separating night and dark: ON NIETZSCHE

Bataille was an extremely careful reader of Nietzsche, like almost nobody today. That is a problem actually. If you read more deeply than others, people are likely to penalize you to the extent that you depart from the conventional academic views.

There is a barrier to going deeper, unless perhaps you are willing to experiment with your own body.

Social righteousness is negatively defined, and I mean that it how it turns out to be in practice.

There’s a measure of dark matter – of guilt and sin and dispossession – in the world. Nobody wants to own it and it gets passed downward or passed beyond. But it never really disappears.

To actually be able to SEE this dark material and to acknowledge that it exists is one of the fundamental insights one can have as a shaman.

For once one sees it for what it is, one can deflect it from oneself and often even redirect it.

That is, one is free to do so or not to do so as one wishes.

The superficial nature of moral normality maintains that those who suffer deeply must have committed a grave sin. They must have brought their suffering on themselves through some immense wickedness.

Shamanism says, “Actually, NO. That is not the case.”

But there are still those particles to be accounted for, relating to humanity’s meta-PHYSICS.

The ability to stop some kinds of guilt in its path is not so easy. It has all the force of some kind of flying object, descending on you from history (history being a place where many things are still permitted to be imperfect, unlike the present).

So, sometimes, the higher and the better thing is just to accept the guilt – even if it was not one’s own to begin with and is unrelated to one’s specific acts.

That’s the way the shamanic world goes ‘round. You accept some of my guilt and I will accept some of yours.

——

An academic who introduces one of Bataille’s books – “On Nietzsche” – states that Bataille fundamentally misunderstands Nietzsche and is just being Nietzsche’s fool

This academic’s idea assumedly is that Nietzsche was in hot pursuit of some kind of ideal state of being, where one would live quite innocently and naturally, without any concern for “guilt”.

Bataille seems to have got the whole thing back to front, according to this view.

—

And yet to live without concern for guilt is exactly what the bourgeois culture does. It’s nothing new and certainly not esoteric. “Let’s just imagine there was no dark matter and live as if there weren’t any!”

This is the “correction” this academic would like to make against Bataille’s conceptions of the human state.

That kind of endeavor, to explore the states of anguish one might feel, seems too close toChristianity, to religiosity. Bataille must be in error, unlike ordinary academics.

—

And yet what do ordinary academics do with their “dark matter”? In order for them to shine so radiantly and gloriously in the lamp of the contemporary bourgeois, who has to become darkened and invisible?

More to the point who has to suffer being dispossessed and made an outlaw?

Isn’t it precisely the shamanic types who are concerned about the movements and processing systems of this matter?

This is, of course, the sacrifice one makes when one accepts a certain ignominy, so as to continue to do the work that has to be done, in redirecting and reorganizing these invisible transactions.

Let me quote this academic quoting Bataille:

“There is in Christianity,” Bataille argues, “a will NOT to be guilty, a will to locate the guilt outside theChurch, to find a transcendence to man in relation to guilt.” This accounted for the Church’s inability to deal with Evil, except as a threat coming from outside. Doing the Church justice, “in total hostility,” Bataille assumed guilt and anguish as his own, daring Christianity to experience Christ’s sacrifice as an unequivocal expression of Evil.” (XII INTRODUCTION)
This is Bataille’s attempt to replace a false Christian orthodoxy with a true religion – one that could be all encompassing, because it acknowledges the dark matter that we keep sending into each other, to destabilise and demoralize the other. If we don’t acknowledge the inevitability of guilt, which comes down to us from history and does not simply accrue as a result of our personal actions, or narrow individualism, we will continue to play the game – unconsciously and blindly of course – of passing off our own guilt onto others, so that they are darkened and displaced and we can continue to shine.

The academic game is all about this, and Sylvere Lotringer plays this typical academic’s game well, even whilst handling the very material that addresses what he is going to do.

—-

I don’t know. There is a certain way in which the rational academician looks right and Bataille looks wrong. After all, Bataille was infected with gloominess and may have been on a rampant track to self-promotion. He seemed to be interested mostly in “intense experiences that tore beings apart” (XI)

Perhaps these “intense experiences” are unusual and contrived, after all, and normal churchgoing endeavors are extremely natural, rather than being theological formulations.

The academic acknowledges Bataille’s view that every “society is founded on a crime committed collectively, but the deed (the anguish and revulsion it provokes) is subsequently denied by those who benefited from it. Complicity and denial are constitutive of morality…” (XII).

Having come close to acknowledging the reality of dark forces, this academic then sweeps into another mode of criticism. Bataille was simply suffering from ressentiment and enjoyed being unhappy. It was his ‘THING’ – the means by which he hoped to triumph.

—

So, what do we have left, AFTER this devastating critique on Bataille?

Well, we have academia – which is in the armpits of the bourgeois and therefore never needs to sufferpangs of hunger or feel resentful. After all, it’s paid its dues – and this attack on Bataille was one of them.

So, Bataille is darkened – and perhaps he wished to be, or had merely discovered the principle of darkening, which he had been wanting to bring to light.

But Lotringer has separated night and dark again, unequivocally. Manicheanism reigns.

It's a long way to Mukumbura - Mike Westcott & Leprechaun

Off to get basic training -- it's a party doncha know?

Mike Westcott & Leprecahaun - I'm Just a Shumba Drinker.wmv

Ode to Lion laager

John Edmond - Blue Job

Fifth Brigade Gukurahundi atrocities

BISHOP ABEL MUZOREWA'S LAST XMAS.mp4

Violence

The fact is all societies are formed by violence.

In the beginning of Rhodesia, the British authorities hanged a female prophet called Nehanda.  She was causing people to rise up against the colonial regime and was powerful witch.

After that, the regime was established, but also on the basis of its own powerful witchcraft.

Basically, on internalized values under pain of death.,

When I am confronting the restrictions to my thought, I am confronting one of those brutal army special forces guys.  I just feel “wrong” when I do this, and inwardly shattered.

Every time it is the same.  I oppose this system within myself and it shatters me.  I feel doomed.  I feel like I have sealed my fate on the level of FATE, which means that someone is going to inform me that someone I care about is dead.

I fear retribution at a metaphysical level.

Emotion and cultural relativism: every day meanings lost in translation (1)

What is philosophy? Respecting boundaries.

Perhaps even the majority of people absolutely have a reading and perception problem or just want to be something they are not.  I just received a comment on my YouTube channel by someone who is sick.

This sickness afflicts the vast majority.  The man said in effect:  “I subscribed to you but we have nothing in common. There is nothing on my YouTube channel for you.   I just wanted to mark your video of that of a typical female talking about gynocentric society.  As you mentioned something about Rhodesia, Zimbabweans should have something to fear from your then.”

In other words:  “I am attracted to you, but I can only stick you with pins.  I confess I really wouldn’t have the faintest clue what you are talking about, except for my vague notions of identity.  I happened to recognize you were female -- that was clear.  I also noted you come from a place that most people would immediately put down as racist.  Why did you reciprocate by subscribing to me in kind?   I have nothing!  I AM nothing!  But pins I do have – and I’ll stick them into you.”

This is the mental illness of the majority.  And because it is not translated, in the way I have translated it, people feel it ought to be accommodated as part of the glorious mix that makes up our “civilization”.

And, to be frank, a version of this attack is an experience I’ve had again and again.  “We’re attracted to you!  Come over to our side!”  But when I reciprocate just a little (in this case by simply returning the favor and subscribing to this fellow’s YouTube), the viciousness and vindictiveness comes out.

Then they often get someone in officialdom to back them and to caution me to “stop being strange”.

And this is the form of passivity we really should be afraid of.  The majority can no longer read, or even take in information presented to them in visual/verbal form.   They are supremely passive and supremely needy, but they feel something humiliating in having to reciprocate or perhaps in having to be “seen” by someone who is not like them.

Self-knowledge is the only antidote – the only “muti” (it means tree medicine) – against this kind of onslaught, for if I had not known myself so well, I might have thought this fellow was expressing some legitimate fear of me, or at least something that could be overcome by clearing up some “misunderstanding”.

I would not have understood, as I now do, that the “misunderstanding” is deliberate on his part and necessary.  He has created it so as to form a buffer between me and him, which would protect his sense of weakness from my actual strength of character.  To remove this buffer by proclaiming it a “misunderstanding” is the last thing he wants.  He has put it there for a reason, because smallness cannot have self-respect when largeness sees it for what it is.

So the deepest interpretation of his comment is:  “I’m going to set up a ‘misunderstanding’ and I hope you will respect it.   I’m tiny and you’re large.   We have nothing in common.  I can comprehend identity, but only a little bit.   I am afraid of you, so please respect my space.”:

And this is wisdom – to be able to read what somebody is really saying, based on personal experience and knowledge and to preserve the boundaries they have set up.

Western positivism

Take the statement, “My main impression” or its variant “What I see is...”.

In Western culture, these statements have authority.  In Eastern culture, not so much.  And where there is already an established hierarchy, not so much.

The Westerner wants to proclaim his impressions because it is presumed that seeing, itself, has some kind of mystical validation.

The thing is, it’s a bluff in a way, or at any rate mostly an unconscious (unthought-through) bluff.

One “sees” something – but unless the power relations make that seeing efficacious (in other ways than just “seeing”), one may as well not see anything at all.

So it is really the power relations that underpin and lend validity to any kind of seeing, which we should be interested in.

---

The psychological blind spots that pertain to a Western style of seeing comes from an implicit positivism.

One “sees” something – and consequently one imagines that this is all there is to see.   Or, perhaps there is actually something more (a rare concession from a Westerner), but this has to do with passively making oneself open to having more insights.

It’s one-sided and therefore (only to that degree) delusional.

----

What one sees is, after all, not simply “what is there” or even “what one is capable of seeing”, but also what the other ALLOWS you to see.

And that is why all attempts to dominate a self-aware person are doomed from the start.

If I allow you (generic) to see something of me and you abuse that opportunity, I can immediately retract that permission by making sure you see less in future and that the information you had gained is not longer relevant – especially in the particular gestalt or compilation you have made of it. 

All abuses of trust form an impetus to move beyond what one had been before.  (It’s a bit like changing the locks.)

-----

I have the capacity for extreme fluidity but I don’t always use it – perhaps because I don’t require you to “see” it. 

----

Am I a master or a slave?

I am the British colonial personality, but with some modifications, something as young mechanics used to say, “Suped up”.   I am, almost never, what I ‘seem’.

----

I like the Japanese use of silences.  What is not said is sometimes more important than what is said.

terror / vision

It can be a good thing to not have everything worked out from the start.  Handicaps can be advantages in some ways.

 

Bataille, for instance, sees Nietzsche as being a significant human marker for being very confused and bewildered about things – in a sense, not knowing which way is up.

 

He said this kind of thing only happens very rarely.

 

To be in a position of not knowing what others already take for granted is to have to find one’s answers for oneself.  It really is a privileged situation.

 

Freudian paradigm and shamanic paradigm

understating matters

You will find that with the sordid side of life, I tend to understate the facts. There is no benefit in rubbing people’s noses in what they are. I just hope they can understand my general meanings from the contexts I give more broadly. Some people, however, do lack an imagination and ability to fill in the details for themselves. These guys, who do not read between the lines because they do not have any depth, tend to accuse me of “sensitivity”.

origins of symbolic thought?

Broken in every possible ways a paradigm can be broken -- that is our insane contemporary paradigm.

What this ape doesn't see too well is that "Mother Ayahuasca" can only bring out of you what is already there.  Sure, if you have the logical reasoning and capacity to recognize false consciousness, it will bring that out.  But it might also bring out a lot of Christian morality and mumbo-jumbo you have secretly been harboring.

Dambudzo Marechera Reading from Mindblast

Mavuradonha Wilderness safari, Zimbabwe

STEP DOWN BABA MUGABE

ON biases

You know what a “bias” is?  It’s a survival mechanism.  Conventional psychology is so biased against biases.

I’ve been watching a series on the Galapagos islands lately.   As you know, they are a series of volcanic islands, which Darwin went to – where he first came up with the idea of evolution.

The point is, all of these islands have a different age, and the animals they have attracted have adapted to their very different characteristics.

On one island, there are finches who are quite calm and seed eating.  On another there are vampire finches.  The peck the backs of other birds and swallow their blood.  One finch has a bias for food, another for blood.

So that’s all a bias is, really.  We should therefore be very careful about giving up our biases because they might be very important to our survival.

There are some biases that can limit you, though.

Yankies

To be frank, it has taken me a long time to understand American culture – its norms and expectations.

As I’ve explained, for a long time, I experienced the world in a state of extreme anomie.

I have just made a statement that will be almost impossible for someone who is settled and established in a very historically powerful and continuous setting (USA and much of Australia)  to understand.   That perspective, in-formed by anomie (which is already not a good word, since it has largely limitedly sociological connotations), was mine for the longest time.   And people kept thinking I was putting it on, because surely it would be impossible not to have a social or metaphysical compass.  

So I would base my interactions with Americans online in terms, not of culture, but maybe closer to what YOU would call “the masculine” way of relating – which was through abstract conceptualisations.

I thought this ought to have worked, but there were all sorts of tendencies to send communication off course.  One is that one simply does NOT RELATE in any realm of possibility in a way that is actually devoid of social context.   People are always reading social meanings into things – even when those meanings have not been put there by me.

So I had a lot of interactions, where people kind of implicitly placed me in a certain identity category or a certain attitudinal category.   I only found this out later, when they began accusing me of somehow deceiving them, that they had gone ahead and made certain assumptions about my identity, which were based in American culture and experiences.    I’ve never been there.  I don’t know what all the US cultural categories are like, or even all the historical reasoning behind their existence.   But somehow certain people felt let down and betrayed that I had actually turned out to be myself.    Also, the fact is, they betrayed themselves by their less than rigorous thinking; by making incorrect assumptions about things I’d said (which included ignoring a great deal that did not fit the cultural category they had prepared for me).  

In time, I learned to see more clearly what the social dynamics in the US are like.   But, before this, I had to absorb a lot of strange projections – and, one is naked when in a state of anomie.    One may know who one is intellectually, but culturally one does not know who one is – that is where the lines of demarcation happen to be.   Crossing these lines would mean an error, but it’s unclear where these lines are, without first experiencing the multitude of errors.

Anyway, I eventually realized that a lot of what I had mistaken for intellectual thinking or raw perception was actually folksy thinking and raw categorization (stereotyping).

Such things make me wary.

When history ruptures, so does the mind

Logos

I have, for a long time been developing my awareness of the lay of the land as normal people see it.  I’ve actually never seen it directly myself, because I’ve lived most of my adult life in a state of anomie.  But somehow I have become very aware that others generally make the assumption that I have lived a very normal life.   According to principles of normality – which have had to be explained to me – one lives a long period of time getting nurturing from parents and adult figures, and this is a period of emotion and attachment.  After this, one breaks free and begins to think in a very abstract and moral way.

The problem with me is I’ve had to do it back to front.

Right from a very early age, my whole life was structured according to very abstract principles.  The structure of society was incredibly militaristic.

Then this sky god abandoned us and the structure disappeared.

I was capable of robotic conformity but not capable of being in touch with the concrete aspect of existence or the emotional side.  Both of these had been repressed (in the better sense, diffused, but not in any social sense) during the 15 year war.

So, whilst most people had had a lot of nurturing and upbringing, I was left without those deeper inner resources, and had to actively work, to develop them.

--

I realize that people do not understand that it is necessary for me to live my life back to front.  It’s just the necessity I have, because I have a back to front character.

An you were right – I do associate immanence with the symbolically masculine side of things, simply because I have had to fight a fucking war to restore my access to immanence, with people blocking me all the way.  Rightfully, and normatively, immanence SHOULD BE the feminine side of things.  But in my case, abstract attitudes and reasoning were bequeathed to me.  They were a product of the Rhodesian situation.  And boy, did the death of the old sky God traumatize me – but mostly indirectly, through my father’s trauma, since he was most deeply affected by the lost of the ideals he’d risked his life for.  I get the impression that when his brother was KIA, he simply told himself that the sacrifice had been worth it, for the country and for Christianity.  But then in 1979, there was a sudden turn of events.  There had been a media blackout, so that we didn’t even know we were losing the war until we were told a few months prior to the handover to black rule.  That is when my father went out of his mind....the death of the old sky god.

Ever since then, we have been in a mode of mourning and recovery.

My writing of my memoir was an attempt to start again by attaching myself to a different sort of God.   I kept the sky god out as much as possible, because he was the source of trauma.  I had to rebuild.

----

Nowadays, I have completed the circle and I have found my center in this dying and decaying God who finally accepted me after 15 years of petitioning.  So I’m not going to make any sudden moves.  I don’t want to suddenly open old wounds or enter the field of trauma.

I don’t think I have anything to lose in associating with you because as you have divined I have actually found my center and my maturity.   Above all, I understand where these back to front attacks come from.

----

On another level, you have simply pointed out to me what I intuitively knew – that I am biding my time until it is safe to make an ascent up the mountain again.   It’s not safe right now, but your thinking was conventional on this point and not in tune with my traumatic history.

The shamanic trip is really about understanding one’s own traumas and catering to them in a developmental way.   These wounds become the basis for the active pursuit of a particular god.

Now, you were saying I should embrace YOUR God, but I have already known this God from early childhood, so I actively avoid him.

This is not “feminine” avoidance (which is there I think the mistake creeps in with most people) but active, masculine avoidance.

I know EXACTLY what I’m doing and why I have to do it.

Most people annoy me when they treat me as if I don’t know what I’m doing or as if it were passive and unconscious.   That is the exact opposite of what is true.

Zimbabwean self defence

How it does it

BLACK SUNLIGHT

What has not been done in the name of some straitjacket?’  My soul a neat shirtfront; these star-studded galaxies. Ashtrays on the desk overflow with stubbed inventions. Night and sky are refuges on a quay; the world debris piled at the edge of neat memoranda. White pebbles on a white beach dazzle the eye towards the lighthouse; a spurt of flame is the whiteman shooting grouse. Orion smiles at cracked tiles on Brixton roofs. The mirror flinches. Torn commandments of clouds shroud the sky from me. Time and space enclose me in their fetid rooms.

Shamans are not people one has relationships with, but people one learns from.   You get too close to them and sometimes that is dangerous.  You can get wrecked.  Sometimes this wrecking is good for you, as when metaphysical illusions are dispelled.  I had to rebuild myself for several years after my encounter with Marechera.  He really does have a pathological strain – a paranoid-schizoid strain – but most of the time he uses his capacities  for a healing purpose.  Then again, one has to know how to take this medicine and one has to want to take it badly enough, or else one is left only with the impression of emptiness.   I think I am one of the few people who could benefit from Marechera, but this was very costly to me.  Costly and unbelievably beneficial.  Necessary, because I had to find my African self again and to have the courage to embrace it.

AND THE BLINDNESS OF THE BLIND MAN AND HIS SEEKING AND GROPING SHALL YET
BEAR WITNESS TO THE POWER OF THE SUN INTO WHICH HE GAZED – DID YOU KNOW
THAT BEFORE?--Nietzsche

To walk the shamanic line – which is the one between madness and sanity – one has to know one’s limits, and I have already reached mine.  The extract above is from BLACK SUNLIGHT.   It’s incredibly compacted and intense.  When I understood this book, I realized that I could not go much further.   My mind was blown.  I could see the world in a different way, an impersonal way, but still see my part in it – even better than before.  But part of my mind was shattered.

This was a horrible experiment I did with myself.   I’m much older and wiser now and wary.  I also have a different concept of redemption.

2.

The whole BLACK SUNLIGHT book has this twisted aspect to it, whereby, through twisting the existing ideology, or even adding a level of humor, one reveals the actual reality as it really is, which had been hidden until that time.    That is, I think shamanic – twisted words or “words that see around corners”.

It is a horrible, shocking book, and I really felt like the ground was opening up underneath me and that I kept falling through it, without any metaphysical net to support me.   At the end of reading the book carefully, several times, I was traumatized severely, but reconciled to life in a deeper way than before.  

I read some reviews of it last night that said the book reveals the “emptiness” of reality.  Someone gave it one or two stars and said it was the worst book they had ever read.  For me, it was the best book I have ever read, second only to Zarathustra.


Marechera’s depiction of Christ is certainly sordid, but he also humanizes him and makes one realize what it really would mean to be reviled, debased, gazed at, etc.   This is very shamanic, because it acknowledges that what we, as humans, really wish to put upon the Christ is our sickness and our shame.

“I closed the huge doors behind me and walked softly towards the altar. I was in the opium of the people. The huge cross dangled form chains fixed to the roof. I stood looking at the crucified Christ. He looked like He needed a stiff drink. He looked as if He had just had a woman from behind. He looked as if He had not been to the toilet for two thousand years. He looked like I felt. That was the connection. That was what made Him big, this mirroring quality that made your right hand a left hand and your sins the path out of themselves. He hung there like on in dire need of a cigarette. Not just passive, but alively so, like a picture out of a men's magazine, explicitly showing all His wounds and orifices with an air of spirited invitation. In these terms Nick had described Him to me, described Him as one describes a thorn in one's flesh, or the spreading disease between one's thighs.

“It was so quiet in there I could hear my thoughts arranging themselves all over His body. Why had I come? I always came to watch Him whenever the soulessness was too much for me. It always ended with the same humiliated ridiculousness of becoming aware that I was staring at a man-made statue expecting a miracle to take place. I had once brought Marie here but she had taken only a few steps towards the altar when she shivered violently and vomited. [...]

“There was a sharp crack. With a cry I stepped back. The heavy cross crashed almost at my feet, the flying chain nicking my cheek. The broken thing smoked with plaster and dust. I stared.”--Marechera

REPOST

Well I was born in Africa and spent the first 16 years of my life there. I find that whenever I tell someone that I am from Zimbabwe, they immediately assume I am from South Africa. There is NO sense of political differentiation between the politics, cultures or economics of the two countries. Neither has anyone EVER engaged with me to ask me about these issues. They must merely assume that because I came from the third world, and they were born in the West, they already know more than I do. So, I find a lot of people tend to relate to me on the basis of their stereotypes and really rather extreme ignorance.

 Also, I have found that there is often a sort of rush among folks within academia, to make sure my views on Africa fit the ones they have developed. Generally, this comes down to keeping the race and class distinctions, so that I don’t think that I am less privileged than any other black folk who were born there, but come to accept my rightful place as supplicant to the Greater Liberal Order due to various colonialist errors. So I am told not to make generalities about Africa, and to treat everybody with respect, and not to joke around with any black person, make threatening gestures — in effect not to treat them anything like I would treat an equal to me. After all, “They’ve had a hard time.”

Presumably, I haven’t.

Longevity

My African way of relating, because I failed in Western moral discipline school.  I was brought up in a very impersonal way, in a collectivist (tribal) culture.  Even though I am white, we still had this kind of tribal orientation, rather than individualism.   It is actually a kind of wildness.    Here’s the blog post someone accessed recently.  It relates, maybe, the psychological meaning and impetus of our collectivism.  Listen to the harmonizing, because we used to do that naturally, in our every day interactions.     It’s impersonal but energetic.   In my school classes, we would pay attention to the mood that others were just starting to generate, and then we would harmonize with that mood.   . http://musteryou.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/but-tock-skins/  That is the source of my wildness – in the capacity to harmonize, derived from southern african tribalism.

In other ways, I am colonial British.  I was brought up in the 19th century manner, where children were considered something entirely different from adults.    I didn’t engage much with my parents at all.  It was an Alice in Wonderland world, with great scope for freedom.  But the society overall was quite rigidly and hierarchically defined, so my manner and style is quite impersonal.    I just don’t like postmodernism because it is Western and it doesn’t address my needs (which is ok) but claims to do so (which is not ok).   Also postmodernists always batter me with their anti-colonialism.  Their capacities to understand are not deep.

My means to deal with very refined, civilized people is to let them go their own way.  I spent long years trying to understand them and to “adapt” to what was expected of me, but clearly I have failed.  I once spoke to a Mongolian shaman or “Satanist” who said that when people have very different expectations and experiences of their worlds, the thing you DO NOT WANT TO DO is to build a bridge between you and them.   It’s far better that they don’t perceive the ways in which you diverge, because it would unsettle them and they would attack you.  So, don’t try to build a connection.  In fact, make sure you do not allow them to build one.   Keeping people out is as much part of the shamanic style as allowing people in.  Zarathustra saw that when he stated, I draw tighter and tighter circles around myself.  

To do that, though, one has to have deep self-knowledge – enough to realize where one’s boundaries are and where they have to be drawn.  Learning psychological hygiene takes a long time, especially when one’s needs are complex and were forged in foreign climes.   Westerners, especially of the liberal sort, seem to assume I am just like them only more so.   So, for a long time, I assumed I was.   Only I always had trouble doing what was expected of me, as I couldn’t quite get into the groove of Western consciousness.  It seemed to involve some kind of trick of adjustment that I couldn’t pull off.   Also, it meant giving up the wilderness, each time I tried it.   I never wanted to do that and the sacrifice was extreme, but each time, the assumption others made was that I was already just like them and that I wanted to do those things.   So they assumed I wanted to do what I didn’t want to do, and/or that it was natural for me to do those things I didn’t want to do.  

Then, also, with Westerners, there is the fact that they have exo-skeletons and are  soft inside, and may be easily offended by a certain kind of joviality that rubs them the wrong way.   By contrast, my thinner skin is on the outside, but I’m tough on the inside.   I’m confident I can beat anybody in sheer strategy and endurance.    I’ve always found this to be so.   I’m the typical Brer Rabbit type when it comes to Western culture:  “Whatever you do, don’t throw me out of civilization, into the briar patch, where I happen to have been born and bred!”   But the Westerners always get around to taking moral umbrage and throwing me there.

The universal nurturing breast

MY KIND OF SHAMANISM

My kind of shamanism is very, very much aligned to what I find in Marechera’s Black Sunlight.   There IS an element of Christianity in this, I think, because one cannot be in Southern Africa and not be influenced by the psychology.  But Marechera’s is a syncretism of pagan attitudes and beliefs and a self-sacrificial emotionalism (in the good sense).   His writing is also designed to be both deeply offensive to Christians and to dogmatic Marxists. (Zimbabwe is a dogmatic Marxist state).   I do think that the fundamental difference between shamanism and conventional religiosity is the former’s irreverence.

FROM THE BOOK:

“I closed the huge doors behind me and walked softly towards the altar. I was in the opium of the people. The huge cross dangled form chains fixed to the roof. I stood looking at the crucified Christ. He looked like He needed a stiff drink. He looked as if He had just had a woman from behind. He looked as if He had not been to the toilet for two thousand years. He looked like I felt. That was the connection. That was what made Him big, this mirroring quality that made your right hand a left hand and your sins the path out of themselves. He hung there like on in dire need of a cigarette. Not just passive, but alively so, like a picture out of a men's magazine, explicitly showing all His wounds and orifices with an air of spirited invitation. In these terms Nick had described Him to me, described Him as one describes a thorn in one's flesh, or the spreading disease between one's thighs.

“It was so quiet in there I could hear my thoughts arranging themselves all over His body. Why had I come? I always came to watch Him whenever the soulessness was too much for me. It always ended with the same humiliated ridiculousness of becoming aware that I was staring at a man-made statue expecting a miracle to take place. I had once brought Marie here but she had taken only a few steps towards the altar when she shivered violently and vomited. [...]

“There was a sharp crack. With a cry I stepped back. The heavy cross crashed almost at my feet, the flying chain nicking my cheek. The broken thing smoked with plaster and dust. I stared.”

African stuff

My whole upbringing took place in the context of a civil war.   This war was declared in 1965.  I was born in 1968. So the first fifteen years of my life were defined by war – father often away on call up, people being declared dead every night on television...”Security forces has issued a communique...”   so this aspect of being at war is part of my nature.  That is why I take a swipe at things like religion (which in my case was almost an emotional death sentence) and psychoanalysis (same).

I am particularly hostile toward those who would like to undermine or suppress my warlike nature, which is my real self.   That is why I so dislike, or hate, postmodernists, who would seem to require me not to differentiate myself from others or to oppose anything I don’t like, but to acquiesce to a general, bland sameness.  I am in general, a very hostile person, then, when I am not at war, but when I am in the martial arts class or opposing something with all my heart, I feel calm, for then I have returned to my natural element.

In general, I am African, and I wish Western people all best of luck with it, if they think they can benefit from being ecstatically open.

I don’t see any problem, by the way, concerning any kind of corruption of institutionalized religion.  I just wasn’t brought up with a need for that kind of narrowness, but I have no particular moral opinion about it, only my dislike.  I am free to reject a system that has proven itself to have no particular defects, just because I dislike it.

American either-or thinking is very strange.   Losing emotional control is not exactly possible for me.  The more threatening a situation is, the more tightly controlled I become.   In fact, my thoughts become very finely focused and exacting, like seeing body heat through a police helicopter camera.   These are my moments of divine revelation, where everything pulls together and makes sense and I finally know exactly what to do.

So, the whole Western cultural thing, where the self has a structure that needs the postmodernist solution of trying to be more open so as to have ecstatic experiences does not resonate for me, in terms of what I, personally, need to do.

Also, I am also skeptical of much of the binary conceptualizing of contemporary leftism.   But also, I think it is a lost cause.  I think contemporary leftism has found its ultimate resting place, up it own anus.  Long may it rest in peace.

I’m very much against any kind of moral reformism, of any sort, including and perhaps especially leftist moral reformism, because I’ve been subjected to way to much of that in my lifetime.   Leftists have always tried to reform me.  I’m the only “identity” that it is viable to hate.  I am, and was, quite literally, a colonial.   So, I see the hypocritical underside of the postmodernist leftist beast, and its need for moral vengefulness against somebody.   I don’t expect you to understand this, by the way.   It takes some experiencing – and even then, you may not know what hit you.

I just don’t like Western culture overall and have no use for it.  I would be the last person to morally reform it, or to “heal” it.  Not my job.  My focus is related to Zimbabwe.

To go further, I really don’t understand the Western “soul” at all – what its needs or wants are.   Often it wants directly the opposite to me.  I don’t want to get close enough to see if this is a sickness.  I don’t care deeply enough.  I think it has to find its own way.  Foucault cannot help it.  That’s a funny joke.   But don’t make me reflect too deeply on this joke, or I will start to talk of “sickness”.....

I'm listening more about facial readings...

I'd put it about on the level of psychoanalysis.  There is a certain amount of probability to this.  Let us name that "science".  Mostly, however it's not science, but art, at least if it is to be realistic and effective.

With this in mind, I can consider the meanings of facial imagery more deeply.  Let's look at the first one.  This is my apehead as it stands -- the face with which I interact with everybody publicly.  I see some intensity, which may be related to my full contact sparring drills a few days earlier.  The bridge of my nose is narrower than the one below, which means greater perfectionism and (perhaps) vulnerability to criticism (including self-criticism) than my private self would take into consideration.  The frown lines, permanently etched from my early twenties, mean I am too hard on myself.  The slight crows feet mean I am emotionally open to others, not closed.   The thinner upper lip means circumspection.  The wide forehead implies an intellectual drive and emphasis.  I'm not that idealistic or concerned about aesthetics or my eyebrows would be higher.  My jaw is fairly square, which means I stick to my views.

1

2. The second picture seems to be a ninja version of myself.  According to the dodgy not-quite-science of facial reading, this is my private self -- the real, inner self.  Let's not get all Nietzschean here and assert the subtleties of the matter:  the original picture may have been taken slightly on an angle.  It's possible that one eye isn't actually Asian.  One eye Asian and the other Caucasian -- I'm not quite sure.

In any case, perhaps quite generally, this portrays my inner self -- being the self that doesn't feel the impulse go engage overtly in societal dramas.

You can see the bridge of the nose is wider -- implying a more hard-nosed approach of indifference to societal mores.  Also, I'm not quite as earnest (naive) as anybody might have hoped, but rather interested and mischievous.

Comparing my portraits, top and bottom, I see  in the first a cerebral emphasis, with more of a sensual/physical emphasis in the second.

This stands to reason.  Often in life, I have been defeated or thwarted in the public domain, but although this is upsetting, my underlying personality, being immensely strong and resilient, gives me great reassurance.

If the first picture portrays the tertiary layer of my self, the second shows the foundational layer.  It's less cerebral, but more instinctive, also more hard nosed, more defiant (the stronger jawline) and indifferent to opinion-makers.

It does not trouble me to fall back onto this layer because I know I won't fall far.  In fact, it may be the means to get the insights I need to move ahead.

literature

Redistribution of Wealth as a Cure for Depression | Clarissa's Blog

Redistribution of Wealth as a Cure for Depression | Clarissa's Blog

I didn’t look for the article, but it is clear that moral idealism can never be economics. No, no, I mean it SHOULD BE clear. What you are describing is the typical moral leftists’ proclamation — “I will hit the economics problem with my moral discourse. Oh, wait a second, I can’t do that.”

So they end up simply siding with regimes that LOOK LIKE they embody liberal liberation fantasies, but turn out to be rather more complex, because, hey, reality is complex. So, they say, “Oh, Mugabe’s great, an anti-colonial marvel. Oh, wait, he’s not good, a despot.” If they’d taken the whole picture into account to begin with, they would not be flipflopping quite so much. But moral leftism is always going to face trouble with its worst enemy — reality.

Apes in capes and Zarathustra

As a living creature you need to grow, but other, being living creatures, also try to drain our energies from us.  They sabotage and steal our energies and this is normal.   This is natural.  Living creatures employ strategies and a multitude of tactics to acquire what belongs to others.  Sometimes it's more comfortable to stay where one is and give up the resources than to move.   This, too, is normal.     We don't want to have to move and regroup as we are energy conserving creatures.   It's easier just to give up some ground than to move elsewhere.

Then, something in us cries to be released from habituated tendencies. This is painful, nearly always, but one has to shift enough to shake off all the dust and debris that have formed an outer case to one's existence.

Please note here I'm not talking about the way a narcissistic ape cuts ties with those around him because they have stopped giving him their energy.   I'm referring to a shift that reclaims one's inner energies as one's own. This is not a denial, or "it isn't me" parade, but quite the opposite.   As Nietzsche's ZARATHUSTRA says, one sometimes needs to reclaim what one deems worst in oneself in order to become fully whole.   Shamanic regeneration means identifying what is us and ours and differentiating it from what it outside of us.   External powers can be parasitical but we do not scrutinize them, commonly, so we do not identify them as such.

An ape who wants to be shamanically whole must enter his or her discomfort zone.  Here there may be a lot of buried traumas and unexpected surprises.  It's easier to act as if these don't exist, since it's socially unpleasant to have to deal with complexities.  Our brains are not especially geared for this, which is why we prefer to maintain a pleasant social illusion of simplicity.   It's by far easier to tacitly concede, "You feed off me and I will feed off you," than to engage in differentiating a self.

Not only is it emotionally difficult to draw together the parts of oneself that have been scattered afar, to make them one again, but many automatically take affront to this.   They claim it's for the social good that they require you to keep holding hands with them - -but really they're inclined to suck your energy.  They know they cannot do this unless they keep you in a weakened state, with a confused sense of responsibility.   It's quite a trick -- to get you to believe that it's your important task in life to feed them affirming ideas and positive sensations.   They call their trick "duty", "morality", or "productivity".  They use such dazzling terms to lure you into sacrificing your self for their benefit and, of course, we allow ourselves to be drawn in by them because it's easier to do what others deem correct than to have to deal with one's devils.

We all have inner demons and they have to be tamed, slapped around a bit.   They're actually who we are, but if we do not tame them, we don't tap them as a source of energy.  Worse, others who can see them there use these energies to harm us.  If we want to believe we are good, we had better understand what is lurking behind the well-formed batallion.  Your enemy has often noted down the parts of you that would engage in sabotage.

Keep the war hardened warriors that belong to your self at the rear and the weaker parts of you will press on forward.  Develop knowledge of what lurks in your unconscious mind and keep that part of your self on guard at all times.

I don't think it is advisable to separate the methods and goals of intellectual shamanism from the metaphor of war.

Irigaray and Yanks misreading her

Can You Help a Depressed Person? | Clarissa's Blog


Many people misread Luce Irigaray as if she were a gender essentialist. I think it's because irony is falling into disrepute as something elitist or hard to grasp. She is, however, an ironist. How could one take a book entitled, Speculum of the other Woman" as anything but ironic? (Apparently, there was meant to be a comma after "other", but the publishers left it out.)

Irigaray is heavily influenced by Nietzsche, who is an ironist. Consider THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA - written in florid Bibilical language, whilst actually condemning religiosity and a metaphysical outlook.

Irigaray is doing the same with Lacan as Nietzsche does with the Bible. She is making fun of his portentous patriarchal attitudes by showing what he has left out of his paradigm -- the possibility of an actual, living woman. She is showing that the space he has left for women is null and void. This is supposed to be funny -- but these days people take it as if she were reifying gender.

Gilligan's island

Can You Help a Depressed Person? | Clarissa's Blog

Gilligan introduced the idea that I can only reason ethically in relation to myself. This is absolutely not true and not true for many women, depending on the levels of discipline they choose to develop. I love watching Aircrash Investigations, which is called Mayday in Japan. In one show a female pilot takes a cargo plane up, but the wires that connect the tail to the body of the aeroplane have been tightened too much — a maintenance error. This means the plane cannot ascend naturally, but shoots up into the sky at a very steep angle, almost on the trajectory of a rocket. Naturally this destabilizes the plane and it starts to nosedive into a crash. Interestingly the female pilot directed the doomed aircraft into the side of hangar, where it had the least chance of harming anybody on the ground.

See, that is ethical reasoning at work. She wasn’t thinking, “How can I work this out in relation to me, and where would be a good spot for me to meet my final demise?”

Now, apparently, we have learned that women do not do that. As Theodor Adorno intimated, it is pointless looking at empirical evidence because ideology already determines what we can or cannot see.

I am a refugee from Western culture because I do believe it has gone insane.

The fact that we do not have essential gendered natures

Can You Help a Depressed Person? | Clarissa's Blog

I hate most that it has become common sense to essentialize female nature in absurd ways. For instance, recently a Canadian anti-bully activist came here to teach Australian school children how to avert bullying. She said she wanted to focus on girls because they were bitchy and gossipy and employed passive aggression, spurred on by their mothers. Now, fine and good. perhaps this is so. But in my day -- and, of course, in a very different culture -- that was not "female nature" at all. Rather it was to be naughty, mischievous, cheeky and yet polite. There was no rivalry and we just enjoyed the pleasure of companionship. Actually, you can see the same kinds of attitudes expressed in the British nursing drama, Call the Midwife.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_the_Midwife

So, as late as the 1980s in Zimbabwe and the 1950s in Britain, female nature was not petty, bitchy or malicious.

Can You Help a Depressed Person? | Clarissa's Blog

Can You Help a Depressed Person? | Clarissa's Blog

What I learned from my experiences is that what religious people come to understand as “female nature” or femininity and often what feminists and others have taken for such is just a depressive state brought on by accepting artificially defined limits to what one is or what one can do, or indeed the emotions one can be allowed to express.

I had the repressed anger (actually rage) big time — and guilt. The way I got out of it was not so much by analyzing this, but by learning to break the narrow rules I’d set for myself. Nietzsche said somewhere that a lot of morality is founded in fear, rather than in bravery. “Too timid to lie!” he said. It’s not that one should feel courage to lie for its own sake, but that one realizes that one often conforms inwardly because one is stuck in a rut of one’s own making. One must form new possibilities for behavior.

The left hand path

Allegedly external self (two right sides) 

Allegedly internal self (two left sides)

In theory -- the right side reveals the left side of our brain, which is logical, analytical, sequential and verbal. The left side reveals our sense of taking in things as a whole, which is nonverbal, private, observant.

Honestly, which of these two would you prefer to meet in the middle of the night?

It has been said of me that as a typical woman (an assertion yet unproved), I must necessarily have a sensitive, delicate soul beneath the cool exterior.  I've often wondered, myself, whether I had an inside-out soul (psyche) compared to most Westerners, because this sensitive, retiring side n'existe pas.

Certainly, my more delicate side seems to be my public side (the top photo).  I'm happy to get along with people on the basis of logic, reason and understanding.  Shatter my public self and I rarely cry. My laughter erupts, instead, intense and prolonged.

Why would someone want to mess with something that is working out well for them?   To attack my public self in any way is playing into my hands.  Like losing one arm in the middle of a fire, and realizing one has grown a far superior bionic arm instead, I fall back onto my strengths, which involve taking the whole picture into account instead of trying to treat it piecemeal.

It's natural and automatic for me to embrace the left hand path.   I operate with an unwavering sense of certainty on it.

The left hand path involves being able to take in reality as a whole.  One has to know when to speak and when not to speak and which provides the maximal advantage.   One can also notice that one does not need to set a trap, as others will walk into those traps they've already set for others.  Make good use of timing and they will ensnare themselves.

Anti-feminists (misogynists) tend to do this a lot to themselves, because they set a trap based on false premises -- namely that women are weaker than they appear.

To embrace the left hand path, by the way, does not involve being passive but deeply understanding the whole picture and working on your timing.

Those who rely on right hand methods -- exerting control, instruction, narrow thinking and verbal communication -- will often become so obsessive that they overlook how having a larger view and getting your timing exactly right is enough to defeat a relatively narrow-minded method of attack.  This is especially so when you consider that the left hand path permits energy conservation.

When Bataille was lying low in rural France, with tuberculosis and waiting for the Nazis to invade, he stated, "We will defeat them with our immanence."  [See On Nietzsche].  In other words, it's all about timing and never  deviating from one's integral path.

We will defeat them in their end.

More apeshit, (interesting, speculative apeshit)

left side (above)

right side (above)

Advantages of working on your inner self

Multiculturalism According to Bauman | Clarissa's Blog

Multiculturalism According to Bauman | Clarissa's Blog


This is moral hair shirt "progessivism". It's a very strong narrative in Western culture, that the more we punish ourselves, the more we are improving. Actually, as Nietzsche showed those progressives would have their psychology back to front -- rather, the more we punish ourselves, the more we morally criticize and condemn. If we were to stop hurting ourselves and enjoy ourselves a bit more, we would certainly become more tolerant of others too, and allow them more scope to be themselves.

Literature and book reviews--by Jennifer & Mike

Hands On | Clarissa's Blog

Hands On | Clarissa's Blog


I’ve learned not to take advice from random heffalumps. In general, avoid the narrative of self-improvement if you want to have a chance to improve in any area of your life. Otherwise, you will be looking up the term, ‘hands on’, trying to work out what the student really intended by that, and wasting time adjusting to the suggestions of someone who just came up with a brainwave that made them feel elite.

Why Ignoring Your Past Doesn't Work. | elephant journal

Why Ignoring Your Past Doesn't Work. | elephant journal

Along with the negative feeling you absorbed early in life, your brain developed a survival mechanism that allowed you to fit well with those around you. When your brain generates negative moments for you, this survival mechanism kicks in and allows you to cope with or control things in the same way that worked well for you in relation to your family and other early caregivers.

Very interesting!  That adaptive mechanism is what I've recognized as "lizard brain"..
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2010/01/on-shamanism-rationality-and-lizard.html

When "tough love" is not the solution

What about using  “tough love” to solve all problems? This was exactly what was used on me to silence me about the real issues in our family and the struggles I was having as a migrant. I became the one scapegoated for my father’s emotional problems in particular. These were more extreme than mine, but he put up such an act and made it so convenient for everybody else to treat me as if I were the problem. Interestingly, my father chose to view my interest in reading as a sign of depression. Actually, it was my lifeline — my means to try to find a way out of the idiotic situation. Lying in bed late to recover from the ‘flu was also viewed by him as succumbing to blind depression.  Indeed, he was making me depressed — but so was my inability to rise above the situation whilst others continued not to listen to me.

Tough love may seem like a really clever solution in all circumstances, but usually it’s just an excuse for others to pile on and express their particular immature states and barely disguised malice. I’m not conforming. I’m reading too much. I’m trying to engage in self-care when I’ve been knocked down hard. It actually takes an extreme amount of mental and emotional discipline to follow the golden thread that will lead you out of a cave, when others want you simply to conform and justify their own views, values and perspectives. To me it was vital to stick to my own path with only a small margin for falling into non-being, as my health had become extremely eroded by being obedient to others’ needs and suggestions. It’s not that I hadn’t tried conformity, but it clearly had not worked out for me. I’d developed chronic fatigue syndrome and a digestive system that did not easily tolerate solids, and made this known by developing huge and painful air bubbles. I was in a bad way, since all my repressed rage had been turned inward. I’d been directing it inwardly for years.

I sensed that accepting more of others rage and then repressing it would have pushed me over the edge. I had to develop other ways to see the world, which would give me other methods of coping. Hence, I had face in various philosophy books, much of the time. I wasn’t doing this to waste time, but to save myself. It was vitally important that I find the means to get out of the Christian indoctrination that had held me to a standard of perfection whilst telling me that as a woman I was worthless. These were, indeed, my father’s views of me and consequently I had to draw together all my mental and emotional energy to defeat him
2.

I did not get any feminists on my side during this long drawn out psychological battle. I know why. A battle is an ugly thing. There are no clear marks defining good and evil. One has to do combat just with what one has at the time and sometimes one is poorly prepared, one’s weapons are not sharp or effective and one is immersed in a lot of ignorance. It would have been nice to have feminists on my side during this time, but I can’t say they were.  Many feminists tend to side with the person who seems to represent the neatest solution to the problem, even if that person is a patriarch.

 Many feminists prefer neatness to reality and they like to be one the side of what society defines as “good” — that is, they prefer a posture of moral conformity over understanding a complex issue.


3.

My solutions, although they did not involve socially condoned productivity, involved pushing myself into my discomfort zones, with regard to expressing emotions, especially those that were not socially acceptable -- for I had a lot of socially unacceptable emotions during that time.My father had been engaged in an actual war for fifteen years and he had repressed all those emotions, including the ultimate humiliation of defeat. Then he'd taken it out on me.  I had some extremely warlike emotions in me, as a result.

4.

 You might or might not care to be surprised about how many people tried the “tough love” approach on me. I think basically they did not want to have to deal with something very intense and complex.  Instead of trying to understand the cultural context of this, although it was clear there was one, they took the cowards' way out by pathologising me.  I was not so damaged or so evil that I could not see a way out of the situation and stick to it with all of my integrity.

5.

Members of the majority often seem upset that a lack of conformity implies that one invalidates their choices.

This is amusing

Since I felt like relaxing and not working this afternoon, I made pictures of my allegedy (according to the video) public and private faces, too.


MY 'PUBLIC' FACE

MY 'PRIVATE' FACE

As you might, see, I can seem earnest and determined on the outside but deep down I'm really just an imp!

The analyser says we are both our sides, by the way.
I'm just taunting those who take everything too literally.  (I'm an imp.)

Distinctly so

My next project will be the long over fifteen minute video, where I discuss in more academic style whether there is some shamanistic element to Nietzsche's writing. Certainly Bataille picked up on that element, and made it his own. I'm referring to the use of Nietzsche's writings to achieve self-transformation and what Nietzsche referred to as "great health", perhaps after a long susceptibility to metaphysics -- an "illness". It's not that Nietzsche is a narrow identity, a shaman rather than a philosopher, but rather that his philosophy has distinct shamanic elements.