Shamanic genius

The way I see it is that there is a kind of natural genius, which is raw power to take in information, to hold it in and to apply it in some way.   That kind of genius may produce very beautiful artifacts, but it is not shamanic.   Shamanic genius is the capacity to transition between different levels of the consciousness, from high to medium to low and back again.   My theory is that the normal state of the psyche is not to want to transition, but to stay in the same place.  Supposing I am a genius, then I want to produce beautiful books presenting my insights and to make myself pleasant to the public and endear myself to them.  That is the drive of ordinary genius.   Ordinary genius always floats upward and upward and upward.  

 

Supposing Marechera was an ordinary genius?  He studied a wide range of classical texts – Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, ancient Roman and Greek literature, the Romantic poets....

 

I imagine he could have written in the same kind of classical tradition.  This kind of literature delights and it appeals to the higher sensibilities in humanity and to its ruling element.  But as beautiful as it is, this is not the kind of literature that reveals the roots of a society to itself and enables it to heal.

 

For genius to become shamanic, it has to be compelled to plumb the depths as well as reaching for the heights.   Otherwise the depths of the society cannot be known and people cannot heal.

 

I noticed this as the distinct difference between Marechera’s writing and that of other Shona writers, for instance Chenjerai Hove.  Hove wrote more in the way of political realism, lauding the struggles of the peasants.   If I were a peasant I would feel elevated by his writing, and perhaps delighted and reassured.  But I would not understand myself better, arguably, and above all I would not understand the real nature of the pathology afflicting my country.  I would not understand its roots.  it is too facile to say that its roots were “racism” and that the enemy was “colonialism”.   That kind of thinking only gets you the repressive tactics of the Mugabe regime.   It’s just too trite.  The writing may be elevating, but it is not diagnostic.

 

By contrast, Marechera’s writing is not always elevating, but it is always diagnostic.   Why?  Because he was wounded to the soul himself – and his wounding was complex.   It never was, for Marechera, just a simple issue of blacks versus whites and who should dominate.  Therefore he had to resolve the issue of his own wounding in a way that harnessed all his intellectual and artistic skills.   And if we can SEE what he is pointing to in his writing, we can actually free ourselves as well.  But those who do not want to admit that they are spiritually ill, because the events in the country’s history have made them so, will keep demanding something elevating and reassuring.  They don’t want to get to the bottom of themselves as that is difficult and painful.  And Marechera, too, probably didn’t want to get to the bottom of himself, but he had been constrained to.

 

So the shaman type is bound to the historical pathology by necessity – and, because he is a genius, finds a way to free himself, that can in turn be used by others.  Those who do not understand the complex and necessary nature of this vocation always urge that one hurries along and gets going into the future and embraces whatever one finds there.   But that is to urge the embrace of superficiality and movement for the sake of movement.  

 

It therefore seems to me that there are geniuses – but there are also constrained geniuses, whose subjective well being has been harnessed and made totally dependent on whether or not they can free themselves from a historically engendered affliction on their psyches.   They have to free themselves or else they remain pinned in a pathological state, which is distressing.  So they find new means to freedom and new insights to resolve the difficulty they are in.

 

Or failing that, they die trying.