The divided psyche tries to solve everything that's wrong with life through morality. As long as the self remains a mystery to the self, one tries to repair reality at the wrong end. Life has already been completed. It is here with us, but because the psyche is divided against itself it seems like life is not yet fully present with us. Parts of it are missing. One imagines that because one cannot see how life is already completed that is requires rational or moral measures for its completion. Condemn drone strikes or announce that racism is wrong. Work to make sure life complies with your specifications. It's supposed to grow into the shape you've designed for it.
The problem with that point of view is that life is already done and dusted. You've come in a little too late to enjoy the drama, probably because your mind was elsewhere, in a state of mental and emotional detachment. But now the play has been perfomed, the lines have been worked through. It's a little too late for you, the moralist, to have made your appearence. And here you are, all earnest and frothing at the bit.
But you've got it back to front. It's not that you can speak at this point or at any point at all really. You are a product of the system no less than the violence that seems to have originated elsewhere. Worse than that, you don't consider it to have been worth your while to pay attention. Switched off from yourself and from your body, you imagine you are pristine. Such is the illusion of those whose minds and bodies occupy two different spheres of consciousness. Come down to Earth and you will see it is all dirt.
Dambudzo says that's just how it is. You think you are so politically knowledgeable and capable of sloganeering yourself out of trouble, but that just goes to show you've not been paying attention. There's no dividing line that separates the dirt of the past from the purity of the future, either in political or any other terms. Your capacity to generate such trivial and predictable illusions is a feature not of spirit, but of simple DNA. Marechera traces such political naivete to his construct of The Great Cunt. It's your political mind speaking, idealising a world that is free from the earthiness that is you.
I don't really like the way Dambudzo styles his truth, but it's difficult to get the point across, no matter what your choice of language. Returning to your origins will tell you something about reality that will never get through if you keep trying to patch over the present and make it so that the different injustices of life are an affront to your morality. Of course they are an affront to everyone's morality, but the game has been played out. You're not a conquering hero, just a latecomer to spectate on the tragedy that has already unfolded.
It's not that you can't do anything to make reality a better prospect, for of course you can. But not with your mind divided from your body still and the assumption that the moral truth begins with you, which is to say from scratch.
Dambudzo, as you see, didn't like condescending moralists, but they retaliated by saying he was not that well a person and he used terms that were quite misogynist. It's not that he didn't, of course. Or that he wasn't. Those things are the dirt of life, the product of history and even of a fair share of injustice -- already meted out.
Dambudzo says figure it out. You're not an angel, you are earth.
If you don't like this kind of thing, too bad. You can pretend you're only trying to help the poor and needy by ignoring exactly what they have to say. That should work out if you're a Western moralist, but otherwise you might prefer to think again.
The trouble is the thinking again is difficult, so Dambudzo gives you a series of juddering plunges, to figure it out. He tries to drop the floor from under you. In literary terms, it's a hard act to follow, and you might find you haven't followed it at all. In which case, you will end up talking about identity politics and how your morality will end up saving the world. Just give it time.
But if you can follow the writing in Black Sunlight, it takes you back to origins, to the point where you lost your whole identity by becoming divided into two parts. It turns you into many broken, fractured aspects, and then reunites you into one, through the figure of the author himself.
Now you are down to earth again and you can probably figure out what the rest of the text was trying to tell you. If this doesn't work, you might like to try it again a few more times, since your notion of trying to save the world by tugging at its already torn seams is not likely to be of benefit. You have to work with all you've got and that means employing your full, rather than divided consciousness.
The problem with that point of view is that life is already done and dusted. You've come in a little too late to enjoy the drama, probably because your mind was elsewhere, in a state of mental and emotional detachment. But now the play has been perfomed, the lines have been worked through. It's a little too late for you, the moralist, to have made your appearence. And here you are, all earnest and frothing at the bit.
But you've got it back to front. It's not that you can speak at this point or at any point at all really. You are a product of the system no less than the violence that seems to have originated elsewhere. Worse than that, you don't consider it to have been worth your while to pay attention. Switched off from yourself and from your body, you imagine you are pristine. Such is the illusion of those whose minds and bodies occupy two different spheres of consciousness. Come down to Earth and you will see it is all dirt.
Dambudzo says that's just how it is. You think you are so politically knowledgeable and capable of sloganeering yourself out of trouble, but that just goes to show you've not been paying attention. There's no dividing line that separates the dirt of the past from the purity of the future, either in political or any other terms. Your capacity to generate such trivial and predictable illusions is a feature not of spirit, but of simple DNA. Marechera traces such political naivete to his construct of The Great Cunt. It's your political mind speaking, idealising a world that is free from the earthiness that is you.
I don't really like the way Dambudzo styles his truth, but it's difficult to get the point across, no matter what your choice of language. Returning to your origins will tell you something about reality that will never get through if you keep trying to patch over the present and make it so that the different injustices of life are an affront to your morality. Of course they are an affront to everyone's morality, but the game has been played out. You're not a conquering hero, just a latecomer to spectate on the tragedy that has already unfolded.
It's not that you can't do anything to make reality a better prospect, for of course you can. But not with your mind divided from your body still and the assumption that the moral truth begins with you, which is to say from scratch.
Dambudzo, as you see, didn't like condescending moralists, but they retaliated by saying he was not that well a person and he used terms that were quite misogynist. It's not that he didn't, of course. Or that he wasn't. Those things are the dirt of life, the product of history and even of a fair share of injustice -- already meted out.
Dambudzo says figure it out. You're not an angel, you are earth.
If you don't like this kind of thing, too bad. You can pretend you're only trying to help the poor and needy by ignoring exactly what they have to say. That should work out if you're a Western moralist, but otherwise you might prefer to think again.
The trouble is the thinking again is difficult, so Dambudzo gives you a series of juddering plunges, to figure it out. He tries to drop the floor from under you. In literary terms, it's a hard act to follow, and you might find you haven't followed it at all. In which case, you will end up talking about identity politics and how your morality will end up saving the world. Just give it time.
But if you can follow the writing in Black Sunlight, it takes you back to origins, to the point where you lost your whole identity by becoming divided into two parts. It turns you into many broken, fractured aspects, and then reunites you into one, through the figure of the author himself.
Now you are down to earth again and you can probably figure out what the rest of the text was trying to tell you. If this doesn't work, you might like to try it again a few more times, since your notion of trying to save the world by tugging at its already torn seams is not likely to be of benefit. You have to work with all you've got and that means employing your full, rather than divided consciousness.
No comments:
Post a Comment