the Internet, affirm their specific identities as they have defined them.  When you can't be bothered to affirm the novel, unique or simply ordinary identity, you are punished by having a very negative definition bestowed on you.   This can be in the form of any name at all. An acquaintance of mine was recently defined as "sociopathic" for failing to validate an Internet stranger's novel self-definition.

In all, Americans are a needy bunch, if hard of hearing.   African feminism has its problems too.  There's too much Christianity and female martyrdom implicit and explicit in it.   Despite this, African feminists communicate more clearly than their Western counterparts and they listen.

Could it be that Americans are not so much in need of a feminist solution to social problems in comparison to  my fellow Africans?  If they needed a practical solution, they would surely be working in more practical ways.

*PS.  I can never outdo you with the mere productive zeal of your stereotyping, so no complaining!

Clarissa made one of these....

...and because I suddenly woke up and had no ideas of my own, I made one, too.

This kind of depicts my primary school years in Zimbabwe. High school was much the same.

Draft chapter 13

My experience with the military began as a baby, sitting in the sandpit and watching aeroplanes going overhead. These planes used to make a lot of noise as they were on training flights. It was near the end of world war two. My aunt used to take me for walks though town and lecture me on pronunciation. I can hear her saying not motee-car, Peter. Motow-car. I frequently used to see platoons marching though town. Also nuns, who seemed to be marching as well. Then suddenly I didn't see them anymore. It was very common to see people in uniform walking about.
Uniforms belong to a previous life. Right from a baby, I was brought up with uniforms. My step father was in the police reserve and used to go out on night patrols. He wouldn't get in until ten or twelve at night. I went into the police reserves myself quite a bit later.
Once in a while, the army would put on a reunion for the people who had been in the war, and my mother would take me along to it. Seeing all the people in dress uniform made me feel a bit spacey because I knew it connected to my father, but I couldn't see the nature of the connection.
Then I got to high school and, at that time, the British empire was held together by the thin red line. The problem was that I was growing up in a colony where whites were outnumbered more than ten to one. So the realization always was that we could be outrun any time, so we had to have as many people capable of firing a gun, as possible. So at the age of fifteen I was required by the state to enroll in cadets.
This involved putting on uncomfortable clothes and spending hours marching up and down. Part of the uniform was army boots with steel studs, with hose tops and putties. Our kit was inspected every Friday, which meant we had to spend hours of preparation. Our broad-brimmed bush hats had to be flat up on one side. To make the hat stay in that shape we had to mix up some water and sugar, then iron it through a handkerchief and dry it flat. In one occasion in the rain, I tasted the sweet stuff running into the corner of my mouth. Then I realised it was from the hat.
We had to spend quite a lot of time in doing dummy combat. We used fixed bayonets. It's amazing more people didn't get hurt. We also had a band. I can hear the bagpipes playing to this day. The band went to England and won prizes. They must have spent a lot of money on that band.
We'd also do regular camps. It was nothing special except in winter Inkomo barracks was a horrible, cold place. They would take you to the firing range and train you to fire a rifle. Each of us had to fire 35 rounds. For a young boy, that was quite an undertaking, as that rifle had a kick like a mule. It was a 303 Endfield.
Some people came back from the range with bruises all over their shoulders. At the rifle range I learned I was never going to be able to fire a rifle. My eight inch group wasn't up to par. What I most remember about those days on the range was nothing to drink. You took a water bottle with you but that didn't last long. You'd have to spend at least a whole morning there. You also had to do butt duty. The place where you fired to is called the butt. It was like being in a trench. The noise was horrific. By the time the bullets get over your head, they're breaking the sound barrier. If you're in the butts when someone is firing the machine gun, that's very loud. One time, we had a very bad-tempered staff sergeant and we said we'll get him. We shot directly at the top of the bank rather than into the bank, so all the gravel went up toward him. We got him. It made him more bad-tempered than ever.

the cost of the gendered division of labor: rational versus emotional

I made this exploration in my memoir — how was it that I came to be so divorced from so much of practical reality? Well, we can investigate that as an imposition of social norms. But don’t forget, whilst you are investigating it, to investigate the suffering this produces. And the confusion. And the immature status this imposes on both men and women alike, since where nobody is a complete person because everybody accepts a different division of labor, nobody can make rational, adult judgments about anything at all — and this includes men, too.

If “rationality is male” according to a division of labor, then men are deprived of their full humanity and are not so much rational as wooden, devitalized, robotic and insane.

How can you even test reality to work out what is there if you require another person to be a function for you, in order for you to be whole? You can’t do any trial and error because the other part of you — either your emotional function or your rational function — is somewhere else.

Because I was the eldest, but also because my father had a lot of mistreatment as a child as well as abandonment issues, I was allocated to:

1. express the emotions he had because of his anger at the world for being abandoned early on.

2. express his sadness and anger for the demise of Rhodesia after the government capitulated to outside demands.

3. act as the whipping girl on a practical/emotional level for everything that went wrong in his later stage of life, when he began to succumb to his lifelong traumas.

4. Accept the blame, publicly, too, for women are “the weak ones”, not men.

5. Act as “the good mother” (or else) and teach my father how to operate within the culture we had entered as migrants.

6. Accept the guilt of “the bad mother”.

* The problems I have had with my father have been endless and only ended with his stroke, which destroyed much of the right side/emotional side of his brain. I’m sure he is also thankful for its removal of his trauma, even though it has left him with a severe disability. 

He can now speak logically, rather than manipulatively, about what went wrong in his life. For the first time, we have a good relationship, where he isn’t trying to sabotage me all the way.

Home sweet home

desacralizing

I've been desacralizing my consciousness. We all tend to retain a sense of the sacred in our lives since we all conform to some degree to the dictates of the Superego.   This aspect of our psychological structure gives us our sense of moral certainty -- it is the force of "God within".

Even atheists will have their own version of the sacred.   Sometimes atheists can be the most extreme moralists of all, because the subscribe to various systems of ideas that require others to be very sensitive to them, for instance with regard to certain facets of their identity.   Why is identity so important to them?   Well, because it constitutes the sacred, inviolable essence of meaning that must be defended with moral fences and alarms.

To understand how deeply the meaning of the sacred enters each of our consciousness would take a lifetime.   There is always some prohibition against questioning those aspects of one's being that have been given a sacred meaning.   A limiting line is drawn against any experimentation.    One does not question anything, here.  Others are also warned off.  This is entirely normal.  We all do it without reflecting about it.

A powerful mind, however, questions everything, and thus desacrilizes her consciousness.

The other side of a desacralized consciousness is the freedom to develop a more realistic understanding of the world.  People are by no means infallible, although they like to maintain that their opinions are absolute and justified at all times.   To grant people's opinions a sacred status is to misread the nature of humanity.   What is often dressed up as a sudden, intuitive insight is usually, if not always, simple prejudice.  One does not have sacred vision into reality, rather one's perceptions are inaccurate in many instances unless one has trained them to avoid the pitfalls set for the unwary.

Desacralizing teaches one that nothing in reality is inherently rational.  Everything is suspect, for there is no "God" maintaining it or organizing it.

My own sources of emotional sustenance

Some people gain a sense of security and reassurance from following established rules. I'm the opposite.   Reflexively numbed when I follow rules as a matter of principle:   That was how I learned to operate in relation parenting and from early primary school onward.  In extreme cases, it leads to emotional numbing. I come from such a rule-following society, originally. We had to walk in single file everywhere and have various inspections. I can maintain this way of living very easily if I have some outlets, but I can’t maintain it easily where there are alien cultural influences, which I have to dive through mental hoops in order to try to understand them. Then I’m doing too much at once — and in an emotionally shut-down state, that’s never easy. Operating within the system means my feelings do not operate, whereas operating outside  it I can remain in tune with the reality around me.

ON THE PLUS SIDE:  If I shut off, I can handle almost anything so long as it’s kept simple. If I have to deal with subtle relationship issues, I cannot do that. My form of adaptation to stress is not suitable for anything but the most extreme situations. That stands to reason since I was brought up surrounded by extreme situations and adapted to them very effectively. When toeing the line and minding my Ps and Qs, I don’t understand subtle emotional needs, enough (my own or others')  — and that means, if I put himself within the system for a prolonged duration I will also not be paying attention to my own needs. That bodes poorly for my psychological and physical health.  I need to follow my own jagged path in order to restore my overall well being and let the blood flow without restriction through my body, again.

My tendencies with handling emotion mean that I am most effective with a short term crisis. That’s when my capacity for detachment and clear thinking really works out well for me.

Psychoanalysis and its current limits

1.  Many of the Lacan's patriarchal stupidities are also present in Freud. That said, I do believe in people getting better, it’s just that you can’t have patriarchal practitioners trying to guide you in the process.

What they’ll end up doing is projecting all the failed protests about injustice from millenia onto you and giving them a psychiatric diagnosis.

Why did Freud misunderstand the direction of projection, when it concerned women. Women are not projecting their desires onto men and thereby becoming hysterical because they can’t face the fact that they have desires. Freud’s society was patriarchal and ours are largely the same.


2.  The manipulation of female perceptions that happens AS A RULE under patriarchy is to blame for the states of distress.  It's not the other way around.

Any advances on Freud’s perspectives are very slow in coming, due to the domination of patriarchal ideas in broader culture. What should be very obvious — that people suffer from trauma when they are manipulated — has been turned into a dogma that people suffer because they are afraid of their own sex drives or in some other way “afraid to face reality”.

But, the origins of trauma are much more simple and straightforward. Freud is to some degree an antidote to patriarchal attitudes of sexual repression, but he also reproduces these attitudes because he could not see what was in front of him.


3.  I think a lot can be gained from a kind of wilderness analysis of oneself, so long as patriarchal practitioners are not involved. But if they are, they will reinforce the necessity of the trauma, making it essential for participation in society.

This is not an ideological attack on Freudianism, but just pointing to its limitations. And, unless I have misunderstood, the underlying principles of psychoanalysis are to give people the fortitude to face reality. Only, (and this is where I am pointing out the source of the problem), reality happens to be patriarchal reality, most of the time.

So it works out like this: “Here are the resources you need to face patriarchal reality, which is true reality, the only reality. You need to embrace the necessity of your trauma. You need to lie to yourself as necessary in order to fit in. You must just accept things as they are, without trying to change them.”

I’m not saying that this is what psychoanalysts, or Freud himself, intended. But if patriarchal power itself does not come under scrutiny through psychoanalysis, then psychoanalysis is worse than useless.


4.  The books I’ve read on psychoanalysis, even the most liberal ones, take very gingerly steps toward the possibility of patriarchal values being wrong. Dorpat, for instance, who speaks of “gaslighting” in therapy (i.e. telling the client that they haven’t really experienced what they have), still maintains that most therapists don’t intend to abuse their clients, but that such abuse is ubiquitous by virtue of the therapists making mistakes.

 The mistake is, of course, that the therapists have internalized patriarchal values which depict women as “just silly” or “too sensitive’ or “making it up”.

worth repeating

Bataille gets his lessons from language and the danger of too much consciousness from Nietzsche.

The shaman sees both sides of the psychological coin -- the advantages pertaining to the early world of paranoid-schizoid consciousness, and those that pertain to the adult state of rationality.  

Bataille’s approach, like all shamanistic approaches, seeks to draw dialectic of communication between the two.

 In the paranoid-schizoid state, there are only singularities, with nothing else sufficiently resembling each event enough to acquire the label of being “the same”. It is with this awareness in mind that Bataille rails against the limitations of the “I” that is adopted when we take up language.

The logic of language, which is the inductive method of knowing, makes him seem (to himself) to be one out of all too many human entities who have been linguistically reduced to conceptually simplified forms, rather than the singularity that he knows he is. He finds this “I” to be servile and lacking in the sovereignty that comes from being a singularity — a thoroughly individual self.


Bataille, however, is also keen to use language (the other way of formulating reality) effectively, to convey, if possible, this sense of lack he feels in having to imply that his identity is general and universalisable.


He also expects to fail in his attempt to bridge the two worlds that divide our self-identity, to the degree that we, as readers, lack the capacity to take in a point of view that does not depend on language.


Marechera's Black Sunlight maintains knowledge of the two different modes of being, building a bridge between the paranoid-schizoid position and language.


Thus  Black Sunlight   expresses a shamanistic position that sees reality as having two very different sides to it.