me tower, you Jane

You are The Tower

Ambition, fighting, war, courage. Destruction, danger, fall, ruin.

The Tower represents war, destruction, but also spiritual renewal. Plans are disrupted. Your views and ideas will change as a result.

The Tower is a card about war, a war between the structures of lies and the lightning flash of truth. The Tower stands for “false concepts and institutions that we take for real.” You have been shaken up; blinded by a shocking revelation. It sometimes takes that to see a truth that one refuses to see. Or to bring down beliefs that are so well constructed. What’s most important to remember is that the tearing down of this structure, however painful, makes room for something new to be built.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

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do do not

Three things you do that women usually do
Observe certain males.
Work for money
Expect the worst.
Three things you do that men usually do
Drink beer
Grumble
Condemn morons
Three things you do that women usually don’t do
Spar
Think contentiously
Say exactly what I think
Three things you do that men usually do not do
Pull out lonely chin hair
Provoke Mike
Say exactly what I think
Three things you do not do that women usually do
Compete with other women in a private context
Sensitivity
Socialisation
Three things you do not do that men usually do
Pontificate in order to dominate
Be taciturn
Look for fights
Three things you do not do that women usually don’t do
Expect very much reward from “society” in general
Become a lesbian
Read the sports page
Three things you do not do that men usually don’t do
Bother with details
Soap operas
Rape and pillage

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The double helix was discovered on LSD

Nobel Prize genius Crick was high on LSD
when he discovered the secret of life

BY ALUN REES

Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.

The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life.

Crick, who died ten days ago, aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle’s warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.

Despite his Establishment image, Crick was a devotee of novelist Aldous Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and another hallucinogen, mescaline, in the short stories The Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies. In the late Sixties, Crick was a founder member of Soma, a legalise-cannabis group named after the drug in Huxley’s novel Brave New World. He even put his name to a famous letter to The Times in 1967 calling for a reform in the drugs laws.

It was through his membership of Soma that Crick inadvertently became the inspiration for the biggest LSD manufacturing conspiracy-the world has ever seen the multimillion-pound drug factory in a remote farmhouse in Wales that was smashed by the Operation Julie raids of the late Seventies.

Crick’s involvement with the gang was fleeting but crucial. The revered scientist had been invited to the Cambridge home of freewheeling American writer David Solomon a friend of hippie LSD guru Timothy Leary who had come to Britain in 1967 on a quest to discover a method for manufacturing pure THC, the active ingredient of cannabis.

It was Crick’s presence in Solomon’s social circle that attracted a brilliant young biochemist, Richard Kemp, who soon became a convert to the attractions of both cannabis and LSD. Kemp was recruited to the THC project in 1968, but soon afterwards devised the world’s first foolproof method of producing cheap, pure LSD. Solomon and Kemp went into business, manufacturing acid in a succession of rented houses before setting up their laboratory in a cottage on a hillside near Tregaron, Carmarthenshire, in 1973. It is estimated that Kemp manufactured drugs worth Pounds 2.5 million an astonishing amount in the Seventies before police stormed the building in 1977 and seized enough pure LSD and its constituent chemicals to make two million LSD ‘tabs’.

The arrest and conviction of Solomon, Kemp and a string of co-conspirators dominated the headlines for months. I was covering the case as a reporter at the time and it was then that I met Kemp’s close friend, Garrod Harker, whose home had been raided by police but who had not been arrest ed. Harker told me that Kemp and his girlfriend Christine Bott by then in jail were hippie idealists who were completely uninterested in the money they were making.

They gave away thousands to pet causes such as the Glastonbury pop festival and the drugs charity Release.

‘They have a philosophy,’ Harker told me at the time. ‘They believe industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people’s mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves.

‘Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD.

‘It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp’s inspiration.’ Shortly afterwards I visited Crick at his home, Golden Helix, in Cambridge.

He listened with rapt, amused attention to what I told him about the role of LSD in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. He gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said: ‘Print a word of it and I’ll sue.’

http://www.hallucinogens.com/lsd/francis-crick.html

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How I found my guts

What had happened to me? Unconsciously, I had learned how to sacrifice. Paradoxically, it wasn’t that which brought me down — it hadn’t been the sacrifice but the peculiar devil may care attitude, which aroused people’s ire. You can’t have both in one person, it appears. The devil may care attitude makes them think the sacrifical attitude is up to no good. Maybe it is a mere mask. Yet that was hardly true. Unconsciously, as a female I had learned to sacrifice — not things, but my mind in the form of excess diligence. I had hung my hat — my whole identity — upon this self-appraisal of how diligent I was. And the devil may care attitude? — well that was actually joy personified, but, also something of a mask.

From the near total disaster I attacted through my boisterousness, I learned that one part femininity is never enough. You can be half and half — but one half of you (the superior part) might be considered the dangerous real you. When this happens, none of the feminine sacrifice of self and soul upon the altar of diligence will be conceded as having a smattering of worth.

Having been punished a great deal for my lack of femininity, I decided I would no longer be half and half. I resolved upon a pure indifference — a quality which some would think of as a masculine approach.

This was the turning point in my life. I took control — and the piteous and tauting cries to become feminine again have not ceased to harangue my ears!

I cannot do this though, it should be clear, for others’ unbalanced punishments have made me much less concerned to punish myself.

—

IMPORTANT NOTE:  I am not using the terms masculinity and femininity in a conventional sense whereby women are feminine and men are masculine .  Rather, I’m referring to attitudes that have become symbolically associated with these terms.


Symbolically, femininity is associated with self-abnegation.  Femininity means to be used up — and often then discarded — by a dominant male.   This self-sacrificial idea is not healthy for any living male or female.

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When I first began to write my autobiography (which is accessible on the right), I was reaching back to days which seemed to me more innocent. Knowing whether or not those days were genuinely more innocent, as they might have seemed, has been the bane of my life. It’s hard to correlate a level of objectivity with experiential states. What, after all, is “objectivity”? There are no doubt childish states and adult states, and it would seem we all have to go through a stage of cracking out of our eggs, breaking shells of prohibition and learning to think anew. In any case, I felt the violating pain of being misunderstood — and wholly rejected — when I first began to write the autobiography. Had I not felt so emotionally violated, I certainly would not have begun to write. My turn to writing certainly had an apologetics streak. I wanted to demonstrate (at least to myself) that I was not as bad as I had been painted to be. As it was, I certainly felt bad. I had a very fragile sense of self identity, and a very fine and delicate notion of what was right or wrong.

The problem was that by walking upon this hairsplinter notion of right and wrong I’d inadvertently fallen off it. I’d cracked my skull and vertebrae – I’d done my head in, somehow, blood dripping tranquilly from the canal of the right ear.

I had to retrace all my steps: Why had I put a foot here and not there? Who was I that I’d fallen off a hairsplinter, when everybody else was walking lightly as on ice?

I felt that my own innocence had actually betrayed me. At the same time, those times in the past appeared to me more viscous, dense, intense.

Who was I, then? How could I, twice, have lost the essence of who I had been?

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And behold.

“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it would become a universal law.” So spoke Kant.

And behold the masses muttered unto themselves, “Yay, pettiness and rampant moral censoriousness are mine. But the consequences of my actions shall matter not one mite. The most important thing for me is to reinforce my own feelings of what feel normal to me, replicating mom and pop in their tired old ways, without examining anything about what that means. I resolve right now not to attend to any consequences of my actions, but to go forth quite boldly smiting the intellectual knave who would cause me to think. Divorcing my actions from their consequences is the best way to maintain my inner sense of beauty. In avoiding any trace of thought, I am sincerely beautiful.”

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morality is as morality does

Bataille – does he reflect a modernist (and European) cultural attempt to invert our intellectual dominance by abstractions, making us free of the control of abstractions, able to embrace the concrete (which we are), or is his inversion attempt more broadly based upon the organic structures of our brains – higher versus lower? In any case, immanence.

There is this thing, with Western culture — there is this moral and epistemological dichotomy, which leads to the pathologising of human organic nature. The dichotomy is based on the difference between a machine and an organism. This machine, in principle, functions at 100 per cent capacity all the time. It has no emotion, only efficiency (much like the nature of the Categorical Imperative in some respects — efficient in principle, but in principle also divorced from a direct relation to human, organic contingencies). Even when Barbara Herman seeks to defend Kant, she cannot help linking “identity” to one’s sense of ethics, unintentionally reinstating a culturally conditioned aspect (identity – for one’s cultural sensibilities certainly inform one’s identity) and drive towards a surface appearance of homogeneity, in her interpretation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

Although a concept of a “universal morality” underlies many an ethical norm guiding the functioning of the ideology of organisation in western cultural systems, psychologically, emphasis on a categorical imperative trains people to avoid paying attention to the specific (or more unusual) instances of human experiences as they could affect the realm of moral thought and deliberation. To adhere to the principle of categorical imperative is, paradoxically perhaps, to fail to understand the moral critiques made through the particular instances of the individual and their life experiences

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The Punitive West

There is this thing, with Western culture — there is this dichotomy, which you don’t find with the Eastern counterpart. It is the pathologising of human organic nature. In addition, this dichotomy is based on the difference between a machine and an organism. This machine, in principle, functions at 100 per cent capacity all the time. It has no emotion, only efficiency (much like the nature of the categorical imperative in some respects — efficient in principle, but in principle also divorced from a direct relation to human, organic contingencies). So in Western culture, whenever something is not running too efficiently, somebody is punished — (symbolically as well as in effect) the organic body is whipped in order to punish it for not being sufficiently machine-like. Western culture then (or maybe just Perth culture) is not a very intellectual culture; it is not a culture that seeks to “understand”. Rather it is a culture that uses behaviourist mechanisms of punishment — to whip, in order to make more machine-like. This is my unfortunate discovery about things. There is little understanding in the culture, because understanding has been made redundant by forceful application of behaviourist mechanisms, which work most times. There is a strong mind-body dichotomy here, but this does not make for a high culture as the transcendental “mind” is also neutralised through punitive mechanical training.

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Women = maliciously powerful (but only if you have no self esteem)

What rings true about the fundamentalist ilk is that they are emotionally undisciplined. I believe that they draw most of their conclusions on the basis of how they happen to feel, a great deal of the time, rather than on the basis of either logic or the capacity to modulate one’s own feelings. So, there is this apparent wholesale hostility to women, whereas at the same time, fundies will proclaim that they have no such hatred towards women — that they actually “respect” women. What seems to be going on, then, (and I draw from my own experiences), is that the fundamentalists — male and female, but mostly male — do have a sense of women’s power. Actually, because they are such emotional beasts, they don’t just think but actually EXPERIENCE women’s power as incredibly powerful as well as primarily sexual. To a male of a fundamentalist mindset, no matter how little actual political power or control any particular woman has, she already has too much power. This is indicated by her ability to make him lose control of his thoughts whilst she is present to him. This is the source of all the hostility against women and the fundamentalist’s sense that women have too much control over things.

The practical reality is that women have very little world power and usually we are not socially positioned to have much power even in our local spheres. This is irrelevant to the male fundamentalist in particular — who still feels that sexual power is the most overwhelming power evvah! So, no matter how little power any woman has, or how much she is suffering, because her legal and practical powers have been taken away, such a woman is still, in the male fundamentalist’s sexually oriented view, OVERWHELMINGLY POWERFUL.

In fact, from the view of the most extreme male fundamentalist, this female power of hers is so intense that nothing whatsoever can ever take it away. Equivocating the women herself with her sexual power leads to the unfortunate notion that no amount of hurt nor pain will actually affect “her” just because her sexual power will always have this immense hold over him, even when she is dead.

So, there is no such thing as “killing a woman” in the emotional mindset of the fundamentalist. Not when her sexual power (universalised as the sexual power of all women, up until eternity) is still so OVERWHELMINGLY POWERFUL.

From the fundamentalist’s point of view, nothing you can do to women can really hurt them or serve to undermine their power!

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M and paranoia

You know what I said about big people! They have a torture machine called drought which they bang on the heads of the little people: they say there is no food. Drought means NO FOOD for the little citizens. All the big chefs will be eating silly – but not for you. Especially if you are sick. The big human beings have made the atmosphere (the air you breathe) and the land (what you stand on when you throw a rock thru Parson Austen’s window) so damaging to live on and breathe in that both kill you slowly.

As I am writing now two cars have collided outside my window. I cannot see much blood because I think its inside, but there are four police cars and several ambulances (police are called pigs in elite society). Ambulance men are called warthogs because they rape you (girls of boy) if you are unconscious – they think doing that to unconscious people is a great experience.
Who are you
Fuzzy Goo?

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The fray

As I head towards the season of NIHIL and wonder what it is I feel so angry about, mine eyes alight upon the most recent key word search on my blog: “kickboxing castration”. If this does not frustrate you, nothing will. Reading oxymorons frustrates the brain and heart (and I do not want to know about your other problems).

Therefore, I move on; the fight moves on into another arena. The metaphor of fight is indispensable for the powerless. Whereas I permit myself all things — and playing dead is one of them — the reality is that one never ceases to fight. And mostly the level of fight is psychological. IN a way, even the physical aspects of life are psychological. One keeps going when one has no energy through psychological tenacity.

It is not the colour of skin that matters, but the social conditions we live in, which give us our contexts. One can understand the psychosocial dynamics that lead to certain outcomes. In this instance, Marechera’s life experiences parallel mine. His family were poor and stressed – or stressed rather, because poor. Perhaps they were also poor in spirit, like my parents. Yet, tradition is tradition. One must support one’s children and the father went out truck driving, but died crossing the street. The mother brought up her children by resorting to the only option left to the impossibly poor: prostitution.

Not an easy job, I imagine, in any respects. This lowliness of doing whatever one feels necessary to do, in order just to scrape by is highly ignoble in the social sense. The child wants more than this – a life with some dignity. It is easy to reject such a sacrifice in order to save one’s own sense of well-being. Perhaps this is in fact the law of existence, which is why one should think twice about becoming a parent. Just scraping by is not going to impart the sense of spiritual nourishment that a child needs. Marechera sought to grow away from his origins. His mother, also feeling the burden, rejected her child. Who wants a budding intellectual around, who shares few of the same values anyway? The work appears a pointless sacrifice to make for such a child.

While the conscious mind binds itself in the task of duty, the unconscious mind is free to wander and prevaricate in order to find reasons to evade one’s duty. Neither the duty nor any of the prevarication enables one to uncover the truth: That one wants to rid oneself of the child who is a burden, all the more so because he is not similar to one in many ways.

Madness is a good excuse to deal with such a changeling. Marechera’s mother went mad, whereupon she visited a witchdoctor who then advised her to get rid of the illness by passing it to one of her offspring. She chose Dambudzo.

Evil had descended upon the family in the form of bad luck – the father’s death, the turn to prostitution, the son’s sense of shame and cultural betrayal. One had better get rid of that son, in the hope of also getting rid of a general turn of bad luck.

I think the same psychology pertains to my father’s attitude toward me. When he proclaimed that I was sitting in a room not light enough, and trying to improve my understanding of the world by reading books on philosophy, he also added in even more paranoid tones, “You are responsible for spreading bad vibrations throughout the house.” It seems impossible to me to imagine that he was not trying to pass on to me the sense of his own mental illness.

He tried in other ways to hurt – he told me that I could not speak properly, and that he thought I was disgusting. Marechera’s parents scolded him for reading books in English until his guilt reached such a peak level that he burnt all his books (then proceeded to replenish them again with the very little money he had.)

Marechera’s almost frantic independence came from the same source mine did. He felt that his family and his culture had rejected him. It was for this reason that he took solace in books.

Now, Christmas comes and one must whitewash happy family photos. Sometimes an almost paranoiac need of independence is a consequence of brutal lessons learned: That one can only manage to stay sane by an absolute emotional detachment from those whose interests differ from one’s own.

Thus Marechera preferred loneliness, and I must take all of my heart in hands for my family’s long Christmas fray.

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milk teeth and guilty pleasures

It may have much to do with hitting my head against walls and antiquated pillars. I feel weary these days. I have been reading postcolonialist texts, and well, I am not sure what to make of them. They all have a moral tone, as if it were actually possible, just by wishing, or by virtue of a certain academic posturing, to no longer be a dominator. Well that is what you are, as a Westerner, I am afraid – unfortunately, you are not a very interesting master or a dominator at that. You are, well you know, grey and a little bit pompous—hardly the image of the swashbuckling redcoat that we would more like to invoke, when calling to mind real colonial domination. Yet, you are a dominator, as you say, because you appropriate the works of dominatees, native peoples who have no rights of their own but produce works of arts in order to reclaim themselves and their heritage. You say you would like to appropriate these, to brighten up your own culture, giving spots of vibrant colour to the yards of Western grey. Frankly, this approach to life (and not just in the sense of guilty conscience in approaching other cultural situations) seems wholly unsatisfactory. Appropriate works from other cultures to your own, and far from getting fields of yellow, all you get is a dull tint of colour in your fields of grey. A teacup storm — this anxiety about cultural domination. When you fail to fully engage with someone from another culture, you also demolish whole internal spectrums of culture. You are a dominator, and what you do always matters. What you neglect to do also paints us all into your picture, staring out through vapid shades of grey.

Do little and you find it is mixed with guilt complexes and mental confusion. Yet, why would one not genuinely assimilate some aboriginal art within this western culture? Appropriate it, however, not just as a tint, which allows your mind to wander, but as your emotional reality, body and soul. Permit the outsider’s art to influences you outlooks; rearrange your thinking and reversing your values. Bite not off measily pieces, but attempt something tastier. Then, you will be able to say, “Yes, we have truly understood this culture which we have been long intent upon appropriating. It has been a long journey of discovery, but now we can clearly say we know it in and out. In fact, it has become our own culture, finally.” Is this reaction too much to expect? (Doesn’t every artist, rather, hope to elicit just this reaction?!) Can’t grey ever desire to improve, by means other than destroying itself? Guilt perpetuates along the lines of cultural ignorance. Each tries to outdo the other by posturing. Subtle in its nuances, guilt erodes all the tunnels of the brain. “How deeply can I paint myself in?” “Oh far!” — an empty echo of destroyed culture.

Ah! There can be a lot to experience outside the grey of culture. Marechera makes that clear within his writing. It takes the form it does often from a malicious joy in going against the dominant cultural warp. Marechera’s pleasure might only have been equalled by the raging flights of fantasy of the earlier colonials, whom he opposed.

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War

I wonder whether Mister Marechera and I have something else in common too: perhaps what it telling about both of us in not that we grew up in the same or similar cultural settings, but that we matured under conditions of emotional tension. Perhaps it is this, more than the obvious matter of the common culture, which made us both stubborn, not must unwilling but unable to let go of our perspectives which were born out of extreme social conditions, and which consequently left deep etches – deeper than usual for most modern humans – in our minds. Perhaps this is what Marechera continually returns to as a sense of something possibly wrong with his character. It is a feeling I am familiar with – that somehow aspects of tension or even trauma surrounding us during our upbringing might have left their irreversible mark. Of course, anything I have experienced in terms of “traumatic” features of my upbringing was less than one tenth that which Marechera did. Yet, all the same, when I consider the deeply relaxed and somehow unthinking approaches, which most people take to life, I see that there is something going on in me, which resounds like a kind of hyper-alertness. I am aware of much more, most of the time, than most people are – especially in terms of an emotionally intense sense of my environment. Why would this be unusual for a child whose backdrop of life was war? This war started only a few years before I was born, and continued throughout my formative years. By my mid-teens, it had almost finished.

 

I can well remember the little boys and their ambush of the classroom. Wait until Teacher’s gone to collect your things – your eraser, your ruler, your bits of coloured pencils that you were intent on flinging around the class. Paul was the stealthy one, the brawny ringleader, and I was drawn into the fray. Rob was second in charge. Somehow early accommodation to gender roles meant that the boys were already more robust. “I’m going to get back my stuff. Do you want to come?” Entering the classroom was forbidden during break time. Paul inspired us with confidence, that “Forbidden” had a prefix – “merely” – stuck in front of it. It was interesting looking around in the Teacher’s desk. I would have got my things and run, but Paul was more content to bide his time. Ah! He found a stapler to play with. “Let’s see how this works!” Ah—“Ouch!” he’d impregnated a staple half way through the surface of his thumb. “Let’s gap it.”

Teacher’s scoldings after break were nothing compared to the joy of having conquered forbidden terrain. I will never forget the lesson I learnt that day, the idea of “merely”.

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slippery slope

I am at an interesting point. Sometimes theory by itself seems too dry and the theoretical possibilities of investigating experiences, too liquid. The problem with theory – despite the fact that even slippery sloppery postmodernismz (I mean the more extreme concoctions which embrace high epistemic skepticism) renounce the fixed nature of “facts” inherent to Enlightenment conceptualizing – is that the very form of theorizing tends to create a staid reality. Postmodernismzzz is too dry with all its staid reversal of Modernist certainty, represented as a different kind of certainty — a certainty concerning lack of depth.

To my mind, multiplicities of determinations are more true to how life “works” than the sense of “truth” that any theory — even a theory which historically reverses a previous theory — suggests. Postmodernizzts are authoritarians who wish to be anything other than authoritarianzz. And a postmodernizt would not embrace the arbitrary to the degree that idt could be interesting. Idt would refuse that idea of mine that University is just a bunch of very evocative and mighty buildings, causing me to think – at least I don’t think that one who calls themselves such can be relatively unstaid enough to give my theory academic journal time. Yet, there’s no saying I am wrong, except consensus (and I won’t give in here.)

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Squiggles

As for the logic which theoreticians employ – well there is no logic without postulates. The illogical move is to assume that we all have the same postulates – or that we should have the same ones, in order to be somehow acceptable atomistic entities of the current postmodernist era.

For example, taking the Kantian notion of human minds as theoretical black boxes, and assuming an ontological fact of social atomisation, I could begin to correct you on all sorts of things that suited me. For example, “there is no ‘Australia’ “. Australia is just a theoretical construct of politicians, which we’d do better not referring to because it undermines our individualism. Also, there is no “University”– just buildings we use based on social convention. And so on… (These points seem very anti-intuitive because those “social constructs” are close to home. Let us move to a subject which seems more intuitive then): “There is no “Africa” “. What we consider to be Africa is just a set of squiggles on a map created by European colonisation. Vague squiggles, squiggly squiggles, that is all!”

–Ah — I do think that the latter construct makes more sense to most …er…most…er..well you know who I mean: those theoreticians who accept the same or similar axioms.

And for such theoreticians, the outcome of this logic is not far removed from their emotional sense of things anyways. And there’s a phenomenological element too (pertaining to the perceptions of the narrow individual, who accepts conditions of social atomisation), for if you went to Africa, you surely would not SEE a whole continent. There is no way of experiencing such a thing. So why imagine one?

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Who has to fight to survive? That depends.

They cannot see what they are not positioned to see. This goes for general spectatorship and it goes for the vibrations, which go through the social mesh of groups and through organisations of people in general. Electric currents roar through the fine mesh of human civilisations, ripping through its fabric, creating scorches. Everywhere there is the pitiful vibration of the paths of least resistance – humans who must die because they form the weakest link by virtue of their non-fine-meshed hands, strangeness, or because of our indifference. “Enmesh with us or die!” thus screams the well-adjusted fascist to the African baby dying of AIDS. “Link hands and let these violent vibrations pass through others!” — Thus sighs anyone who has lived upon Earth for some time. (But their hands are held to exacerbate their coldness at heart; their touch is merely metallic.)

You cannot see the hardship because you are not in a similar enough position to see it. Or, putting it differently: Your position in the fabric of society is a defence against seeing it. Violence rips through others’ flesh and bodies not because they are structurally positioned to receive it, in your view. You have other ideas about its causes. Yet violence rips through you as well, finally, and you think that this is because you are ‘just’ weak.

My father was one of the weak ones, psychologically violated, pushed from his mother into the arms of an adoptee father who hated human guts. Forced out of his country. What had he done wrong? He had always been a believer. Cherchez the weak link! Ah—the “fabric” of society – it gives as good as it receives. Let no man feel the violent force of others’ political domination rip through him – rather try to pass that “privilege” on to a woman.

Feeling himself a victim, he was intent on victimizing. He thought deflecting punishment onto a weaker part of society would make him strong. How unfortunate! A bad gamble, made on an unfortunately too mechanical assumption!

One is not passive fabric, after all. What rips through one will rip through all — a risky idea then, to decide to spread the violence.

Women are not expendable and our weakness is only a positional weakness. We are hardly the possible lightening rod for your evil vibes, nor are we willing and naturally passive receptors of the world’s misfortunes. We are vulnerable because we exist along society’s fault line – the philosophical incapacity to register another’s humanity despite physical differences. This inability is not one that women, specifically, created. If the power had been ours, we certainly would not have chosen to be so positioned by societies. (If you attack us individually, you will find out just how strong we are – a bad move, always a backfiring move.)

Yet, so acted my father. Kicked out of his country, he proceeded to make things even in his own mind by attacking women.

Every step of personal advancement in my life has been against his wishes. Like the mermaid who must experience excruciating pain just to walk on Earth, I have experienced outright antagonism for every step to independence that I’ve made. I have even felt sad about this: The Rhodesian ideal of “Christian civilisation” was not a wholly flawed one vis-à-vis us women. It was partially flawed indeed – an early bad gamble against humanity’s progression. Now, it has gone. Violence has ripped through it, through the patriarch – who did not think it right that such destruction had not ominously also ripped through me.

He made amends for Fate’s randomness by taking out his frustrations upon me when he perceived that I was progressing. Progression itself. Maybe this is what irked him. (Hadn’t his patriotic position been a stand against it?)

What a terrible thing! To fight and risk dying, and sacrifice others from your family to die, all for a bad gamble – hardly the idealistic outcome of the “God is on our side” motif that seemed to valid under the shadow of media sanctions. And then the next bad gamble: Blaming women. (How could we not choose to fight to defend ourselves? – aren’t we humans, too?!)

Despite a popular misconception that in the fundamental sense – perhaps vis-à-vis some theoretical standing towards “God” – we are all the same, it has never been my experience that this is in fact true. If I were to try to analyse my sense of change and difference between being in Zimbabwe and being in Perth, Australia, I would say that it involved a shift from a rather practical orientation towards the world and the humans in it towards a more theoretical, arms length approach. In effect, I found that human relations in Perth are Mediated relationships. That is, for the most part, relationships are theoretical postulates. To give an example: one does not, for instance, notice somebody in need and then immediately render assistance without first pausing to consider the theoretical postulates which are thought to govern the situation. There is always the sense of a need to pause thus, and to consider one’s axioms before any human interaction with another.

This “arms length” theoretical mandate is given further enhancement by a sense of division between public and private realms of society. This is less a structural division these days as it is an epistemological division. One assumes that the role that one has been financially harnessed to do actually provides the attributive source of each person’s identity. So much for “public” identity. “Private” identity is the lower brother in this epistemological hierarchy. One “privately” varies from one’s fellow citizens, but this is not considered problematic unless it impinges on one’s capacity to fulfill the role that is designated “public”. One is defined by the manner one has found to earn money. One is not defined by one’s choices in life – which are personal – unless it is considered that one’s personal choices impinge on one’s public identity. In other words, personal choices are not considered interesting, except in the occasional negative sense. This theoretical division between public and private produces a social pattern, which constantly repeats.

It has taken me literally years to be able to understand these basic constructs of this particular society. I have discovered this to be a very patriarchal society, much to my dismay and horror. Let me explain. Suppose one is unfortunate enough to find that one is being bullied. One can try to convey this to others as important information – but the realm of the “personal” is also the theoretical realm governing complete personal choice and variations which require neither logical nor moral explanation. “Personal information” conceptually has nothing to do with the public realm, unless one is committing some sort of sin. The proclamation, “I am being bullied” is therefore not the kind of information that pertains to one’s public role, and is not considered meaningful except as it pertains to oneself and one’s own choices. On the other hand, one claim might, if one is unlucky, be considered to be making a personal confession of the kind of “sin” – one which would prevent one from performing one’s public tasks. Then, “I am being bullied,” would be taken as a confession of the sin of weakness, even up to making oneself worthy of social censure. So, it is hard for a women who has encountered misogyny is this society to deal with it effectively, without calling down upon herself society’s mechanisms of blame.

In Zimbabwean society, which is relatively backwards socially – and often and generally misogynistic in various ways, it can be, nonetheless, easier to get help if one is being bullied. That is because a female realm of particularly female-gender oriented thinking runs parallel to a male realm of male oriented thinking. So, if a male is abusing you, you can expect to immediately get help from other women, who do not consider you at arms length, wondering if engagement with your personal life would somehow contaminate their public standing. There is already strong and public recognition that women will have different issues than men do, and that solidarity makes one stronger and not weaker. Yet in Perth society, there is the issue of the “weak” and bullied woman acting as a contaminant on others social lives.

For the reasons given above, I find that patriarchal values have a much stronger hold on this particular Western society than within a third world culture which on the surface of it is more backwards and “patriarchal”.

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sloppy thinking

One of the rhetorical features of postmodernist theory concerning “otherness” is that it is considered vulgar or specious to refer to a whole continent or state of people and their conditions in one breath, but that what is meant by such a reference in each case is considered consistent with every other case of giving such a reference. There seems to be a ‘common-sensical’ notion that what is meant by any encompassing term or generality involving groups of people is always a put-down of these groups. Yet it is generally far from established that a speaker has the hierarchical view which she is implicitly understood as having. One may wish to draw attention to Africa as a whole for all sorts of reasons, many having nothing to do with hatred or contempt or with the tendency to impose an implicit hierarchy. Somebody who has lived in Africa and experienced their socialization there may well have a different view from one who has been brought up to think of Africa as being at the bottom of some hierarchy. The generalisation that “otherness” is necessarily implied by the use of generalisations has not been examined. It is not even clear, whether in all instances, sloppy thinking is necessarily involved (unless we have taken care to ask each speaker what she really means to say).

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The purer form of human being is always the prototype revealed most perfectly within the high school yearbook. The prototype is a smooth outline of a human being, thick white aura, but with the radiant blue purity of potential all around, rather than etched in content – etched in implying lines, lines upon the features, lines scored deep into a tired and wary soul. The prototype of the glorious human is only simple lines. We nostalgically long for our glory of youth.

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identity

Was Marechera really looking to find his identity? This is not a straightforward question, because there are a number of identities to be found, for the willing searcher, many different from the others. What kind of an identity would a Marechera have been searching to find? Was he looking for a pragmatic identity – one that would help him publically to advance his literary career? Was he, perhaps, looking instead for a self – a hidden essence—upon which to place his hat? Was he looking for an identity somehow free of colonial taint, and yet not held merely in his mind, but exemplified by his very actions, as concrete reality? Or, was he able to accept a mere conceptual identity of freedom, the slow disrobing of colonial attire forcibly placed over him, for literary pleasure? Did Marechera seek his own identity – or didn’t he rather seek identity, pure and simple? The tramp on the park bench makes the best company, at last, because he has no use for sin and status, guilt complexes and a well-contrived self-image. Authentic identity is where individuals are freed from the Categorical Imperative, free to roam with only visible bonds to limit them, where individuals speak of their own needs and feelings, not by relaying any societal voice of condemnation. Marechera said he wrote for tramps. For him, these were the humans that had the greatest possible authenticity.

Surely, Marechera was no postmodernist for he sought – and possibly found, if he and his ruminations are to be believed – authenticity in the natures of tramps. His ideas of identity were bound up in his notions of authenticity.

Last night, the crows were loud, and one had to sympathise with their short lives. The humans had learned, at last to do so, since this was a kinder, gentler society. The poor crows listened, and they even had their own tune. Venus-like students, youthful nubiles, would crouch down to play to them their cheering, reassuring tune, whilst heading home from music class. It made no matter, given passing time and history, that this tune was reassigned from elephants.

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My little troll has been keen to make me laugh of late, picking delicately here or there for that which he can easily digest, but like an incredibly fussy eater, leaving behind all of the meat. He tells me that in his society, people are solely concerned with image. He says that they have no soul, and try to find out who they are by emulating characters on (what I assume to be) popular TV shows. He fears that he might be like this himself, but if only, if only, he says, I will be the scapegoat for him by representing this tendency, he might be able to feel his way towards some freedom of some sort. He does not know for sure, he says – it’s just all about hoping, at this stage.

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Actual Oedipus finally learned the gods’ lesson that by following one’s own reason, one ends up being covered by destructive instincts — his final fate being an indication of this principle. The threat of the Oedipal triangle is the taboo which hangs over each and every one of us: Do not think for yourself, for if you do, you will prefer blindness to clear perception in the end. Rather, just obey the gods’ dictums and sacrifice yourself blindly from the start. But this blind self-sacrifice from the start (in Oedipus’s case, he should have killed himself to prevent what actually did occur), is just a premature and more extreme imposition of the sentence he imposed upon himself finally — his self blinding was a kind of self negation. With regard to just this individual and his fate, his disobedience to the gods at least prolonged his life, and led to sin. The alternative would have been a smooth-running moral order, without the complexity.

The true opposite of conformity is not ‘rebellion’, but thinking. To my mind the idea that it is even possible to socially rebel is a very antiquated notion. Perhaps my real difficulty is in imagining how one might easily pinpoint the whereabouts of moral ‘rebellion’ in a pluralistic society. How might it essentially differ from concerted effort and ambition that derive directly (and not derivatively at all) from one’s unique and very genuine and considered thoughts? To rebel, however, one has to have a recognizable standard from which to depart. In effect, ‘rebellion’ is measuring oneself against some general thoughts, which are in any case not one’s own, and deciding to do the opposite to what the general thoughts, (perhaps those of one’s community) prescribe. One would have to continually draw reference from a value system which one did not consider to be one’s own, in order to ‘rebel’ against it. Thus, ‘rebellion’ would be derivative and secondary to one’s intrinsic sense of the hegemony, which would remain dominant and primary. Such a view discounts pluralism, because it makes out any opposing point of view to be merely derivative, and far from equal, to just one point of view which is (somehow) determined as the one correct view.

I wonder whether some of the rhetoric that encases Marechera’s life, mummifying his sense of dynamism, otherwise accessible though his work, is this idea that he ‘rebelled’ against society and that his ‘rebellion’ was automatically derivative — due to its reaction against a dominant order. Due to its derivative nature, then one should consider his actions and deliberations as largely futile (unless, perchance, one wants to be kind and act as if to extend a hand of mercy, perhaps expressing one’s pity for what ‘could have been, if only’…).

The last sentence, regarding pity, resonates with a sentence that I have read; wherein a critic propounded their idea that Marechera had belonged to a “lost generation of Zimbabwean youth’. This statement, seemingly neutral and historical on the surface, now appears to me to be loaded with a moral agenda – suggesting that one sees Marechera somehow as morally lost, and hence deserving our pity. The implicit argument underpinning the notion of his belonging to a “lost generation” is that his lack of social stability meant that he ‘rebelled’ and that, therefore, his ‘rebellion’ was necessarily futile.

Perhaps this is the way that many of his Zimbabwean critics read Marechera today. But this view of ‘rebellion’ does not allow for moral and characterological complexity.

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Results

I am Jean-Luc Picard
Jean-Luc Picard

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75%

Uhura

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70%

Will Riker

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70%

James T. Kirk (Captain)

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60%

Mr. Sulu

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55%

Worf

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55%

Deanna Troi

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55%

Mr. Scott

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45%

Chekov

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40%

Geordi LaForge

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40%

Data

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38%

Spock

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37%

An Expendable Character (Redshirt)

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35%

Leonard McCoy (Bones)

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20%

Beverly Crusher

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5%

A lover of Shakespeare and other
fine literature. You have a decisive mind
and a firm hand in dealing with others.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test

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The cultural subtext

What is strongly counterproductive in contemporary societies is the feeling that “authoritarianism” leads to totalitarianism. What most people poorly understand as the danger of “authoritarianism” is actually nothing other than “authoritativeness”. Therefore, there seems to be a general agenda in the western school system to undermine authoritativeness and promote learning at one’s own pace as a path to individuation. What it does do is to produce a vacuüm of authority. Where authoritativeness should be, there remains just the sense of the flailing individual “self”, still poorly defined, uncertain. And this, my friends, is what produces the sickness which reinforces the dominant social order — including traditional gender roles — as a last resort to finding something hidden and authoritative. “Females are Mummies who are delicate while men are Daddies who are strong,” is the subtext of all school lessons that undermine a different vision for social authoritativeness. To fight the sense that there are people or ideas that are authoritative actually produces authoritarianism in its most regressive form – manufacturing sick puppies, who hide their propensity for conformity and their abuse of the outsider under the mask of being individually “different”.

The rogue banker smirked outside the banking tower, having gained ignominy as a patriarchal doppelgänger. He looked exhausted, collapsed, but nonetheless, the smirk revealed that status of outsider was a calculated goal, by which to achieve his notoriety. He was only a craggy replica of The Thinker, next to the outside waterfall, except his eyes gazed deceptively upwards instead, to receive the light of fame. Meanwhile, I tried to find the remnants of a salvation, seeking ditch-digging jobs. Was it sincere or was it merely an act? I found two, tore the job advertisements out and floated them within the dirty pond water. I climbed up to a chalet overlooking a steep cliff. I had resorted to find my own adventures outside of the firing range of patriarchal potshots and condemnation. It was a luxury hut, though not that broad. I felt I was slipping towards the broadsheet, which was green and luminous. I grasped on to a long vine just as I lost my footing, and I slid down abseiling approximately 20 feet.

I continued to move around in the dark, meeting people whom I hadn’t met for ages, and trying to restore an updated version of my dissertation.

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the self esteem imperative

Self-esteem appears the biggest issue for the home tutor. Very little compares to it. It should never be underestimated. In all the years I have been tutoring, 95 percent of needs are hardly educational at all. To imagine that as a hired tutor, you are there to educate the young ones is a mistake that will tend to undermine your confidence and dignity. The message you get from the parents is rather this: “Little Johnny would like a little bit more – a bit more of whatever you think he is missing. We are hopeful that what you have to offer can set him straight. There’s an essential quality of something which we sense that he is presently lacking.”

“Yes, certainly! How are his marks?”

His parents ply their rosary of academic symbols sullenly: “Well, he’s getting mostly Ds and C pluses. These are his scores. He needs more work in English in particular.”

The teacher suddenly sneezes. “Oh, I’m sorry – how does Johnny like his schooling? Does he have a favourite subject?”

His parents look alarmed. “His English marks are average. He needs to improve in other subjects, too, but we are most concerned about his English.”

“Ah,” sighs the teacher to herself. “I diagnose bad self esteem somewhere.” (She is careful not to voice her feelings, for this cash cow must be milked for all its sour drops.)

“I will do my best to bring his marks up to scratch. Thank you for this information,” she announces firmly, moving on proficiently to little Johnny in his room.

Yet wee Johnny has a drawn face. “How’s it going?” the professional enquires. “I don’t know,” utters Johnny. Clearly he wears an aura of despair. “What do you like at school?”

“Nothing, really,” Johnny enthuses.

“Your parents want me to help you increase your marks!”

“Oh.”

“Can I inject you with a little piece of moral fibre? – it is free, I promise. You won’t have to pay for it. It comes in bucket loads, and I’ve brought along with me just the tiniest piece!”

Little Johnny shrugs his shoulders. He’s prepared to go through the motions. The tutor is expected to have the magic touch. Everything is permissible so long as it is painless.

Johnny rejects the moral fibre out of hand. It is considered something other than painless.

“How is little Johnny going?” ask the parents, the next week. “Is he getting what we paid for?”

“Yes! He is,” I assert confidently. “I went over X and Y material with him. Little Johnny has certainly now covered X and Y material.”

The parents now know that a painless fibre is at last being injected. This is transcendental fibre – untouchable, invisible, benevolent. No pain involved.

Little Johnny ingests his non-material fibre, week after week. His marks remain at the level of a D.

Everybody is puzzled – including the tutor. “I gave him no sense of the real world, which might have troubled him, and by focusing on his marks I definitely avoided giving him any frightening sense that education was a value in itself. Indeed, I did everything possible to lighten the burden on little Johnny – since the burden of one’s parents paying money should have covered it. And yet, despite all this, wee Johnny’s marks have hardly been improving!”

The parents themselves are now considering how to make the calculation necessary that will cause heads to roll. Somebody, somebody has caused Johnny to experience his difficulties. “Get another tutor!” they proclaim.

“This tutor cannot reassure us that we are good parents, can we have another?” bellow the parents in their angst.

“We need more of that Categorical Imperative, that easy distraction from life’s hardships, that sense that not thinking is better than attending to ideas, as well as that almost certain knowledge that pursuing this approach will make life’s pains go away!”

The tutor anticipates the nature of this complaint and scowls: “And I was careful to give little Johnny so little of the painful sense that life actually mattered – and still his parents are keen to damage my reputation, exclaiming that I caused the pain!!”

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