Don't take direction or advice from narcissists

A Small Observation « Clarissa's Blog


I had the opposite experience to Clarissa and I am also not a narcissist. I tried to get explanations for a number of unfortunate circumstances in my life, and people said, “It’s down to you as an individual. There is something wrong with you. You’re not trying hard enough to succeed.” So, I tried even harder. I became hyper-conscious of every word I said and every action I did, and whether it was a prelude to failure or not. My self-consciousness and capacity to analyze myself became extreme. I gave supreme credence to the views of those around me, who perhaps saw something in me that I hadn’t seen. Nothing changed, except that actions that should have been natural and intuitive on my part became orchestrated and deliberate. This was exhausting. I became extremely fatigued, but still the implications were that I was unintelligent and not trying hard enough. I couldn’t figure it out at all.

As I pursued my PhD and gradually became more educated, bit by bit I realized that other people didn’t really know what they were talking about with regard to their “expertise” on my life. There was a turning point — around 2009 — when I realized the “impartial” observer was not necessarily more intelligent than I, either.

In the past few years I’ve been consolidating the knowledge that most of what people assumed to be true about me was based on their own cultural experiences along with their own self-serving psychological projections. This new understanding leads me to consider that I don’t need to get myself all worked up in order to succeed. I’m already highly motivated enough, without adding fuel to my fires. To the contrary, I need to learn to pull back and relax and accept things as they are. Above all I need to stop taking direction or advice from narcissists.

2.

When it comes to trying to figure ourselves out, we often don’t find the answers in any place resembling common sense, especially not in the common sense of the masses. They’re the ones most likely to reinforce a false perception of reality that keeps you operating in the same old ways. I couldn’t work out what daunted me until I realized I was projecting the better part of myself into others. So, when they came up with random pronouncements or critiques, these seemed to be imbued with the authority of someone who really took intellectual ideas seriously, who was very concerned with accuracy and rigor and who had deeply humanitarian impulses…. And yet, if these were the attitudes behind some of the comments, why would those comments have been made at all?

This incongruity between expectation and actuality used to confuse me a great deal, and then, one day, VOILA! -- I realized that people were speaking much more impulsively than I would do, and from a cultural rather than intellectual base. In other words, other people were rarely “like me” at all. I’d been projecting my own qualities into them, and then critiquing myself on the basis of what they'd had to say.

Discrepancies

 Discrepancies between actual behaviour and intent exist, but their meaning is quite complex and far from being easily decipherable. If you see a contradiction between someone's proclaimed intentions and their actual strategies, you will figure out they’re not doing what they claim to be doing, but have some other desired goal. That is a logical deduction.

The discrepancy between claim concerning intention and actual action could have quite a few explanations, however:.

1. Misunderstanding one’s actual goals and what is required in order to attain them.

2. Misunderstanding as to what one’s goals *ought* to be. One has mistaken goals and is not meeting one’s proclaimed goals, because one is actually in touch with something closer to one’s heart.

3. Alternatively, someone is obviously not facing what they know to be true. But if they know it to be true, this already implies some authenticity on some level.

4. Someone doesn’t actually have goals. The true narcissist, lacking the will or capacity for introspection, makes it up as they go along — leading to many discrepancies between proclaimed intent and actual act.

Secular religiosity and Elevatorgate

Women are made to stand for the entropy driving the universe toward more and more disorder until God (reified Reason) fades away to nothing. Just another irrational power game justifying  of one group of humans dominating another.

Even many secularists get suckered into playing this game --  Richard Dawkins  as, for instance, when he implied that women trying to draw some demarcation lines of their own (which is always a patriarchal no-no, since women are intrinsically without structure) is just so much whining and silliness.

The lines he would draw between rationality and irrationality are consistent with Western culture being quintessentially rational, and cultures where women allegedly or actually suffer more than in Western culture being considered irrational.  This contrast is hardly as stark, in reality, as our metaphysical conceptions would lead us to assume.

training 29 AUGUST

Getting stronger but not necessarily faster.

Patriarchal metaphysics

Judeo-Christian metaphysics maintains that the negative principle of life (woman) must submit to that which is deemed to be the positive principle (man), or else all hell will break out, civilization as such will be doomed and evil will be perpetuated as a general rule.

Everything centers around The Father in the same way as the Earth circles the Sun. Women are considered to be negative or shapeless, unless they get their true essence of being by conformity to patriarchal mores. Ultimately they must submit to a man to find their identity and redeem themselves from evil, which is related to a state of chaos and/or formlessness.

Men are to be considered always the perpetual “victims” of female recalcitrance. This is only logical if you assume that the force of evil (chaos) is necessarily more violent and powerful than the force of good (logic and order).  At the same time, since this sense of gender relations is founded not on empirical or psychological facts, but on metaphysical precepts, nothing really changes if women do submit to patriarchal mores.  

Evil in the world is not reduced by submission, since women themselves are  evil, which is metaphysical view that remains intact no matter what women may do.  This is how patriarchal systems justify bringing to bear on women a lot of hostility “for their own good” and to “make them see reason”.  This increases the more the man in charge is feeling unstable -- for he feels a sense of "evil", perhaps fuzzy and undefined, or perhaps interpreted as the devil himself, moving through his agent of women to undermine his psychological resources and cut out his courage.

With their intrinsically back-to-front consciousness, patriarchal systems continue to hold that women inflict harm on poor suffering men who just happen to be in power over them, whenever women act according to their volition.

Canned responses to patriarchs

1. You’re just expressing emotions. Emotions don’t mean anything to me, so I am free to ignore them.

2. You may have said something, but it has no meaning. Can you say it again, in a way that has meaning?

3. Perhaps there is something wrong with your sexuality if you think that way?

4. You seem to be nuts!

5. No, I still can’t quite grasp what you are getting at or why.

6. Are you trying to say this to fulfill your biological urges or reproductive whims? It seems rather narrow, and I cannot grasp it from my heights.

moi

Rounds on 27 Aug 2012

Improving

A letter to a friend

Dear Friend

There is no "human nature" apart from a certain desire to expand creatively and a certain desire to accommodate those close to us and belong.   Creative expansion need not be considered negatively, in a winner takes it all sense.   One can give to others through one's creativity.   Perhaps the problem is with having any fixed idea of human nature in relation to it being either good or evil. It is neither.

The trend to want more and more does not occur in a vacuum but is part of the capitalist cultural matrix.  The market can only expand if there are enough consumers to drive it forward.   We are encouraged, therefore, to want things we do not need, in order to expand the market.  

Communism, on the other hand, may not allow for the need to take risks and to experiment, which are features of life that make us feel alive.   That may be down to trying to fix a concept of  "human nature" as being socially, rather than individually, defined.

My writing draws from Nietzsche, through Bataille and Marechera.   They represent different human generations, each attempting to come to terms with social reality as it unfolds.   What attracted me to these writers is that they do all, generally, have a theory of what it means to be human, but in a way that doesn't posit or necessitate a particular social or political agenda.   They each have an axe to grind, but they are all thoroughly honest about their own mentalities -- what cultural theorists call "self-reflexive".  So, you can say, well Nietzsche wanted to rid the world of monotheistic religion, whilst he tended to be a bit misogynist.  Bataille wanted to rid the world of wage-slavery.   Marechera hated colonialism and Zimbabwean "socialism".   But they all transcend their respective hostilities and agendas, because you can take much more from them than that, by way of their keen observation of life.   You can also learn much about how the individual's psyche is structured.   You learn there is a death instinct and a creative drive.  All these writers have pushed themselves to their limits in pursuit of knowledge, so you also learn what it looks like when somebody does this.   This is "intellectual shamanism" -- the free exploration of one's subjectivity.  Most people would rather do anything else, but it is the only way to make an ongoing and fresh cost-benefit analysis in order to effectively run one's life.

If everybody did this, certainly the system would be fixed.  People would no longer crave what they didn't really need, like petty addicts.   People would no longer moralize about what others are doing with their "human nature" because they would be so busy investigating their own.  The fact that most people don't even know what they want, but are inclined to go along with another person's program means they are easily manipulated and their individual nature is distorted.   They are pulled out of shape and turned into something they don't necessarily want to be, and they don't seem to care.

Probably, though, not enough people want to take up the challenge of radical individualism, in order to find out what they want.   I think global warming will take its course and reduce the global population, whereupon there will be a different social order to the present one, with a different sort of elitism.   Perhaps there will be no pretence at democracy, since the idea of democracy seems to have run its course, with an increasingly cynical leadership (such as in the US) that does not care what the populace thinks of it.  I imagine different sorts of societies will spring up, based on formulas not yet tried.

Anyway, not my problem.  My program is to mock those who decline to act for themselves whilst they use the rhetoric that humans are just animals and we cannot help ourselves.  I concur with them that they are apes.

Jennifer

Listening to words and self-deception

A lot of what many conservatives say can seem like random ideas or speculations, not necessarily coherent, until you unpack them.Consider the poster below I made from the leader of the Australian opposition party’s words.

Click to engorge

Try to ignore the images, in the first instance, which I supplied to show the ramifications of this conservative’s agenda.On the surface of it, the speaker is simply calling for honesty and for balance in our thinking. We could read his words as saying, “Let’s not get all overwrought just because a boss, or other male representative does something wrong, sinning a bit. Instead, let’s open our hearts and realize that he does more good than harm.”

In fact, this seeming call for leniency and kindness hides a fundamental patriarchal ideological structure which is directly patterned by those right-wingers in the US who argue that it’s not so bad to be raped because at least that brings a child into the world.

So, Tony Abbott,  our opposition leader, is implicitly arguing that male energy, no matter how forcefully or wrongfully applied, is always for the good.  His words appeal to a traditional, metaphysical view that female energy is only ever passive and reactive, so it requires male energy to give it meaning, force and shape. That is why having a rapist’s child might be a good thing in the dark minds of sordid fellows — because a rapist is the embodiment of male energy and women allegedly need male energy if they are to become something other than dark matter.

Similarly, even a vicious boss or wife-battering husband could be considered to be doing women some good, by exposing women to the necessary male energy that she needs to come into being in a meaningful way. This is actually the conservative ideology that underlies a text that could otherwise seem benign or genteel to some ears.

2. "Metaphysical" means imaginary. 
It means it has no relationship to reality. Nonetheless, many people live their lives as if metaphysical notions about the world were true. If enough people do that, it can change the real texture and experience of reality for a lot of people. To take one example, if women believe they are inherently passive they will wait for men to act, and not enjoying life on their own terms. That is why metaphysical precepts are so insidious.

Who said this and why?

Revisiting THE ALLEY

Apelike levels of consciousness predominate when people are under stress. This is most extreme in the case of war, but also true with the simple fact of an excess population in relation to natural resources and space. In Marechera's drama, the black veteran and the white one have survived the WAR but lost much of their sanity, since they have attempted to seal off their wartime atrocities behind a wall of unconsciousness. The illusion that people maintain is that this can be successfully achieved. It cannot. Uncontrolled regression (for there is a controlled sort), even temporary uncontrolled regression, is costly. Both men were lawyers but have now become tramps. They may have thought the damage they were inflicting was far from home, but it was on women close to them. The pretext for war is that males must protect the women and children close to them, but it is precisely the women and children who are killed by war. At the same, time while the war lasts it seems to free the libido.

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

On difference and culture

When I was doing my course on postmodernism at an honors level, I stated that my background and early culture had nothing in common with Western culture, particularly urbanized Western culture. The lecturer moved instantly to misinterpret and obfuscate what I’d said by informing me that there was no need to feel left out, as he had himself been brought up in rural Western culture.

This reaction, which is the rule, suggests that even very educated people have an enormous degree of difficulty processing the fact that others may simply think differently from them, due to cultural factors. And, no, it’s not that we “want to”, or that we “need to feel we are special” or that we have “made choices” — all fundamentally Western tropes. It’s not an issue of hidden motivations. We’re not deciding not to belong in order to become the new form of revolutionary soap powder on the market. It’s not a strategy or a means to vie for power. And, furthermore, just because we have to repeat that we don’t have a strategy because the fact that we are different is denied, doesn’t mean we are “protesting too much” and therefore do have a strategy.

It’s just the simple sense of being different that is an unacceptable fact to Western ears.

Who is Dambudzo Marechera and what does he mean to me?

Not too many people outside of Zimbabwe have heard the name of Dambuzo Marechera,  while many have heard of Chinua Achebe, whose 1958 work, Things Fall Apart, was hailed as the definitive African novel. For Marechera, as well as for me and so many others of the generation whose parents fought the second Chimurenga or Rhodesian civil war, things fell apart, as well, in more ways than we could have told.

We were the children of our parents – and therein lay a problem. Neither Marechera nor I had any choice in the matter. Marechera was born in 1952, into a rural community in what is now Zimbabwe. When he was about to turn 16, I was born. His awareness of politics and the world around him would have taken form in his teenage years, when the white colonial regime of Rhodesia declared its independence from Britain, thus crystalising the political structure of the society as a system which would probably be white-ruled for a long time to come.

I was born three years after pronouncement of white independence. Five years before I was born, the country had seen the beginnings of a guerilla war – for there were those who wanted their independence from the whites, whilst the whites wanted their independence from Britain. So, I was born into a situation that had a backdrop of guerilla war and suppression of black ‘insurgency’. I was born on the white side of the fence, in glorious and expansive rural style suburbia. Marechera was born into rural huts and ultimately into the black ghetto of Vengere Township. Given these obvious differences, what can we have in common?

The question might well be asked, and the most honest answer is that we were both children of our parents. Black and white we may be, but neither of us decided to afflict war on each other. That was a decision undertaken by those who represented our parents. Marechera and I were both in some sense born on the wrong side of the fence. The global community was for the black guerilla fighters and against the white oppressors, and yet, actually, they were taking sides with one or other of our parents. We – the children of our parents – were never asked about our views. We were never given a choice.

So it was that Marechera, child of his parents, grew up struggling against the tide. Offered an education in English, he was keen to follow through to get out of his ghettoised environment. Meanwhile, his parents raged against him learning English, causing him to burn his school books in anguished confusion or protest. I, however, the child of my parents, was caused to emigrate a few years after the guerilla war had ended with the country falling into the hands of a black majority.

Being the child of my parents, the war didn’t end there for me. In fact, it was only just beginning. For little did I realise that sacrifices do not go unrequited. The Rhodesian war only began for me, upon migration to Australia, when I had come of age. I was 16 at the age of my Zimbabwean exit. It was the year 1984. We had barely found our feet in an altogether different culture, when it was already time for me to requite the parental sacrifice.

It began with condemnation that came about because I was both socially lost on one hand, and that I was seen to be adapting to what must have been presumed to be the nefarious and decadent values of the first world, on the other. Poor adaptation and the cultural values that I had adopted through partial assimilation meant that all my parents’ sacrifices to keep up an ideological purity had been entirely in vain. I was not growing up with the values that they had battled for against Dambudzo’s parents. So, I was worse than a traitor, from my parents’ point of view. I was somebody who was undoing history – and undoing them, in the process. Each difficult step I made towards adaptation to the new and foreign culture earned its punishment. To break me down and make me repent was my parents’ goal – the unspoken agenda they had against my growing up in ways which hadn’t been prescribed.

This brings me to why I relate so much to Marechera. Reading his works, I am made aware of how the simplicities of our parents – and indeed of the global community, in supporting one faction of our parents against another parental faction – have led to intellectually impoverished perspectives. Marechera and I have both revolted against moral, social and political oversimplifications, in favour of a level of understanding that takes into account the human elements of suffering, and what it means to be historically (and socially) contingent beings – the children of our parents.

Reading Marechera’s works, I encounter the complexities of emotional life, in forms which do not compromise the meanings of experiences, in order to please the powers that be. Marechera writes in a complex way and this complexity is his integrity, for as he says:

The tyranny of straightforward things is more oppressive and more degrading than such idle monstrosities as life and death, apartheid and beer drinking, a stamp album and Jew-baiting. One plus one equals two is so irrefutably straightforward that the unborn child can see that even if man was wiped off the face of the earth one plus one would always and forever-equal two. [92]

Round Four Of Four

A very light round, going very easy on each other.

From 2010: gender and civilization (it's a cultural affair, stupid)

I have trouble trying to see males, per se, as more rational than I. That doesn't work for me, and I can't seem to make this contemporary paradigm make any sense.

Confirmed somewhat from my recent trip to Zimbabwe, I get a sense that the culture there still views women as representing "civilisation" and men as representing the wild man, as part of "nature". If I am right that this really is how most colonial whites see it, it also confirms that this is probably how I was brought up to see it, too.

If so, this would particularly account for my suspicion about gender roles in Western culture. After all, it would have been an effective switch, for me, to have start to see myself in terms of "nature" (at least at the subconscious level) whilst seeing males as representing the opposite symbolic pole of "civilisation" as such.

I needed to make that switch in my thinking to adapt successfully, to a very different culture, -- and I did not.

The more recent (or, in other terms, "urban") male strategy of dominance -- choosing to identify with civilisation and not with nature -- seems linked to the world moving away from frontier cultures (wherein men were supposed to guard the peripheries) towards urban cultures. In this latter case, hierarchies, represented by the metaphor of the skyscraper, seem more apt. This is a case of men on top, women on the bottom.

***

... which would explain the nature of my project: a desperate effort to try to inscribe myself into "nature" and into the realm of emotion, to adapt -- an effort that ultimately failed, since I have now chosen non-adaptation, not fitting in, as my only realistic recourse. And why I now see a large part of the memoir as representing a project that failed, at least in Western terms although not in relation to African culture.

Patriarchal psychology and projection

Patriarchal types always complain that nobody ever manages to explain to them in a logical or coherent way what patriarchy is and why it must be abolished. Some of those more contemporary ones may in fact read the words of feminists, but these words have no meaning to them, or if they do, the words seem "hysterical", "crazy", "emotional", "reactive", "oversensitive" and "exaggerated".

In every one of these descriptions, we have precisely the patriarchal perception of WOMAN.  Patriarchal readers, some of whom may be women themselves, are unable to register any range of experience that is not already part of their conscious self-identity.   They wish to identify themselves with the opposite characteristics to those listed above.   Those opposite expressions to this are what patriarchal people view as "masculine".

When a patriarchal fellow is unable to understand the substance of the words he is reading, but instead finds himself tripped up by pejorative expressions that enter his mind, guess who is tripping him up?  He is responsible for reading the characteristics he doesn't want to be identified with into the written word, to the extent that he cannot make coherent sense of what is written, but keeps asking for another explanation.

Such a fellow has no doubt already been told many things by feminists, but he cannot remember any of them, because he has been so intent on projecting the qualities he considers to be negative out of himself and into the text he has been reading.  After that, he can feel disgusted with the text, but not disgusted with himself.   So far as he is concerned, he is empty, free, an undefined essence floating above everything.   Nothing moves him. He is a human being without emotion, without physical body.

Such is the nature of patriarchal projection.  Patriarchal people have been rendered insane by their ideologies, but it is always a woman who are viewed as being "mad" whenever a patriarch cannot digest her words to him.

What is projected into women by the patriarch is actually and precisely the insanity engendered in the patriarch's mind as a result of his patriarchal ideological training.

A strange thing happened to me on the way to the theatre...

SNOW

My fantastic dream last night was about navigating snowy, mountainous terrain.  The scenery was wonderful, the environment just dangerous enough to look challenging without actually being so.  

In truth, I have never seen snow.  My working theory is that it's just sugar and salt mixed together.  These are not threatening in themselves, although it's questionable as to why some people would desire to sprinkle them all over their terrain.  

I, personally, prefer the warmer climes and wonder why some people generate the snows of their discomfort.

Be warm, I say.  Enjoy life a little more than you do.  Try not to fret.

Energy fields versus projection

1.  Shamanistic usages of language Shamanisms learn to speak very indirectly about reality.  As Georges Bataille points out in his Unfinished System of Nonknowledge  verbal communication sets itself at odds with the physical body and its vicissitudes.   To communicate completely, one does not communicate with language, but non-linguistically.  "We feel each other through our wounds," he said, thus suggesting shamanic access to  another dimension of knowledge, not through suffering as such, but through the internalization of knowledge as a result of wounding.  To draw a distinction here between two levels of communication is vital.

 Crude psychoanalytic interpretations would tend to make out the shaman to be one who whines about wounding whilst justifying false ways of seeing the world, to make himself feel better.  So, psychoanalysts may set out to defeat what it sees as a competing system of interpretation of the world, by distorting its claims.  The willful nature of this misunderstanding is obvious because it does not distinguish between a wound and the person who has it.  Whereas psychoanalytic distortions would have the wound seem to speak for and on behalf of itself, in shamanism, the shaman masterfully speaks on behalf of his wounds and furthermore uses his incidental wounding and the understanding it brings to heal others.

 In the case of Bataille's form of shamanism, the "wounds" are the sexual organs, which he considered a wound to language itself, as a system that aims to be closed and complete, capable of accounting for everything and making all of reality seem rational.   The physicality of the body itself  prevents the formal dimensions of language to close the circle of meaning, in terms of giving a full account of everything in the world.

 This suspicion of language is expressed in all forms of shamanism, which attempt to address the problems associated with the body in a more direct way than via language.   To the end of addressing the body and not the mind, language may be "twisted" so that the shamanic seer can use it to "look around corners". Marechera uses this expression in The Black Insider, where he criticizes logical formulations for degrading the more human dimensions of reality.

The tyranny of straightforward things is more oppressive and more degrading than such idle monstrosities as life and death, apartheid and beer drinking, a stamp album and Jew-baiting. One plus one equals two is so irrefutably straightforward that the unborn child can see that even if man was wiped off the face of the earth one plus one would always and forever-equal two.

The "unborn child" is one who cannot yet speak, who can be readily victimized by narrow forms of logic that would easily be able to erase humanity.  The "unborn child" is also the non-rational state of the shamanistic seer.   Huge aspects of reality are more readily observable when one has learned not to depend on language.

2.  When shamans work with "energy fields", they are referring to the ability one needs to have to defend oneself against projective identification.  This term has gained meaning in psychoanalysis as implying that someone has injected their own needs and values into another person to get them to play a particular function on their behalf.   These functions are to express emotional attitudes that area already in another person but which he doesn't have the confidence or the courage to express.

Shamans work to develop a strong "energy vest"  for the one who has become ill, to enable her to resist future attempts to control her.   A shaman's incantations are sung to create a sense of wholeness about identity, defined as integral bodily sensations. Future assaults against the integral wholeness of the victim will from now on be understood by her in terms of what they are, and not being unconsciously accommodated. 

Having developed a sense of energy fields, one is cured, since one now understands when one's own energy field has been violated.   Should a "dart" be fired in one's direction, one can choose to ignore it, or to return the dart to the original owner.  There is nothing mysterious about the fact that darts and energy fields exist, except for the terminology.  The means by which assaults take place, as well as their psychological meanings,  can be accounted for in the earlier mentioned term of projective identification.

 Shamans take knowledge of energy fields a step further than others do in psychoanalysis, however.   An advanced shaman will conduct effective ideological warfare by observing another's energy field and sending "darts" into the field of another to disrupt their mental ability to work. It was said that shamans used to lob mountains at each other.

sparring 20 August 2012

The classical music background is a riot.

Listen to your body

Completely Open Thread « Clarissa's Blog

I  agree with this: “I believe that it is important to listen to your body when it tries to tell you through sickness that something is not OK instead of trying to shut it up with pills and potions.”

I would be working a job that was entirely wrong for me, not be in a relationship, and identify with a defunct ideology, had I not listened to my body. Listening is vital,  but this implies developing a different sense of identity from the one that remains resolute in one position, as if rigidity were a sign of strength.

Nietzsche:
To the despisers of the body will I speak my word. I wish them neither to learn afresh, nor teach anew, but only to bid farewell to their own bodies,—and thus be dumb.
“Body am I, and soul”—so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children?
But the awakened one, the knowing one, saith: “Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body.”
The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.
An instrument of thy body is also thy little sagacity, my brother, which thou callest “spirit”—a little instrument and plaything of thy big sagacity.
“Ego,” sayest thou, and art proud of that word. But the greater thing—in which thou art unwilling to believe—is thy body with its big sagacity; it saith not “ego,” but doeth it.
What the sense feeleth, what the spirit discerneth, hath never its end in itself. But sense and spirit would fain persuade thee that they are the end of all things: so vain are they.
Instruments and playthings are sense and spirit: behind them there is still the Self. The Self seeketh with the eyes of the senses, it hearkeneth also with the ears of the spirit.
Ever hearkeneth the Self, and seeketh; it compareth, mastereth, conquereth, and destroyeth. It ruleth, and is also the ego’s ruler.
Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage—it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body.
There is more sagacity in thy body than in thy best wisdom. And who then knoweth why thy body requireth just thy best wisdom?
Thy Self laugheth at thine ego, and its proud prancings. “What are these prancings and flights of thought unto me?” it saith to itself. “A by-way to my purpose. I am the leading-string of the ego, and the prompter of its notions.”*
The Self saith unto the ego: “Feel pain!” And thereupon it suffereth, and thinketh how it may put an end thereto—and for that very purpose it is meant to think.
The Self saith unto the ego: “Feel pleasure!” Thereupon it rejoiceth, and thinketh how it may ofttimes rejoice—and for that very purpose it is meant to think.
To the despisers of the body will I speak a word. That they despise is caused by their esteem. What is it that created esteeming and despising and worth and will?
The creating Self created for itself esteeming and despising, it created for itself joy and woe. The creating body created for itself spirit, as a hand to its will.
Even in your folly and despising ye each serve your Self, ye despisers of the body. I tell you, your very Self wanteth to die, and turneth away from life.
No longer can your Self do that which it desireth most:—create beyond itself. That is what it desireth most; that is all its fervour.
But it is now too late to do so:—so your Self wisheth to succumb, ye despisers of the body.
To succumb—so wisheth your Self; and therefore have ye become despisers of the body. For ye can no longer create beyond yourselves.
And therefore are ye now angry with life and with the earth. And unconscious envy is in the sidelong look of your contempt.
I go not your way, ye despisers of the body! Ye are no bridges for me to the Superman!—
Thus spake Zarathustra.


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*  Note the shamanistic doubling in the form of the self and ego.  The self observes and judges one's behavior as a whole.  One's ego would do well to listen to it when things start going wrong.

Shamanism and monotheism

Due to the nature and intensity of opposition to the intellectual shamanistic paradigm, I understood there is a formidable amount of emotional investment in the view that both morality and knowledge have predetermined structures.  These are thought to be made known though the inspiration of certain wise men, whilst being inaccessible to women.  Nietzsche, too,  can be read as promulgating a foundationalist position in the pattern of old testament prophets whose oracles were only decipherable by those of the greatest spiritual elevation. Many of his contemporary readers believe that belonging to the generic category, "men", suffices for one to understand Nietzsche's works.

Shamanistic literature is much more evasive than foundationalist texts about who has the right to understand it.  Nietzsche's naming of one of his works as Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is very much within the shamanistic tradition, which appeals to a heightened subjectivity.  If the book appeals to you, it is "for" you, but otherwise it isn't.

In contradistinction to this are the quintessentially patriarchal texts of the Christian God and Allah.  All foundationalist texts seem to fall from the sky already formed but in actual fact are the products of much prevarication and revision.  Given that none of the patriarchal texts lie on a firm foundation, despite the vigorous promotion of the opposite idea, monotheistic religion does not have a better leg to stand on than shamanistic texts.  The idea, "these texts are true because they have an authoritative source", does not seem to hold up where patriarchal authority is shown to be multiple, historically variable, subject to the political climate and ultimately devoid of an actual God to assure the authenticity of all interpretations.

Herein lies the advantage of shamanistic writing, in that it does not require one to first believe in anything in order to gain benefits from it.   One can read Carlos Castandena's Don Juan without any concern as to whether it is a reliable text.   If Castaneda was in a sense Don Juan himself, having made up all the information and advice, the value of the text remains unaltered.   Psychological trickery is fundamental to shamanism, just as it is a means by which its wisdom can be communicated.    Nietzsche adoption of the tone of an old-testament prophet, despite being nothing of the sort and indeed inimical to the aims of religiously inspired persons, is a concession to the shamanistic spirit of mockery as a means for communicating wisdom. So if you come to the ultimate conclusion that you have been "had" by a shamanistic text, perhaps this is the principle lesson of life you needed learn all along: the meaning and value of skepticism.

According to the principles of shamanism, what one says doesn't have to be True, but it has to work.   By contrast, patriarchal reasoning demands that something has to be true when it is based on authority.  However, it can neither show that its principles work, nor produce its authority.  One may not be better off with shamanistic texts, but at least one is not worse off.   

Identity fetishism

My best metaphor for my impressions of Western individualism and how it often functions, comes from the engineering of the Titanic. I'm not sure why this imagery sticks with me. It surely cannot be that I suppose Western society to be doomed. My selection of this imagery probably has more to do with the idea that Western society is a piece of construction or engineering -- more so than African societies tend to be (in ways I will one day go on to describe).

At the bottom of the Titanic were compartments, which made her seemingly unsinkable. These were large walls in the belly of the boat, separating sections of the engine room, one from the other. Unfortunately these walls did not extend up to their ceiling, but stopped some way from it. The purpose of these dividing walls was that if the ship began to take in water, only one or two of the compartments would be filled. The rest would not be flooded as the dividing walls would prevent this. Obviously, for various reasons which I shall not go into here, this engineering safety plan didn't work.

How are individuals of late capitalism like the individual compartments in the Titanic? Well, for a start, they are emotionally very compartmentalized. That is the force and structure of Western individualism: It has the effect of emotionally compartmentalizing people, which often makes direct communication of emotional ideas and feelings into quite a feat. For instance, I have struggled for ages to get some people to understand some of the experiences I've had. It's very hard for many people to grasp what others want to say to them because the walls of conceptualization of ideas build up around each person, cordoning them off as "an individual", so that the urgency of a quick, sharp cry, "Help! I'm being abused!" is rarely heard -- and if it is heard, it is rarely acknowledged unless one is fortuitous enough to be surrounded by like company.

When walls of ideological meaning grow up around one -- as is common in a highly conceptualizing and emotionally repressed society -- sometimes it feels as if the only people who will attend to one's cry are those who have an ideological axe to grind. These may be precisely the sorts of people one does not want to be understood by, least of all 'helped'.

Contemporary people, I think, live in a state of great emotional repression, generally. Probably this is a feature of their adaptation to modern industrialism, with its tendency to atomize and fragment otherwise naturally growing communities.

The late capitalist individual must therefore put a lot of emotional emphasis on the few emblems of individuality allowed to him or her. These are those insignia and icons I have suggested in posts below. So much emotional potency, so much unfulfilled human potential is invested in so very little -- an external form of some sort, for example the way I wear my hat, or the coloured contact lenses I invest in, or the car I buy. Threaten a Westerner's belief in his insignia, and you symbolically undermine the whole personality of the Westerner himself.

The bourgeois individual will repress her passions out of a feeling of necessity. It's common wisdom that this is what it takes to put bread on the table: One submits to the boss and grinds one's teeth, or quietly resigns oneself to a mechanical necessity of routine and conformity. Yet the more that one represses hope and passions, the more one's insignia burn with the fateful potency accumulated from all of one's repressed or unexpressed desires. Within these few signs resides all of the Westerner's belief in his true self: the underlying passion of his repressed individualism!

Whereas a typical cultural individualist will not feel entitled to object when the boss steps his  famed boot upon the repressed worker's frail and emotionally emaciated hand, the same person does feel entitled to express his outrage if some unwary stranger manages to inadvertently insult his prized notions concerning his category and status -- after all he believes he is this narrow, factional identity.  Along with it, politically he sinks.

training 15 AUGUST

A Surprising Realization « Clarissa's Blog

A Surprising Realization « Clarissa's Blog

Clarissa's writing yesterday got me thinking.  I hadn't realized it was possible to suffer from formlessness.  I may have suffered from it in my early twenties, when I craved a rite of passage to test me, teach me the lessons of adulthood and what society means and how it works.   That was a period in my life when it would have been good for me to begin learning martial arts.  More generally, though, she and I are polar opposites. Whereas she agonizes over formlessness, I have had to try to find ways to escape the imposition of too much form.

This is why people who come along and try to shape me for any reason earn themselves the status of my mortal enemy. I have my own internal structure and I'm capable of reaching a fever point in self-discipline.   What I don't need is someone coming along and arbitrarily trying to impose some structure on something they can't see.   What I need is to extract the heat, to take off some of the pressure of being fully-formed and to be allowed for moments at a time to enter formlessness.

I have nothing to fear from formlessness, unlike the fear I have of too much structure, especially when the new structures imposed are unrelated to my existing structures.   To calculate multiple opposing principles and conform to all of them means the temperature rises to the point that I can no longer think. I need simplicity and clarity in order to continue to achieve my tasks.

Psychological structure  has always been a part of my life to the extent that I've internalized a sense of structure fully.  I never have to fear losing control or devolving into a state of formlessness, because my early childhood life had more structure in it than I've experienced since.   Above all, my primary school had an extremely military structure.  We marched everywhere in single file, recited our times table and greeted our teachers by standing up whenever one entered the room.   We were yelled at, threatened and sometimes subjected to corporal punishment -- a ruler on the knuckles for inattentiveness.  That was how I grew up, by internalizing the necessity for such discipline.  Should I drink alcohol or move away from places where form is directly imposed, I still retain this form within myself.  

But impose yet another layer of form on me that takes no account of my early training, and I'm in danger of losing my cool.   I have a form of my own and I don't need two or three more layers of someone else's necessities imposed on top of that.  A Christian cultural tendency for strangers to come along and morally shape others I find reprehensible. Let people be as they are and function according to their identities.   Don't come along and try to mold or rearrange them!

Systems of memory in relation to shamanism

The shamanistic view is different from the psychoanalytic view that holds that psychological projection is an anomalous attitude of reprobates.   In terms of shamanism, absolutely everything one sees, hears or encounters is a projection.   Neurology makes it clear that perception is a function of the brain's incorporation and rearrangement of data.  According to Atul Gawande:

Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.

The information we take in from our ears and eyes is not the same as what we experience.   The brain takes a huge amount of information from the senses and then rearranges it in such a way that a human being can gain advantage from it.  We see what makes sense to us, often by adding to incomplete information by producing information from memory, so that we often encounter precisely what we expect to see. We are the creators of our own realities.

 To go a step further, we don't visually experience the far sides of the color spectrum that beetles and bats may do.  But, had we the needs and desires of insects, our brains would have learned to give us a different range of information.  We would have learned to sense a far wider spectrum including infra-red and ultra-violet.  Becoming aware of these light waves perhaps does not serve us as humans, since this may not give an advantage in indicating  food or sudden danger. 

 Humans and beetles inhabiting the same space will nonetheless experience different qualities to their environments.  What comes to the foreground and what pales into insignificance will not be the same aspects of the terrain.  A friend tells me that on taking LSD one hears all the background noises to life that would ordinarily be filtered from awareness.

 To  have the benefit of vision  enables us to navigate our human worlds effectively as humans.  A parallel world may exist for other species.  Each takes from the sensory environment what will nourish it in terms of what it is.    Taking in too much of reality would obstruct us in our normal activities.   We do well to leave a lot unnoticed.

 On the basis of being separate peoples and cultures, we also automatically impose filtering mechanisms.   I see what I need to see to nourish myself according to my particular needs, desires and capabilities.   I am convinced that others who enter the same environments would not see or experience the same network of meanings that are available to me.  I switch off when confronted with young children, for instance.  I can't focus on them and my brain attempts to block them out.  I'm learning to notice social tensions, but they don't intrinsically interest me, so they are about the last thing I recognize when I enter a new environment.

 When I began my life in Australia I didn't "see" social relationships -- only natural ones.   When I began a new job many years ago, I didn't "see" institutional relationships.  I saw only postmodernist metaphysics, by virtue of which I had been trained to see the world.  I began reading Marechera later and had to get rid of a lot of postmodernist assumptions to understand him.

 Contemporary humans get to move through their environments by throwing off one reality to enter another.   Shamanism enhances the process of gaining knowledge of our worlds by encouraging us to switch off from what we think we know, which is just a neurological projection however useful.   We can't enter another environment so long as we are certain of what we know.   This is only possible by entering a state of uncertainty.  As Bataille says of Nietzsche, out of this striking moment of dissolution a philosophy is born:

Let no one doubt for an instant! One has truly not heard a single word of Nietzsche's unless one has lived this signal dissolution in totality; without it, this philosophy is a mere labyrinth of contradictions, and worse; the pretext for lying by omission (if, like the fascists, one isolates passages for purposes which negate the rest of the work).

In terms of what I have described of shamanism, Nietzsche's way of writing, whether intentionally or not, actually invites a radical rewriting of consciousness on the basis of a fundamental dissolution of reality.  By means of such shamanistic reworking, one's existing projection gets dissolved and is replaced by another, superior mode of looking at the world.  One understands more accurately where nobility fits in and how the majority can tyrannise those who don't see things their way.  This adjustment in seeing, however, leads to handling life more effectively.

New sparring partner

Just the end part of a sparring session

Shamanic injury and blindness

Temporary physical injury and blindness are essential to a shaman, for they ultimately enable him or her to see better.

Shamanic injuries lead to a compulsion to cross a bridge from one side of consciousness into another and in effect to join two opposing levels of consciousness together.  Traditionally, shamans seek to retain the injurious darts in their bodies in order to keep hold of magic power.  Whereas shamanic injury leads to a darkening of normative perceptions, it enhances others.  Blindness forces one to rely on senses other than vision.   Needing to function without sight or health, one develops aspects of one's awareness that would otherwise never be developed.  Nietzsche is typical in this pattern, as is his 20th Century French protégé, Georges Bataille.  The result is a "double vision", whereby two levels of reality can be compared and data extracted from combining their vectors in much the same way as the brain combines information from the left eye and the right eye to produce a third level of consciousness -- depth perception.

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes:

Even my eye trouble, which at times approached dangerously near blinding, was only an effect [of general exhaustion] and not a cause; for, with every improvement of my general bodily health came a corresponding increase in my power of vision. An all too long series of years meant recovery to me. But, sad to say, it also meant relapse, breakdown, periods of decadence. After this, need I say that I am experienced in questions of decadence? I know them inside and out. Even that filigree art of apprehension and comprehension in general, that feeling for nuances, that psychology of "seeing what is around the comer," and whatever else I may be able to do, was first learnt then, and is the specific gift of that period during which everything in me was subtilized-observation itself, together with all the organs of observation. To view healthier concepts and values from the standpoint of the sick, and conversely to view the secret work of the instinct of decadence out of the abundance and self-confidence of a rich life-this has been my principal experience, what I have been longest trained in. If in anything at all, it was in this that I became a master. To-day my hand is skillful; it has the knack of reversing perspectives: the first reason perhaps why a Transvaluation of all Values has been possible to me alone.  (2)

Just a bit later on, he says:

This double series of experiences, this means of access to two worlds that seem so far asunder, finds an exact reflection in my own nature-I have an alter ego: I have a "second" sight, as well as a first. Perhaps I even have a third sight. The very nature of my origin allowed me an outlook transcending merely local, merely national and limited horizons; it cost me no effort to be a "good European." (3) [emphasis added]

As we can see, the representation of "two worlds" of consciousness that have to be bridged by virtue of a necessity stemming from sickness leads to the  sense of having a "third sight" -- implicitly a mystical level of vision.

Contrast the use that a shaman can make out of his constitutional blindness with the normative blindness of the one who sees only one world, that being the vision circumscribed by the felt necessity to conform:

One used to fly by vision and now one flies by radar — blindly, as it were. That is the destiny of women within patriarchal societies – to have to rely upon a set of “civilising” values. That way, their navigation systems can always be jammed if they become too vocal. Women who have been “translated” into beings with now ‘ Civilized’ as opposed to natural mannerisms, have been taught to rely only upon those forms of communication that have been narrowly defined as “sensible” according to expectations which are starched, formal and conservative. How does one live within patriarchal society as a woman? Blindly, and disregarding of one’s own experiences, lest they puzzle and derange one enough that one finally takes action. Women are born to be castrated, according to some.

More sparring #7

The death instinct and its link to pleasure

Skydiving in Zimbabwe December 1999.

Getting on and getting ahead

My mode of adaptation is from living in very stimulating environments. My childhood environment was especially intense like that, with the war going on, so people didn’t really get into the normal apelike behavior of too much preening or sending irrelevant information around the gossip mill. The news we dealt with was always pretty serious.

But then with my father’s semi-emotional breakdown, which became more serious as time went on, it became advisable not to express any emotion at all, for he would misinterpret it inevitably and overreact with violence. Those were my teenage years, when I learned to be very stoical.

Now, I find I have always been at odds with the roles I am expected to play, especially with regard to gender, because I don’t do the grooming behavior of picking fleas out of the other apes’ fur. This is precisely what bores me and drives me crazy. I find it insane when people touch me or comment on what I’m wearing as a way to suggest I ought to make myself more comfortable, or make me hold an infant. I consider the people around me who make me do this to be out of their trees.

In all, I don’t identify with the community of apes, which doesn’t bother me at all, except when it is the requirement for getting on or getting ahead in work.

The "Death Instinct" and shamanism

I had cause to revisit my knowledge of the so-called "death instinct" after reading the following article.

ON THE DEATH OF WHITNEY HOUSTON: Why I Won't Ever Shut Up About My Drug Use | xoJane

Herein, a very beautiful ape expounds:

The life instincts are those that deal with survival, reproduction, pleasure—in other words, instincts that are crucial for sustaining a person’s life, as well as the continuation of the species: thirst, hunger, pain avoidance, love, human interaction and other prosocial actions.
You follow?
But eventually Freud determined that human behavior couldn’t be explained by life instincts alone—and introduced his theory of death instincts, or death drive, or Thanatos.
Freud posited that “the goal of all life is death”, concluding that humans hold an unconscious desire to die—and that self-destructive behavior is an expression of the energy created by the death instincts.
According to this theory, then, if you are not a self-destructive person, your death wishes are under control because they overridden by healthier life instincts.

I shall both add and subtract from this formulation on the basis of my shamanistic understanding.

The "death instinct" is not a self-destructive drive that kicks in automagically in the same ways cells are biologically programmed to die.   Instead the death instinct is the underside of the life instinct, and its constant monitor and guarantor.  The death instinct makes sure the life instinct is on-track, or if not, it withdraws its support for whatever you are doing and forces you to reformulate your goals:

Even in your folly and despising ye each serve your Self, ye despisers of the body. I tell you, your very Self wanteth to die, and turneth away from life.
 No longer can your Self do that which it desireth most:- create beyond itself.
That is what it desireth most; that is all its fervour. But it is now too late to do so:- so your Self wisheth to succumb, ye despisers of the body.
 To succumb- so wisheth your Self; and therefore have ye become despisers of the body. For ye can no longer create beyond yourselves. And therefore are ye now angry with life and with the earth. (Nietzsche, Zarathustra)

Nietzsche speaks of those who have succumbed to the death instinct, because they have embraced a lie about the nature of reality.   They think reality is spiritual and not physical, and therefore the death instinct has  taken charge and is forcing them to either rethink their proposition or to get out of life altogether.

As I have outlined via my interpretation, the death instinct serves the life instinct.   These are not two distinct instincts that could gain the upper hand. The reality is close to Taoism and far removed from Manichean formulations.

That the death instinct is always in service of the life instinct is very good.  Wilhelm Reich, by the way, also noticed that when one does not believe in oneself enough, one sacrifices oneself to those whom one more easily believes in.  This is the death instinct at work, functioning as an evolutionary principle, and removing those who don't believe in themselves so that they do not clutter the scenery.

Why does one not believe in oneself? Because one is on the wrong track, because one has turned against what is ecstatic, vital and good about life, and has adopted negative formulations.

The intervention of the death instinct is not supposed to be final, except in the worst of cases. Mostly, it is just death tapping you on the shoulder, telling you that you have gone off-track.  It may be difficult to figure out where one has erred.  When I received my warning from death, I was in a mode of extreme conformity and emotional repression.  That's when death alerted me that I had to change my ways. I've since done so, and nothing has been the same since.  All my relationships are extremely positive.

Shamanistic death and regeneration works in the same way. One has to face death in order to learn where or how one might have strayed from life's purposes.  Once one has discovered this, one can get back on track. Death no longer has its hold, and Eros (the life instinct) takes over.

CUT YOUR LOSSES

I have learned to cut my losses.  You have to realize that absolutely everybody is projecting.  Not all of those projections are malicious.  That is, not all of them are means to get you to do something or be something in service of someone or something who can't be bothered doing it for themselves.   Some projections are based on cultural stereotypes, or ignorance, or habit, or any number of things.  There are people who talk to me in a way that I don't identify with; that I think I am not.  They don't mean any harm by it and they are not obstructing me, so I don't address this.  There are others who are trying to get a hook into me.  They see my independent spirit and my adventurous attitude and they would like to harness that in service to their own goals, whatever those may be.   This seems craven, so it can be hard to believe it is the intent of some people, but all indications are that this is still what some people want to do.

Philosophical idealism is a huge obstacle to understanding how most people operate -- that is, by projection.   We are taught that people are rational, so therefore if they object to us, or try something on, or appear to engage in mind-games, it must be because we upset them in some way and need to adjust our attitudes.   The idea is rarely entertained that we may have upset them by being different, by operating on different principles, by showing that one can embrace attractive options that they have already rejected.

Everybody is projecting, and many men envy women because we seem to represent the ability to access emotions that these men have denied themselves.   We may be oppressively stereotyped, but that isn't what interests the men who feel deprived of access to their own feelings.

Since this fundamental reality is not considered relevant by most people, I have cut my losses with regard to humanity.   Almost everyone chooses to embrace a great deal of irrationality and to operate by projection to a high degree.  There is nothing that a rational person can do to change this, as no amount of Mea Culpas will turn the whole thing around.   Rationality or subtle adjustments won't work.  Paying attention to what other people claim they need won't work, as they rarely need what they claim they need.  Their deeper need is to get rid of the projective mechanisms as a means of adjusting to the world.   Then they can be whole again, and won't need so much from others.  In the mean time, all their claims and demands are bogus.

Picture: after sparring

after sparring

Round 3

Chasing Mike a bit too much in this one, and just trying to get fitter.

The illogical nature of patriarchal dogmas

The following extracts are from « Broken Daughters, starting at part 7 and working backward.  I selected them because they reveal the internal logic of patriarchal thinking.  One sees this kind of thinking in Freud, in secular authorities and in many systems of religious beliefs.  They are not restricted to fundamentalism, although in that case they become more obvious, less dilute.

1.  Love. Love isn’t an emotion. Our hearts are evil. They are so inexplicably evil that you should never, ever, under any circumstances, trust it. If your heart says left, you better go right. “Love” in a fundamentalist sense means that you submit to your husband fully. You put up with him abusing you. That’s love. You put up with him not making enough money, having his babies every year, cleaning his house and washing his laundry, cooking his food and fulfilling his sexual needs not because of affection but because of “love”, the love that doesn’t know affection for each other, only duty and submissiveness to an authority.

2.  Why did [my father] not give [my mother] praise then? I stumbled over yet another idea. My mom might not be submissive enough. .....

3  Another suggestion of the book [To Train Up A Child by Michael Pearl] is that spanking produces happy, cheerful and content kids. In reality that means: If your child has a bad day, is grumpy and whiney, spank it until it laughs again. I don’t know if that makes sense for you, it certainly doesn’t for me.

 4.  My mother read a lot about raising children God’s way. Though I was spared by the horrors of “To train up a child”, the Pearl’s guidebook to send your child through living hell at this point in my life, my parents were defenders of spanking. A lot, and early. Sin was a child’s nature and you could only get rid of it by beating it out of your kids. I was a nice baby, but that changed soon enough. At a few months age, I apparently started showing signs of terrible sin. I was crying – a lot. I didn’t sleep through the night anymore. My mother was helpless. At that point, my mother was a few weeks pregnant again. I did not stop being a bratty baby. She had a miscarriage a few weeks after I started this “sinful behaviour”. My mom was devasted. He and dad met up with a few elders of the fundamentalist church we went to to get council. They concluded that my sin had brought evil into the house and the Evil One had caused the miscarriage.

Let us work out how these patriarchal principles reverse cause and effect and obfuscate logic
.

1.  In the first passage, logic is obfuscated by the idea that your internal coordinates are all wrong.   Whatever you have a natural inclination to do, you should do the opposite.  That is the only way to rectify evil.  Personally,  I once acknowledged that I could tell what would be beneficial for me to do in life by what a particular fundamentalist Christian strongly demanded I ought not to do.   My life has come out very well as a result of using my own instincts and accepting that I had to read his injunctions in the reverse.

2.  The second passage.  We can see once again a reversal of logic so that it flows in exactly the opposite direction.   If the appointed leader isn't do his job look for the answer in those he has power over.   The powerless are to blame for those having power not expressing it appropriately.

3.   Violence produces happiness -- this is expressed as an explicit principle of life.   If someone is having problems, if they are down, it is possibly because they haven't been kicked enough.  Kick a person enough when he is down and he will rise up again, and thank you for it.

4.  Children are inherently sinful and their sin is a disease that can spread to contaminate the whole family, causing misfortune to their parents.  Children really are that powerful.  By comparison to children, parents seem to have no power at all -- the exact opposite to what we all know is actually true.

I hope I have elucidated the outrageous and calamitous nature of patriarchal reasoning and how it reverses cause and effect necessarily and consistently.

From my own experiences having been brought up in a Christian household, and from ongoing experience and studies, I have concluded that patriarchal ideology of any sort is wholly dependent on turning things back-to-front, to make reality look inside-out -- the opposite to what it should.

I've also discovered that this way of thinking is so widespread that often we invoke patriarchy's back-to-front reasoning without even realizing it.  Many secularists are as guilty of this as their raging fundamentalist brothers and sisters.

Even Freud is not devoid of mental gymnastics, in contempt of plain logic.   I believe I have finally understood the core Freudian notion of the Oedipus Complex as a prohibition against following your heart -- for you will surely f*ck your mother and kill your father, if you do so -- the worst outcome possible and the most evil.  Priestly reasoning illogically enjoins one to follow the opposite of what one's heart dictates, or at least submit to the priest and his form of "reason". Failing to submit to patriarchal authorities (who obfuscate logic), you will only end up physically proving how evil you actually are. Herein is the quintessentially patriarchal double-bind.

Marechera's writing

When I decided to study Marechera for my PhD, I was attracted to his writing from the outset by the sense of honesty I found in various quotes of his I'd found. I immediately felt that this was a person who knew himself very, very well, and was not afraid to say something just because it didn't fit a pattern of socialization or acculturation which might have been more acceptable. I thought this  subject was worthy of my PhD studies. Since these early stages, my esteem for this writer has only grown in multiples. I find him a difficult writer because he is not lacking in depth.

It is hard for a person to read a writer of another culture whilst understanding his or her depth. I chose Marechera to study, specifically, because he came from the same region of the world that I did. I thought that this would help me to understand him. It did-- but psychologically, at times, I've felt almost that I had bitten off just as much as I could chew. Specifically, I have been shocked at what I have understood -- the viciousness of poverty, the extremity of social alienation which leads to madness.

I approached Marechera with a sensibility of one who is also alienated. (For a further elucidation of the nature of this, read the end part of my autobiography, which is attached to my profile on this blogger.) I followed his writings through the logic of my own alienation, with the implicit understanding that alienation is actually a form of logic. What I read and saw in my mind's eye appalled me. I saw someone who believed in himself -- despite overwhelming social pressures not to. This was someone who saw the preservation of his sanity as being dependent upon staying the course of personal independence from dominant and dominating social forces. He stayed the course -- and paid the ultimate price with his life.

This was my  mind-shattering insight into the persona of Marechera. He refused to submit -- and a price was subtracted for that. Marechera's own life speaks to us about the violence of society.

Trying to relate to Marechera's writing requires mental and emotional conditioning. It is as if, I -- being a semi-contact fighter -- decided one day, for reasons best ascribed to a sudden spark of daring masquerading as madness, to go up against a full contact amateur fighter.

Marechera writes in many ways like a self-trained, intuitive fighter. He ducks and weaves a lot -- it can be hard, at times, to find a "self" within his writing. As a reader, you find his self evades you, time after time. Sometimes you manage to pin him down, to land some contact with the subject hiding behind the text -- but not for long. A close reading of Marechera's Black Sunlight will leave an engaged reader feeling the gasp and retraction of far too many body blows. He is a hard writer -- in all too many senses.

One can learn a lot about writing from reading Marechera. I learned enough from him about the hardness of life in order to finish my autobiography, which had been screaming, in the half-birth position, for a number of years.

Marechera's writing is audacious and nothing if not confrontational. He deals with the ongoing issue of preserving human dignity in the face of extreme unfairness, poverty and oppression.

His writing is not only rich thematically, but also stylistically. He adopts a casual and extremely bold approach to style -- appropriating aspects from all different stylistic systems; often with the effect of a humourous juxtaposition of anomalous cultural ideas and content.

His writing has been underestimated because he chose not to be constrained by notions of conventionalism (artistically and socially) -- especially ideas about how someone of his race and (originally, peasant) class ought to write. He is still not read as widely as he should be read today because of various unconscious social prejudices -- not just literary prejudices, which concern style.

Piggy

Many have the view that power in divided equally, that one need only speak one's mind in order to be heard to the degree that one's position is intrinsically reasonable or rational.  I was once deluded by precisely this ideology. My path, via shamanism, was the way out of this illusion.

Systems reproduce power relations.  Consider:

Piggy on the Railway
Picking up stones;
Down came an engine,
And broke Piggy’s bones. ‘Ah !’ said Piggy,
“That’s not fair,”
“Oh !” said the engine driver,
“I don’t care !”

Who feels sorry for Piggy?  One may wish to take his side, but ultimately one sides with the engine driver.  Piggy didn't need to choose the railway line to pick up his stones. I certainly would not have done so.

Reason re-contextualizes Piggy's suffering as perfectly fair, since one ought to know better than to pick up stones on a railway.

Reason has its place and that is to bring home the bacon and Piggy has to learn to comply with the established order, if he doesn't want to face unpleasant consequences.

Yet Piggy's idea of fairness is to be a pig picking up stones.  The engine driver's sense of meaning is to do his job.  There is something in the pig that is saying something other than, this is not fair, according to the rational notions of the engine driver.   This something protests unfairness in altogether different terms -- in terms of being a pig.

This hidden voice is significant to shamanism -- shamanistic techniques recover these.

Judeo-Christian culture

In terms of whether one gets along easily in Western society, having a Judeo-Christian outlook can help. It’s good to be able to see just about everything in moral terms. I’ve never had much interest in doing this.

Even when people go to the gym, although certainly not when they train with me, there’s an implicit expectation of some kind of moral input. You’re supposed to be improving yourself or making yourself fit for the sake of society. It’s never just about what you are doing and doing it well. But I can’t grasp the issue of how self-esteem fits into this project of making oneself morally better. I tread on people’s self esteem because I don’t think it’s an issue. You should want to learn a skill, rather than aiming to gain belief in yourself.

I’ve only ever been able to attain that sense of freedom not in a social setting but by working alone — and usually against the grain.

Why care what people think?

Why does one care what anybody thinks?

The bourgeois ideal is that we spring whole, from our father's heads, like Athena appeared out of the head of Zeus and "pealed to the broad sky her clarion cry of war." (Pindar, Seventh Olympian Ode).

This is perfectly ideal and I admire the aesthetic.    It comes with the injunction, "Thou ought not to care what others think."  Now that I am older, I understand the double-prohibition of the Western ideal.   Its other side is:  "You don't listen.   You think too much of yourself.  Pay attention to what others say."

Perhaps these two conflicting principles are supposed to guide you to a resolution via the golden mean.  Nietzsche prefers the blunt term, "mediocrity".  A moral resolution out of two opposing principles results in only this.

The contradiction in terms that is bourgeois culture has its answer in shamanism.   One stops thinking.  One genuinely doesn't care.   That is, one embraces the benign aspects of Thanatos (the death instinct), thus allowing life to take care of itself.   The shaman enshrouds herself in the cloak of death, thus turning all intentions into spirit.   NOT DOING is the answer to aggression.  One doesn't respond.  One allows death to take its course.  Motivations themselves also become much more apparent under the auspices of not doing.   One sees the underlying links between different levels of reality.   Actions seem to be modes of overstating one's position when so little is necessary -- to intervene very slightly and change everything.

Shamanic insight emerges from underneath the shroud of death and ego loss.  Reality starts to make more sense when it is least interfered with.

One truly ceases to care -- and by not worrying, one sees what needs to be done and does it.  

Why?

Shamanic self-defense

Shamanic self defense works by understanding what is invisible to most -- that is, how emotional energies are channelled. This is not Christian passivity or turning the other cheek. This is not forgiveness. What you're aiming for is a slow burn.

 When someone is in a state of emotional aggression, they need to release that energy away from themselves in order to feel comfortable. Patriarchal society provides them with a natural means to do this, by blaming women. However, individual women can refuse to be a conduit for this aggression. Note, too, that most times an aggressive patriarch doesn't realise he or she is being that way. They just feel they feel in a morally righteous mood -- but that justification covers a lot of hostility, hatred and mean-spiritedness. People can release their aggression into you if they can get you to counter-react to their act of hostility. Even trying to justify or vindicate yourself can feel like a satisfactory counter-reaction to the aggressor. So, you have to refuse to do this. Sometimes the aggressor is looking for an explanation that will give meaning and justification to his behaviour or his life. You have to deny any explanations. Just step back and you will deny him or her the link to you that they want to use in order to defuse their sense of aggression. That will mean they have to face their own aggression by themselves -- a novel experience for them, surely.

It's a internal event, though, you won't see them physically beating themselves up, but mentally and emotionally, they will be struggling.

Note: This is also not passive aggression, since there is no emotion involved on the part of the one who responds in this way. There is no intention for the aggressor to "guess what I feel". The connection between would-be aggressor and his target is simply severed. He is therefore thrown onto his own devices, to face the world in accordance with his particular level of development.

Dead Man (1995) and BLACK SUNLIGHT (1980)

IMDb :: Boards :: Dead Man (1995) :: Symbolism and Metaphors...Help?


The more I go into this movie, Dead Man, the more I understand that its shamanism parallels that of Marechera's short, episodic book, Black Sunlight.
Some precise parallels:

1. The extremely choppy, episodic nature of the filmic (Jarmusch) and written (Marechera) texts. This speaks to the way the mind sleeps, then wakes up and continues on its narrative. It's the shamanistic movement between the rational daytime awareness and irrational  sleep, a dialectic necessary to keep life going. This is faithful to the way we actually experience our lives: by going to sleep and the next day necessarily recreating the original narrative of the path on which we're bound. This pertains to the functions of our deep subjectivity and to natural bodily rhythms.

2. The encounters with extreme violence and death as a poignant and mesmerizing aspect of life. Society is changing order and there is violence all around. In Marechera's narrative anti-colonial riots, anarchy and war relentlessly assault the psyche as expressions of violence and resistance.

3. To be blind or without normal vision is represented as a different way of seeing more clearly. Lacking vision, one is dependent on the visceral senses. Instinct then predominates, after it has learned how to exert its intrinsic force. In Black Sunlight, Marie's blindness represents a shamanic way of seeing. Death presses in more viscerally, in that it reaches on through the faculty of smell, rather than knowledge or visual perception. In Dead Man, the Indian guide Nobody suggests that his charge would see better without spectacles. This turns out to be true, in that he can use his pistol more effectively without clear vision.

4. The episodes show nothing more than several consecutive plunges into a state of greater proximity to death, matched with a greater awareness of the immediacy, strangeness and fragility of life. This polarization of the distinctive elements of life, highlighted the contrasts between life and death, is a key feature of shamanistic doubling.

5. One moves from a world of logic and violence to a world of flowing organic unity. In the Jarmusch movie, one moves from a failed attempt to integrate with socially-defined reality in a town called Machine. Since one cannot become part of The Machine, one is compelled to die. In Marechera's novel, Chris joins with other social drop-outs at Devil's End. Jarmusch's protagonist, William Blake, meets his Indian protector, Nobody, only after receiving a bullet close to his heart. Thus, a shamanic wound sets the protagonist apart from the rest of society in each case. He starts to see reality differently, above all historical reality, through his wound.

6. In Jarmusch's film, Nobody gives Blake the initiatory drug, Peyote. After this, Blake sees the effects of the colonial war against the Indians all around him, but the violence cannot touch him as he is impermeable. In Black Sunlight, apocalyptic shamanic visions at the climax of the novel. They are later explained, as if denied, by the protagonist, who had become the double of himself, Christian, having taken "Chris' psychiatric drugs".

7. Marechera's protagonist is represented early in the book as a court jester, hanging upside down in a chicken-coup due to having offended the Great Chief. This is political satire, but is also a way of depicting the state of the uninitiated soul with his own superego. The author views himself as being condemned to be tortured and the source of this condemnation is political. The refrain of "stupid white man" expresses the political irony of Dead Man.

8. In Marechera's novel, the protagonist-author, reunited with himself finally, as one, ends up showing the whiteness of his bones by effectively releasing all the words out of his body through his wrists. Rain pours down as overabundant meaning. Everything is liquefied  This is indicative of shamanic ritual in facing death and finding unity with oneself through resignation. In Dead Man, Indians dress up Blake's dying body after he has been shot a second time, so that he can complete his journey on the other side of the mirror image of reality he has entered. This signifies that he can become one with himself again, on the surface of liquid (unconscious) (mental) processes.

9. Both texts suggest solutions to political and social problems (colonial domination and machine-like attitudes) by going more deeply into death. This is a means for detachment and shamanistic dissociation, by virtue of which, one sees historical reality more clearly.

10. In both texts, transgression of the normal social law is a result of accident, not deliberate. Blake's killing of a member of the Town of Machine (a mechanistic world) is an act of self-defense. In addition, his being framed for the murder of another member of the town gave him an outlaw identity that was incongruous with his inner attitude or intent. Marechera similarly shows how his protagonist becomes a revolutionary despite himself, because he has been driven mad by social norms. Shamanism is thus shown to be a state of primeval (but not historical) innocence, in the face of attributed social and political guilt.