Modern values win the rhetorical battle against the past, on behalf of a "softer, gentler society". In substance, modern values equate people with their feelings and demand that only such an equivalence be recognized as ethical. Despite this, real justice and goodness would consist in not treating people so superficially, as if what one sees on the surface is all that should be allowed to exist. To develop depth of character, to be able to express one's self as a whole, one has to look further than fleeting feelings.
Saturday 31 August 2013
The rhetorical battle between modernity and old-fashioned character
Modern values win the rhetorical battle against the past, on behalf of a "softer, gentler society". In substance, modern values equate people with their feelings and demand that only such an equivalence be recognized as ethical. Despite this, real justice and goodness would consist in not treating people so superficially, as if what one sees on the surface is all that should be allowed to exist. To develop depth of character, to be able to express one's self as a whole, one has to look further than fleeting feelings.
Friday 30 August 2013
You Can Always Blame the Immigrants | Clarissa's Blog
You Can Always Blame the Immigrants | Clarissa's Blog: "Once you see through all their strange projections, you realize that these are very inept people who are angry at how little they control in life. They go in for projections to compensate them for a lack of power, even in the form of a basic understanding of life’s principles.
There are people who want to live without being harmed and also, (because harming others does harm to one’s self image), without harming others. Don’t be deceived that they really want to live for others or to help them. They have to do what it takes to protect their self-image as harmless and good people, but that it not the same as having wisdom, courage, or the capacity to do good.
I think that so long as such people can get away with projecting their worst attributes into others, they create a psychological buffer (at the expense of innocent others) and do not need to have any insight into themselves.
When we remove ourselves — that is, our psychological buffer field — from the situation, we return them to themselves as they actually are.
Live and let die, I say."
'via Blog this'
There are people who want to live without being harmed and also, (because harming others does harm to one’s self image), without harming others. Don’t be deceived that they really want to live for others or to help them. They have to do what it takes to protect their self-image as harmless and good people, but that it not the same as having wisdom, courage, or the capacity to do good.
I think that so long as such people can get away with projecting their worst attributes into others, they create a psychological buffer (at the expense of innocent others) and do not need to have any insight into themselves.
When we remove ourselves — that is, our psychological buffer field — from the situation, we return them to themselves as they actually are.
Live and let die, I say."
'via Blog this'
Thursday 29 August 2013
Repost on doubling
Ontological doubling appears not just at the end of sequence of books, in Ecce Homo, where he speaks of having a privileged understanding of what constitutes health due to his tendency to become ill. Yet, here he makes the link to shamanism that is most definitive. Throughout his writing, however, the doubling of the psyche also has an epistemic structure:
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. [my emphasis]
In Gay Science, Nietzsche also speaks about the basis for self-overcoming, though sinking into the depths of despair and learning to think more suspiciously about the structure of reality:
Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time—on which we are burned, as it were, with green wood—compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put aside all trust, everything good-natured, everything that would interpose a veil, that is mild, that is medium—things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us “better”; but I know that it makes us more profound.
Such a descent into pain, along with exercises in mistrust of how things appear to be, make a thinker more profound. We become more profound because we become suspicious of what we used to “know”
– i.e. “things in which formerly we may have found our humanity”. One, in effect, sinks to the underworld and then comes up transformed.
This is one direction of the Nietzschean dialectic: the underworld of experience in relation to normal life. Nietzsche points out in Ecce Homo that dialectics are a sign of decadence, but nonetheless a person who is healthy overall turns even injury into an experience for learning. This is as per the historically recurrent motif of “shamanic wounding” — but one must be strong enough to begin with for any suffering to be able to yield genuine insights, rather than merely pathological notions about the world.
If this “down-going” or “going under” relates to an age-long shamanic notion of the underworld, there are other “worlds” of experience to be explores. A middle level of experience comprises the everyday world — and in shamanic terminology, there is also a realm of the heights. To reach one’s inner heights, one transcends oneself. This has the structure of tactical self-doubling. Thus Spoke Zarathustra describes the nature and meaning of self-transcendence:
One day wilt thou see no longer thy loftiness, and see too closely thy lowliness; thy sublimity itself will frighten thee as a phantom. Thou wilt one day cry: “All is false!”
There are feelings which seek to slay the lonesome one; if they do not succeed, then must they themselves die! But art thou capable of it—to be a murderer?
Hast thou ever known, my brother, the word “disdain”? And the anguish of thy justice in being just to those that disdain thee?
Thou forcest many to think differently about thee; that, charge they heavily to thine account. Thou camest nigh unto them, and yet wentest past: for that they never forgive thee.
Thou goest beyond them: but the higher thou risest, the smaller doth the eye of envy see thee. Most of all, however, is the flying one hated. [Emphasis mine].
Self-transcendence is fraught, as it involves being aware of the contemptible aspects of one’s self and moving above those cowardly elements. Consciousness is thus doubled in the process of moving between what we are and what we will to become. This doubling implies painful self-knowledge, which nonetheless one must accept if one wishes to explore the higher realm.
historically contingent types
This following seems to be largely my position with regard to Marechera, and indeed, with regard to myself in a way. The pre-industrial context that Marechera and I found ourselves in (and I wonder, perhaps this was less so for the white males of our culture?) led to individuated personalities which were, however, not premised on an Oedipal development and resolution very much. In fact, I would say that I developed an Oedipal condition rather late indeed, upon adaptation to migration, and then promptly undid it as I didn't like the feeling it gave me, of being trapped.
My father rarely made sense , so I did not attribute many insights to him, but he has mentioned, once, how after I turned three he was called up for military service and, upon his return, he had "lost touch with me" and in his view, our relationship was never the same. So perhaps this is also part of the basis for my lack of Oedipal conditioning. In any case, Marechera, too was without a father after the age of 11. Mike was without one after the age of 5. This is the character structure that I can most relate to, which makes sense to me.
*****************
Critics have always emphasized that the basic experience of Malte [of Rilke's novel], the 28-year-old artistocratic Dane who comes to Paris with artistic and intellectual aspirations and begins to record his life crisis in his notebooks, is one of ego-loss, deindividualization, and alienation. Often this disintegration of the ego is attributed to Malte's city experiences alone, and his childhood, which also features dissolutions of self, is said merely to foreshadow, to anticipate the later experiences. Not only is such a narra-teleological account not tenable, oblivious as it is to the much more complex narrative structure of the novel and to the always problematic "inmixture" of past and present in narration, but the very thesis of disintegration of self, of Ent-ichung, actually presupposes a stable self, a structured ego, a personality in the sense of bourgeois culture and ego psychology that could then show symptoms of disintegration under the impact of the experience of the modern city. What if Malte has never fully developed such a stable ego? What if, to put it in Freudian terms, the id/ego/superego structure, which after all is not a natural given but contingent on historical change, had never fully taken hold in Malte so that all the talk of its disintegration was simply beside the point? What if the fixation on the ego, which the late Freud has in common with traditional non-psychoanalytic notions of self, identity, and subjectivity, was simply not applicable to Malte? What if Malte represented a figuration of subjectivity that eludes Freud's theory of the structure of the pyschic apparatus and that cannot be subsumed under Freud's account of the oedipal? Perhaps we need an entirely different psychoanalytic account for what has usually been described as disintegration of self and loss of ego in Rilke's novel.
( p 109, Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking time in a culture of amnesia.)
Modernity and the erasure of the individual
Is the individual under erasure, in contemporary modernity?
Cf. http://www.madinamerica.com/2013/08/societies-little-coercion-little-mental-illness/
Old post
Shamans have the kind of experiential self knowledge that makes their passions servants to the shaman’s will, rather than aspects of the self that are dangerously unknown or unpredictable. The shaman, therefore, is master of him or herself. Neither society nor his or her emotions are master.
The shaman’s mastery is equivalent to radical non-conformity in terms of taking up a fixed and formal social role. The role of superego as agent of social conformity is radically subverted by the shaman’s very being. From an uninformed onlooker’s perspective, this mode of existence, shamanism, goes against the grain of conventional assumptions concerning the possible. The shaman, perversely enough, is no particular social subject, but may change his or her identity at will, according to whim and the imagination. The shaman’s very existence is definitively scandalous – it offends the sense of social norms, as something that ought not to be, as an offence against our socialised conceptions of the possible. Nonetheless Marechera was never more a shaman than, in his ordinary life,when he adorned himself with myriads of cameras to become, in turn, his own idea of a Fleet Street photographer, an old woman, and finally a hunter. (p 225).
The scandalous nature of the shaman attacks our formalised (and indeed often reified) visions of what society ought to be like. As observers of the practice we may too easily be led astray by our emotions and their powers of persuasion, to the point of denying the very possibility of shamanic being. Our cognitive dissonance in the face of superego pressure to conform overwhelms us. Consequently, we believe that there is either normative society or there is madness, but that there is no third category of shamanism – there is no mode of being that evades the necessity of social conformity without being driven completely mad. Yet, the mode of being that is shamanism is a state of having conquered the demands of superego through facing death. Viewed in Hegelian terms, the bondsman is unfree because he is afraid to face death. The shaman, however, is one whose very being is defined by having entered the realm of death. By facing death, he has made himself free of societal constraints – the primary one being the socialising force of superego. Thus the shaman’s identity is not held in place by societal expectations, but by the tranformative force of his own will. That the shamanistic mode of being can look like social death from a spectator’s point of view doesn’t add up to a practical negation of his being. The shaman’s relationship to death is ongoing and dialectical – the negation of his formalised social being fuels his imagination, which stands as a dialectial opposite to the nature and conditions of a fixed state of social being. The shaman’s relationship to normal, conventional society is in the relationship of scandal to a fixed standard of morality.
In the choreodrama, “Portrait of a Black Artist in London,” Marechera invites us to view him in terms of scandal. The choreodrama opposes, with great psychological violence, the formal identity of the black man; the “negro”. It counterposes to this state of being an opposite force, which has as its principle the destruction of the aforementioned public state of identity:
I said take a walk through the mind of negro
Like everything human it’s not a pleasant sight
I cannot meet you there only in the grey area of the mindless
The one they quaintly call the anarchist cookbook ( p 267)
Wednesday 28 August 2013
An alternative mode of ethics
That which is primeval in the character structure can be brought to a condition of being quite familiar to the higher mind. When this happens, the higher part no longer has to fear it as much. Don’t get me wrong – I am not talking about taming or the kind of familiarity that breeds contempt. Rather, consider a surfer who wants to ride a 30 ft wave. He or she will start with smaller waves, then moving to higher ones. The purpose is to learn to move with the wave, to harness its energy as one own, and not to go under.
I think Nietzsche and Bataille were both aware of the tiered layer of the psyche. They were not trying to promote animalism or degeneration of the higher mind. That is a caricature of their position, which in the case of Bataille I have seen at times given the term, “left fascism”. You see, people fear that the passions will start to predominate over reason and this will be an expression of fascism.
The opposite may be true, in that when we deny the power of the passions, we embrace a regimented order that in some ways approximates fascism.
It’s not that I think everybody has to become big wave surfers or riders of wild stallions. Some people do and others don’t. I had to do so, because I had so much buried violence in me. I had to bring into a greater awareness and interactive relationship that which was in danger of destroying me otherwise. I had to go forth and meet the danger.
Now, I realize other people do not need to do that to nearly the same extent. Some people don’t have this measure of violence already in them that they need to confront and learn to work with (but never exactly to “tame”). I had it in abundance, partly genetically, and partly because I had been touched by an actual war. So Nietzsche and Bataille were appropriate allies for me, helping me to come to terms with the deeper layers of my self. I am also aware that other people read them in totally different ways, not understanding that they provide an instruction manual for riding big waves. They don’t have the same internal needs as I, so they see a lot of the writing as gratuitous, whereas I see all of it as necessary and precise.
Putting it a different way, my path to emancipation necessarily had to be different from the path others will take. I have to keep approaching the wilderness within myself, or otherwise I lose emotional valency. My higher mind is exceedingly strong and rarely in danger of disintegrating, so I have never had cause to fear that it would not rebuild itself, should it have to do so.
All appearances aside, I am prone to being entirely dominated by the higher mind. Should I allow this to happen, I will become schizoid, regimented and retiring. It is, in fact, the higher mind that is a basic threat to my sanity, which requires modulating. By “higher mind”, don’t mean reason, exactly, but authoritarianism. My social conditioning, from a very early age, was quite authoritarianism, compared to what people experience today. I have this to thank for the fact that I have a very, very militarized external shell. (And, as I have said to you, my psyche is in a way, back-to-front compared to most people, since MY potential fascism stems from the control center of my higher mind. In fact, if someone aggravates me violently and for a long enough time, I am quite capable of becoming a killer. I have enough external self-control to do just about anything.)
Bataille and Nietzsche are softening effects for me. They don’t turn me into a fascist, but teach me how to take pleasure in myself in a way that prevents me from directing my negative energies outwardly onto others. I keep them inward and enjoy them for myself.
My path to peace is different from others’ though, and it leads to lots of misunderstandings, especially when people imagine that my higher mind is in danger from my lower mind, as if it really were not very much stronger than these lower forces, in almost every way.
Genetic nature and social conditioning obviously have a lot to do with these differences, as I have noted. Also there is the vexing issue of gender, since I seem to be aligned with the masculine side of things, in the traditional order, which ought not to be possible
I really don’t do anything “on purpose”, such as choose a gender identity or try to align myself with something wild so as to appear cool. I have to follow a particular structure of meaning that has nothing to do with personal choice, just something discovered.
In any case, what is real and what appears to be real in my case is generally, if not always, misaligned. I am, actually, being exceedingly moral when I try to engage with my primeval self rather than leave it to its own devices. When I assert that I do not “choose” my state of being, this is also far from being, as some might think, an admission of failure. I am very good at managing myself. Also, others should be grateful when I don’t see myself as being in any way similar to them – this means I leave them alone, which sometimes is the best they can hope for.
I think Nietzsche and Bataille were both aware of the tiered layer of the psyche. They were not trying to promote animalism or degeneration of the higher mind. That is a caricature of their position, which in the case of Bataille I have seen at times given the term, “left fascism”. You see, people fear that the passions will start to predominate over reason and this will be an expression of fascism.
The opposite may be true, in that when we deny the power of the passions, we embrace a regimented order that in some ways approximates fascism.
It’s not that I think everybody has to become big wave surfers or riders of wild stallions. Some people do and others don’t. I had to do so, because I had so much buried violence in me. I had to bring into a greater awareness and interactive relationship that which was in danger of destroying me otherwise. I had to go forth and meet the danger.
Now, I realize other people do not need to do that to nearly the same extent. Some people don’t have this measure of violence already in them that they need to confront and learn to work with (but never exactly to “tame”). I had it in abundance, partly genetically, and partly because I had been touched by an actual war. So Nietzsche and Bataille were appropriate allies for me, helping me to come to terms with the deeper layers of my self. I am also aware that other people read them in totally different ways, not understanding that they provide an instruction manual for riding big waves. They don’t have the same internal needs as I, so they see a lot of the writing as gratuitous, whereas I see all of it as necessary and precise.
Putting it a different way, my path to emancipation necessarily had to be different from the path others will take. I have to keep approaching the wilderness within myself, or otherwise I lose emotional valency. My higher mind is exceedingly strong and rarely in danger of disintegrating, so I have never had cause to fear that it would not rebuild itself, should it have to do so.
All appearances aside, I am prone to being entirely dominated by the higher mind. Should I allow this to happen, I will become schizoid, regimented and retiring. It is, in fact, the higher mind that is a basic threat to my sanity, which requires modulating. By “higher mind”, don’t mean reason, exactly, but authoritarianism. My social conditioning, from a very early age, was quite authoritarianism, compared to what people experience today. I have this to thank for the fact that I have a very, very militarized external shell. (And, as I have said to you, my psyche is in a way, back-to-front compared to most people, since MY potential fascism stems from the control center of my higher mind. In fact, if someone aggravates me violently and for a long enough time, I am quite capable of becoming a killer. I have enough external self-control to do just about anything.)
Bataille and Nietzsche are softening effects for me. They don’t turn me into a fascist, but teach me how to take pleasure in myself in a way that prevents me from directing my negative energies outwardly onto others. I keep them inward and enjoy them for myself.
My path to peace is different from others’ though, and it leads to lots of misunderstandings, especially when people imagine that my higher mind is in danger from my lower mind, as if it really were not very much stronger than these lower forces, in almost every way.
Genetic nature and social conditioning obviously have a lot to do with these differences, as I have noted. Also there is the vexing issue of gender, since I seem to be aligned with the masculine side of things, in the traditional order, which ought not to be possible
I really don’t do anything “on purpose”, such as choose a gender identity or try to align myself with something wild so as to appear cool. I have to follow a particular structure of meaning that has nothing to do with personal choice, just something discovered.
In any case, what is real and what appears to be real in my case is generally, if not always, misaligned. I am, actually, being exceedingly moral when I try to engage with my primeval self rather than leave it to its own devices. When I assert that I do not “choose” my state of being, this is also far from being, as some might think, an admission of failure. I am very good at managing myself. Also, others should be grateful when I don’t see myself as being in any way similar to them – this means I leave them alone, which sometimes is the best they can hope for.
Tuesday 27 August 2013
The pitfalls of moral leadership (Hugo Schwyzer)
Addendum:
You might consider whether taking Christianity seriously doesn't engender mental illiness as almost a matter of course. The principles of selflessness lead to an exaggerated emphasis on the self, because a person cannot be without an ego center and still retain balance. Christian asceticism, similarly, tends to provoke lapses of extreme lasciviousness. The oscillation between two states of being is the desperate response of a mind and body put at odds with itself. Madness is highly likely. But if one can manage to purge the principles of Christian metaphysics within oneself, one might not be so mad after all.
Monday 26 August 2013
Coconut oil much maligned but ready for a revival - Ockham's Razor - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Coconut oil much maligned but ready for a revival - Ockham's Razor - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
....Not only was the coconut oil compared to soy oil hydrogenated, destroying the 8% fraction of unsaturated fat it actually contains, but its lack of an omega-3 component was overlooked. The rats fed coconut oil were deficient in omega-3 while the soy rats were not. What if the essentials had been added, just as they are in traditional coconut-consuming societies where fish and chicken are common fare?
Sunday 25 August 2013
Dambudzo Marechera's BLACK SUNLIGHT (whole)
Looking out at the world from a regressive PARANOID-SCHIZOID position, to see how consciousness has trapped you in its narrow confines ……
I realize there is a lot of political and social commentary in here as well literary intertextuality. I say this rather impatiently because it's not what I am interested in. The underlying emotional structure of the text is more important as it reveals a contrast between conscious reality and a much deeper, more personal and more fundamental level of truth. In fact one is freed from a very mind-confining conscious reality when one enters a paranoid and schizoid state, since then one has the emotional power and distancing to see the civilizing constraints for what they are.
you may click on the text images to enlarge the pages from BLACK SUNLIGHT
No to patriarchy
The Children of the Intellectual Class | Clarissa's Blog
The funny thing about the military is that in theory, and in any case when it is working effectively, you have an impersonal identity. So identity is not gendered. That is why the military is often the first place where racial segregation breaks down.
The funny thing about the military is that in theory, and in any case when it is working effectively, you have an impersonal identity. So identity is not gendered. That is why the military is often the first place where racial segregation breaks down.
Saturday 24 August 2013
shamanic insights
Stop putting your life on hold or mortgaging it to notions of moral perfection. Go deeply into your trauma and face your death and disintegration. In doing so, you will learn to live authentically and in the moment.
Cf: http://musteryou.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/understanding-the-way-life-imprisons-you/
Psych. . . What? | Clarissa's Blog
Psych. . . What? | Clarissa's Blog
One of the great benefits I have had through self analysis is the reduction of guilt and confusion. I had both, and there were related to each other, because of the different way in which modernity frames reality. People would say to me that I was acting in a certain way because my ego was sensitive, but that was far from being the case. Sometimes my ego just withdraws itself and I am no longer relating personally -- that is, with sensitivity. I am relating pragmatically, in terms of what has to be done to handle a situation in the most effective way.
They would say, "you should feel bad about responding too sensitively." But at that time, I would feel nothing personal about the matter, as I was already in an ego-retracted mode and acting impersonally (and quite effectively, to solve a problem).
I found it very confusing that contemporary people kept asserting I was doing one thing when I was doing the other, but now I see that my inclination to become impersonal is triggered by a sensitized reaction to threat. In modern society, the threat of actual violence is minimized, but I was brought up in a society where the violence was real and learned to respond accordingly.
So I'm over-reactive to a threat, certainly. But I find modern people quite under-reactive and oblivious. They don't read their environments well or scan them for any possible danger.
In any case, I'm not feeling guilty anymore, because I understand that my adaptation is not a moral failure, but has to do with being oriented to different circumstances. Also the perceptions moderns have about my level of reaction has to do with their assumption that modernity is the only possible society one can live in. They judge on the basis of one's adaptation to modernity and try to turn that into a moral question.
Definitely no counselor I ever saw was able to develop insight like I have, even when the different circumstances were explained to them. The modern idea is that we all are individuals, who at the most are influenced by one's nuclear family, but certainly not more than this. Adaption to the environment is not considered to play a role, except in a way that is deemed to be extraneous to the development of an individual self. So therapists have a fundamental cognitive block, it seems.
One of the great benefits I have had through self analysis is the reduction of guilt and confusion. I had both, and there were related to each other, because of the different way in which modernity frames reality. People would say to me that I was acting in a certain way because my ego was sensitive, but that was far from being the case. Sometimes my ego just withdraws itself and I am no longer relating personally -- that is, with sensitivity. I am relating pragmatically, in terms of what has to be done to handle a situation in the most effective way.
They would say, "you should feel bad about responding too sensitively." But at that time, I would feel nothing personal about the matter, as I was already in an ego-retracted mode and acting impersonally (and quite effectively, to solve a problem).
I found it very confusing that contemporary people kept asserting I was doing one thing when I was doing the other, but now I see that my inclination to become impersonal is triggered by a sensitized reaction to threat. In modern society, the threat of actual violence is minimized, but I was brought up in a society where the violence was real and learned to respond accordingly.
So I'm over-reactive to a threat, certainly. But I find modern people quite under-reactive and oblivious. They don't read their environments well or scan them for any possible danger.
In any case, I'm not feeling guilty anymore, because I understand that my adaptation is not a moral failure, but has to do with being oriented to different circumstances. Also the perceptions moderns have about my level of reaction has to do with their assumption that modernity is the only possible society one can live in. They judge on the basis of one's adaptation to modernity and try to turn that into a moral question.
Definitely no counselor I ever saw was able to develop insight like I have, even when the different circumstances were explained to them. The modern idea is that we all are individuals, who at the most are influenced by one's nuclear family, but certainly not more than this. Adaption to the environment is not considered to play a role, except in a way that is deemed to be extraneous to the development of an individual self. So therapists have a fundamental cognitive block, it seems.
Friday 23 August 2013
On formulating moral judgments
When people judge something as evil or immoral, they regularly do so as a preemptive strike against something emotionally disturbing, thus morality is often a psychological defense mechanism and not ethically deep. It can be possible to make real moral judgments on the basis of real knowing, but this requires a prior development of one's character to be able to fully encounter (and treat fairly) what now seems alien, and is consequently frightening.
Psych. . . What? | Clarissa's Blog
Psych. . . What? | Clarissa's Blog
Indeed, I have made a self-analysis on my own, but it takes many years and much bumping into things. I very much doubt that any progress could have been made by others who operate only within the context of modernity. But my strange feature of the personality is to become a very different person when people make strong emotional or contradictory demands of me. I become in a mode of being at war, which is not surprising considering the context of my upbringing. I can easily conjure up those parameters for psychological existence — saving energy, hiding in the scrub (not revealing one's whereabouts), repressing intense emotion, calculating the principles of one's survival.
Lately I’ve discovered this mode of psychology, the psychology of the extremes, is fundamental to my well-being. When I move into this state, I can process existential material very easily and effectively and make all the right decisions for myself, including moving closer to some people and cutting emotional ties with others. I’m very strong in this mode of expedience, which makes me a aware of different aspects of my personality, under pressure.
Now, the probable reason I have this capability is my father’s violence. He used to fly at me and hit me or attack in other ways. Thing is, I must have formed an adaptation to it in my very early years. It’s not maladaptive for coping with extreme situations, although it may be so in terms of modernity, as I sometimes read situations that are not yet extreme as if they were so and move very quickly between a normal and defensive state.
After many decades, I have concluded these things about myself. I understand there are pros and cons to having this kind of a character. It makes me unsuited to much of modernity as I take too much far too seriously -- but then I have the power of the depth of insight to go deeply into myself and kind of melt down in such a way that enables me to cope extremely effectively with a new crisis. I’m highly adapted to any sort of crisis, partly because I can emotionally cut off, whilst clarifying practical issues.
This analysis is in accordance with my behavior and introspective findings over three or more decades. As I said, it would have been hard for people not familiar with my autobiographic background to be able to put the pieces together as I have done. As well as this, there is a pronounced tendency on the part of those who only know modernity to pathologize my behavior without understanding its adaptive and enriching possibilities. I understand these myself, from experience, so I don’t intend to flatten myself out and try to become like everybody else.
Indeed, I have made a self-analysis on my own, but it takes many years and much bumping into things. I very much doubt that any progress could have been made by others who operate only within the context of modernity. But my strange feature of the personality is to become a very different person when people make strong emotional or contradictory demands of me. I become in a mode of being at war, which is not surprising considering the context of my upbringing. I can easily conjure up those parameters for psychological existence — saving energy, hiding in the scrub (not revealing one's whereabouts), repressing intense emotion, calculating the principles of one's survival.
Lately I’ve discovered this mode of psychology, the psychology of the extremes, is fundamental to my well-being. When I move into this state, I can process existential material very easily and effectively and make all the right decisions for myself, including moving closer to some people and cutting emotional ties with others. I’m very strong in this mode of expedience, which makes me a aware of different aspects of my personality, under pressure.
Now, the probable reason I have this capability is my father’s violence. He used to fly at me and hit me or attack in other ways. Thing is, I must have formed an adaptation to it in my very early years. It’s not maladaptive for coping with extreme situations, although it may be so in terms of modernity, as I sometimes read situations that are not yet extreme as if they were so and move very quickly between a normal and defensive state.
After many decades, I have concluded these things about myself. I understand there are pros and cons to having this kind of a character. It makes me unsuited to much of modernity as I take too much far too seriously -- but then I have the power of the depth of insight to go deeply into myself and kind of melt down in such a way that enables me to cope extremely effectively with a new crisis. I’m highly adapted to any sort of crisis, partly because I can emotionally cut off, whilst clarifying practical issues.
This analysis is in accordance with my behavior and introspective findings over three or more decades. As I said, it would have been hard for people not familiar with my autobiographic background to be able to put the pieces together as I have done. As well as this, there is a pronounced tendency on the part of those who only know modernity to pathologize my behavior without understanding its adaptive and enriching possibilities. I understand these myself, from experience, so I don’t intend to flatten myself out and try to become like everybody else.
Thursday 22 August 2013
Some Blah from the past
THE HOUSE OF HUNGER ‘AT THE HEAD OF THE STREAM’.
READING MARECHERA’S THE HOUSE OF HUNGER AS ‘AT THE HEAD OF THE STREAM’.
There is a key to both understanding and misunderstanding Marechera’s first published work of fiction – and it lies in the restoration of its intended name, “At the head of the stream.” For is it at the head of the stream – a shamanic designation, as I shall explain – that we find the author’s restored self, in the character of the old man at the end of the novelette. The other sections of the book, apart from the novelette, are nine short stories, semi-autobiographical, which reveal aspects of the author’s life experiences and psychodynamic states. The works in all were published under the name of The House of Hunger, and received recognition as a Joint Winner of The Guardian Fiction Prize in 1978. At the award ceremony, Marechera notoriously expressed his disdain by throwing items from his table at various presiding officials’ heads. He went on to write books that were not highly appraised as they were perhaps not so well understood. This early misunderstanding can be traced to the dropping of one name for the novel and the appropriation of another. David Pattison, a critic of the writer’s life and works points out that in the publisher’s strategic renaming of the work from “At the head of the stream” to “The House of Hunger”, the work obtained a broader and more poignant political focus than it would otherwise have had. This change of name was no doubt calculated to suit the marketing interests of the publishing company, who would been able to rely upon the negative publicity concerning the Rhodesia regime in order to generate interest in a book that seemed to be critiquing it. Whilst the change in emphasis made Marechera out to be a more conventionally political writer than he in fact was, Pattison points out that it also raised expectations for a certain level of conventional political service and engagement from the writer that was not to be forthcoming. That which was later viewed as the author’s failure to reach his audience was actually a failure of communication from the start, set into motion by this marketing ploy which misrepresented the author’s interests as being of a narrow, political variety, when his engagement would have been better understood in shamanistic terms, as suggested by his own title. Perhaps it was due to the overboiling of the author’s frustration at feeling wilfully misrepresented in his views that ended up with flying plates and bottles.
The concern of the writer was, and always has been, a shamanic one: He wanted understand the nature of trauma afflicted through political oppression. His writing was intended to give meaning to the afflictions of those who were fighting to liberate Zimbabwe from colonial interests, and who were dying by the day. He spoke on this when he accepted his award. His approach showed an intention to bring to light the suffering of his people in a transpersonal way, rather than to head a political movement in a way that objectively transcended the actual experience of suffering.
In order to understand that which Marechera as shaman wants us to understand, it is necessary, in shamanistic fashion, to cross an experiential and metaphorical bridge between the living and the dead. Discussing “the phenomenon of the ‘perilous passage,’ Eliade notes that whereas in illo tempore, everyone could pass easily over the bridge connecting heaven and earth, now, with the advent of a mysterious fall and consequently of death, that passage can be negotiated only ‘in spirit-either through actual physical death or in the simulation of death constituted by “ecstatic” practice.” [p 49, Perkinson] Michael Taussig’s concept of shamanic wildness as “the death space of signification” may also assist us here.
“The colonized space of death has a colonizing function, maintaining the hegemony or cultural stability of norms and desires that faciliate the way the rulers rule the ruled in the land of the living. Yet the space of death is notoriously conflict-ridden and contradictory; a privileged domain of metamorphosis, the space par excellence for uncertainty and terror to stun permanently, yet also revive and empower with new life.” ( p 374)
Thus, wherever life is prohibited from developing smoothly, a “death space” of signification (something that evades the possibility of speech and language) occurs. Yet this evasion of the dominant discourse also opens up a space for rewriting reality on one’s own terms. The concept above is particularly relevent to what occurs when societies are so oppressive that those living within them cannot express an adult identity except in a broken and shattered sense (as we shall see later in Marechera’s reference to himself perched upon the precipice of manhood but seeing only an “ape in the mirror”). Jim Perkinson, in his argument that blackness is a shamanic category in the myth of America, expresses the idea that certain groups of people can be “shamanised” as a result of their oppressive social contexts. For instance:
“W.E. B. DuBois articulates the pain of enduring racial oppression in terms of the affliction of “double consciousness” that he also describes as the experience of “being born with a veil and gifted with second sight in this American world.”‘ This latter description (“born with a veil,” “gifted with second sight”) is itself a veiled reference to being born with a “caul” (or gauzy film covering the eyes) in African American culture-a sign of a peculiar shamanistic ability to see beyond the ordinary.” [ p 19, Perkinson]
“W.E. B. DuBois articulates the pain of enduring racial oppression in terms of the affliction of “double consciousness” that he also describes as the experience of “being born with a veil and gifted with second sight in this American world.”‘ This latter description (“born with a veil,” “gifted with second sight”) is itself a veiled reference to being born with a “caul” (or gauzy film covering the eyes) in African American culture-a sign of a peculiar shamanistic ability to see beyond the ordinary.” [ p 19, Perkinson]
It is my argument in this chapter that the inability of the author and protagonist, the writer Dambudzo Marechera, to command a place in society as an adult citizen, with associated qualities of respectability, internal complexity, and ability to transcend some of the violence of subjection to the whims of others, leads to this shamanisation. According to Perkinson, shamanisation occurs when one is reminded of one’s inferior standing in society because of one’s skin colour. This produces a shift in consciousness whereby the subject who is so accosted is thrown backwards into an historical investigation in search of reasons for his current subjection. Such a backwards shift denies the validity of the current state of subjection and the identity associated with such devaluation. It also consolidates an alternative identity from that which is implied by the insult about one’s race. For instance, Fanon, when sudden insulted on the street, may find that his consciousness is suddenly thrust back to the nature and identities of his ancestors. This occurs in the process of being unable to defend his position as an adult worthy of respect in the present. As Perkinson interpets it, there are shamanistic aspects to this occurrence for the oppressive circumstance compels a moving away from the consciousness of time in the present and its associated normal state of bodily awareness into something ressembling the world of spirits:
[I]n the moment of encounter on the street, where a little white boy says, “Look, a Negro!” and then continues, “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” the [slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world] crumbles. For Fanon, the moment is “an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spatter[s his] whole body with black blood.” Indeed, the world itself shatters: “All around me the white man, above the sky tears at its navel, the earth rasps under my feet, and there is a white song, a white song. All this whiteness that burns me.”‘ His corporeal schema is replaced by an epidermal one. He ceases to be aware of his body “in the third person” and instead becomes aware of it “in a triple person.”13′ He suddenly exists triply, responsible at once for his body, his race, his ancestors. {41, Perkinson]
It was as if the subject, being so assaulted, separates from his bodily sense of being in the present and is thrown back to encounter the spectres of the past — in all of their qualities of blessing or horror. According to Judith Lewis Herman, writing on Trauma and Recovery, “traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death. “ ( p 33). Psychological trauma is also “an affliction of helplessness” ( p 33). There are some similarities between what the shaman makes of trauma and Michael Taussig’s notion of the “death space of signification”. Putting the two theoretical postulates together it would seem that a “death space of significaiton” (Taussig’s term) occurs when normal ego-based consciousness moves away from the ego’s normal construction of space and time, into a zone that cannot be represented in these everday terms of time and space. When one is denied the power – because of various state or social mechanisms, such as the institutionalisation of slavery – to transcend one’s extreme subjectification to the will of another, one enters this death space of signification. In shamanistic terms, one “crosses the bridge” [Eliade] between the living and the dead. In similar conceptual terms, one leaves one’s body (and the present) and enters the “spirit” world of the non-present. It would also seem that the oppressive force that compels the negation of one’s present persona in time and space also pressures one backwards to the past in some sense, — in Fanon’s case, back to the origins of his ancestors. This backwards movement can also be understood metaphorically in Marechera’s terms as a movement towards being “At the head of the stream” of life’s problems and dilemmas. It ought to go without saying that one must have encountered experiences of extreme oppression and of the extreme curtailment of one’s subjective will, in order to intuitively understand this notion of “death spaces”. This will not have been the case for most – hence the difficulty of engaging with much of the imagery and conceptual paradigms that Marechera loves to tease us with, in his writings.
The difficulty of understanding some of Marechera’s texts can be reduced by having an intellectual familiarity with what shamanism is, and how it can be found in this writer’s works– for there is a band of social and aesthetic logic running through Marechera’s oeuvre that by both accident of fate as well as artistic design, is shamanistic. “Three shamanic behaviors […] are the initiation crisis, mediumship, and shamanic journey.” [p 101 Roger Walsh, The Psychological Health of Shamans: A Reevaluation] In this chapter I will examine both his novelette and several of the short stories within the earlier section of his works published under the name of The House of Hunger. I will show that the novelette covers in a very psychologically comprehensive fashion his “shamanic initiation” and subsequent recovery to become a writer of a shamanic genre. I will focus primarily on the novelette published with this group of stories – which, like the title of this collection of writing also goes under the name of The House of Hunger.
The central feature of the novelette is the writer’s semi-fictionalised account of his life in Vengere Township in colonial Rhodesia. The writer gives vivid pictures of an “iron net thrown over the sky” (p 74, 75) in the sense of hungering for fulfilment and transcendence of what was effectively “a ghetto”, and yet being unable to attain that. His character, in similar fashion to that of Stephen Hero, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is a mixture of arrogance and uncertainty about women. Above all, he is a character who disdains the vulgar level of survival necessitated by life in the black slums. His disdain of this kind of lifestyle is passed on as a disdain of women, whom he feels are dangerous as well as dangerously inhuman because of their ability to survive and nurture, even under the impossible terms of poverty and violence. The author’s attitude is one of hatred, nurturing a little seed of hatred until it grew:
“I found a seed, a little seed, the smallest in the world. And its name was Hate. I buried it in my mind and watered it with tears. No seed ever had a better gardener. As it swelled and cracked into green life I felt my nation tremble, tremble in the throes of birth – and burst out bloom and branch.” ( p 17)
This hatred, planted within the “house” of his mind – a hatred which is also represented as longing for “the black heroes” — was the likely force behind the his “shamanic initiation”. The inertia of everyday life in the “ghetto”, the reckless determination to hate the degradation of life in this environment, along with an intellectual and artistic drive that could not find nourishment within this limited environment was what pushed the writer and his protagonist to the point of crisis that undermined his sanity. It seems reasonable that such an upsurgance of destructive effect from within was necessary to clear the space from which the author could construct a different platform for identity:
When the forces of growth overwhelm the forces of inertia, then a developmental crisis occurs. The symptoms of this crisis may vary depending upon the individual’s personality and maturity. They may range from primitive pathology to existential, transpersonal, or spiritual concerns (Wilber, Engler, and Brown). In the latter case the crisis has come to be known as a transpersonal crisis, spiritual emergency, or spiritual emergence (Assagioli; Grof and Grof 1986, 1989, 1990), and it is these that seem closest to and most helpful in understanding the shamanic initiation crisis. [Walsh p 116]
Walsh goes on to speak of the shamanic initiation (in Marechera’s case, understood as a loss of sanity and control over language) as a maturation crisis – thus accounting for the change in the author as he no longer sees himself positioned as a social victim of his circumstances so much as one who has learned to tell tales and master reality from a position of self-knowledge, having harnessed his own vivid imagination as a tool of self-nourishment. The novelette depicts what is really an involuntary shamanic initiation, in the sense that the writer didn’t set out with the goal in mind to become a type of shaman. Yet his hatred of reality nurtured and watered the psychosis that was to overtake him in the form of four hallucinated figures following him everywhere, when he was at the point of stuyding for his school leaving exam.
“They could not have been the black heroes whom I sought – or perhaps they were. I don’t’ know. There had been four of them; three men in threadbare clothes and the woman of the faded shawl. This had happened a few weeks before my sixth form examinations – which I then had to write with the assistance of a massive dose of white tranquillisers and pink triangular pills.”( p 28)
The shamanic initiation can sometimes take the form of “madness” according to [expert on the topic…] So much for the involuntary aspects of the process of becoming “shamanised”. The wreckless watering of the seed of hatred no doubt had a voluntary aspect – at least in the form of the will of wanting to depart from reality. The writer also confesses, in autobiographical tone, to having enjoyed dagga (marijuana) ( p 3), which, as a drug, would have increased his chance of “shamanic initiation”.
Another aspect of shamanic consciousness was more obviously creative: “Friends who acted out of character affected me in the same way [as a tropic storm from which one needed to take shelter. …I was] creating for myself a labyrinthine personal world which would merely enmesh me within its crude mythology. That I could not bear a star, a stone, a flame, a river, or a cupful of air was purely because they all seemed to have significance irrevocably not my own.”
The crude mythology forms the basis for his escape from reality. This is acknowledged very directly and precisely by the writer, yet in terms that invoke the shamanic elements, of earth, fire water and air, as well as the heavens and the earth. What he is escaping, (in the same paragraph), is that which he cannot allow himself to overlook – the nonspiritualisation, the non-transcendence of his human experiences. “On a baser level I could not forgive man, myself, for being utterly and crudely there. I felt in need of forgiveness. And those unfortunate enough to come into contact with me always afterwards consoled themselves and myself by reducing it all to a ‘chip on the shoulder’. This is a very well-written account of a kind of attitude and situation that could lead to a break with reality. In fact, disapproval of oneself and others is a factor that may contribute to the experience of hallucinations and paranoia – both of which the protagonist suffered from in the novelette.
The author’s acute observations of his psychological state are excruciating in their exactitude in terms of depicting a society’s psychological dynamics, and a young man’s psychic disintegration. […author.] has stated that shamanic initiation might be understood as the result of an internal pressure towards personal growth that breaks apart unconscious patterns of resistance. The tearing apart of the fabric of one’s being is a motif the writer has used more than once in the pages of the novelette. “I looked up. As I did so the old cloth of my former self seemed to stretch and tear once more.” ( p 17) Yet, the writer is also clearly driven to grow and develop despite his own limitations, thus the internal opposition that developed within him: “My fear of heights had not restrained me from climbing the cliffs of my nerves. And the demons, finding the House unattended, had calmly strutted in through the open door. Had I been a good atheist perhaps….” (p 29).
The writer is beset by voices and rain that seems to knock upon his head, the metaphoric house of spiritual hunger. “For it was a strange thirst. An unknown hunger. Which had driven him from himself, from his friends, from his family, from the things of his first world.” ( p 79) There is one violent event after another. In the opening scenes the author’s cat is killed by a children’s gang, and by the end of the book the violence hasn’t quite relented. The impossibility of nurturing is visited in the nature of a beaten and not dead yet cat which still seeks affection. The author resists Immaculate’s affections, because he cannot quite understand how she could be so, within the context in which she lives. The lack of personal transcendence becomes a limitation of subjectivity – a trap wrought around his wounded and stitched up head: “Those stitches like a net cast up into the sky tightened around my mind, and with the needle bit sharply into the tenderer parts of the brain.” The life in the land of gansters has already taken its toll on the sensitive young man by depriving him of speech, earlier in the book.
The descent into madness is as a result of not relating to the dominant social orders as a whole (although he does relate to it already very strongly in terms of his masculine-identified desire to keep himself apart from the contamination of women – at least in part an experientially founded attitude). In terms of the traditions of Shona culture – his culture of origin – he had shown his proclivities to be other than those of an obedient and respectful son. This had been as a result of unintentionally speaking English to his mother, and earning a hiding. Nor could he identify in totum with the colonial English speaking culture, which seemed to impress upon him the culture of the oppressors. If the “Symbolic register” is taken to encompass the social and cultural values of each of these rather geographically circumscribed social milieus, then surely both would have represented equally alienating alternatives in terms of choosing an adult life and set of values to support it. Both could have been felt as extremely threatening in terms of undermining his happy connection with life (p 85) as a child. The tension that has built in him regarding gender is the tension that, according to Lacanian psychology, comes from language and the ability to speak it. For sexual difference takes place as part of a induction into the organisational principles of language – Perhaps, then, it is also his unhappiness regarding gender, as well as the lack of spiritual fulfilment in the ghetto, which breaks the protagonist apart?
“I began to ramble, incoherently, in a disconnected manner. I was being severed from my own voice.” ( p 30). The author goes on to describe the fight, autonomously taking place as if apart from his own will or preferences, between the English and Shona parts of his psyche. Yet he himself has become incoherent. The refusal of the symbolic order is a refusal of meaning on terms other than the subject’s own terms. It is a refusal of the reality of the ghetto and its lack of scope for transcendence in the form of subjective self fulfilment. It is odd then, that such a rejection of language should lead to such an unexpectable outcome – whereby the author in later works comes to refer to himself as a “wordhorde”. Indeed, the exquisite precision of his writing, when it comes to expressing just the right word for each psychological state he undergoes gives testimony to the expressive potency of an absolute master of language. What happened to Marechera or the protagonist if we are to be more exact could have so changed his nature and identity?
Along with the effect of being in a pressure cooker, which is effectively what the ghetto situation was, on a psychological and social level, the author’s own attitude to life was to push the envelope, to climb up to the height of his nerves in order to satisfy his curiosity about life. This openness to knowledge is what ultimately secured a path for him outside of the dominant cultural mores and its status quo. This approach is fully compatable with various shamanistic projects, which according to Perkinson, “entails internal flights of creative daring, laboring inarticulable depths of anguish into forms of self-knowledge that continually elude dominant culture categories and understanding. In this vein, we would also perhaps have to recognize a certain novelty of the enterprise in coming to enjoy shamanistic flight for its own sake.” ( p 47)
The writer’s reckless tendency not to save himself by allowing his life and being to be co-opted by language as both a subtle (value laden) and overt (aspect of public identity) control mechanism may be part of what caused language to depart from him – creating the underlying conditions for his shamanistic initiation. It is also what saved him. Increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus. “The spirits increase, vigor grows through a wound.” said Nietzsche. [Twilight of the Idols]. The vigour supplied through the experience of being wounded expanded the range of his imagination to take in unconventional insights. The same recklessness that caused his brain to suffer from hallucinations now enables him to master his own psyche and its insights as adventure: Rather than locate his subjectivity within a particular brand of cultural identity, he invites his brain to explode. Towards the end of the book the protagonist welcomes the subtle exploding of his mind as part of a shamanistic journey away from the categories of identity contained by language:
‘White people are shit,’ Doug added with closed eyes.
I agreed.
‘And black people are shit,” Doug blew cinders and ash from his shirtfront.
Before I could agree again Philip interrupted:
‘Everybody human shits, that’s the trouble.’
I nodded, watching my mind explode deliciously.’ ( p 67)
This epistemological destruction of difference is indeed shamanic, for it is a way of giving in to the conventional fear of losing one’s identity and the stability of self, only to find what one had been looking for all the time – the unity of one’s self as a preposterously humourous undermining of conventional tropes of identity. According to Joan Halifax quoted in Perkinson (page 23) “The shaman is a figure “balanced between worlds,” teaching that trauma can be “a passageway to a greater life where there is access to great power at great risk.” Indeed, the shaman often becomes androgynous, “balancing” or equalizing problematic social roles and creating healing through paradox. The initiatory quest here is one that opens the mystery by “becoming it,” transcends death “by dying in life,” pierces duality “by embracing opposites,” reunites fractured forms by fashioning oneself as “a double being.””
If the story is indeed at least partly fact and not fiction, the author’s “shamanic intitiation” must have achieved the effect that turned him into a writer. It must have led to a greater stengthening of mind, insight and creative energy. The elaborate richness, acuteness of observation and humour of the writing in this group of works lends certainty to the idea that there is a salient difference between the person depicted as Marechera in the stories and the writer who completed the semi-autobiographical texts. A lot of the richness of the text is ironical. Marechera’s conscious or subconscious concession to an ironic view of himself as a kind of shaman is indicated through a viewing of his bones after having undergone an X-ray. Shamans, traditionally, count the number of their own bones. “But he let me see the X-rays on the illuminated screen. The sight of my own bones chilled me.” ( p 77) There are shamanic insinuations in the
earlier parts of the text, wherein the writer conceives of himself as prematurely grey, and has his wise old man status affirmed by a bird’s dropping on his head. Perhaps the shaman is necessarily one who is prematurely aged? – As Perkinson says about Freida Kahlo, it was as if life, after her accident, suddenly had no secrets from her. The ‘old man’ speaks of a hunger that couldn’t simply be nurtured by hate. “He fed on hatred of all things; but that did not quench his thirst.” ( p 79) In the terminology of Carlos Casteneda’s don Juan, (whom Marechera read) he longed for “infinity”.
earlier parts of the text, wherein the writer conceives of himself as prematurely grey, and has his wise old man status affirmed by a bird’s dropping on his head. Perhaps the shaman is necessarily one who is prematurely aged? – As Perkinson says about Freida Kahlo, it was as if life, after her accident, suddenly had no secrets from her. The ‘old man’ speaks of a hunger that couldn’t simply be nurtured by hate. “He fed on hatred of all things; but that did not quench his thirst.” ( p 79) In the terminology of Carlos Casteneda’s don Juan, (whom Marechera read) he longed for “infinity”.
As stated in the beginning of this chapter, the clue resides in the very name of the book in its original intention: At the head of the stream. The shamanic resolution of the binary aspects of the author’s mind (particularly “spirit” versus “vulgarly there”) has its meaning in this term. In both Lacanian and in interpersonal terms, the shamanic iniitation experience would appear to involve a going backwards; a regression. This is in fact the case; however the regression solves a particular purpose of taking one to a place where the contradictions of life can be seen in a different light. What makes the difference is that Marechera discovers a nurturing aspect within himself, in the reformulation of his father – the “old man” who “died beneath the wheels of the twentieth century” under a train. “There was nothing left but stains, bloodstains and fragments of flesh, when the whole length of it was through with eating him.” ( p 45) – to an older and nurturing version of himself, who is a story teller. This revitalised old man takes the young man under his wing, by telling parables and snatches of stories and amusing him with his absurd ideas agasint the backdrop of his mother’s condemnation that his isn’t growing up quickly enough: “But the old man was my friend. He simply wandered into the House [which the writer tells us is the protagonist’s mind] one day out of the rain, dragging himself on his knobby walking stick. And he stayed. His face was like a mesh of copper wire; his wrists, strings of muscle [….] What he loved best was for me to listen attentively while he told stories that were oblique, rambling, fragmentary. His transparent, cunning look, his eager chuckle, his wheexzing cought, and something of the earth, gravel-like, in his voice – these gave body to the fragments of things which he casually threw in my direction.” (p 79) This old man is, in fact, Marechera the writer as a shaman. Shamans are cunning and perhaps dubious characters by all accounts – however, what defines them is that they have mastered “the spirits” that had previously tormented them, just as the writer has mastered the necessary fragmentation of life, and the need for creative stitches to bind reality together, so as to give it some digestable semblance of form.
“What is unique about shamans is not that they complain of persecution by spirits; it is that they eventually learn how to master and use them [(Eliade; Shirokogoroff) in 112 Roger Walsh]”
If language and its symbols were indeed the young Marechera’s tormentors, then by the end of the book the master has definitively established his mastery over them. This “old man” has also, quite obviously, overcome the younger writer’s hostility towards all that nurtures, which had been fueled by his sense of a gender dichotomy (wherein women foolishly sought nurturing and nurtured, whereas men were tough gangsters.) What has significantly happened is that the young man has matured and overcome his opposition to reality by learning to nurture. “But as he listened to himself, to the thirst and to the hunger, he suddenly said to himself, to the thirst and to the hunger, he suddenly said in words of gold: “I will live at the head of the stream where all of man’s questions began.” One way of reading this is that the shaman lives at a point of experience that precedes and oversees the nature and development of the dichotomies of social meaning. Another way of looking at this comes from the short story, “Burning in the Rain’, in which the writer encounters his own hesitation “on the threshold of manhood” ( p 85) and encounters an apparition of an “ape in the mirror” (a sure sign that his transcendence into manhood is threatened by social limitations in a racist society). In this story, the destruction of his old self (in three different ways) is also counterbalanced by a submerged existence which nonetheless has compensatory value, “at the head of the stream”. ( p 84) . Speaking of a persona of a lover accused of being a whore, he writes, “At the head of the stream, that’s where they had, with great violence, fused inot one and it was among the petunias so unbearably sweet that they had become afraid and listened to the staring motionless thing which made rivers flow. ( p 84) This union that takes place as a form of creativity overcomes the male-female dichotomy that had been limiting his scope within the normative symbolic register of divisive cultural evaluations. It is precisely this refusal of the normal symbolic order and the recovery of a self that exceeds the epistemological scope of the common verities within a particular culture, that enables the shaman to develop into a wiseman: Shamans “show proof of a more than normal nervous constitution.[…] shamans not only recover but may function exceptionally well as leaders and healers of their people [p115 Eliade quoted by Walsh].
The “head of the stream” is the place of recovery, the explosively creative place in which the shaman dwells in the spirit world (along with the “manfish” – another symbol of a drowned soul) – yet it is also, paradoxically perhaps, a place of creative renewal of one’s drowned identity. “At the head of the stream” one encounters the unity of one’s unfragmented self. This is an originatory position, pre-ontological, which lies beyond the comfort zone of humanity and its social organisations. It is the position of the creator, who uses his or her creative insights in order to direct reality, without succumbing to the force of language, himself. It is from this position, that precedes and yet surpasses the conventional organising system of language, that the writer is able to read societies’ dichotomies (from the point of clarifying distance of detachment from humanity) and thus to diagnose societies’ wounds. Meanwhile, the reader is encouraged to recognise that life is reformulated and given new vitality through the creativity of the mind expressed as stream of consciousness.
Wednesday 21 August 2013
More from Byron Seidrmann
I think certainly Nietzsche was specifically drawn to use Germanic "mythology" aka religion as an aesthetic format because he was of Germanic heritage. It was an involuntary instinct for him to do so. That's not the only reason, but it's the core of it. For the most part Nietzsche's general philosophies are comfortably in line with the thinking of his ancient Germanic ancestors. Where his thinking departs from traditional pagan Germanic thinking is his tendency to sometimes morph his nihilism into the grimmer realms of Fatalism and Social Darwinism. Also some argue that he sometimes slipped into sexism. I don't know if Nietsche was sexist or not. I think he may have drifted into that sometimes.
The Germanic tradition is perfectly in line with the basic precepts of feminism. Ancient Germanic women were held in high regard, and enjoyed more equity and freedom than most other women in the ancient world. It's the Germanic tradition to believe that men and women are "equal". It's a vague term anyway. But you know what I mean in this context. Men and women are of equal intelligence. Ancient Germanic women were considered by the men to be of equal or even superior intelligence to themselves. The wisdom of women was taken seriously, and was actively sought out and followed by men. Women were favored to some extent in ancient times,in ways which by modern standards are outdated. A sort of pagan chivalry prevailed. Raping women and children was strictly taboo, outright banned(which was rare in the ancient world), and violators were castrated and or hung. But raping men was permitted. This was unfortunate , but undeniably true. Raping men was not seen as real rape. It was an act of war.
Ancient Germanic Women were not outright banned from being warriors, but very few women were warriors. It was an extremely male oriented social role in ancient Germanic societies. The goddess Freya is a war goddess as well and a love goddess and the master of all shamans. She taught shamanism to Odin. Of interest is that most of her most loyal followers in ancient times were men. Most of the warriors in ancient Germanic cultures were men. But we know from accounts and artistic depictions that a small minority of women did become warriors. It was much more common in other North-western European cultures to see women warriors an soldiers. This lack of women in the armed professions should never cause anyone to think that ancient Germanic women didn't hold high levels of respect and powerful social roles in society. Some scholars of ancient Germanic cultures postulate that it few women would have had any interest in taking part in the horrific bloodbaths which the men were expected to take part it. When a woman really wanted to take part on the horror show she worked hard and made it happen. So, I think it's clearly apparent that Nietsche was influenced by and largely in line with the ways of his ancestors. But his Germanic ancestors would have agreed with the basic precepts of feminism. In general women and men shared and freely switched social roles and professions in ancient Germanic societies. Only the military was male dominated. Women were the ones who were considered the masters of the spirit and the intellect.
Africanisation
For some reason, I wasn't able to measure out my life before, possibly because my brain was still clarifying and resolving some of the issues to do with my PhD thesis. Now I am more focused on what it means to be middle-aged. I was never comfortable being a younger person. I always felt like I had to make excuses for it. Somehow I was never up to being what I needed to be, due to missing gaps in my knowledge, which made me feel like I was not yet the whole package of what I needed to be. I had parts missing from my self-awareness that had to be made up by prolonged study -- tackling philosophy books and books on psychology. I also had to spend time alone, looking inward. To be clear, I didn't feel like empty or bereft so much as that my stew had only partially been cooked. I could feel the depth and richness of the hot pot starting to develop, but every small event took me away from gathering the heat to speed along the process. I particularly despised forced socialization, as it made it necessary for me to break away from my obsessive formulation of ideas.
Being young was wasted on me, because what I really wanted to be was knowledgeable, about myself and my world. It wasn't that I had to communicate this knowledge or prove anything by it. I just had to move beyond the uncomfortable stage of being half done. Youth was a stage of incompleteness, a condition of waiting and searching and combining different elements to complete a whole.
The goal of all of this was, what? A spiritually abundant middle age. I feel like I have come in just under the deadline, to be assured a very happy and knowledgeable middle life. Had I not been so successful on my own terms, I would still have had that unsettled and discontented feeling as if something had only been half done.
There are some things different about me, I suppose, in that it has taken me until my early forties to mature. I've had so much interesting intellectual and psychological material to work through, that I wanted to get right. I've fought off other, externally imposed agendas, along the way. One of the major ones has been the female gender role. I found it threatening and offensive that people should attempt to take me off my path and put me on another one, half-way through my maturation project.
I had to bring myself up and play adult to the child within myself, so it would have been disastrous if I had to try to take care of others as well. My migration at the age of 15 had given me two sets of cultural narratives to work from and I wasn't sure which elements were ethical, or even possible for me to embrace. My father was enraged at any sign of departure from the original cultural narrative, as he had sacrificed a great deal of his life for it. Others were upset at me for seeming not to know my way around and for my quality of being slightly schizoid -- a feature of post-migratory trauma.
It's clear I was emotionally detached because I couldn't understand what was being asked of me. The demands on me were contradictory and disturbing. I had to change, yet would be punished for any changes. I had to educate my parents about the new cultural reality and yet could barely understand it myself.
I was aware, too, that to be in this half-cooked stage caused others to view me as unreliable. It wasn't anything I did, but sometimes I would emote in ways that belonged to the African past and other times I was more fully Western. You could never be sure what you were getting.
I wasn't even sure I could cross the bridge between Africanisation and being a Westerner. It meant re-arranging a lot of aspects of my identity and trying to change the contents and the density of the parts. I had parts that were very permissive and parts that were extremely authoritarian, both of which related to my African upbringing. Aesthetically and ethically, these were inconsistent features, even from the start. The right-wing or conservative aspect came from my Rhodesian heritage and the very relaxed component of my psyche was from African tribalism and its spirited irreverence.
And now I'm at an age where parents are moving toward death. I've finally arrived in adulthood, and am prepared to take care of those important, familial obligations. I've crossed the bridge that took me way beyond youthful confusion. I, too, am in the process of moving toward my inevitable demise, but not without knowledge.
I have decided to return to Africa. I don't mean this literally, but in my head. I've figured out I don't like modernity. I know it's petulant of me to say so, after all there are some advantages, but if I am to continue on my march to a more consolidated adulthood, this is not the way. Modernity makes people childish. That insight fell on me just a few days ago, but I have no doubt at all about it. You don't communicate in modernity, you lean on others. You lean hard and they are supposed to bend and accommodate your wishes, just through the leaning. Due to their dependency on pressure tactics, most people don't learn to communicate in a civil way, as one person might communicate to another.
This is childish and it is the aspect of modernity I explicitly denounce. I renounce it here and now, too. I'm not going to function in that way, of leaning on others to get a result. If they can't understand what I am saying, I will count my losses and move on. Psychological manipulation is debasing.
So here I am in Africa, where I've returned to do my dying. The slope up to the age of 45 is toward life and the living. The slope down again is toward death and where one meets one's origins. I'm up for it.
Being young was wasted on me, because what I really wanted to be was knowledgeable, about myself and my world. It wasn't that I had to communicate this knowledge or prove anything by it. I just had to move beyond the uncomfortable stage of being half done. Youth was a stage of incompleteness, a condition of waiting and searching and combining different elements to complete a whole.
The goal of all of this was, what? A spiritually abundant middle age. I feel like I have come in just under the deadline, to be assured a very happy and knowledgeable middle life. Had I not been so successful on my own terms, I would still have had that unsettled and discontented feeling as if something had only been half done.
There are some things different about me, I suppose, in that it has taken me until my early forties to mature. I've had so much interesting intellectual and psychological material to work through, that I wanted to get right. I've fought off other, externally imposed agendas, along the way. One of the major ones has been the female gender role. I found it threatening and offensive that people should attempt to take me off my path and put me on another one, half-way through my maturation project.
I had to bring myself up and play adult to the child within myself, so it would have been disastrous if I had to try to take care of others as well. My migration at the age of 15 had given me two sets of cultural narratives to work from and I wasn't sure which elements were ethical, or even possible for me to embrace. My father was enraged at any sign of departure from the original cultural narrative, as he had sacrificed a great deal of his life for it. Others were upset at me for seeming not to know my way around and for my quality of being slightly schizoid -- a feature of post-migratory trauma.
It's clear I was emotionally detached because I couldn't understand what was being asked of me. The demands on me were contradictory and disturbing. I had to change, yet would be punished for any changes. I had to educate my parents about the new cultural reality and yet could barely understand it myself.
I was aware, too, that to be in this half-cooked stage caused others to view me as unreliable. It wasn't anything I did, but sometimes I would emote in ways that belonged to the African past and other times I was more fully Western. You could never be sure what you were getting.
I wasn't even sure I could cross the bridge between Africanisation and being a Westerner. It meant re-arranging a lot of aspects of my identity and trying to change the contents and the density of the parts. I had parts that were very permissive and parts that were extremely authoritarian, both of which related to my African upbringing. Aesthetically and ethically, these were inconsistent features, even from the start. The right-wing or conservative aspect came from my Rhodesian heritage and the very relaxed component of my psyche was from African tribalism and its spirited irreverence.
And now I'm at an age where parents are moving toward death. I've finally arrived in adulthood, and am prepared to take care of those important, familial obligations. I've crossed the bridge that took me way beyond youthful confusion. I, too, am in the process of moving toward my inevitable demise, but not without knowledge.
I have decided to return to Africa. I don't mean this literally, but in my head. I've figured out I don't like modernity. I know it's petulant of me to say so, after all there are some advantages, but if I am to continue on my march to a more consolidated adulthood, this is not the way. Modernity makes people childish. That insight fell on me just a few days ago, but I have no doubt at all about it. You don't communicate in modernity, you lean on others. You lean hard and they are supposed to bend and accommodate your wishes, just through the leaning. Due to their dependency on pressure tactics, most people don't learn to communicate in a civil way, as one person might communicate to another.
This is childish and it is the aspect of modernity I explicitly denounce. I renounce it here and now, too. I'm not going to function in that way, of leaning on others to get a result. If they can't understand what I am saying, I will count my losses and move on. Psychological manipulation is debasing.
So here I am in Africa, where I've returned to do my dying. The slope up to the age of 45 is toward life and the living. The slope down again is toward death and where one meets one's origins. I'm up for it.
Tuesday 20 August 2013
Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Black Sunlight
Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Black Sunlight
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. Bataille's book ON NIETZSCHE addresses similar issues about humanity's dark side.
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 safety net. After reading the book carefully, several times I was traumatized severely, not least because it took me back into my own Rhodesian past. I also felt reconciled with the vagaries of life in a deeper way.
I read some reviews of it last night that said the book reveals the "emptiness" of reality. Someone elsewhere 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.
I felt I really understood my place in the world much better, especially how to have reverence for the fragility of life.
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. Bataille's book ON NIETZSCHE addresses similar issues about humanity's dark side.
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 safety net. After reading the book carefully, several times I was traumatized severely, not least because it took me back into my own Rhodesian past. I also felt reconciled with the vagaries of life in a deeper way.
I read some reviews of it last night that said the book reveals the "emptiness" of reality. Someone elsewhere 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.
I felt I really understood my place in the world much better, especially how to have reverence for the fragility of life.
Drivel
People can fail to understand something and then they communicate to you that they feel threatened by the ideas they can’t immediately grasp, which they term "drivel".
That’s not a scientific attitude, or even a civilized one. What is more problematic is that people feel the need to cut their chances of social interaction by expressing nastiness. I can understand what they are telling me, that they do not understand what I am saying and that they feel that perhaps my life is easy because I can understand things that escape them, but why do they need to also shoot themselves in the foot, by proving they are dislikable? It seems to be going too far.
That’s not a scientific attitude, or even a civilized one. What is more problematic is that people feel the need to cut their chances of social interaction by expressing nastiness. I can understand what they are telling me, that they do not understand what I am saying and that they feel that perhaps my life is easy because I can understand things that escape them, but why do they need to also shoot themselves in the foot, by proving they are dislikable? It seems to be going too far.
Lonely?
Why You Are Not Finding a Job | Clarissa's Blog
It seems they do not know how to communicate very well, without getting upset or going on the attack. I mean, it would have been possible for the person commenting on my short video on Irigaray to say, “I don’t really understand French philosophy or see much use for it. I have the suspicion it may be antiscientific, but I’m not sure why I feel that way. Something about it bothers me.”
Instead, I am presented with ideas I know to be false, such as that I glide through life, or that the writing is “drivel”. I am absolutely certain that both statements are as false as can be.
If people want to break out of their loneliness, they could try speaking in a normal, civil way, just for a start.
It seems they do not know how to communicate very well, without getting upset or going on the attack. I mean, it would have been possible for the person commenting on my short video on Irigaray to say, “I don’t really understand French philosophy or see much use for it. I have the suspicion it may be antiscientific, but I’m not sure why I feel that way. Something about it bothers me.”
Instead, I am presented with ideas I know to be false, such as that I glide through life, or that the writing is “drivel”. I am absolutely certain that both statements are as false as can be.
If people want to break out of their loneliness, they could try speaking in a normal, civil way, just for a start.
Riding his polony
http://clarissasblog.com/2013/08/20/why-you-are-not-finding-a-job/#comment-108155
As we previously noted, people appraise reviews on Amazon on the basis of whether these accord with their values. The quality of the review isn't considered as important.
America is a very, very emotional society. Spielberg and Hollywood epitomize this. Stories are supposed to be uplifting and to have a moral message -- nothing grainy, artsy or dark.
Culturally, people find it unreasonable to be asked to move beyond their emotions.
But also this inability to read something in a light other than "how does this serve me or fail to serve me" has a feedback loop, so that people are so used to getting biased responses that they naturally defend against them.
In all, people are behaving very naturally because they don't have any idea that it is necessary to move beyond what feels natural, to develop higher culture.
As we previously noted, people appraise reviews on Amazon on the basis of whether these accord with their values. The quality of the review isn't considered as important.
America is a very, very emotional society. Spielberg and Hollywood epitomize this. Stories are supposed to be uplifting and to have a moral message -- nothing grainy, artsy or dark.
Culturally, people find it unreasonable to be asked to move beyond their emotions.
But also this inability to read something in a light other than "how does this serve me or fail to serve me" has a feedback loop, so that people are so used to getting biased responses that they naturally defend against them.
In all, people are behaving very naturally because they don't have any idea that it is necessary to move beyond what feels natural, to develop higher culture.
Monday 19 August 2013
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