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