Sunday 31 May 2015
Repost
The men who went to war were considered deep. I wasn't that capable in accessing mind and soul and didn't claim to be. For many years, after migrating, I sought to find my depth, which I had been locked out of, since I had lost my African trajectory in life. Eventually, I found it by crossing over into what had been denied me in the past -- knowledge of the male modality.
Because "emotion" is gendered "female" in contemporary Western society, nobody had any idea what I was doing (making myself whole by integrating more emotional knowledge and experience). It was assumed by quite a few people that my job ought to have been to try to move away from slushy, feminine "emotion" and into the realm of rationality and logic. However, the opposite was the case -- I had been brought up into the realm of rationality and calm logic, but without much scope to experience or express emotion.
It was a struggle for me to break the hard shell of my character so that some knowledge of emotional life could enter.
I struggled with the same project for years and years -- about ten to fifteen actually.
Finally, I've reached the point where emotion seems to be fully integrated with the way I live my life, at least on an individual level.
The problem is with Westerners who understand my project at cross-purposes and think I was writing as a means to become more stupid and frail. No, not at all, because emotion was defined by masculine freedom in my experience. Women in my culture were not permitted much or it, apart from the cultural attribution of stereotypical weakened states, for instance if they happened to not from here.
Change can happen, but it is hard.
Also, in terms of Western culture and its expectations, I have an inside-out personality. The more threatening I find a situation, the less emotional I am, even to the point that I actually lose touch with my emotions in very threatening situations, and become a stone.
However, it is often assumed that as a female I must inevitably be very much in touch with "feeling".
It has taken me a long time to realize that the majority of people have been taught to reason about gender differently.
Because "emotion" is gendered "female" in contemporary Western society, nobody had any idea what I was doing (making myself whole by integrating more emotional knowledge and experience). It was assumed by quite a few people that my job ought to have been to try to move away from slushy, feminine "emotion" and into the realm of rationality and logic. However, the opposite was the case -- I had been brought up into the realm of rationality and calm logic, but without much scope to experience or express emotion.
It was a struggle for me to break the hard shell of my character so that some knowledge of emotional life could enter.
I struggled with the same project for years and years -- about ten to fifteen actually.
Finally, I've reached the point where emotion seems to be fully integrated with the way I live my life, at least on an individual level.
The problem is with Westerners who understand my project at cross-purposes and think I was writing as a means to become more stupid and frail. No, not at all, because emotion was defined by masculine freedom in my experience. Women in my culture were not permitted much or it, apart from the cultural attribution of stereotypical weakened states, for instance if they happened to not from here.
Change can happen, but it is hard.
Also, in terms of Western culture and its expectations, I have an inside-out personality. The more threatening I find a situation, the less emotional I am, even to the point that I actually lose touch with my emotions in very threatening situations, and become a stone.
However, it is often assumed that as a female I must inevitably be very much in touch with "feeling".
It has taken me a long time to realize that the majority of people have been taught to reason about gender differently.
Saturday 30 May 2015
Thursday 28 May 2015
The day John jumped
I was in the first year of primary school and I had to illustrate the sentence that John was jumping. To achieve this, I had to draw a picture in colored pencils and underneath write the defining sentence about John's jumping.
I believe I started off on a good track. I drew a picture of John, who seemed not to have any ground line underneath him, and I made the requisite comment, which was either, "John jumps" or "John is jumping". Since the exercise was time pressured, I hurried to queue behind my KG1 (Grade 1) teacher's desk, with my exercise book in hand, behind the other students. She would either make a huge tick sign or a huge cross sign in response to one's efforts. Some students had to do their work again.
When I reached the elderly teacher's desk, she remarked that my picture had not been sufficiently clear. John may have been suspended in air, but it was not clear he was jumping over something. I ought to go back to my desk and draw the requisite object that John was jumping over to receive the necessary tick.
I went back to my desk, but I had been daydreaming (a fact I still remember unto this day). Instead of drawing a log under John to indicate his elevation, I had begun another picture, namely of John jumping over a log. Once I had done this, I suddenly noticed that instead of one picture to answer my teacher's critique, I now had two, which oddly enough said the same thing.
My friend sitting next to me confirmed my worst thesis by looking over at me and saying, "That is wrong". I realized that my only recourse was to follow her example of pulling out the offending page, even though that was illegal. Each exercise book had about 16 lined pages in it, and each missing page could be noticed. She had earlier showed me her method of using a ruler to tear out the offending page, whilst removing the evidence of a jagged edge on one side of the book by tearing out its partner page on the opposite side. I tore out the page that seemed to have reproduced itself during my dreamlike state, but I forgot to tear out its partner, or I did so inadequately.
Returning to my place in the queue beside the teacher's desk, I showed her my renewed depiction of "John Jumps". I had been using all the force of my mind to make her not see the jagged edge of my book where a page had been removed, but she saw it all the same. I told her I knew nothing about it and she accused me of foul play with the exercise book and threw my book across the room to hit the wall. She told me to retrieve it.
I believe I started off on a good track. I drew a picture of John, who seemed not to have any ground line underneath him, and I made the requisite comment, which was either, "John jumps" or "John is jumping". Since the exercise was time pressured, I hurried to queue behind my KG1 (Grade 1) teacher's desk, with my exercise book in hand, behind the other students. She would either make a huge tick sign or a huge cross sign in response to one's efforts. Some students had to do their work again.
When I reached the elderly teacher's desk, she remarked that my picture had not been sufficiently clear. John may have been suspended in air, but it was not clear he was jumping over something. I ought to go back to my desk and draw the requisite object that John was jumping over to receive the necessary tick.
I went back to my desk, but I had been daydreaming (a fact I still remember unto this day). Instead of drawing a log under John to indicate his elevation, I had begun another picture, namely of John jumping over a log. Once I had done this, I suddenly noticed that instead of one picture to answer my teacher's critique, I now had two, which oddly enough said the same thing.
My friend sitting next to me confirmed my worst thesis by looking over at me and saying, "That is wrong". I realized that my only recourse was to follow her example of pulling out the offending page, even though that was illegal. Each exercise book had about 16 lined pages in it, and each missing page could be noticed. She had earlier showed me her method of using a ruler to tear out the offending page, whilst removing the evidence of a jagged edge on one side of the book by tearing out its partner page on the opposite side. I tore out the page that seemed to have reproduced itself during my dreamlike state, but I forgot to tear out its partner, or I did so inadequately.
Returning to my place in the queue beside the teacher's desk, I showed her my renewed depiction of "John Jumps". I had been using all the force of my mind to make her not see the jagged edge of my book where a page had been removed, but she saw it all the same. I told her I knew nothing about it and she accused me of foul play with the exercise book and threw my book across the room to hit the wall. She told me to retrieve it.
Wednesday 27 May 2015
Tuesday 26 May 2015
TMBULATIONS SECTION 2
I was up in Mount Darwin, where I made my home. It was a shack, no bigger than a small anthill but fully thatched. They would be able to come to see me here and I would give them the best of my advice. I'd made it all the way up here through the infantry stage, though an eternity cooped up in prison with nothing but its languor and an old PC to keep me company. In the earlier stage we had tried to build high-tech flying machines, but the very basic technology was not suited to the making of complex machines, which meant we resorted to test flying them to see if they crashed. This method led to the deaths of many apes, but that never stopped us, and we kept on going.
At this higher level I would be able to watch real aircrafts taking off and landing. Sometimes, like a dream when you are pinned down to the land but somehow still flying, the ache of a thousand years began to grab hold of us as a special form of gravity. The hills it seemed were aching for reprieve -- from what? -- from being hills. It took a particular form of resilience to stay aloft as one began zeroing in on the grey netherworld beneath one.
At this higher level I would be able to watch real aircrafts taking off and landing. Sometimes, like a dream when you are pinned down to the land but somehow still flying, the ache of a thousand years began to grab hold of us as a special form of gravity. The hills it seemed were aching for reprieve -- from what? -- from being hills. It took a particular form of resilience to stay aloft as one began zeroing in on the grey netherworld beneath one.
Monday 25 May 2015
People of The Lie (Part 3)
This video resonates quite a bit. It took me a long time to figure out my family's dynamics as well as the broader political and social dynamics I found myself caught within. It was hard to do this because I kept getting hit from all sides. The only thing that saved me was that in general I did have an exceedingly rich childhood, so I could always fall back on that (with positive dissociation). But my father's background was very harsh. His father was killed in World War 2 when my father had just been born. There was no social security system in the country for single mothers. My father's mother remarried with expedience, but my father was not well treated by his new father. Nonetheless I did not see much of my father growing up and when I did he was often in good spirits. He had an evil temper, though, at times for really no reason at all. When "we" suddenly lost the war, my father lost it with me. He relived his childhood experience of being rejected by his own father and being forced to grow up too quickly by his mother. Somehow he blamed me for his new set of circumstances, which involved having to uproot from the country of his birth and start over again. He must have viewed his life as a failure at that point, because he projected his sense of failure onto me. At the same time, sometimes he would start hissing vitriol at me like I was somebody who had all the power in the world and he was a defiant two-year old. I was supposed to carry the family's burden of adjustment to the new culture, as I was the oldest. I was very much out of my depth, however. It must have slipped my parents' power of observation that I, too, was in a state of mourning, having lost eveything I used to know. MY parents adopted a strict, fundamentalist Christian mode of belief, and my sister and I both felt my parents' wrath, as we represented the feminine principle in Christianity, which is Eve, who betrayed Adam via Satan's influence. We received a lot of hostility, with the result that my sister took refuge in another house, but eventually converted to Christianity and I became a convinced enemy of Christian ideology. Since all the guilt and the shame of my family's displacement from their country had been placed on me, I became the black sheep of the family. My health began to suffer really badly from a lack of emotional nourishment as well as having to endure my father's sporadic emotional abuse. I also couldn't find anyone to speak to about this, as nobody was prepared to listen. I got a job after University, but was targeted for workplace harrassment. The agenda behind the orchestrated attack was to pull me down from my alleged pedestal as an alleged right-winger working in a left-wing organisation and to teach me about the harshness of life that the majority had to experience. I was not, however, a right-winger. and I was handling my own bad hand in life as best I could. Through this ongoing micro-management, constant "disciplinary" meetings and blame shifting, I eventually lot my health in a more severe way than before. I moved back in with my parents to save money, as I thought that being able to do that would be the only means I could springboard myself into a brighter future. I had to try to get my digestive system to function again, as my stomach would puff up with air whenever I ate something solid. Despite my expectation that I would have enough wit and resolve to protect myself from my father's rage, or that he would respect my now obviously adult status, he occasionally invaded my privacy in physically and emotionally aggressive ways. Once again, nobody believed me or would help me. I've had to build myself up again on my own throughout the years. I had no help from therapists or university professors, although for a time the university was a sanctuary of sanity. What is amazing is that I am even here today, and not a psychiatric or physical wreck. People tend to minimize what I have been through, but I've developed some strong defensive skills. Thanks again, for your videos.
Sunday 24 May 2015
Saturday 23 May 2015
Gaslighting Is No Longer A Secret Part 2
You were harrassed since the age of 15, whereas with me it began around the age of 12, I think. My father began to blame me for losing a war and then we migrated three years later and the hosts of the country began to blame me for all sorts of things too.
Friday 22 May 2015
Thursday 21 May 2015
Manic Narcissists Should Not Be Enabled In Our Society
A common experience for me has been when people have perceived the mobbing I've endured and I guess made the impulsive or calculated decision to attack me again, as I seem to them to be vulnerable. The fact is I've always kept a very clear head, especially under extreme duress, so those people are walking into trouble by trying to pile onto me. If they start behaving like some of the mentally ill people that have attacked me, I immediately categorize them as belonging to the enemy camp, and I do treat them as such, by distancing them and putting them under the lens of critical scrutiny. I'm very much the opposite of a pushover, since I've never had a deep need to belong, but I do value integrity in people and punish the lack thereof. The mentally ill opportunists certainly do not see that if I am pointing out that somebody around me has behaved in a hostile and violent manner toward me that is because I already have them pegged and neutralized. If people don't see this, for some reason, and take the opposite side, working against me, I only have to repeat the same strategies that I used in the first instance to more quickly neutralize the same kind of behavior in those who have taken to copying the tactics of the orginal psychotic person. The psychotic narcissists thus fall into traps that I didn't even set for them. It's strange and amazing to see.
Truth lies in shades of grey in Zim - The Star
Truth lies in shades of grey in Zim - The Star
Some, I found by following my nose – like the six young men pulled off a bus on the Plumtree-Bulawayo road, marched 150m into the bush and executed. It was weeks before that taste of death washed from the back of my nostrils and throat. And it was many months before the image of a perfect row of teeth in a fire-charred skull, at another killing site, would fade.
Some, I found by following my nose – like the six young men pulled off a bus on the Plumtree-Bulawayo road, marched 150m into the bush and executed. It was weeks before that taste of death washed from the back of my nostrils and throat. And it was many months before the image of a perfect row of teeth in a fire-charred skull, at another killing site, would fade.
Wednesday 20 May 2015
IDENTITY POLITICS & how we cope with history says a lot about us
I explain how those who do not cope well with life treat history and how those who do cope with it do so. I've noticed a really strange schism over the years, whereby there are those who feel very threatened by exposure to linear, organic reality. It is alarming and unexpected that they seem to feel this way, but there are those who simply opt out whilst standing in judgement of everything.
Tuesday 19 May 2015
SEEING THROUGH THE MIRAGE OF WESTERN IDENTITY POLITICS
Having newly come from Africa, I made a prolonged journey into the hollowed out core of Western culture lasting more than two decades, whereupon I found that that all the high level claims Westerners made about their identity politics were a mirage. As I began to realize this, I found that people began imploding around me, on cue.
Monday 18 May 2015
Sunday 17 May 2015
Saturday 16 May 2015
Thursday 14 May 2015
Wednesday 13 May 2015
Repost
For Lacan, everybody is sick, without exception. You are either a neurotic or a psychotic or a pervert. To conform to the system means to adopt an impersonal identity -- but nobody can do this completely, without making themselves mentally ill. Hence, we are all emotionally unsound and poor conformists. Bataille is a more complex version of Lacan, since whatever Lacan states in cynical, psychoanalytic terms, Bataille states in Nietzschean, paradoxical terms.
Bataille's conception of sacrifice makes clear his own view of the overwrought nature of the human condition -- at least as he and Lacan experienced it in 20th Century France. Conforming is always a concession to impersonality, in both Bataille and Lacan. Conforming preserves the bourgeois person. The cost is impersonality; the benefit is preservation of oneself via creature comforts, bourgeois status and (impersonal) identity. The practical opposite to this norm of bourgeois conformity is personal self-actualisation. Herein is the Nietzschean paradox (and it also depicts what I call "intellectual shamanism"). To self-actualize is to give up the benefits of self-preservation:
Bataille's conception of sacrifice makes clear his own view of the overwrought nature of the human condition -- at least as he and Lacan experienced it in 20th Century France. Conforming is always a concession to impersonality, in both Bataille and Lacan. Conforming preserves the bourgeois person. The cost is impersonality; the benefit is preservation of oneself via creature comforts, bourgeois status and (impersonal) identity. The practical opposite to this norm of bourgeois conformity is personal self-actualisation. Herein is the Nietzschean paradox (and it also depicts what I call "intellectual shamanism"). To self-actualize is to give up the benefits of self-preservation:
I love him who reserveth no share of spirit for himself, but wanteth to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walketh he as spirit over the bridge. (Nietzsche)
Bataille takes up a Nietzschean perspective when he associates self-actualization with sacrifice. He is also Freudian (and was used by Lacan to develop his perspectives), for he views sacrifice in terms of psychological deviance, on the basis of one's circumstances being untenable (the need to represent impersonality in the workplace leads to an opposite, reactive attitude, once one has time to oneself). In his essay in book form, Theory of Religion, Bataille portrays the worker in a state of destructive reverie. Bourgeois form and sobriety are sacrificed to despair. This structurally determined polarization of the worker's consciousness is between the profane (one's experience of work) and the sacred (one's experience of free time, expressed as a frenzy of destructiveness.) Free time and money to spend purely to satisfy one's appetites are the worker's accursed share.
The Freudian influence on Bataille renders this reading of the worker and his behavior as pathological -- although, like Lacan thought, necessarily so. Civilization is not experienced by organic and instinctively driven human beings as a natural condition, thus it necessarily produces its discontents. Bataille's point is that society structures the psyche of the worker in terms of polarizing his consciousness, so that it swings between conformity and destructiveness. Bataille's views are also Marxist.
Nietzsche's views are not at all Marxist in any way. He expresses his views in terms of evolutionary proposals. He expresses his ideas in terms of Darwinism.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.
This is a tragic view of the world -- that in order for humanity to make progress beyond its apelike origins, many who aspire to do something great will fall along the way and not meet their goals. Their failures, however, are necessary, because they offer the basis for others to learn and thus succeed.
Thus for Nietzsche, sacrifice for the benefit of humanity is achieved by those who attempt -- (and perhaps fail) -- to self-actualize, for instance, the young soldier lost in war: a "down-going" is also an "over-going". A failure to do all that one had wanted to is nonetheless also transcendence of humanity's existing ape-like condition. One advances human evolution through one's attempts. One sacrifices oneself to the future of humanity, rather than sacrificing the future of humanity to one's self.
Tuesday 12 May 2015
Monday 11 May 2015
Sunday 10 May 2015
Saturday 9 May 2015
Friday 8 May 2015
summit and decline
Here's is an example of the dialectics we can find in Bataille. It has to do with understanding that humans have two important states, one of energy and one of depletion. You know about Potential Energy in physics? When an object goes upward it uses kinetic energy to gain potential energy. That is what it means when we say that humans can reach the moral "summit". But that expenditure and squandering of energy for narrow purposes at the height of experience cannot continue forever. Most people do not even experience a significant event of the moral summit in their lifetimes. Most are taught to embrace the morality of the decline (self-preservation through morality) at all costs.
Thursday 7 May 2015
Wednesday 6 May 2015
Tuesday 5 May 2015
Repost
When people think "What can she miss about Zimbabwe?" They cynically imagine it has to do with my ability to dominate others there, or to do with some kind of financial thing, whatever. The answer does not lie in the big issues. Rather one's sense of belongingness is invoked by the quality and nature of the breezes, by the kinds of greetings you receive, which somehow "makes sense", by smells and tastes which reawaken older experiences, and confirm them. So, we have an unconscious sense of self-continuity which doesn't need to forced or justified by reference to "big issues".
It is true -- I see environment and environmental memory as forming for nature of the self in a way that is generally overlooked. There is a lot of injustice in such overlooking.
Let us start from a simple fact. Whoever, you are, others will not have the same experiences as you. Words on paper do not always invoke similar experiences and memories. In that case, for you (but not necessarily for others), they are dead. One finds in the text only what is already within oneself through direct knowledge. The mundane–wind, smell , taste, an emotional sense of the particularity of a place can be shared through words, but first they must be experienced.
To set out to prove that there is a special dimension to this invocation of the five senses of which I speak, one would have to already have accepted implicitly the notiion that industrial modernism and its tropes invoke the more objective mode of language than appeal to the five senses can. The basis for possessing any sort of self in this late society will be more “metaphysical", which is to say more based on being able to articulate abstract representations. It is paradoxical enough when one's identity comes to be based on an abstract matrix of formulated thought much more than on the concrete and organic nature of one's actual experiences.
Repost: the inheritance
As it has turned out, my injury was related to the specifics of my father's madness. I don't blame him for going half-mad. In fact, it was the decent and honorable thing to do. To fail to react to maddening situations would have been even more maddening. I would never have realized the truth behind the madness of life had he kept up a veneer that everything was fine when it wasn't.
My father's madness involved a reversal of typical parent-child relations, where I was held responsible for all sorts of things that seemed to have gone wrong, in the eyes of my father. I didn't know what these things were, as they have occurred before I was born. It has taken me about twenty years to find them out.
I remember when my father was yelling at me, attacking me, with one term of abuse after another -- it finally dawned on me that he saw me as impervious to any insult, not matter how hurtful. From then, I realized he wasn't really talking to me personally, when he got into a rage. Rather, he was addressing an adult, omnipotent figure, from the point of view of angry two-year-old, who knew no limits to his anger.
This, in turn, explains my own lifelong preoccupation with not being pushed into a role where people feel it natural to take out on me their undefined or barely articulated aggression. I'm afraid of the inarticulate emotion of those who seem to demand my unconditional approval at great cost to myself. When people complain that their emotional expectations were not met, I never know how to discuss that, least of all in a workplace setting, where the implicit threat of losing my livelihood hangs over me. My understanding is that these demands are potentially infinite, unless someone in authority steps in and draws a clear line about what is expected from me. For the reasons I've just outlined, this is why I prefer typically "masculine" work environments, where my ability to cater to others' emotional needs is not assessed as a feature of my ability to do the job at hand.
They cannot be satisfied by any act on my part. It expresses an infinite source of destruction, always in opposition to any form of reason. That was how I had experienced my father's rage, growing up. It had increased exponentially the moment there was no hope for "Rhodesia". My father's faith in the established order was shattered. His ideals of permanence and stability -- the ideals he'd sacrificed for -- were suddenly gone from the realm of possibility.
I was trying to grow up, but in many ways I had to play the role of the parent. This was exacerbated for me as the eldest child of new migrants, who expected me to teach them the ropes. My parents lent on me for support, but became embittered at any turn away from narrow, conservative values -- those of family, God and Church. I was being exposed to more liberal values, thus the tension.
The problem at the core -- well, there were a few. The main one was I was ill-equipped to be my father's mother in a culture which I couldn't understand whilst I was still trying to grow up and make adjustments of my own. The secondary problem was patriarchy. Yes, it exists and the reason I know that is I couldn't get any help in dealing with my father and his strange ways. He burdened me into feeling guilty for his negative emotions. He leaned on me to play a mothering role. I lacked the necessary emotional and intellectual resources to appease him. Nobody I turned to would believe there was any sort of problem -- except, perhaps with me.
My father had certain ideas about people who depart from conservatism "going off the rails". I think he sincerely believed I had "gone off the rails" due to my adjustment to a more liberal culture, which Australian culture seemed to be at that time.
Nobody ever assisted me. That's because Judeo-Christian culture maintains the men are rational and women just aren't. This is the theological structure of its belief system and I only found out how pervasive it was by turning to various people only to find them repeat their version of the "men are rational; women are emotional" formula. That is how it went. My concerns entered the "too hard basket". As for my family, it was more convenient for them to keep up the pathological state of relations, because blaming the family's new migrant difficulties on the only atheist in the family hid a multitude of sins.
My father's psychological problems did give me insights into human behavior, in particular how authoritarianism is structured by finding a scapegoat and projecting. It is quite clear, people actually aren't aware that they're engaging in this pattern of action. My father's madness gave me the basis for understanding that one can't simply adapt to one totally different situation after another, willy-nilly. To expect people to do that is inhuman.
His reactions also formed my character in giving me an extreme aversion to playing the role of anyone's early childhood mother. I won't play the part where anyone unleashes their tantrum at me and expects me to help them deal with their anxieties, just because I'm female. I have a completely traumatic reaction to this kind of attitude. I realize I'm doomed and that I can't cope with it no matter what forms of reason or logic I impose, as I had tried to tell people of my father's attitude before, using only cold logic and reason. This hadn't worked out.
My father's madness involved a reversal of typical parent-child relations, where I was held responsible for all sorts of things that seemed to have gone wrong, in the eyes of my father. I didn't know what these things were, as they have occurred before I was born. It has taken me about twenty years to find them out.
I remember when my father was yelling at me, attacking me, with one term of abuse after another -- it finally dawned on me that he saw me as impervious to any insult, not matter how hurtful. From then, I realized he wasn't really talking to me personally, when he got into a rage. Rather, he was addressing an adult, omnipotent figure, from the point of view of angry two-year-old, who knew no limits to his anger.
This, in turn, explains my own lifelong preoccupation with not being pushed into a role where people feel it natural to take out on me their undefined or barely articulated aggression. I'm afraid of the inarticulate emotion of those who seem to demand my unconditional approval at great cost to myself. When people complain that their emotional expectations were not met, I never know how to discuss that, least of all in a workplace setting, where the implicit threat of losing my livelihood hangs over me. My understanding is that these demands are potentially infinite, unless someone in authority steps in and draws a clear line about what is expected from me. For the reasons I've just outlined, this is why I prefer typically "masculine" work environments, where my ability to cater to others' emotional needs is not assessed as a feature of my ability to do the job at hand.
They cannot be satisfied by any act on my part. It expresses an infinite source of destruction, always in opposition to any form of reason. That was how I had experienced my father's rage, growing up. It had increased exponentially the moment there was no hope for "Rhodesia". My father's faith in the established order was shattered. His ideals of permanence and stability -- the ideals he'd sacrificed for -- were suddenly gone from the realm of possibility.
I was trying to grow up, but in many ways I had to play the role of the parent. This was exacerbated for me as the eldest child of new migrants, who expected me to teach them the ropes. My parents lent on me for support, but became embittered at any turn away from narrow, conservative values -- those of family, God and Church. I was being exposed to more liberal values, thus the tension.
The problem at the core -- well, there were a few. The main one was I was ill-equipped to be my father's mother in a culture which I couldn't understand whilst I was still trying to grow up and make adjustments of my own. The secondary problem was patriarchy. Yes, it exists and the reason I know that is I couldn't get any help in dealing with my father and his strange ways. He burdened me into feeling guilty for his negative emotions. He leaned on me to play a mothering role. I lacked the necessary emotional and intellectual resources to appease him. Nobody I turned to would believe there was any sort of problem -- except, perhaps with me.
My father had certain ideas about people who depart from conservatism "going off the rails". I think he sincerely believed I had "gone off the rails" due to my adjustment to a more liberal culture, which Australian culture seemed to be at that time.
Nobody ever assisted me. That's because Judeo-Christian culture maintains the men are rational and women just aren't. This is the theological structure of its belief system and I only found out how pervasive it was by turning to various people only to find them repeat their version of the "men are rational; women are emotional" formula. That is how it went. My concerns entered the "too hard basket". As for my family, it was more convenient for them to keep up the pathological state of relations, because blaming the family's new migrant difficulties on the only atheist in the family hid a multitude of sins.
My father's psychological problems did give me insights into human behavior, in particular how authoritarianism is structured by finding a scapegoat and projecting. It is quite clear, people actually aren't aware that they're engaging in this pattern of action. My father's madness gave me the basis for understanding that one can't simply adapt to one totally different situation after another, willy-nilly. To expect people to do that is inhuman.
His reactions also formed my character in giving me an extreme aversion to playing the role of anyone's early childhood mother. I won't play the part where anyone unleashes their tantrum at me and expects me to help them deal with their anxieties, just because I'm female. I have a completely traumatic reaction to this kind of attitude. I realize I'm doomed and that I can't cope with it no matter what forms of reason or logic I impose, as I had tried to tell people of my father's attitude before, using only cold logic and reason. This hadn't worked out.
Monday 4 May 2015
Saturday 2 May 2015
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