Klein and Althusser

Kleinian theory is of interest because it has a parapsychological resonance to it. Projective identification is of particular interest to me.

In projective identification, you become the aspect (either distortedly elevated, or distortedly sullied) that is the disowned part of another person’s mind. The seemingly paranormal side to this dynamic is that you can start to become, in words or action, just exactly what the other person thinks you are — even though you were never really that in the first place. It seems like a kind of magic (and a way of knowing what is in the other’s mind without him telling you).

In the case of Althusser’s notion of interpellation, the authorities, or an authority within the social system “hail” you. You don’t know that you have a particular role and identity to play until you are thus hailed. Once this happens, you understand that you are exactly that sort of person that the social system thinks you are because of your own reflexive response to being addressed authoritatively. You implicitly accept the right of the authority to give you an identity, and your own reflexes betray you into falling into line with whatever identity is given. In the case of Althusser’s paradigm, you probably didn’t have a sense of self before you were interpellated in this way. In the case of Klein’s theory of projective identification, your actual identity is being distorted by this psychodynamic.

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The Zimbabwean Children’s Liberation Festival

There was a bear in the garden
Playing piano wires in its teeth
A sparrow on the triangle echoed the burden;
The cat on violin clawed out its kin & kith.
Owl’s brassy eyes sleepily clashed like cymbals
While the rat in owl’s beak shrieked in soprano calls
Cricket & Cicada’ steel brush on silver drums
Dappled the scene with a jazzy farewell to arms.
Little Lulu pulled the pin of a gall she found
And BOOM! Lulu burst out of life into the bass drums.
Her mum on the trumpeters screamed & screamed all
round

While the bear in the Festival Garden
Clawed the piano wires in its jagged teeth.
Fatboy let loose a cello sound from his behind;
Violet the violincello sneezed into her mama’s skirts;
Little Farai squeezed Shona juices out of his brown eyes
And, with a flourish, burst into God Bless Africa.
“Bless you,” Fatboy murmured asweat with sweet
mankind.

But little jeering faces leapt onto the sets
Holing Farai down, sang Baboon Go Home
And sneered at Fatboy for a kaffirlover.
Fatboy’s fists swung like windmills facing Dover
Meatball, his expat teacher, dragged all apart:
Tweaking into reluctant ears the art of nonracism.
BOOM! Lulu again burst out of life into the deep bass
drums.

The bear thumped a grim growl from the piano muzzle
Over his jaws.

“Ma, Shakespeare’s girlfriend was a nigger. Fatboy
Said so, “ said Peter the Pants.
“hush.”
“Ma, Othello’s wife was a white girl,. Fatboy said so,” said Violet the violincello.

“Hush.”
“A nigger was an Emperor of Rome. Fatboy said so.”
“You don’t want us to know the United Nations or the
OAU. Fatboy said so.”

“Ma, are you a boer?” “That means I’m also a boer.”
“Did you really kill Farai’s parents at Sharpeville,
Chimoio & Nyadzonyia? Fatboy said you did.”
Fatboy’s parents are white like us. But he says you
jailed them for years and years. Why did you?”

“SHUT UP! These brats ask too many questions.”
“But teacher said to ask.”
“For that I’ll take him to task.”

Bootsie, The Ghetto Boy, chewed his lip.
His dusty buttocks showed through his khaki pants.
With paper & comb he played his soul, hoping for a tip.
His brown moth face, his brown moth wings all vibrant
Toward the spotlight, he played hoping for a tip.
In the background of Bootsie’s thin ghetto strains and
frame.

Grimfrown the Beat rested his chin on the great bass
guitar

And with hairy clawed fingers thrummed a slow judgment
BOOM! Lulu thundered out of life into God’s wrath.

“Fatboy says those who take the gap are cowards.”
“Fatboy says Smith and Walls should have been hanged.”
“Fatboy says reconciliation only works when justice is
seen to be done.

Otherwise all whites are lumped with the killers.”

Fatboy by the fountain fought down a great yawn.
The blistering sun sucked bitter sunlight from his fatty
brawn.

Little Farai had his can-opener head stuck fast between the
rails.

BOOM BOOM Lulu detonated again and again.

Bootsie sang:

I got nothing to tell you
That’s not skin off my back.
I got every
little thing to hide
And win respect a mile wide.
But I don’t do nothing
for nobody
‘Cos nobody does nothing for me.

The cat, furious, screeched demented arrows at the
vanished moon.

Lulu BANGED! BANGED! BANGED!
Prefects like hyenas drooled and drew nearer.
The rat in teacher’s beak squealed expressionist poems.
Alice bleeding from the smashed looking glass bit her lip.
She thought the Zimbabwe Festival “very curious”.
Three staffroom typewriters chattered in tune
Thought Fatboy a future minister or bloated monster
Deemed Farai a prick and Lulu too fargone
And declared the Festival a resounding disaster.

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Marechera’s sense of politics is – because of its ethical nature – deeply shamanistic and oriented towards healing (which is not to say that it doesn’t involve trickery, which takes the reader along the psychological paths that he or she is aready primed to go in) . Some critics have accused him of not being involved in politics, seeming not to realise that Marechera’s political insights are mostly in the form of forewarning against the errors of the past and present. Since much has been said about Marechera’s ostensible failure to politically engage, it is worth spending a few moments in determining the difference between conventional politics and the shamanistic posture of warning and vision.

Much of Marechera’s writing may have been dismissed as “serious political commentary” because of its jocular vein or aspects of biting irreverence, but serious satire lurks – albeit in a sly and esoteric fashion –within most of Marechera’s poems and other writings. For instance, (as a short digression), consider “The Zimbabwean Children’s Liberation Festival”, ostensibly a little piece of nonsense about bagging drums and farting, which however demands that the next generation of Zimbabweans should not repeat their parents’ errors.

BOOM! Lulu thundered out of life into God’s wrath.

“Fatboy says those who take the gap are cowards.”
“Fatboy says Smith and Walls should have been hanged.”
“Fatboy says reconciliation only works when justice is seen to be done.

Otherwise all whites are lumped with the killers.”

What the attuned eye of the poet sees is that lurking underneath the apparent pomp and ceremony of the liberation festivities are the tendencies of the next generation of Zimbabweans to set off grenades, causing trauma and screaming; to exploit past racial divisions between black and white by inflaming them for political gain, and to wax overly-sentimental over (black) Nationalist themes:

Little Farai squeezed Shona juices out of his brown eyes
And, with a flourish, burst into God Bless Africa.
“Bless you,” Fatboy murmured asweat with sweet mankind.

This is the kind of politics that Marechera eschews, from the position of one who has deeper insight into the link between psychological violence and politics. His more profound approach gives us a psychological reading of politics, rather than being a political position in itself. (When, for effect, he chooses to use political rhetoric, Marechera is pro-anarchistic –being against giving his power to others.)

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Divine the spark

I have very often wondered why more women do not “shamanize” — do not become half crazy — like me. Women experience more downwards pressure — much more degradation, slavery, the continuous vulgarity of pain.  There are a million reasons for women to set themselves free from the current social system and stand apart from it. So why do more women not shamanize but remain conservative instead?
I forget things too easily — that life is not a mechanical process, and that violence alone does not shamanize, but requires the faculty of will. One does not shamanize through experiencing fear or violence, but through deciding to.
As the emotional (and sometimes physical) violence continued, I had made this pledge: “I don’t accept these terms for life. 
“Death is preferable to slavery.”
Making the pledge to war — that led to shamanizing.

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Overman

———————-
2 REVIEW

It is not difficult to guess that Marechera’s attitude in his choreodrama may have been related to overly levated expectations regarding British society, which Marechera almost certainly had entertained (his sense of let-down upon encountering those of the upper classes who took their education lightly has been well documented). Lloyd Matowe details in his unpublished novel, The Garden of Eden, how Britain was represented to those of the colonial culture as somehow being a perfectly elevated and fair society. “Buckingham Palace” is an emotionally equivalent construction of Matowe’s deliberately overly inflated term for Britain, “The Garden of Eden”. Nonetheless, the overall sense of Marechera’s choreodrama is that one does not enter Britain on one’s own terms, but on the terms that one becomes British – terms he was not prepared to accept:

Wipe your nose you’re in Buckingham Palace
Whitewash your race you’re in Kensington Gardens
Shave your pubic hair you’re a Heathrow Asian virgin
Shoplift and run the bullet is already in your back Wandsworth
The children’s meals are cut their gums bleed with education
I said wipe your arse you’re in Buckingham Palace

Marechera’s behaviour may have seemed out of place in Britain, but in the country he had come from, with its enshrinement of an anti-authoritarian chic during the war years, a certain degree of outlandishness was not all that unusual. After all, for the white colonial leaders it was a way of thumbing their noses at British propriety and British notions of civilising order. Jarring and outlandish behaviour had the political – as well as thoroughly psychological value – of undermining the stature of the British authorities who would condemn Rhodesia’s UDI.

By denying the validity of British culture, one also undermined the political basis for Britain to tell the colonial State what to do. (However, the undermining of the relationship between Britain and Rhodesia occured at a behavioural level, and not necessarily at the level of principle or implicitely held values — on that level, the colonials were more British than the British.) After all, the one country was politically not like the other, but the latter had to be shown to have attained its own cultural identity as evidenced by its making up and following its own rules (but not so extremely as to not be on the right). [Note — see pamwe chete, for white cultural eccentrics] The cultural milieu of the rebel state was a perfect for producing cultural eccentricities. The emphasis ( in terms of a kind of Robinson Crusoe innovativeness to beat the sanctions) on waiving of the rules of normal civilisation (also to beat the sanctions and to win the war) led to the adoption of a certain pragmatic nihilism in social conduct, as part of the society’s norms. One could argue very easily that Marechera’s eccentricities only exceeded this cultural norm to the degree that he had been traumatised by the force of injustice within the colonial society. (Most of all, he had suffered as a victim of extreme poverty and its political correlative – that is, very narrow prospects to improve his lot.) This is in fact my view.

Although Marechera’s rejection of British authority was related to a cultural default: the culturally dominant white regime’s rejection of British authority, it is even more significant to note that Marechera also strenuously opposed the political domination of the white colonial authority. In some ways, this didn’t help him as he was, despite himself, as he acknowledged, a product of Ian Smith’s education system. That didn’t change his determination or political direction – he could still oppose Ian Smith’s ideologies (by realising the limits of his classical education, for instance; or by adapting and corrupting the English language, rather than speaking it perfectly). However, he was astute enough to realise that he was, to some degree, opposing what was already within himself. It was this inner knowledge that he had to oppose himself in order to find a way forwards, that made his approach to knowledge shamanistic. For what he found within himself – the aspects that he considered corrupted – were also salient within the culture of the new Zimbabwe. By diagnosing the illnesses within himself, he could point the way to purifying and regenerating the culture. First, however, he would have to dwell within the liminal realm where one’s own persona is not only burdened with the aspects of life that signify death, but is the bringer of new possibilities. In such a way, the writer addresses the newly liberated Zimbabwe, which stands as his reprobate lover and his muse.

By the time of writing “Throne of Bayonets”, the writer has embraced a position of absolute freedom for himself, living for the moment. Maybe such a concept of freedom was never far from Marechera’s embrace, but now we see that it has come to practical fulfilment in a hand to mouth existence on the streets. Remarkably, the focus in his poem is not on himself and on the difficulties that his situation poses, but on finding a solution to the unfulfilled potential of the revolution in Zimbabwe. This approach is just as paradoxical as it might seem, for, in being prevented from leaving Zimbabwe by a government authority at Harare Airport, the writer has taken to sleeping on park benches on the streets — as well as under a hibiscus hedge, which the poem mentions. Having divested himself of any personal attachment or relationship to any authority or system of control, he finds himself alone in the company of death. An encounter with the metaphysical Absolute of individual freedom is also an encounter with death. To “cross over the bridge” from social existence and participation to the other side of freedom/death is shamanistic. It is to go beyond what is conventionally and definitively human. This shamanistic role in this light has strong philosophical credentials.
Only by entering this realm of death, this realm of “over-man”, can the writer transcend his ego – that is the limitations internalised by the social and historical conditions of his time. Such a person who goes beyond narrow concerns for self, as determined by the limited nature of a particular time and a particular place is an “overman” who goes beyond humanity as it is currently known and described.

“I teach you the overman. Human being is something that must be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

Such an individual who goes beyond is different from one who takes a conventional human perspective, for in the process of one repressing anxieties about one’s mortality, one loses something valuable – insight into a broader and more complex perspectives on the world. However, in going “beyond self”, one observes the social dynamics at play both in oneself and in others. For instance, the writer transcends the conventional anger he might otherwise feel at finding himself in a situation that began with white, colonial oppression, and that ends up only with (black) Nationalist repression.

The poem – simultaneously transcendent (of ego) and immanent (in its openness to the immediate sensations that allow for scrutiny of immediate realities of the post liberation situation) – goes beyond merely conventional politics. Needless to say, the narrative does not trace the development of the more obvious political aspects affecting the author’s life, but rather searches ever more urgently for a solution to the social dynamics affecting Zimbabwean society (black and white) at large. This superior process (both ethically and cognitively) is also costly: The process of discovery is a soul journey within the realm of death, (which is, in some ways, social death, since it is a realm definitively beyond the human.) An ego-based experience is always based on core values of fulfilling one’s own needs. An egotistic perspective is inferior to one that transcends ego, as it draws us back into identity politics and an eternal war based on the fallacious cultural construction of “races”.

The author begins his poem by telling his story of precarious survival and then calling upon his “tenant soul” – his inner self as transcendent muse — to show him what the deeper realities of his personal and historical situation. Through encountering death/transcending himself, he faces, head-on, the hidden fears that would otherwise restrict his vision: He discovers “terror [to be] the totem of truth”. Thus, his writing explodes a conceptual divison of Nature versus Culture, as the two essentially opposed human categories of engagement.

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social conservatives

I was separated from my peers right at the point of achieving maturity; right at the point of adult learning. (This was when I emigrated from Zimbabwe.) So it has been hard for me to see myself in others — or conversely others in myself. My new peers had a different cultural perspective altogether, with entirely different cultural roots.

These days, having finally achieved a well-developed level of social insight — insight that was a long time coming — the provisional walls of defensive barricading melt around me. Behold! I see social conservatives before my eyes — no longer in their strangeness and mild dangerousness, but as they actually are.

What a strange vision stands before me. These are people who see that almost whatever happens to them is largely ‘natural’ and, hence, inevitable. I can’t believe it! They see the whole of the past in this way. (I know they do because I was brought up to see life in a similar way. I struggled like death itself to remove this cacoon wrapping of fatalism and inevitability from my embryonic self.)

Adult life is about getting and using tools of reason to apply to circumstances, to make things better. It doesn’t matter to me if I’m seen as good or evil, so long as I’m acquiring such skills. This is freedom from pain and power itself.

Social conservatives care not one whit about releasing themselves from pain in this way. I don’t know how they manage to survive in any way. They feel pain in the fact that others don’t belong to their group. They feel the painful need to avoid being cast as evil; and they feel the painful need to cast others as evil.

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I dream of America

This was a dream about America. (Mike said America was the normal place in the world last night):

Mike suddenly stops his car in the big city at the crossroads, and he jumps out. I run out and follow him. He is using a number of ropes to climb up the rickety stairwell of some slum building. I also have ropes, but he is already two flights of stairs ahead of me. We climb to the top of the building, and it gets narrower and more ricketty, like a steeple. And then we start to climb down (we are still separated) and each floor of the building has a really basic shop or some kind of consumer goods. It’s all for free to gauge what people really want. I take a chocolate at each level. Then I get hungrier, so I take a leg of chicken and eat it. Then I start to think that I will take some chips — only I wake up.

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On the separation of public and private spheres

I am not one who thinks that private and public social spheres should be kept seperate. I believe that it is one of the principles of the bourgeois revolution, but I am all over being bourgeois. I want a different kind of revolution: a revolution of feminist enlightenment. Let us see if we can take the human spirit one step further towards advancement.

The private or “domestic” sphere was — and to a large extent still is — the province of a (male) Master’s home and castle. It is my understanding that legally and politically, whatever occured within this domestic province was (and partly still is) considered to come under the definition of pure Nature. The point is that you cannot legislate Nature. Nature just is what it is. So if “Nature” in one man’s household is full of abuse, rape and torture, but in another man’s household is relatively free-flowing and harmonious — well, that too is just Nature!! Nature — as we can see — is remarkably untameable and unpredictable. You’ve just got to hand it to Nature!

The public realm, however, is the designated realm of the individual. It is within this realm — and this realm alone — that we are all designated free agents, able to negotiate various pacts between other free individuals. What occurs in the public realm is considered rational — but ONLY IF aspects of Nature (that which “properly” pertains to the domestic realm) are prevented from being considered: Once “Nature” enters the public realm, the public realm gets all polluted. It can’t function in a rational way any more, and that is seen as the beginning of the end of proper rationality and civility.

However, I’m all for breaking down this artificial divide between proper civil life and the domestic sphere which has been relegated to the sphere of “Nature”.

We should be able to see now, at this historical juncture, just how much bourgeois values and expectations have got things back to front — for it is the sphere of domesticity that is most artificial, socially constructed and regulated by antiquated cultural mores. It is only in the public sphere that we are truly free. Thus, it is necessary to bring that which has traditionally been relegated as “private” out into the sphere of the public realm. It is only by uniting what has been kept private with its public face — the potentiality for individuality and freedom — that we can face the world robustly and with honestly at last.

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sickening attack

massacre of six people on May 5 at Chaona

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inheritance

———————-
2 THRONE OF BAYONETS

Marechera’s behaviour may have seemed out of place in Britain, but in the country he had come from, with its enshrinement of an anti-authoritarian chic during the war years, a certain degree of outlandishness was not all that unusual. After all, for the white colonial leaders it was a way of thumbing their noses at British propriety and British notions of civilising order. Bad and outlandish behaviour had the political – as well as thoroughly psychological value – of undermining the stature of the British authorities who would condemn Rhodesia’s UDI. By denying the validity of British culture, one also undermined the political basis for Britain to tell the colonial State what to do. After all, the one was not like the other, but the latter had attained its own cultural identity as evidenced by its making up and following its own rules. [Note — see pamwe chete, for white cultural eccentrics]

The cultural milieu of the rebel state was a perfect for producing cultural eccentricities. The emphasis on Robinson Crusoe innovativeness (to beat the sanctions) and the waiving of the rules of normal civilisation (also to beat the sanctions and to win the war) led to the adoption of a certain pragmatic nihilism in social conduct, as part of the society’s norms. Marechera’s eccentricities only exceeded this cultural norm to the degree that he had been traumatised by the force of injustice within the colonial society. (Most of all, he had suffered as a victim of extreme poverty and its political correlative – that is, very narrow prospects to improve his lot.)

One might see much of Marechera’s rejection of British authority as being related to the default: colonial rejection of British authority. However, Marechera also strenuously opposed the political domination of the white colonial authority. In some ways, this didn’t help him as he was, despite himself, as he acknowledged, a product of Ian Smith’s education system. That didn’t change his determination or political direction – he could still oppose Ian Smith’s ideologies (by realising the limits of his classical education, for instance; or by adapting and corrupting the English language, rather than speaking it perfectly). However, he was astute enough to realise that he was, to some degree, opposing what was already within himself. It was this inner knowledge that he had to oppose himself in order to find a way forwards, that made his approach to knowledge shamanistic. For what he found within himself – the aspects that he considered corrupted – were also salient within the culture of the new Zimbabwe. By diagnosing the illnesses within himself, he could point the way to purifying and regenerating the culture. First, however, he would have to dwell within the liminal realm where one’s own persona is not only burdened with the aspects of life that signify death, but is the bringer of new possibilities. In such a way, he addresses the newly liberated Zimbabwe, which stands as his reprobate lover and his muse.

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sheep

As I may have mentioned many times before, upon arriving in Australia, I struggled because I did not have a Western ego. What I have just said will sound so unlikely that I would be well advised not to proceed with any further elaboration. Let us just stop here and not go beyond.

—–

One of the problems with not having a Western ego is not knowing the terms of reference that everybody else knows and uses in order to place you within a social context in a particular way. For instance, when I asked for help to know my way around, I received one or two subtle and not so subtle messages that I was “not special.”

Of course I readily agreed with anyone who said it that I was by no means “special”. The word, “special”, had no particular ring to me. The idea of it didn’t take me any further. What I wanted was that my experiences would be authentic. I had no points of comparison to make between myself and others socially, since it was the question of social meaning that I was asking my interlocutor to help me with. Particularly I wanted to know “where the wise people of this society are”. I wanted to ask one of these wise people what the society meant, so that I would not feel like I was gasping for a breath of fresh air all the time. I felt fatally separated from my previous reality in which everything seemed natural and consistent with itself.

I thought that the best way to find out the meaning of this society was to ask. But by asking, I was demanding attention for myself, apparently. If I demanded such attention for myself, then that made me “special” — and I was told that this category of special was something I was not. So, I was unable to ask for what I needed — and eventually a sensation of tightness grew around my throat, as I began to realise that nobody was interested in helping me to find my way.

Reading about Dambudzo Marechera’s antics in London brings some of those feelings back. I understand how difficult it can be to communicate your needs when those of the host culture have their own cultural difficulties to deal with.

Lately I have reflected upon the degree to which narcissism is a condition to which Westerners seem regularly prone, due to the philosophy of individualism combined with post-industrial alienation and the atomising of community into the unit of the single person. One must simply bolster one’s ego-force to cope with the incredible sense of social vacuum that this entails. Yet some take this process a little too far, and in the midst of their pain and alienation, become narcissists — demanding that everyone should pay them double for the lack of genuine relationships in early life. Thus those who require extra support or attention seem to be one of the Westerner’s own bleating sheep demanding, “More!” and “More!” This is the character structure that most predominates.

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political harrassment and recovery

This article is very interesting, as it outlines why it was so hard for me to think clearly in all respects, or to make any progress in my life whilst I was being harrassed and on social security benefits.

Fortunately, the scholarship fund came in ultimately, and now my mind is much clearer and more proficient.

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More on Imago

Psychology. An often idealized image of a person, usually a parent, formed in childhood and persisting unconsciously into adulthood.

—

Perhaps I have been missing something all along?

It seems that key to Western self-conception is that having of an Imago. When I reflect back upon my teaching practical for middle school, I realise, belatedly, that what we had been called upon to do was to mould and represent ourselves as an Imago. This is the fundamental role of a teacher of children. To be such is considered more important than educating them on narrow and specific topics.

It is this sense of the representational whole that I had been missing, through not being brought up within Western culture. Not to have an Imago — or to have a very weak one — is to see the world and the people in it as being open to all sorts of possibilities and permutations. It is to judge neither oneself nor others very much.

At the age of 16, my outlook on the world was defined by the paragraph above. I had no conception of identity as such (except that bounded by my skin — the limitations of my body) — only of a world of possibilities (this is possibly why the concept of identity fascinates me so much as a cultural construction of complete artifice). It is this characterological construction that puts me in touch with shamanistic ways of viewing things in the world as very much unbounded via the imagination and infinitely mutable (at least in principle). Shamanism is more extreme in its imaginative postulations than this cultural viewpoint I’m describing, but in both cases the world is seen to be more mutable than it is seen to be by Westernised consciousness.

This is the aspect of pre-industrial “wildness” that I was brought up with — not to view myself or others overtly in terms of identity. Of course there are distinguishing marks that come to define someone — but these are determined on the basis of observation and experience (a kind of empirical practice that has as its starting point the open acceptance of the unknown-on-principle. (Observing that someone matches or fails to match their Imago is based on a feeling — not empirical data. So, what jars me about Western epistemic practice is the presumption to know something on principle, along with the presumption to judge something against an Absolute standard or “Imago” – ie. I am not your mother and I don’t care to be seen as such!)

When I speak to people of African origin I am often delighted by the randomness of their perceptions — which on a deep level reflects my own. For instance, when Letwin called from Zimbabwe suddenly on the phone the other night (she said she’d noticed my business card and decided to keep in touch), she spoke to Mike at first.

She said a weird thing when she called: “Is it raining there?” — he told me. “Why would she ask that?”

It is in the spontaneousness and unpredictability of this question that I recognise aspects of my own culture. (I think that this is, indeed, a great question to ask, if it comes to mind!)

My Zimbabwean culture is chaotic and sometimes frightening. It is undertood by instinct and intuition rather than by the rational mind. In a world without imago, anything can happen.

And this must be why, when dyed in the wool Westerners come up to me to assert, “Hey , guess what? You’re not perfect in X or Y area!”, I feel inclined to answer thus: “And what is that to you, since you haven’t even taken the trouble to get to know me?”

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IMAGO

Psychoanalysts speak a great deal about imago :

Psychology. An often idealized image of a person, usually a parent, formed in childhood and persisting unconsciously into adulthood.

It’s considered necessary to get a good internalisation of one’s ideal parent in order to be able to function in society.

But what if, under shamanism, the point of determination is a relationship not with one’s internalised parent as imago but with animals of various sorts? How does that change things?

Animals are not products of a civilising idea but are rough and free. To look for one’s imago within the animal or mythic world seems promising as a pathway to healing one’s perspectives IF one’s parents weren’t all that great and created less than an ideal impression.

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There they are

I am dreaming of conservatives these days. Everywhere I go in dreamland, there are they. The cause of my nonconservatism in life is presently, no doubt, under scrutiny by my unconscious mind. So last night, I am on this beautiful campus landscape. I have gone there to attend a course. The imagery is like a scene from Southern China. I am looking for my meeting, with my tutorial group, only I cannot find it. Technology has moved on since I was last here, and I now need tickets to attend the course. The security guard is eyeing me suspiciously. I think I came in the wrong way, but all the doors were locked, and so I got here by breaking the code of the labyrinth. A professor (from a picture on the flycover of a book about Cesar Vallejo) shows me the set of stamps within the locked cabinet. These would enable me to attend class, but all the dates on them say early May, which is now past. I guess I’ll just go home, instead.

I pass through the exit, and there are some men trapped in the glass revolving door. They are gesturing madly at me, caught within the vacuum of the door’s glass inner cylander. But there is nothing I can do.

I descend the hill down towards the flat plain. I would like to phone Mike to tell him of my plans, but he has the mobile phone with him, not me. There is a woman with headphones on, spraying DDT. She suddenly attacks me with a cloud of smoke, which I narrowly evade. She’s broadcasting it to her mother via her headphones now:

“Hi Mother, I almost sprayed a woman. But at least it won’t affect our children. Or our children’s children.”

I’m in a world of conservative alliances and family ties.

Families are supposed to be inherently good — so much so that just the mention of the word, family, invokes a lot of rosy feelings. To be enthralled in the embrace of family is supposed to be entirely excellent.

blah river

So I will go and watch Neighbours tonight, to experience all the shallow human limits of the coddled normative consciousness.

Last night, I was working for a conservative beetle-woman as I slept. It had been arranged — I was going into business with her. She was undercutting my potential with her advert that announced that I was very different from she, and that I ought to be taken as such. I left, and started walking the next day, as I thought it had been arranged. I went through a mechanical factory, neat and orderly, in which those who ran it simply ignored me. I went upstairs and out, passed a slum on my right. The occupants — male — engaged me with points of reference I had no knowledge about. I kept walking, as it began to rain — a summer shower. Before me was flat land turning into desert. Should I have been walking the opposite direction, after all? I began to miss Mike.

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Tonderai Ndira — Zimbabwe’s kidnapped activist

Tonderai Ndira

update on the murder of Tonderai Ndira

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eros versus thanatos

When I was in my late twenties, I discovered a rather strange phenomenon. I had always given myself permission to act freely and spontaneously in the world. I found others resented me for this — even though so far as I was concerned, they were just as free as I was to act in terms of their own emotions and perceptions of the world around. So I tried to show them the way to be free.

“It’s like I’m doing,” I explained.

I noticed that a number of them managed to cut free from the mechanics of their everyday existence. They began to act more in accordance with their own emotions and perceptions. However, what I saw suprised me and alarmed me.

Instead of feeling pleasure, they expressed themselves in terms of aggression and resentment. The spontaneous selves that they had freed from bondage were vulgar and repulsive selves, that ought not to have been freed at all.

That was so far from what I’d been expecting.

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HEALING THROUGH REGRESSION

So, I’m thinking that perhaps the key to getting anything deeper out of Marechera’s work is whether or not you have had a free and easy childhood upbringing or not. Both Marechera and I did. Our problems, such as they were, started very much later.

So it seems to me that, Klein’s views of the good breast and the bad breast apply here. (I read on this last night.) It is possible for someone who has had a positive childhood to regress positively, with great recuperative benefits. When we accept the abject, we also encounter — to our surprise — the good mother, along with a feeling of the interconnectivity of everything. So, we encounter something beneficial through shamanic regression, and can heal ourselves.

Others will receive absolutely no benefit from regressing. They will only re-encounter the devastating experience of the bad mother, perhaps the mother under pressure from the strains of modern living. They cannot encounter the good, because the bad that they would risk experiencing is too devastating. Therefore they admonish the writer to stay on the surface of reality, and not to make any useless journeys.

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mapping the psyche

I think that in black African culture, childrearing processes are much more casual than they are in typical Western culture. This could account for my rather different character structure from many others, because I was part of an assimilationist generation, although subtly so. My generation had a lot more African culture in its thinking than did my parents’ much more European generation. So this kind of casualness of upbringing does not predispose you to hating women or hating mothers.

Hating mothers seems to be behind a rather different cultural tendency to view all things from a more abstractive distance than one might otherwise do — it is the typical (perhaps) narcissistic construction of the world, which aims to keep emotional experience at a distance. Things ‘naturally’ fall into categories in terms of this approach, rather than leaving visceral impressions. But I don’t think in terms of categories very well and am much more attuned to visceral impressions. (Another reason I had difficulty on my ‘prac’ in the DipEd — I’m just not seeing the same thing as everybody else. I’m not deciphering “identities” in terms of categories but in terms of my visceral impressions. That makes me “illogical”.)

But I’m trying to think why Marechera’s “shamanistic” approach is something I’ve been able to learn from and grow from, whereas it seems that others are hardly in a position to do so. Reading between the lines, Pattison berates the writer for not adopting his appropriate public identity (of African blackness, etc. ) — his ‘category’ — and making that the starting point for all his writing. Anything else seems to Pattison to be just so much prevaricating nonsense (“false journeys”).

But what I’m getting at is that Marechera seems to be mapping out the psyche in terms of its African cultural landscape — not its European one (not in terms of a European/Western typical psyche). So, he will be able to reach those who have had a similar upbringing to himself.

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ultra-reality

The way I see it, the shaman has exactly the opposite relationship to his “false self” (his/her social image) that the narcissist does. For the narcissist, all of the rhetorical power of identity is invested in this false self (see: http://www.healthyplace.com/communities/personality_disorders/narcissism/faq39.html ).

For the shaman, it is the exact opposite dynamic in play; with Marechera, there is either a negative attitude towards, or completed skeptism of, his publically identifiable self and its possible value.

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2 poems

Shamanic soul journeys away from the painfully contingent ordinary world may sound like pure escapism from what I have described here. One stands in skeptical distance from the way that one’s culture and the state political machine interpellates one – which is to say, gives one a narrow and specific role to play within a predetermined system of social hierarchy. Yet the shaman’s journey has a purpose – to get to the roots of the system that so arbitrarily determines one’s identity. The ideas entailed in the meanderings of both texts are largely diagnostic of a particular society’s ills – that of London in the first case, and of a post-independence Zimbabwe in the second case. The shaman diagnoses, through his own symptoms of emotional distress, the nature of the social and political imbalances that persist within the political system as a whole. The world, in terms of shamanic cosmology, is not atomised and individualised, but involves everything being intricately interconnected, such that psychological insight into myself will give me psychological insight into others. [find quote].

The shaman’s soul journeys (as I’ve suggested, rather different diagnostic soul journeys take place within each of the texts) involve the shaman standing apart from his own ego – his own “interpellated” or politically defined social self – in order to attend to deeper messages of wisdom that emerge from the “self”:

Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage–it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body.
There is more sagacity in thy body than in thy best wisdom. And who then knoweth why thy body requireth just thy best wisdom?
Thy Self laugheth at thine ego, and its proud prancings. “What are these prancings and flights of thought unto me?” it saith to itself. “A by-way to my purpose. I am the leading-string of the ego, and the prompter of its notions.” [Thus Spoke Zarathustra]

Thus the shaman’s insights into how he has been interpellated (socially and politically) as a black man, within society’s larger system of meaning, will not always show him in a light that is very flattering. This fact of representation highlights that a gap exists between what is known by the unconscious and what is known by the ego alone. The shaman’s excruciating search for honesty is a search for what is known by the unconscious (a desire for the kind of knowledge that transcends a merely egoistic perspective). The aspects that the shaman brings to light may seem to represent “self-hating” but are more appropriately understood as pointing to aspects of violence within the social systems he is questioning. This point is key, for the ability to actually engage with the aspects of life that one would rather eschew is the very source of the enhanced (and sometimes prophetic seeming) insights of the shaman. As Melanie Klein’s work shows, it is natural to accept only the positive aspects of ourselves and project that which we dislike on to others – a process called projective identification. However, shamanism faces the deadly seeming aspects of these negatives in the search of cures for the sick soul. The shaman is the quintessential enemy of projective identification – seeking for a cure within the vile and repulsive elements of the unconscious self.

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postmodernist dupe?

I woke up past midnight with the realisation that one of the reasons why I so despise postmodernism as a political practice is the way it so viciously undermines you.

I was in a workplace abuse situation, when I was duped by all the errors of my university learning to explain that I was suffering from abuse but it “may only be a perception”.

Needless to say, the abusers took that particular indication of my mental cloudedness and ran with it.

Today I regard postmodernist thinking as one of the most naive forms of Western intellectual corruption. I stand in horror when I so much as sniff a postmodernist interpretation of my writing.

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The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.
An instrument of thy body is also thy little sagacity, my brother, which thou callest “spirit”–a little instrument and plaything of thy big sagacity.
“Ego,” sayest thou, and art proud of that word. But the greater thing–in which thou art unwilling to believe–is thy body with its big sagacity; it saith not “ego,” but doeth it.
What the sense feeleth, what the spirit discerneth, hath never its end in itself. But sense and spirit would fain persuade thee that they are the end of all things: so vain are they.
Instruments and playthings are sense and spirit: behind them there is still the Self. The Self seeketh with the eyes of the senses, it hearkeneth also with the ears of the spirit.
Ever hearkeneth the Self, and seeketh; it compareth, mastereth, conquereth, and destroyeth. It ruleth, and is also the ego’s ruler.
Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage–it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body.
There is more sagacity in thy body than in thy best wisdom. And who then knoweth why thy body requireth just thy best wisdom?
Thy Self laugheth at thine ego, and its proud prancings. “What are these prancings and flights of thought unto me?” it saith to itself. “A by-way to my purpose. I am the leading-string of the ego, and the prompter of its notions.”

http://nietzsche.thefreelibrary.com/Thus-Spake-Zarathustra/6-1

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employing subtelty

There is a subtle move of the foot — it’s very subtle, but it sets you up to follow a jab and a cross with a roundhouse kick. Without that subtle adjustment of the foot position on the leg you’re going to kick with, you can’t follow up nearly so smoothly. Smoothness matters because you need to be able to make your combinations one flow of movement — not interrupted, awkward, or ending up off balance.

For six rounds on the bags today, I practiced setting up my punches from exactly the right distance, and following with the subtle foot movement to set me up for a roundhouse kick. It is much harder than you might think to perfect even a simple combination like this without overcommiting or dropping one’s guard. Almost nobody does this correctly.

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Psychoanalysis versus King Kong.

The way I reflect upon the Lacanian and Freudian constructions of castration that I have drawn up below is that I wonder how much they relate to present day culture. I can certainly see that there is much more of a Nature/Culture division along gender lines as the fundamental conceptual schism at the very base levels of Western society — which is to say at the levels where instinct predominates over education. It is less the case as you go higher up within Western culture ( to the degree that levels of education correlate somewhat with the capacity to go higher, to wield power, etc).

What I also reflect upon is the actual hollowness of the laughing gestures of the vulgar ape today. He is patriarchal in his evaluations, through and through — and yet it is as if this is not enough; it is a joke; it is the unsatisfying position of being a dupe to the extreme. The current product of instinct in Western culture is deeply restless within himself and agitated in a way that causes him to strike out. He does not feel that women (represented via his mother?) have been castrated but that they have all the power — and that they are out to feminize him. In some sense he seems to be crying out for a purer and more genuine castration — to free him from the power of vulgar agitation that is his instinct working within him. He takes control over the force of language (represented in his mind as a symbolic absolute) — he demands that others not deviate in their language from the meanings he has given words in his own head. He is oblivious to the fact that his own meanings (reinforced to him at the level of instinct) are not the same meanings attributed to the same words within higher culture. He rages, and demands that his own meanings be consented to, as representing the truth given once and for all — (the masculine absolute of the law?) . But it is all a rage — and somehow overtly pitiful, whilst gesturing in the opposite direction.

I sometimes wonder about the degree of damage that has been done within Western culture by the broadly-based appropriation of Darwinistic ideas in the crudest possible form. The breast beating antics of King-Kong may appear to represent the highest expression of raw power, whilst offering the opportunity to have one’s cake (social power) and eat it too (express oneself in an uncastrated way, as a force of nature). Yet there are problems associated with this approach to life, as I have subtly indicated in the paragraph above. The inner agitation of the wanna-be king of the jungle, crudely beating his breast, is not an enticing sight. Educated women despise it. The approach misses its mark on all sorts of levels.

The Japanese, by contrast  with their cultural notions of harmony with nature, may not have the most “masculine” of societies, but their society is extremely rational by contrast with the nature of the one given above. It is also highly authoritarian, and unimaginatively patriarchal.

Yet Western culture has a huge bubble of illogic with a self-defeating aspect to it, brought about by its vehement embrace of certain tropes of Darwinism.