Some level of one’s epigenetics can become known and it can be worked with to produce better outcomes through self-understanding. I am very doubtful that some of it can be changed at all since it is what it is. I find my own self-knowledge useful when refuting trolls, who do not know themselves at all. One can resist projections if one knows oneself. But I think really part of me will always feel a failure when I do not rescue those close to me from lost battles, but particularly lost wars.
Psychoanalysis traditionally wants to sexualise everything and make these epigenetics out to be a product of the Oedipus complex, but in fact I think my sense of failure is my grandmother’s in not stopping her husband from going to war in his youth, and being killed. While I gained the trauma from my father’s side of the family, it is not an outcome of wanting to please him. To say that would be too superficial. In reality I would have to go back two generations, not one, to fix the problem. In any case, I have it as an abstracted problem, which is my inroad to understanding Marechera, by the way, as he also had this or something very similar as his own psychological knot. It’s also very visceral, as it informs my dream content. I have to try to overturn the negatives of war. And there are different means for this that can be tried.
In all, my intensity level is too high and too primal at a fundamental level. I’m impatient with people for just going about their daily lives and for not fixing this problem. Then again, it can’t be fixed by others. We have to fix it for ourselves. In any case, this is the source of Marechera’s shamanic wounding and my own. My sense of this is deep, just as when two minds resonate more than normal, you know they are sharing some of your trauma. But it was a source of frustration when writing my thesis to see other interpret his writing in the light of something more superficial and trendy like identity politics.
Anyway, understanding myself better I realize how much my fundamental or core issues are not the same and cannot be the same as those of someone brought up in the industrialized world. It’s a kind of comfort to know this, since when they project their issues onto me I can immediately see what it occurring.
Still it is not possible to express the inexpressable beyond what I have done here, or to fix the unsolvable. There is only self knowledge and the attempt to record history, make art, and engage in improving people’s awareness wherever possible of the subterreanean levels which undergird us all.
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