Monthly Archives: October 2011

Status and religion in Western cultures

Posted on by Standard Respond

Let us start from the premise that in Western culture, “Emotions” are a hot potato, which everybody wants to get rid of. That’s because to be deemed “emotional” is to be considered to have lowly status and to need others to command you at their will. So everyone wants their emotions “validated” so they can be rid of them. To refuse to “validate” someone’s emotions is seen to indicate that one does not see oneself as being equal to the other person. One won’t take their emotions from them and pass them along to the next person. They’re stuck with these emotions and have no means to get rid of them (mainly because of not having learned any strategies to cope by being with oneself). I think it’s this seeming refusal to play along that upsets people. It’s also why many people seem to resort to projection, in order to get rid of their emotions. That’s a way of forcing you to accept the burden of their emotions whether you want to or not. The situation with the two people today was a case in point. I had a different perspective that was very much divorced from populist ideology, and this seems to have been offensive. Therefore, the two characters behaved as if I must accept the price for my independent views in being left to carry the hot potato of both of their emotions. Specifically, a philosophical position was imputed to me that I did not hold.

As regards US culture in particular, many who consider themselves to be advanced are always in a mode that they want to break free from religion and that this is the most radical thing for them imaginable — the thing that takes the most courage; the really decisive act.

Unfortunately, their situation dominates their minds and interests so much that they can’t even entertain the possibility that somebody like me had already broken free from a religious framework a very long time ago. It’s like they’re always trying to persuade me that I ought to do it.

I find this behaviour very presumptuous and one-eyed.

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/

The precarious nature of existence

Posted on by Standard Respond

–everyone has a different “rock bottom” and it’s always interesting to find out what one’s is.
– people in the USA don’t know what poverty is, or how it is possible to survive it and be relatively happy, until they’ve visited parts of Africa.
– Zizek is right up to a point–there is a “system” in place that capitalises on anxiety and perpetuates it. If one grows up on television and takes the commercials to heart, one is never pretty/handsome enough, rich enough or poised enough to warrant self-satisfaction.
– many people are terrified because they associate a different meaning to reaching “rock bottom” than they ought to, when they encounter an absence of reified forms of consciousness.
– In Zimbabwe, since the majority of the population has hit “rock bottom”, they all pull together with a feeling of camaraderie and mirth (also a fair dosage of stoicism). But this concerns cultural differences, not just psychological differences between individuals.

Eat, Pray, Love: a spiritual journey of discovery

Posted on by Standard Respond
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/

On being buried in a purple philanthropist’s shirt | STAY SANE AND SAVAGE

Posted on by Standard Respond
On not being buried in a purple philanthropist’s shirt
(why this is advisable)
~~~
How might life have ended for me in the colonial world?

Certainly, much of life would have been easier. Certainly I would not have become much of a hybrid: I would have been less of a monster, less of a dragon of the deep.  My struggle with my not belonging kept me youthful. I refused the easiest way, the path of least resistance, which is the means to aging.

By that degree to which I resisted I am became Eternal Youth!
It hit me forcibly, that somehow I could have been the person I was supposed to have been – even though I’d been transposed.

It struck me also in a sweet-sick way, the way that I have layers–layers of skins for coping, layers of mental and of physical toughness … dragon skin I didn’t have before.

A woman died, (a woman that I knew), and then I heard she wanted to be buried in her philanthropist’s shirt! She was a nice woman, but it seemed like a flighty and unreal mystics dream, that she would make this gesture, outright, in this way… She confuses me. I could have ended up this way, in Africa.

Surely not, in the Western world, with all of its sophistication and all of its faux sophistication (vulgarity)?

I still have traces of the natural reticence that comes from being brought up well, and female, and in Africa. Forgetting anything that appeared malicious, going to the grave knowing as little as she did to start with, might have been my fate — maybe more or less.
Could she have been me? What if I had never questioned anything, and what if the confusion of an almost completed maturity being thrown into a cultural disjunction was not mine?

Perhaps my parents may not have been so off the mark in trying to ensure the presentation of a perfect, purple corpse.  I am sorry for her, in the purple shirt, I am. She was trying to say something like, “You people hold on there for me, and make the world a happy place – and try not to take any of this too, too seriously.”


My first burbling, adult cries: “What does this culture mean? What the fuck does this culture mean?” must have sounded like a death of innocence to them. The arithmetic measure of an adult’s cry exceeds the childish cry only by decibels.

The punishments to evoke fear of ‘finding out’, lest the burg’ning female experience a death to innocence. What was never, ever clear, to the aforesaid burg’ning one was that knowledge could be bypassed – possibly by following the path of least resistance. To find an answer in connectedness by forging new relationships: such might have got around the need for knowledge; might have made everything feel right, no matter that the differences between one culture and another  are.
From the point of view of feeling, change is less an issue:  human beings appear to remain static.  Only logic analyses and separates out: making them, and us, into separate entities with separate historical periods, and separate natures. How terrible must be the death of innocence, when things are no longer connected!  How wonderful the religious state, which draws us all together, in a condition of amorphous feeling!

But – things never change for the religious mind-set: you can go to the grave as innocent as you were born!

She was amazing! – the purple-shirted woman: She must have had self control. She must have, for she kept on teaching right until just about the point when she died. But what was it that was eating her from within? Only a cancer?

(Or rather more besides?)

Sainthood is amazing. She must have gone all throughout her life, taking only very little for herself, giving out, always. Essentially passive, she put on the bravest of faces: She became a Stoic.

What for?

Females in my culture were necessarily Stoic. As “undeniably emotional” creatures, it was ‘the best they could obtain’. Those who have pain, and do not know how to express it, scream. Those who have a need to understand their lives, but do not know how to express it, relate their feelings incoherently. Without Knowledge, there is either Stoicism or — uncontrolled emotions.

The men in my culture flattered themselves: As women aged, they were supposed to become more stoical, like “the male”.

 The fact is neither divided-from-themselves gender knew anything but that was because life was brilliant! For the most part, living off the fat of the land is not a hassle.

My life had been a product of indifference to this knowledge that grew somehow and inexplicably within my parents, into a fear of knowledge.
If only I had used my feeling sense, instead of intellect, I would have understood their “solution”, better. As it was, they expressed their fear of my intellectual growth in a way that was incoherent and un-Stoical: 

by fifteen, I was mistress already of  many  Stoicisms.
~~~~~
DickensLady.jpg
~~~~~


http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/

Nietzsche’s shamanistic doubling

Posted on by Standard Respond

Nietzsche says, in the preceding passages, I am a decadent and also the opposite of a decadent. He then says:

“This dual series of experiences, this access to apparently separate worlds, is repeated in my nature in every respect. I am a Doppelgänger, I have a “second” face in addition to the first. And perhaps also a third.“

(Nietzsche, “Why I am so Wise”, Ecce Homo, Vintage Books, p 225).

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/

From Belongingness to Modernity

Posted on by Standard Respond
When people think “What can she miss about Zimbabwe?” They cynically imagine it has to do with my ability to dominate others there, or to do with some kind of financial thing, whatever. The answer does not lie in the big issues. Rather one’s sense of belongingness is invoked by the quality and nature of the breezes, by the kinds of greetings you receive, which somehow “makes sense”, by smells and tastes which reawaken older experiences, and confirm them. So, we have an unconscious sense of self-continuity which doesn’t need to forced or justified by reference to “big issues”.

It is true — I see environment and environmental memory as forming for nature of the self in a way that is generally overlooked. There is a lot of injustice in such overlooking.

Let us start from a simple fact. Whoever, you are, others will not have the same experiences as you. Words on paper do not always invoke similar experiences and memories. In that case, for you (but not necessarily for others), they are dead. One finds in the text only what is already within oneself through direct knowledge. The mundane–wind, smell , taste, an emotional sense of the particularity of a place can be shared through words, but first they must be experienced.

To prove that there is a special dimension to this invocation of the five senses, one would have to prove that industrial modernism and its tropes invoke more objective language when communication is at its most effective. The basis for possessing a self in such a late society then becomes more “metaphysical” , paradoxically enough, since identity comes to be based on an abstract matrix of ideas much more than on the concrete nature of one’s experiences.

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/