When I decided to study Marechera for my PhD, I was attracted to his writing from the outset by the sense of honesty I found in various quotes of his I'd found. I immediately felt that this was a person who knew himself very, very well, and was not afraid to say something just because it didn't fit a pattern of socialization or acculturation which might have been more acceptable.
Recently, I came across some material on narcissism (a personality disorder), which got me thinking. I read that the associated personality disorder is the result of the emotional aspect of the self not maturing, whilst the intellectual and social self gains in adult sophistication. It is said that the inner self remains in a form of stasis, not growing at all, yet the outside self appears to have grown and to be fully matured.
The nature of this developmental pathology is deeply problematic, because the stasis of the inner self implies the stasis of the overall self. The adult cannot mature until the ‘inner child’, as it were, begins to mature. However, the adult self, with its degree of acquired sophistication, formulates strategies and engages in tactics to prevent the childlike self from having to engage with an emotionally complex world.
Although such a situation, as it has been formulated, seems hopeless, there is another way to look at solving problems of emotional trauma. The adult self must take on an authoritative role and go “looking” for the child, using all the wiles and strategies that he can muster. Rather than turning his wiles against the outside world, he puts them to good use in search of that within himself that wishes to remain hidden.
To employ such a strategy with regard to bringing about one’s self healing is what I refer to as “shamanistic doubling”.
Perhaps this is a hard achievement to manage. Nonetheless, I have the impression from many years of studying shamanism that facilitating a conceptual and effective ‘doubling’ of the self furnishes the basis for many different forms of shamanistic healing.
I need to get at least one more part time job, to boost my income. Here are my reflections on what I’ve learned from the past.
I feel myself exceptionally fortunate at this stage in my life, because I’m pretty much established what I’m good at and where I generally tend to fall short. Not having an objective understanding of this in the past used to perplex me a great deal. I tried out for quite a few different jobs, some that suited me and others that were nothing short of disastrous.
The three of four jobs I’ve recently had or presently hold have suited me far better than those I took on when I first finished my undergraduate degree, when I simply applied for any job that had became available. Those I’ve succeeded in have been being a graduate student (on scholarship) and completing my PhD, working as a teacher of English as a foreign language and now teaching boxing for fitness. Before that, I produced advertising copy, wrote as a freelance journalist for a martial arts magazine, did part time cleaning jobs, designed web pages when the Internet was just starting up, taught school subjects as a tutor, edited fiction and worked as an administrative assistant and public relations assistant, all with varying degrees of competence.
What the current jobs have in common is a component of novelty. To continually engage with novel ideas, novel practices, or novel people keeps me alert and on target.
Jobs that suit me least are those that require strict attention to detail. Since I think primarily in abstractions, I find it difficult to follow procedures according to linear logic. My visual memory is also rather poor, especially when fatigued. That’s why it’s useful for me to take videos of my martial arts classes, so I can recall the lessons.
I find from situations where I have pushed myself beyond my normal limits, I don’t recall geographical orientations or the arrangement of a number of objects in one place, on the basis of visual memory. It remains possible that visual memory can be trained, and this is what I’m trying to do through my martial arts. At the same time, this was the factor letting me down as an army recruit and a teacher trainee. In the first case, lapses of memory grew worse, the more I was pushed to my limit: “Where is your bayonet, recruit? I’ll tell you where it is. You left it in your locker and now the enemy has got it and all of your platoon are dead!”
In the second case, I wasn’t even tired, just too bored to focus on the children in the class. They all looked the same to me, and ultimately I used a female pronoun to refer to a male, which immediately cooked my goose.
In many ways, my mind wanders quite a lot. I retain the power needed for a concerted effort, and can continue to make one when I train my mind to obsess about one topic until I start to make breakthroughs with it. To train my mind to focus on something boring is extremely difficult. My past experience indicates that even when this is extremely important, I cannot do so. It seems as if I don’t have the brain power, developed from an early age, to focus on concrete details for a prolonged duration.
I’ve had many successes in life — above all, researching and completing my PhD, which finally assuaged my lifelong thirst for knowledge. I’ve also re-established my links with Zimbabwe and taught self defense across the country, there. My enduring relationship with Mike is a long term success that few women could dream of matching. I’ve established the concept of intellectual shamanism and continued to develop my ideas in relation to it. I’ve achieved brown-belt in my martial arts style and am moving like a snail towards my next grading.
In terms of leisure activities, I’ve made a thorough investigation of Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille and Dambudzo Marechera, and understood them inside and out, including from the perspective of the theoretical platform I’ve developed, which transcends them in some ways. I’ve been skydiving nine times, with one jump from a static line in Zimbabwe. I’ve written a memoir, and assorted other material, much of it posted on blogs or available as E-books. I’ve traveled via the public transportation system all over Zimbabwe, stayed in a rural township there and been on horseback safari through the north-eastern wilderness there. I’ve slept rough. I keep attuned to Zimbabwean and Western political situations. I publish poetry or articles. I’m a mentor for other Zimbabwean gender activists and a really reliable friend. I use the Internet for networking and jaunty explorations of territory that may still still elude me.
The nature of this developmental pathology is deeply problematic, because the stasis of the inner self implies the stasis of the overall self. The adult cannot mature until the ‘inner child’, as it were, begins to mature. However, it seems that the adult self, with its degree of acquired sophistication, formulates strategies and engages in tactics to prevent the childlike self from having to engage with an emotionally complex world.
Although such a situation, as it has been formulated, seems hopeless, there is another way to look at solving problems of emotional trauma. The adult self must take on an authoritative role and go “looking” for the child, using all the wiles and strategies that he can muster. Rather than turning his wiles against the outside world, he puts them to good use in search of that within himself that wishes to remain hidden.
To employ such a strategy with regard to bringing about one’s self healing is what I refer to as “shamanistic doubling”.
Perhaps this is a hard achievement to manage. Nonetheless, I have the impression from many years of studying shamanism that facilitating a conceptual ’doubling’ of the self furnishes the basis for many different forms of shamanistic healing.
Nietzsche’s inclination to shamanism doesn’t go as deeply as Marechera’s does into the origins of the consciousness; because he was afraid that going into such depths would lead to the kind of truth that was actually destructive of consciousness. Too much knowledge would tear the veils from our eyes, and be all too likely to show the base and unappealing aspects of human existence. Such knowledge would make us give up and fail to aspire to make cultural progress (since such progress requires a limiting of consciousness and a natural measure of self-deception). Thus Nietzsche’s “shamanism” is reflexively self-limited. Traditionally, however, shamanism is not limited by such philosophical caution. One goes to the bottom of one’s being and is either destroyed by it (remaining in madness) or one ‘recovers’ to a healthier state than one was in before descending towards the temporarily regressive state (successful recovery from it implying ‘shamanic initiation’).
In regards to shamanistic ideas, overall it seems that Nietzsche was not recommending shamanic initiation for others in the active sense, so much as anticipating a period of cultural upheaval, during which time the “higher men” (intellectuals, artists, philosophers and those whose appreciation for culture were a mark of physiological sensitivity) would become shamanised (pushed towards a temporary mode of regressivity) due to catastrophic change. It is likely that Nietzsche has experiences this “shamanic initiation” himself, and wanted to prepare the ground for others, whom he anticipated experiencing it. He wanted to make sure the outcome of this inevitable crisis was positive for those whom he favoured and identified with – “the higher men”. They were to become stronger as a result of encountering the tremendous upheaval of cultural change.
Bataille takes up Nietzsche’s philosophical baton by using shamanistic initiation as part of his philosophy. However, Bataille writes half a century later (1897 – 1962), after the catastrophic changes that Nietzsche had anticipated had already occurred. Whereas Nietzsche writes for “aristocrats” of the spirit, who were still partly immersed in much of the culture that Nietzsche considered worth preserving, Bataille writes for a society that has lost its aristocratic spirit. His contemporaries are no longer the rulers of society, even symbolically, but are the “mass men” reduced to wage slavery. Bataille wants to create a shamanic awakening in just those sorts of people, since they are the people whose spirits define his day and age – the democratic masses (and proletarians), just as Nietzsche had predicted. The kind of initiation he recommends for them may be well suited to their barbaric consciousness. In any case, his ideas of shamanic initiation are more extreme, and related to outright revolution.
Both Nietzsche and Bataille show us that shamanistic initiation can be easily related to a political agenda to either managing and directing (Nietzsche) or causing (Bataille) social change. That is because, as Nietzsche correctly points out, a descent into the depths of consciousness (the epistemological benefit that sometimes accrues through temporary regression) leads to deeper self-knowledge, which can either damage us irreparably, or change us for the better. I wish to suggest that such shamanic knowledge is by no means illusory, unless we are to believe that such high calibre intellects as those of Nietzsche and Bataille were firing blanks.
A stitch in time saves 99, and it is clear to me, at least, that much of what our late and great 21st century societies lack is the capacity to express authority in an appropriate and timely manner.
That’s a shame. We’ve lost the skill for it, the practice, the nuance, the ability to put a well-timed stitch in place for the sake of making for a greater, better society.
We have lost the old-fashioned colonial notion of society-building. Now, it’s every individual for themselves — and this ideology is reinforced again and again, as the only rational and truly moral ideology.
Yet a stitch in time saves… at least nine, was a much more effective practice, in every way engendering respect for the sense of a fair and rational society, of which we were a part. If this practice of colonial white society had been extended further and wider to include more of the non-white individuals who lived in the general geographical area, a stitch in time would have saved 999 999!
In any case, the practice of an inclusive moral approach directed towards building a unifying sense of culture, was effective practice at the girls’ school I attended. The female teachers there were all effective moral arbiters, able to produce solutions to almost any disruption of order, in a way which gave a sense that we were not only respectable participants in the society, but that we were also growing in moral wisdom by having our disputes thus arbitrated.
But that sense of enjoyment and participation in even the more negative aspects of life has been lost, perhaps for all time, by the current modes of practice in society — which are geared more towards a punitive approach.
When as an individual, you really have a moral problem, in most cases I have found, you are expected to deal with it alone — without the benefit of good advice, support, wisdom or indeed, a sense of being included in society even in the very process of working through a difficult problem. Rather, you are isolated in your quandary, effectively quarantined by the processes of dealing with your own uncertainties, until you have resolved your issues somewhat, and then may re-enter the company of other slow-breathing, carefully plodding and non-disruptive individuals. Only at this point of resolution are you considered to be truly participating in “society”.
Whereas in the past if someone was causing me a lot of trouble, either on the home front, or in the workplace, I would have been able to engage the support of some older woman who was in good standing in the community, now there are few such women with any moral authority of their own. At best there are individuals with institutional authority, which is limited, mechanistic and quite crude. There are no upstanding folk who would — because they could — gently go behind the scenes to have a quiet word with the offending patriarch. Such an old-fashioned approach, which would have been used in the past, would have had the effect of consolidating a standard for what is acceptable as normal behaviour within a particular context. it would have acted like the proverbial stitch in time which saves nine.
These days, however, the culprit doesn’t get to know that what he was doing was wrong until somebody takes the case aboard, extracting vigilante justice. And yet the culprit himself probably didn’t intend to be an asshole or a destructive menace — he was acting out without restraint in a society which refused to discipline him. Half of him was actually waiting, anticipating reprimand, so that he could be sure that he was being included in society, as a moral individual. Yet, being an authoritarian through and through, he wouldn’t listen nor be restrained by the threats and counter-actions of a low status individual.
He would only have listened to a woman whom he thought already had social authority.
UPDATE: People in this society are so genuinely confused about how to set wrongs to right that they interpret a request to step in a help moderate a situation with a request to shake down the victim herself and get her to conform.
Looking back through my blog entries, I am noticing that most of my writing on my blog, except for that from 2006, when I had managed to integrate more emotion, is what the myer-briggs personality styling calls “introverted thinking”. That would conform with my being “entp” — working primarily from insights based on pattern recognition, and then trying to express what I already see, in terms of language. That means I’m not thinking in language, but in terms of some sense of the structure of things which I am temporary suspending in my mind. This leads to a lot of what I write being written in a hurry, so that I can plot what I “see” before it disappears again from my mind. I envy those who can think more directly in language, as my way of thinking is an interpretation of my thoughts and I don’t always append the correct terminology to my ideas.
When I grew up, very few people had any access to luxury goods.
There were economic sanctions, so national self-sufficiency was very important. Things like cars and parts were sometimes hard to get. We also had sanctions busting secret agents, so sometimes we got some of the missing items, but nothing was guaranteed. In the latter part of the 1970s, chocolate tasted pretty bad, since we had no cacao. Cheese was in short supply, and when a load was deposited at the supermarket, it was strictly one per customer. We kids used to grab an extra cheese and queue up separately from our parents in order to obtain more. Petrol was also restricted and the difficulties increased after Mozambique became independent in 1975, meaning that there were there were restrictions on goods coming from ports in that direction. Tobacco crops sometimes couldn’t be sold and were ploughed back into the land. The country developed a mixed-fuel base, which sometimes set light to your engines.
Then, around 1979, chocolate began tasting like chocolate. Petrol was still hard to obtain and there were long petrol queues, with people parking their cars in queues overnight. I imagine this was because South Africa remained under colonial rule and was now the outright enemy of the newly liberated “Marxist” Zimbabwe.
Then inflation started. Prices had been kept constant by the restricted nature of the economy and certain fiscal policies. Whereas before, you could buy a family sized packet of chips for twenty cents, now the prices were going up five cents every couple of months. Really fancy goods were still unavailable. Contemporary fashion was still unknown. Newly appointed government ministers started to drive around in the latest models of Mercedes. I saw one planted in a storm water ditch at the bottom of my road. Power goes to the head when it comes suddenly.
Zimbabwe today has open economic borders with all countries, but the government controls the lucrative resources such as the mines. The infrastructure — especially water and electricity — has fallen into disrepair. This is much more the case in the impoverished “high density” areas, where there may be only one water source shared by ten or twenty houses. In medium density areas, water and electricity supply are unpredictable and rationed. Class divisions have become more entrenched as per this system of unequal sharing of communal resources. These divisions are no longer largely racial, although it would be unusual for a white person to live in a high density suburb, as I did for several weeks in 2010. If you do stay there, there is no racial animosity, although neighbors may quietly theorize about your reasons for being there.
Owners in low density suburbs often have bores and electricity generators. Their properties are also protected by electrified wires or security personnel. So, security, at any rate, has become privatized. It used to be a function supplied by a militaristic state with a huge army.
To make money, it is common for everyday individuals travel over the borders to obtain rare items such as electronics goods, and bring them back to Zimbabwe to sell at a profit. The government has slapped a hefty import tax on new goods such as computers, but obviously it is still possible to get around this in some way. There are back routes into Zimbabwe and there is a high level of corruption.
There are tolls on the major country roads, which never used to be there. The police are generally looking for a bribe, as $150 US a month is not enough to live on. (They are genuinely gracious when they receive $5. There is no special effort to extort more from an individual.)
There is also the informal sector, where people try to obtain diamonds illegally. This is dangerous. On the lighter scale, people can also pick up hitch-hikers who pay a standard fare of $1-2 for a short distance and $4-$5 for a longer ride. (Longer distances would be for three or four hours).
People have an amazing sense of fairness in terms of operating on the basis of standardized expectations, an attitude of justice that even extends to how the informal economy of corrupt government officials.
If Marechera’as self-exile from the world of conventional mores had a reason, then that reason was to repair an internal sense of loss. According to Alan Collier Ostby, H. Ellenberger (The Discovery of the Unconscious, 1970) says traditional healers saw psychological problems in terms of “soul loss” (Otsby p 166). Contemporary object relations thinking of the psychoanalytic school speaks, instead, in terms of “object loss”, however the qualities of sickness they are describing are phenomenologically similar, one presumes, apart from the obvious factor of cultural differences, which contextualise this inner sense of loss in different ways.
MINUS THE MORNING was written, it is true to say, via self-hypnosis: my task in writing it was to reimagine all the sights, smells, colours and moods that I had experienced growing up. Actually, I am speaking here in the voice of the child that I was -- not using the voice of the woman that I later became.
The book pictures me as being encapsulated in a world where I was in direct communion with nature.
I started my PhD because there were too many mysteries out there for me not to investigate them. How could I sit in an office and do anything at all when there were mysteries out there?
I continued it because the plot thickened. The mysteries became more psychological, rather than aesthetic in nature, and they made my mind ache.
I found socializing to be a huge strain in the middle of my PhD, because it took away energy I needed to crack the problem that was at the core of my thesis. It could be framed in the simplest way as “how can madness be productive?”
At one stage, I felt like I was going mad. My mind was galloping at a frenetic pace and all of the world seemed to have slowed down and gone stupid. Any part of everyday life that didn’t help me solve my problem got in my way. I couldn’t even explain the nature of my problem except in the most esoteric terms. It had to do with trying to look at the other side of trauma — at the generative side.
So many books seemed to somewhat support my thesis. Other journal articles only used part of my theoretical platform, but were more opposed to the conclusions I had drawn. Thus, I became perplexed as to how to use this more ambiguous material.
I continued to become madder and madder. I had too much information in my head and I had to make it all add up. I had read extremely widely. The literary material seemed to yield confirmation of my views in flashes of intuitive insight, but which I didn’t yet have the means to articulate. You certainly couldn’t point to the text and say, “There it is!”. Nothing was positivist about my views.
Eventually, I couldn’t look at my thesis, as I had looked at it so much, the words had stopped meaning anything. I began to wonder if in fact the words I’d written had no meaning. An old wound had started to open. My father’s words: “You’re a failure and you can’t even communicate properly!” began to resonate. I’d written the thesis to vindicate someone who also seemed to have been victimized by being denied communication — and now, the same was happening to me.
I was fighting my father through trying to complete my thesis. It was the ultimate superego battle — he didn’t want me to show him up through having an education, through not accepting a typical female role, and I wanted to complete my thesis without his interference. Yet, this battle was taking place entirely in my mind — a culmination of at least a 20 year long battle for my right to determine my own direction.
Writing my thesis was a rite of passage. The strain of going against the grain was intense. I engaged with a lot of ideas that would have been denied me had I taken the path I was supposed to. To engage intellectually with ideas of war, trauma and racism would have been one thing. I engaged with these emotionally, however, and this had been forbidden me, growing up. I wasn’t supposed to interact with the realities of the civil war surrounding me. Emotional access to these were related to age, social status and gender.
In engaging with new inner experiences, against the prohibitions that had been set up to protect me, I was destroying myself as I had been before.
The thesis became a means of self-destruction and renewal, through gaining forbidden knowledge into the interior of my cultural history.
According to Lacan, an individual moves from the paranoid-schizoid psychological state of early childhood, and then on to an adult level of consciousness via an encounter of oneself as ontologically whole (through gazing, literally or figuratively, into a mirror) roughly approximates Lacan's set of ideas (although it is not necessarily the same). However, Kleinian and Jungian psychology are also relevant for understanding the scheme and meaning of the protagonist’s shamanic journey.
Bataille is a Western thinker, who he has a bit of the Catholic tradition in him, too. It isn’t easy to explain transgression, but it has to do with one’s relationship with one’s Superego. Bataille likens it to “sinning”. To try to give you some idea, if one just conforms with what one has been taught to do, since childhood, one can be very moral, but one does not encounter the sacred. To have a fresh encounter with the sacred one has to go against the grain of what one has been taught is right since childhood. It’s not a matter of going against one’s conditioned ethics on principle, or in the abstract. To the contrary, what one is really doing is challenging one’s limitations. It can be very easy to be “good” in a passive sense. But there is a kind of goodness that transcends this passive sense of being good. By being bad, one goes beyond all earlier, naïve conceptions of goodness — especially goodness as passive compliance to one’s authorities and their demands. One discovers a different way of looking at the world. The experience that allows the world to open up to you more than before is related to the sacred.
Identity formation is really, really interesting. I studied it a great deal in my thesis, most particularly the political nature of identity formation through projective identification. I came to believe that this is the most decisive way in which our identities are formed, because it is really almost impossible to resist a particular identity if a large mass of people are projecting that identity onto you.
I used myself as a guineapig for much of my investigation into the realm of the psyche. My understandings were founded on the fact of my very strange subjectivity. That is to say, I found my subjective states very strange because they didn’t seem to match other people’s states under various circumstances. Most of the time, they were the opposite to other people’s expectations. For instance, where other people took situations very personally, I didn’t — I saw what I perceived as wrong behavior as being a consequence of larger social and cultural dynamics. I took very personally my inability to fully comprehend or come to terms with these dynamics. I would sequester myself from the rest of the world for hours — and days — on end, to try to understand the meaning of these broad social movements that led to the adoption of conventional subjective postures.
I remained puzzled for an inordinately long time. I’m sure I would have given up after a few years, had not my sense of having an alien subjectivity spurred me on.
My first break-though came about after reading an article by a Jungian, which spoke of “pre-Oedipal” states. There, I encountered, for the first time, the concept of “projective identification”. This concept suggested that we do not have permanent or fixed identities, but rather identities that are permeable by others. Another person may project into us parts of themselves. We subconsciously accept the projection, perhaps out of fear or love, but most often out of necessity, in order to feel we are conforming to societal expectations. Another book, written in the style of childish analogy, offered further elucidation of this extremely complex and sophisticated psychological dimension. This was Soul Retrieval, by Sandra Ingerman. As a student of literature and cultural studies, one learns to draw knowledge and information from all sources. One doesn’t necessarily interpret a book at the intellectual level of its typical reader: one looks for any commonalities it shares with other texts, and discards whatever isn’t useful.
Ingerman’s text outlines how one may form emotional attachments to others in a way that leads to losing aspects of one’s own identity in a fundamental sense. One can also leave parts of oneself behind in the past, if an emotional relationship with a location in the past is so great that it replaces the meaning of the present.
I immediately diagnosed myself with “soul loss” — having lost parts of myself to the past. My emotions had certainly not moved into the present, through no fault of my own. The rupture with the past had been so sudden that my sense of identity had become scattered. My problems were cognitive as well as emotional. I simply couldn’t understand the present, and my emotions, being scattered to the past, gave me no inroads into the present, as they were inaccessible to me.
The metaphor of looking for my lost soul made huge sense to me. I dedicated the time spent writing my PhD to this particular task. I saw myself as an intrepid hunter on its tracks.
My first breakthrough came with understanding that typical gender relations are most often a feature of projective identification. This finding was extremely relevant in terms of ongoing communication difficulties, where I’d often been intent on pointing out that some situations I was in were unworkable. I received gender-based responses, along the lines that my suggestions that any situation was untenable or had to be changed was simply unrealistic. I was left with the untenable situations. It was as if I hadn’t bothered to communicate my views.
I later understood that this non-responsiveness was a result of others viewing women as being primarily creatures of emotion and fantasy. Not only were we seen to be making up statements on the basis of nothing at all, we were deemed, in a sense, not to exist. This was a result of males projecting their fantasies and emotions onto women. We could no longer be taken seriously as a result of male projective identification.
The more I began to understand my experiences in this light, the more they began to make sense. I’d finally understood the way that gender was constructed in contemporary Western societies. I should have felt pretty self-satisfied at this stage, but there was still something awry. I sought confrontations in order to discover the lay of the land. For some reason, every disagreement I had with significant authorities ended with a sense of clarification of my identity. The illogical nature of reality was capable of being straightened out whenever an authority revealed his (or her) actual motivations. This was fascinating.
If I had lost a great deal of my “soul” to others through being brought up in a typical patriarchal society, I was now getting it back. Even the hostile responses to my inquiries about the nature of the world were extremely instructive. They allowed me to see more starkly the difference between other people’s perceptions of my motivations and my actual sensibilities. Thus I took back from hostile and antagonistic forces a little more of my “soul”.
In Western society, it is generally assumed that if one projects something onto others, this must necessarily be the ugly or unpleasant parts of one’s character, which one wishes to deny to oneself. In my case, I was unconsciously engaging in the opposite behavior. I was projecting all my goodness into those I deemed authoritative. My original society had been authoritarian, with some legitimately fearless and sincere authorities. I had no idea that I had internalized the cultural dynamic in such a way that I was losing my very center of gravity by projecting insight, knowledge and benevolence into certain others, whose help I could have used.
The fact that these others inevitably let me down through displaying a very high lack in all of these characteristics should have given me a clue. It was my typical experience to be let down by the authorities in whom I had invested my implicit trust.
It took me a long to realize what I was doing, mostly because the messages were so mixed. Projection is actually encouraged by this society, in order to reinforce hierarchical norms. At the same time, people view any sort of projection or mixing of boundaries as pathological — although the fact is we all do it all the time. Our very societal structures of gender and many facets of social hierarchy are founded on the necessity of psychological projection. Without this, they start to crumble and are gone.
My advanced understanding of the inevitability of projection, as well as its political nature, gave me much of the basis for my theoretical platform of intellectual shamanism.
Postmodernism, Christianity, NietzscheAs a particular example, consider how Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, notices that “up to now [revenge] has been mankind’s chief concern”. (Penguin 1961: 162) Nietzsche’s Zarathustra counsels against this spirit of revenge — and in it’s place a mental state of affirmation.
Yet, herein we have a problem: there are those who would misread an injunction against ‘revenge’ as an injunction to remain passive, simply because Christianity has taught them over the ages to equate inaction (allowing the Lord to avenge one) with ‘morality’ — and, also because religiously inspired action (that is mistaken for all kinds of action) is inevitably reactive rather than creative.
Christianity has so dominated the general culture’s understanding of what it means to act (courageously, for instance), that it even gives Nietzsche’s writings a false flavour of moral prohibition: Instead of “thou shalt act to morally justify oneself as being good Christians”, the postmodernist who has internalized Christian values reads the Nietzschean injunction as: “thou shalt prohibit thyself from acting, since any acting only takes place on a moral basis — and you ought to be above that.”
So that is the danger of mixing Nietzsche and Christianity. It leads to a feeling that one is prohibited — by morality, as it were — to act. Nietzsche, however, holds that a noble person acts nobly, without any need for a specifically moral framework to give meaning or direction to one’s actions.
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.
This is what is wrong with psychoanalytical generalizations. When literary critic, David Pattison chides writer, Marechera for putting some obscene words, as it were, into the mouth of his mother, Pattison is chiding Marechera for not observing the internalisation of unconscious guilt with regard to "the mother" -- any mother, presumably, as they must be interchangeable on principle if Pattison is claiming that he knows -- on principle -- what it is right or wrong to say about mothers.
I’ve stated often enough before that intellectual shamanism may appear to use the same vocabulary, at times, as those who inhabit a Judeo-Christian framework, but nonetheless our meanings are far from being the same.
DIFFERING WORLD VIEWS
Let me start by stating the different ways of viewing the world, that pertain to these paradigms.
In the Judeo-Christian view, the world was created once and for all by a primeval entity — the Judeo-Christian God. Since reality has already been created, there is no more creative work to be done. The very best one can do is to operate realistically within the framework that divine providence has created. There remains, of course, the possibility of acting “unrealistically” within the world that the deity has formed. Any unrealistic behaviour is sinful and is deemed to be destructive of the pre-established divine order. Irrationality is definitely an offence against the deity and against what has been created.
This describes the world view that is most prevalent today. Underlining it is the assumption that conformity to pre-established systems is necessary in order to prove oneself moral, realistic and not crazy.
By strong contrast, the shamanistic system I have uncovered is not founded on a myth of divine creation. Rather, according to intellectual shamanism, the world is not yet fully created. Some aspects of the world have clearly come into being, but other aspects are still in the process of being born. Still other aspects are incubating and waiting. They may never come into being — or, they might. Their chance of survival depends on the creativity, insights and will power of the people presently existing.
DIFFERENT CONCEPTS OF HEALING
When one speaks of healing in contemporary culture, one often inadvertently invokes notions of falling short of a particular standard of well-being from the outset. In terms of the Judeo-Christian paradigm, the Lord made the world perfect and then humans fell from grace, into sin. “Healing” is therefore the work of the sinner, the one who has fallen short of normality and wishes to atone for that. In Western culture, the term, “healing”, is also often invoked by the New Age flake, who feels out of touch with nature and is trying to get back some sense of the organic nature of reality.
Intellectual shamanism, by contrast, does not see that we humans do anything else other than following an inevitable trajectory that involves destruction and healing. Our cells die and the body renews them. The very ability to develop greater physical strength is premised on the tearing of our muscle fiber, which achieves greater strength every time it is destroyed. This is not to imply a metaphysical formula, whereby one can inevitably be assured, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” In some cases, one weakens and dies. This is also an inevitable part of human experience. To realize when to fight and when to yield is shamanistic wisdom. Both attitudes are neutral and neither of them imply original sin.
Of course, for the High Modernist -- one who is habituated to thoughts patterns which promote "certainty" (even if this is at the cost of accuracy!) -- Modernism is already understandable as an a priori category of logical thought. One does not need to turn to the history of ideas to understand it. One may gesture in that direction, though, and this implies that one does not think that that a High Modernist (totally theoretical) explanation actually suffices, even to explain Modernism itself.
When one has been conditioned to an experiential way of looking at the world...what that means is that one waits for an impression to creep up upon one, slowly gradually, like a thief in the night, before one makes one's judgment, drawing it in, creating an impression.
This process of being slow and waiting -- it can draw the whole world into you, if you let it.
When as a Western intellectual one easily alights upon conventional touchstones -- the evils of colonialism, the normative division of people on the basis of their colour and their gender -- one would do well to be aware that these touchstones and the compulsion to alight thereon, are also ideas which derive from the West, and that not everybody has a Western conceptualization of these concepts.
That quintessential American tendency to put an emotional emphasis on everything — that is what I am most inimical to.
I don’t have any social aspirations. I don’t want to be loved. The assumption that everything we do is for this motivation makes me misread myself retrospectively. If that really were the case, then surely I must be a bumbling idiot who keeps failing dramatically?
But, in reality, that doesn’t motivate me. I’d like to be understood without being one with the person who reads my writing, for instance. Let them be their own person — but they must realize it, too, and stop making themselves one with me.
