Reading War Nerd | Clarissa's Blog
My situation has been one of being locked out of primeval narcissism. People assume that one has to struggle to get out of it, from the inside out, but I have always been, it seems to me, on the outside of it, stuck in a world of abstraction and disembodied detachment. I’ve had to work really hard to acquire a healther, more narcissistic orientation, to put myself at the centre of things and make myself the weight that stabilizes reality around me. I don’t know why I’ve lacked this primeval narcissism that is considered by some people to be automatically present in all and ubiquitous, apart from that our society was very duty-bound and also the female gender role in Rhodesian society was epitomised by selfless idealism. My self was very diffused into the environment, but also rigid and duty-bound. And not located in the body at all, but outside of it. Therefore I never had enough wherewithal or defensive tools to defend my “identity” (such as it was or construed to be) from anybody with a hostile motive. I really had to learn and learn to centralize myself and to feed back more of my energy toward my own interests. And indeed to discover my own interests. None of this came easily to me. What is common between the Japanese and mlitary personnel (one being polite and the other aggressive) is that they both have this decentralized attitude in relation to the self. That kind of culture makes things very easy for me. I’m fundamentally a very impersonal person who needs to work hard to contain and keep hold of primeval narcissism. I alll too easy let it go — or when I’m tired I have the most disturbing out of body experiences where I’m really not connected to anything.
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