Draft Chapter 12: my father’s memoir

Next door to us lived Leslie Tiffin. She was the same age as me and I was always over there visiting. My uncles and arts used to tease me that she was my girlfriend. They used to say am I going to marry her. the thought of marriage, at the age of seven, hadn’t even occurred to me. The mother was very relaxed. She left her baby out in a pram in the rain and it nearly drowned once. The pram filled with water. Nel Tiffin would not let anything bother her. I was so often at the Tiffin’s house that I was a bit like another brother. There was a hedge between the two properties and we cut a hole in the fence and just went through.

Nel had adopted two children from a distant relative. The boy, whose name was Rollo, was an outright bully and his eldest sister Verna was his main target. I once Rollo beating Verna with a large bamboo stick until it broke. He used to beat her around the legs. She had a lot of personality, and I would have thought that on occasion she would have answered straight back at him. They were both from one family. It was after the war so it might have had something to do with that. He wanted to be the boss man in the family group. Nel was very easy-going.

Because I was part of the family, if they went anywhere, they used to take me with them. They went to see Snow White at the movies. They walked out and I followed them. One minute they were there and then, they disappeared. They became mixed up with the crowds of people walking past. To me, they just vanished. So, I walked up and down the road outside for a few minutes and a woman asked me if I was okay. I explained my problem. She said I’ll take you home. I as eight, and had no clear memory of how to get to my home. I managed to remember enough of it to find my way to the back of our property. There was a pathway through to my house. The lady followed me back. Then I tried to find my mother, but she too had vanished. When I found her, she was working in the garden. I called out that this lady had brought me home. She just looked up and said okay. I do not think she understood the situation. my mother didn’t notice much of what I did.

 
Leslie and I used to walk up to a kopje at the back of her house. This was made of big boulders on top of each other. It became our secret play area. We were lucky we never saw a snake. One day we were playing round the rocks, Verna arrived on the scene, and she suggested we should do something different from just playing around on the sand. We should take our clothes off. Feeling slightly bored, we decided to try it. It gave us a feeling of uninhibited freedom but nothing else. Sometime later we were up at my house, playing around a new dog kennel that dad built. We were rather bored, so I suggested to Leslie we try the ‘clothes off’ thing, again. My mother found us and beat the hell out of me. We would have been about seven. I realized it was better not to hold a grievance. It stays with you, if you do.

Many years later at boarding school, matron told me to go outside and put my jumper on. So I walked outside followed by matron hurling abuse because I didn’t have my jumper on. When the housemaster, whose name was Vanasvegan pounced on me and sent me up to the sick bay. I think that was just a convenient place for him. Then he went out the room for a moment and came back with a stick. He told me to bend over and he hit me twice with it. On each occasion, he knocked me over. The stick he used was a cane wrapped in rawhide. He was hitting me for not having a jumper on as the matron had told me to. He should really have been reported, but there was no point in holding a grudge. The whole situation was disgraceful in many ways. The stick had cut my bum, causing an open wound. I do not know if other kids were getting hit.

It was a slightly sick world, but then it is a slightly sick world even today. In Australia these days, people would notice that something was wrong. later on, when some fairly innocent event happens, your subconscious is going, what if someone takes it in their head to start beating you again, then you don’t sleep and start to get nervous. There are many situations in life where you get very nervous and not altogether logically nervous. When you get nervous, it steals life from you. Life can be good, but if you are nervy, it’s stolen from you.

Leslie and I had many good times, even after I was beaten for playing in the dog kennel. We would play hide and seek with her brothers. Roldy was the younger brother. When I was ten, he would have been eight or nine, he had an elder brother John. They were okay but a bit immature. Roldy was the sort of bloke you’d play hide and seek with end he’d disappear and you’d eventually find him crying somewhere. He thought he’d been abandoned. (Roldy wasn’t the one left out in the pram. That was John. Nel had left him under a tree when a huge rainstorm came. When my mother got to him, his nose was about the level of the water. Nel had gone to town. My mother told the story repeatedly, to illustrate how things were more relaxed in the olden days. My mother thought it was okay to be relaxed, but not quite that laid back.)

In the meantime, life went on. We had horses and the Tiffins had a few too. They decided to go into it in a big way and they bought a farm at Umwinseydale. They decided to ride their horses to the farm. They asked me if I wanted to go along for the ride, so I said yes. In the mean time, they built a house at the farm. It took them a few months. I went to stay with them the farm until they were ready to ride the horses there. It would have been a couple of months.

One morning at the farm, when I was starting to develop a crush on Leslie, it had been raining. The sun was out and hot. We walked down to the stables. The Tiffins kept twelve horses and five cows. The servants had been told to collect all their dung and pile it up. When e got to the stables, there was a pile about six feet high. Despite my protests, Leslie ran up this dung heap to the top. The heap had gone all mushy inside, with an outer crust that promptly crushed when Leslie got to the top. She found herself up to her armpits in cow dung, whereupon she begged me to join her, but I could not see the sense in it. Nowadays, I would have run up and joined her at the top: you can get more out of life by sharing than by being safe.

TRAUMA AND RECOVERY

This book was instrumental in providing me with a lot of insights that changed the way I understand misfortune.

Many intellectuals who borrowed from psychoanalysis, including Erich Fromm, Kleinians and others I read whilst studying for my thesis, implied indirectly that the symptoms of trauma were a result of moral failure. Indeed, I was only reminded of the nature of this association last night, when I watched the World War One drama, DOWNTOWN ABBEY. What can be worse that being killed? To be killed for cowardice. So a household servant is informed that her relative died in the war, but it was “worse than that”. The ideology of “moral fiber” that is central to the 19th Century has not been overturned by the early part of the next. Rather, there was a notion that some possessed moral fiber (See pp 271ff) whereas others did not..

You would be able to see this ideology regarding the all-conquering character who makes no excuses, in Nietzsche. I’d like to think that my thesis on Marechera, who also has much of the Nietzschean spirit of wanting to conquer the world, but in an entirely different context, which did not permit permanent or definitive success, corrects previous suppositions about the structures of the psyche. The ability to persist in dangerous situations is certainly laudable, however, in contradiction to the 19th Century view we must now assume that such determination to persist when all the odds are against one will take its toll on the mind. This extraction of a cost nothing to do with anyone’s innate capacity to follow through on an extremely difficult task. Rather, as we know today, everybody, even the strongest, has a breaking point. Some people may last longer than others under extreme duress, but more those of more rational views would frame this as a psychological issue, not a moral one*.

Judith Herman puts everything into context when she shows that those who suffer from trauma suffer not from their own limitations but from the limitations of those who should be part of their nearest communities. To take a brave risk is one thing, but if your community doesn’t back you up, you are probably going to suffer from psychological trauma. Herman is certainly not suggesting a hippy-dippy attitude, where “community” is the answer to all wrongs. Rather, what she seems to suggest is that we are all interconnected. If you withdraw the human connection — that is, the lifeline — from somebody who has taken a risk, they are going to feel more in danger. The betrayal of trust will compute, at a psychological level, as trauma.

It’s not that the particular individual from whom you withdrew your moral support has some intrinsic moral lack.

It’s that you withdrew your moral support.

-

*These days we seem to have flipped into biologism which, on the surface at least, seems exactly the opposite of the 19th Century view. In other words, biological “reasons” are invoked for people to take various chemicals to make them “normal”. The problem is no longer a moral one, but one pertaining to one’s unique, individual biological make-up. This view is as false as the 19th Century one — even if it seems to offer the sufferer less difficulty in the short-term, because the demand to unquestioningly conform to social norms remains as an unethical pressure.

Maturity

Many are the benefits of maturity. One is in realizing what one had failed to recognize before — that people often have readily identifiable propensities that having no relationship to what it means to be an individual.

Social psychology is more important to know that individualistic psychology, if you want to make your way through everyday life. In the past I was under the mistaken impression that everybody around me was an intellectual who thought very deeply about every sort of issue. Many people represented themselves that way to me. I later learned that intellectuals are not that great in number. They are those who can generate an original thought, rather than reacting to the world and repeating what they’ve heard. To be assertive is not the same as generating original thought. One really has to have thought it through.

Other myths I’ve managed to shrink over time include the idea that one necessarily stands out as being more intelligent if one’s life follows a smooth and easily managed path. There’s no logic behind this supposition. One cannot account for all the variables influencing our existences with such a trite formulation.

I’ve also developed a much better understanding of the two enemies of shamanistic thinking:

1. Identity politics, which has an agenda to morally reform the world. Moral reforms are hopeless. Genuine change has to be willed and has to come from within.

2. Biologism. There are many forms of biologism on the left and the right. Essentialist feminism and biological determinism both are detrimental to intellectual development. You cannot be open about the future if you are working within deterministic systems or within categories of pre-defined identity.

Far beyond and above this, the most important insight I’ve had in my life to date is that most people, when they seem to be addressing you, are really addressing an idea of you based on narrow, categorical assumptions. That is, most people don’t rely upon direct perception.

That makes sense when you later understanding how many social constraints act to condition us against direct perception. One sees people in terms of categories, as one is trained to. One doesn’t see the behavior, the tendencies, the nuances. It is particularly Americans not to take the time to see these, for Americans are the ultimate sales people, and one doesn’t make a sale unless one seizes up the prospective buyer in the first few seconds of interaction.

To have an accurate perception is difficult, since one must constantly clean the windows of the psyche to reduce effects of cognitive distortions and mental projections. Otherwise, one sees the world precisely as it isn’t. Most people don’t have the basic strategies in place to achieve hygiene. They can be great people, but don’t expect them to perceive anything accurately. They cannot do so. It’s not because they’re bad, or mean or wrong. They just don’t have the necessary training and awareness.

Change your diet for better health

Irrationality is not the enemy of civilization, but is its closest friend.. Rationality is not the enemy, either, as those of postmodernist persuasion have been convinced. The lack of any dialectical relationship between the two is the enemy of human, organic life. Where one does not acknowledge and integrate the irrational parts of life, one runs the danger of ill health. This is where shamanism differs from contemporary ways of thinking. One cannot continue to make everything about life more efficient, more protected, more controlled, without running the risk of losing the very essence of what makes life meaningful. Those aspects of life that are not anticipated, not devised for one’s experience by a superior power, which involve possible danger or hardship, provide far more of the substance of life than managed and efficient thinking.

You can’t protect life too much without destroying it. One can eliminate certain hardships and it is rational to do so, but never deny yourself or others the chance to engage with aspects of life that you cannot control because they are unpredictable.

Too much refined sugar in one’s diet leads to heart disease. Too much containment and control leads to a diseased spirit. Humans were meant to run around and experience novelty, not be confined to a desk.

CRACKS!

It’s been a long time since I equated happiness with success. I remember vaguely wanting my life to be “a success”. I had no real notions of what would form success, but a more general hopefulness that I would know “success” when it came about, because it would make me happy. 

I gradually learned this formula was self-defeating. One cannot set out to seek “happiness”, because seeking happiness as such assures that it will elude one. One has to seek what one wants out of life instead, and then happiness appears. 

Because I had this formulation back to front, I was very miserable for a several years, particularly in my early twenties, when life seemed to stagnate, and I waited for “happiness” to pull me from my dormant state. 

Christmas after Christmas, this guest refused to simply arrive. My family had brought me up with Christian values, which suggested that life rewards you in its own time and in a “natural” way. There was nothing to do and nothing that could be pushed along. This ideology in itself was depressing enough

What was I doing wrong in seeking happiness? I had no maturity — a fact I’d come to recognize, when it came to understanding my place in the world. I had no skills to analyse anything, so I didn’t know where I ought to fit in. Being a migrant of several years had much to do with my experience of anomie. I had longings that seemed to be answered only by returning to an African environment. 

All of this time, I never felt, “perhaps I’m falling through the cracks?” Instead, I just assumed that fate was tricking me by leaving me behind in unrewarding twilight zones. I was very angry and very sad about this, but I hadn’t any words for either of these strong emotions. I had no means to conceptualize why things had ended up as they had. They just had. It was fate — and fate had no explanation for it. 

Gradually, I gained an education. But progress was slow. I had a lot of mental blanks to fill. Also, people were generally hostile when I told them I had come from Africa. I had no notion of what this meant. I was trying to find some traction in life, and I had no idea that I had a controversial “identity”, because of where I had come from. I was trying to find those old emotions — the ones involving being “one” with the organic world around me. I also wanted the thrill of imminent danger as these were the sensations I had grown up with because of the war. 

Now, my feelings had totally abandoned me, and I was looking for the sort of environment where we could rendezvous again. I couldn’t find one. Everything was green and sealed over — not the sort of environment I was seeking. 

This distressed me beyond words.

My breakthrough eventually came through reading Nietzsche. Through his writing, I gained access to some of these older, familiar emotions. I used his ideas to structure new meanings. My life gained inner purpose for the first time since I’d left Zimbabwe, back in 1984. 

My path to salvation has been slow. I’ve learned how much a person can adapt to very different circumstances, and when she should retire from the fight — not in a spirit of resignation, but with respect for knowledge about where the boundary lines are that preserve the self.

 

I’ve found that pleasure is not too hard to find, especially if one awakens old robust states of mind.   Sources of happiness appear.

Look back TO WAR

I’m undergoing a midlife crisis — only not in the normal sense of things at all.   I’ve never been one to mortgage my emotional life for any benefit I hope to gain from the future.  This means there’s little need to resent the way I’ve spent my past   I’ve made all the right decisions in life so far, and now I gloat over these with the satisfaction of an aging Zen warrior.  I’m through to a higher level in the game of life.   This is what I had been aiming for.  This is what I have achieved.  I have become wholly myself — and the lines, although few, tell a story of how much I have conquered by facing directly, rather than turning away from it.   I would have cross-hatches by now had I been indecisive.

 

I had chance to meet an old man for an article I was researching many years ago. He thought he could see “spirits”. His face was cross-hatched in all different directions, like he’s been lying face down on some tightly woven wire mesh.  Everything about his face was going in a different direction, with no focal point to pull it all together.  My face reveals the opposite — a legacy of working through one particular intellectual and emotional problem:  my historical legacy of war.

 

I’ve just dispensed with the issue of taking care of a historical legacy. Although I did not realize it before,  the issue that has preoccupied me has been war.  World War Two and how it affected my family and of the legacy of the civil war in Zimbabwe were mine.   I learned what it means to be a child of a number of wars and to inherit an emotional legacy that is defined by war.  It was very important for me to understand the nature of war and of warriors, so that I could come to terms with this legacy.

 

That circle is now closed.   I’ve defined the problem, analysed it back and forth, and finally understood it.   I behold that the weird intensity of my nature also came about through having this legacy of war in me.   It’s unlikely to go away, although my Buddhist sense of self-satisfaction increases.   Self knowledge produces a sense of security in oneself that youth does not afford.   Once again, there is a certain amount of enjoyment in knowing that my face tells this story.   It would be hard to project negative qualities onto my face, because my emotional habits tell another story.   I’ve become more real than before.   My appearance reveals me as I am.

 

I’ve realized, too, that I have limits.   I’m keen to understand complicated issues, but not keen to socialize.  I’ve never felt the need for “family” as a means to achieve something in the world.   What others gain from having children really puzzles me.   I can’t get into the inside of this one.  I don’t feel that developing a nuclear family  is advantageous.   I’m sure I echo my grandmother in this, as she seemed to feel some resentment about her hardships, which included family responsibilities.  To fall into the same trap as my grandmother would be to undo all the self-knowledge I’ve worked so hard to develop.

 

The circle is closed, once again.   I’m not in a position to make the same mistake.  The door is shut.  The offspring trap is an impossibility.

 

I’ve won all my battles and I’ve won them fair and square.  From my new vantage point, the only regret if I have one is that I took the advice of people who said you must adapt and change to other cultural perspectives.  I took my own advice — it was both right and wrong in many different ways.  One doesn’t always understand that others may have hidden agendas in wanting you to “adapt”.  Adaptation is a form of exploration but it must be done on one’s own terms, not on the terms of others.

 

I now understand what level of adaptation is possible for me and what isn’t.   Experience has taught me some simple facts — if I don’t feel an internal drive to achieve a particular task, this is indicative of my not being able to develop the skill-set to achieve it. Quite simply it is not “in me” to take on certain roles that don’t already have intrinsic meaning for me.  It’s intrinsically meaningful to me to help others solve intellectual problems, but it is not ‘meaningful’ for me to take care of young children or to help mold them into any particular shape.   I don’t have any feelings either way and I can’t manufacture what isn’t there.  I feel I have a traumatic brain injury from trying to go down this path too many times.   I’d thought of it as “adaptation”: get a job and fit in.

 

Life doesn’t work that way, because you can’t manufacture emotion.   You have to start off with the correct emotions for the particular job, which are then easily transformed into a particular skill set, suitable for that sort of job.  As a rule, if you’re not already engaging in a particular task, you probably won’t be able to develop the skill set to do it.   There’s no act of will that can force the issue.   You have to be already emotionally attracted to the task to the point of active engagement with it.  If this is the case, the task will seem easy.   There will naturally be a period of adjustment when one takes on anything new, but “adaptation”   should never be necessary.

 

One ought never to push a situation to the point where one is “attempting to adapt”.   That always spells out that something unnatural has occurred.   Humans are not that flexible that they can adapt to anything.   Each is more suited to some sorts of tasks and less suited to others.  Those who try to push the issue of adaptation, rather than assisting with adjustment, are generally trying to develop a sadomasochistic relationship with you.  It’s important to be alert to this and resist such attempts to break down your character at all costs. Adjustments are acceptable, but “adaptation” ought not to be necessary for adults — and bending to the point that one breaks is never going to be helpful.

 

I’m at the stage in my life when I’ve realized my limitations.   I know where I end and the other begins.   I want what I have, and I want these to a higher degree than I presently have them.   My skills are thinking and writing, in that order.  I’m not that personable, unless you love a laugh a minute:  I am wry.

 

I’m not burdened by the past anymore, so I may just walk into a wall.   Something’s shifted.  If it’s not me, it’s you.

on “human nature” versus social conditioning

Karen Lea

The perception is to compete for attention etc to WIN in a discussion because it is painful to fail to do so…competition for nonmaterial things…emotions being something very dangerous to start competing over…yes,we are not chimps.Some of our more basic responses are however,very much the same.
I must think more about the advent of something that didn’t evolve biologically….it tends to be a big basis of my discipline to analyse the world that way…to look at human culture and ascertain the biological parameters that may have led to its cultural development..other wise one would have to say most humans are just bat crap crazy.I guess i am comfortable with that too.

Jennifer Frances Armstrong Thing is, I ask Karen Cronje or Helen Riach Thom or Sandra Lewis to tell you about our schooling and upbringing, you will see it did not have this weird emotional competitiveness about it that you seem to think is universal.

Jennifer Frances Armstrong Say, something, Sandra Lewis. Did we used to bicker and manipulate or fight in any way? Was that part of our socialisation or culture to do that?

Karen Lea

If the culture YOU grew up in does not experience it doesn’t mean it isn’t one of a range of human behaviours…for millions of Australian,UK and AMerican girls at least if not SA/Zim.
I said it isn’t universal but it is a range of human behaviours which CAN be expressed..as in the primary comment you posted in fact.If not in yr upbringing then certainly in others.

Jennifer Frances Armstrong So? Mass murdering is in the range of human behaviours that can be expressed. Genocidal behaviour, etc. Shall we make Rwanda our model of human behaviour?

Jennifer Frances Armstrong I think it is a feature of capitalist thinking in industrialized societies.

Sandra Lewis

No, I do not remember having experienced any of that when I was growing up and going to school at Borrowdale Junior School in Zimbabwe. We were also respectful to one another and I don’t recall any name calling or swearing either. The first time I heard bad swear words was when I started school in Australia! I look at the young kids now a days and it disgusts me how they treat one another and speak to one another and the bad language they use at a very young age. It makes me want to wrap Chloe up in cotton wool and bloke her ears so she doesn’t have to hear any of it!

Sandra Lewis ‎*block her ears!

Jennifer Frances Armstrong Thanks, Sandra! My first experience of swearing was about Form 3 in high school, when one of the girls had returned from Europe and was using some experimental language to see how we would react. That whole thing of being nice to each other’s faces whilst undermining each other behind the scene was never part of our upbringing.

Sandra Lewis I totally agree Jennifer! I am so glad it was not part of our upbringing. I remember everyone at junior school as being just “nice” and there was none of this two faced business, bitchiness or emotional competiveness!

Sandra Lewis That is including the boys! They were all nice to!

Jennifer Frances Armstrong Yeah, the culture and its mood were just different. People find it hard to believe that it’s not human nature to be nasty. They think I must be idealising my earlier experiences, but this was not so.

 

Crossings

My orientation to the world before now was strange indeed.  I now understand the origins of that orientation and why it was misunderstood by others,   who could not have understood the origins of a profound drive in me I did not understand myself.

It comes back to my father and the way he used to speak to me on two levels, simultaneously.   On the one side, he spoke to me as his angry, rejecting step-father had spoken to him.   “You are no good. You don’t belong. You have to conform to the capricious expectation of every stranger, or else you are unacceptable.”   This way of speaking to me filled me with shame. Being unacceptable, one does well to hide oneself from the world.   At the same time as he spoke, he spoke in an opposite voice.   This voice said, “Watch out!  Don’t listen to the angry father, who was my step-father.   Submitting oneself to the arbitrary will of others leads to a hell that I’d like to see you escape.   Don’t really listen to the words I’m saying, but to the emotional tone underneath:  I’m warning you about what not to do, if you want to be happy.

I am certain — not just on the basis of logic, but on my father’s testimony — that had I listened to the overt voice, rather than the subtle and implicit tone of his disavowal of his angry father, my life would have been ruined.   One must ignore authority and go one’s own way, he was trying to tell me.

How does one take from this mode of communication a meaning by which one can live one’s life?   Clearly, the child that remained in my father was asking for much by way of protection from his vicious step-father.   This was a request for redemption — and it became my quest to find the key to redemption of the historical past.  My memoir was in aid of this.  My thesis, even more so.  I had to find a way to address the request for help.   Otherwise, the angry father would keep screaming and screaming.   The child would be continue to be hurt forever.

My ultimate construction of a system of “intellectual shamanism”, was a way for me to solve the problems I’d inherited through my family.   I had to address my father’s childhood trauma, because if I didn’t, I would still know about the emotions he’d experienced, which were unresolved.   One does not walk around expressing an attitude that problems are resolved when they are not so. That is to fall into trap set by a step-father who demands outward conformity without regard to inner emotional states.   That was what my father had warned me against — the path that leads to unhappiness and emotional self-destruction.

What the three writers who predominate in my thesis have in common is insight into this thinly expressed understanding that I gained from my father.   For Nietzsche, to engage in any activity without the cooperation of one’s heart and soul was a “recipe for decadence”.  For Bataille, “inner experience” was paramount.   And, Marechera considered it more laudable to sleep under hibiscus bushes than to submit oneself in any way to an authority’s draconian designs.   In pursuing a path to inner experience, I was fulfilling a request I had received from my father.   I was to redeem history.   Although I didn’t understand it at that time, this became my imperative.   I put everything I had — all of my intellectual and emotional resources — into solving the problem.  I seemed to conclude that the “child”, the double of the angry step-father, had to cross a bridge back to his emotional self in order to restore his state of being.   He lacked the emotional strength for the task, and I had been baptized into this role in his stead.

A shaman restores the state of well-being by “facing death” on behalf of others.   So, I defied, relentlessly, the will of the angry step-father.   Each time, I regained a bit of ground for emotional use.   Each time, the principle of conformity died with me.  The terror entailed by disobedience to the primeval law increased.

Finally, I was exhausted, but I had fulfilled what was necessary for me to do, by defying the primeval law and opening up the space for intellectual contemplation of emotional issues and matters previously hidden.

I still feared the strangeness of my father and his unpredictability, but I took immense pride in the fact that I’d tried with all my might to bring redemption to the situation.

A few months later, my father had his stroke.  Intuitively, many of my family felt that he’d been holding onto life by such a slim thread anyway, that he should be allowed to die.   They saw nothing but a linear continuity of life, where character remained the same or worsened with each blow.   I had been studying shamanism, however, and was convinced by now that brains were quite adaptable.

We held his one hand for the next few weeks.  The other side of his body was immobilized by the severe damage to the right side of his brain.   I told him he had brought me up well — which was certainly not a lie in  relation to the early years of my life.   The specialist said the best case prognosis would be that he would be able to speak “a few words” (which somehow I took metaphorically, rather than literally) and would walk with a stick.   Nowadays, he speaks fluently just as before, but is far more forthcoming about the nature of his experiences (due to less right brain inhibition).  He also walks and jog and can use his left side, although sometimes awkwardly.   He expresses a great deal of gratitude and jokes a lot, but I haven’t seen him angry.

Once again, this is the reverse of the prognosis that he would become deeply depressed, frustrated and angry due to his disability.

The change you fear to be

I made mention recently that passive consumerism is the new psychological condition that has become rampant. Many people strongly resist the notion that they are passive consumers. They like to see themselves as moral arbiters instead. They’ve now realized that anything to do with “change” is trick, perhaps even a force for evil.

The discourse of the left has become less practical, more resigned and moralistic.   “Don’t you realize that our original trusting natures have been traumatized by too much politics?”   Such original natures were no doubt pure and discerning, but lost their purity and capacity to discern right from wrong the minute they accepted novelty or innovation.

 

The only way to restore the purity of the original nature is by a reinforced will to embrace passivity.

 

Otherwise, trauma and disappointment lie around the corner.

 

But, trauma and disappointment also follow those who embrace a sense of nothing as their morality.

MARKET DRIVEN ADAPTABILITY

A most nefarious aspect of late Capitalist society is the idea that people ought to work on themselves to change to be more effective.   Of course there are many ways to analyse, see and be better at what you do. This is different being exhorted to adapt and improve to respond more effectively to the demands of others.    A problem with accommodating the demands of others is that they have not been screened to determine their rationality, freedom from malice, capacity to perceive accurately, ability to be free from prejudices, and so on.  Adaptability thus becomes a spiritual meat-grinder.  To refuse to pass through the meat-grinder gives the impression that one considers one’s present state to be all too precious.   After all, others have happily passed through it, or so it would seem.   To pass through the grinder by accepting public opinion means that one is changed.   In a fundamental sense, one has altered according to the needs, demands and emotional requirements of others.   These others are a black box of consumerist needs and qualities that are defined abstractly.   Tomorrow, they may have different demands.

 

 

 

Adaptability is demanded by an unstable economy, and capitalism is the quintessence of economic instability, since its principles of success demand constant change.  Although economic systems are, in themselves, without moral meaning, people nonetheless assume that adaptability has a moral meaning.   To fail to adapt when change is demanded of you seems to imply retaining the aura of an unethical stance.   After all, others demand it and your own well-being (in the short-term) depends on it.   The situation you are commanded to adapt to may be amoral, but you stance sure as hell isn’t.

 

 

 

Responsiveness is a market need and anything else is not self-preservation but selfishness, for the market eats all of its children — and it eats them again and again.

 

 

 

Perhaps it is due to the hollowness of market demands that many these days now refuse to be anything other than what they “are”, maintaining that if they have any deficiencies, these are surely biological and unchangeable. The market for psychiatric drugs increases, as many fall back on the position that there is nothing they can do to change themselves.   At the same time, everybody recognizes that acquiescence to market forces is necessary, no matter how illogical or harmful their impact on the person.

 

 

 

So contemporary society poses the problem:  ”Change is impossible (because it’s never enough) — but it is necessary for survival.”   It is no wonder that most people’s responses to its demands for adaptability remain incoherent.

 

 

 

Giving children psychiatric drugs is an example of a typical non-response.

 

 

draft chapter eleven: my father’s memoir

Many influences were those of my early life.  I kept coming up against that my name depended on who knew who I was.   For example my step father would say that my name was Peter Francis foster Armstrong, and that was because I was adopted – the foster part.   The point is that young kids need stability.  They need to know what they can rely on.  Don’t tell them stuff they can’t rely on.  It’s no use to them at all.   Then,  my father decided I ought to go to boarding school, a very English habit,  although not exactly Rhodesian. Boarding school is a bad place for people who are insecure.   Every single kid in there hated it.    They coped by becoming very aggressive and beating up anyone weaker.   I looked around for something to give me a feeling of permanence and all that seemed permanent was my depression.   I clung to my depression.

Achieving permanence of some sort became my philosophy for a while.   I became very gloomy.  If I felt lost, I would just revert to my sadness.   When you’re at boarding school,  you’re getting knocked around all the time.  It’s not hard to find something to be sad about.   Just being left at the boarding school, away from home, wasn’t a good feeling.  Even at home,  I felt I couldn’t rely on my parents.   They were both unpredictable. My father could be very hurtful.  He was a bit messed up.   My mother would suddenly start beating the hell out of me.   I can only guess she was feeling uptight.  She’d had a hard life.   When she remarried, and I don’t think it was a very happy marriage.  Dad insisted on taking control and he was a very negative person,  pedantic, perfectionist and fastidious.  He was verbally abusive.  Mum used to hit.

After school,  I would walk around our garden.   We had five acres.   My parents had put a lot of work into the garden and it sort of contained their personalities in the garden.   I noticed that as I walked around,  I’d come across the water pump,  pumping water out the ground.   As I looked at it, I would remember all the agony they’d undergone to put it in there, and in a way the water pump became filled with their personalities.  If I wanted to relate to my parents,  I would look at the water pump.  Since I found I could get stability from objects,  in a trivial way,  I took to stealing. I would help myself to sticks of a chalk as I wanted those colours.

In boarding school you had to have a rest every afternoon.  From our lunch, which would be about two o’clock,  you had to go lie on your bed,and no talking allowed.  You had to be there until three o’clock, at which time a bell would go and you could get up and do your thing. I read books.  I actually remember the day I realised I could read.  The teacher was away and I was sent to another classroom.   I sat down with a book and I went though all the processes of sounding out the words in my mind, and slowly began to make sense off all the words.   When I got to the end of the first story,  I was excited.   The mystery of the disappearing cat.  From then on,  I started to read.

I learned to link certain situations with experiences I had.  If the story involved Christmas,  I visualised my family at christmas and built the story around it.  For me,  reading was a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle.  If the story was too exciting,  I’d get all wound up,  because I’d become part of it.  Almost every story became exciting. By the time I was ten or twelve,  I thought I could fly a plane,  since every time I read a book about flight attendant Bigglesworth,  I would envision myself flying all these planes. By contrast,  arithmetic was absolutely awful,  because if couldn’t visualise myself in it.   In a book about a world war two guy who escaped in italy, he was shot.  In my mind,  I made it so real,  that I woke up with vomit down my side.

When I was about eight my parents next off some place and left me for about four hours. While they were gone,  I suddenly saw flames on top of a hill next to us. These flames were twice the height of a house.  The only time I’d seen smoke coming off from anything was a train.  When my mother came back,  I told her there was a train going over the top of the hill.  It was a bush fire,  but it could have been a train,  as I used to hear train noises at times.   There was plenty to cause fear.

I was sent to bed at eight and the noises would start.  One was a steam train in the distance.    Our house was an amateur building job with a thatched roof.  The thatch was laid on wires.   There were lots of geckos.  During the night,  the temperature changed and the wires would strum like guitar strings.

Nature, contraception, violence

I would say that my biology has given me a particular induction into pain to which many, particularly males, will not be privy. I have, for a long time, been aware of extreme violence as an unavoidable part of life. Violence has long been established as the baseline of my capacity to experience the world. I’ve learned, as it were, to take my gulps of air from life quickly, because ultimately one is submerged in pain beyond belief. The oral contraceptive pill stemmed this for a while. I learned, however, that Nature is vengeful.

Without any form of chemical contraception, I’m at the mercy of Nature. Initially, she creeps up on you with a sensation of tingling in your finger tips and toes. Then the intensity increases until there is the effect of an electric current running through your body. Muscles, especially those used recently, start to contract and expand. One feels like a long distance running having already covered 20 kilometers in difficult terrain. Sweat gathers on one’s forehead. At first the body feels warm and then it starts to shiver. The moving in and out of the tides causes an increasing feeling of nausea. One is about to throw up, but this throwing up won’t stop the sensation of a knife jabbed deeply into one’s lower intestines. One sits on a toilet and the ripples in one’s system causes an easy evacuation of the load. But still the pain becomes more intense.

One tries to steady the mind, in between electrocutions, by not thinking painful thoughts. Negative memories trigger spasms throughout the body, that reverberate back and forth. One tolerates only neutral ideas — no revenge; no aggression. Every moment every fraction of a thought seems to fracture and open to reveal its contents. Even the thoughts one had not been aware of thinking seem to reveal themselves in this way. The spasms will have their way, and eating becomes impossible on the first day. One may venture forth with caution on the second day, but this is hardly to be advised.

One wakes up after a feverish sleep to notice whether the analgesics are still partially working. Reviving from sleep means one must continue to labor with one’s death wishes. The sensation of lying on a bed of nails does not let up. The next day, one’s hair looks dry and stressed and one’s complexion chalky.

****

This is what it was like growing up in a society where women’s health issues were not taken seriously. Nature was considered to be something that took care of itself. In the late seventies and early eighties, the birth control pill had been invented, but it was not offered as a solution to the female dilemma of being stabbed and electrocuted periodically. Our culture was, in many ways, backwards.

****

More recently, Nature was creeping up — again. My bodily chemistry had changed, and the oral hormones I was taken proved to be less efficacious in providing pain management.

Since I was losing my stealthy battle against Nature, despite using all the tricks accumulated in my book, I opted for an implanted contraption. This would give me a steady supply of hormones direct to my uterus, where it could sap them up.

To have an IUD implanted is like tolerating the investigation of your body by a huge alien robot. It’s not comfortable and everything about this alien seems huge. The final step of the implantation was like touching a hot stove and being sharply burned by it. After three seconds, the pain went away. I sat up and felt euphoric right away. That night I felt the hormones pumping. Their effect, in addition to the oral contraception already in my system, made me feel high.

****

My experience so far, two weeks down the track, is that I don’t feel any more a sense of Nature’s machinations.: that creeping up, the ecstasy of stealing time before she struck again. I don’t need to play so many games in order to preserve my sanity.

****

Also, for the first time, I’m observing other women in a different light. I used to think that dressing prettily was a sign of great frivolity in the light of Nature’s violence, when we would do better to set up military encampments against our impending doom.

I’m less dark, these days.

shamanic doubling / minus the morning

Reblogged from Nietzsche's hairs:

Shamanic "magic" means the ways that a shaman may use his psyche for achieving particular ends. It's where shifts of consciousness pertain. It might be argued, and quite reasonably so, that this shamanic "magic" has nothing to do with reality. Reality, as it were, abides on the non-magic side of things, by definition. Reality is that place, the range of experiences and the condition of being where things do not change "magically".

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This one needs very careful reading

competitive individualism vs ubuntu

Reblogged from Nietzsche's hairs:

In many of my readings concerning psychoanalysis, I keep coming across this expression: "The depressive position."

Upon reflection, I wonder whether this term is key to enscapsulating the difference between how most Westerners experience their own consciousness, and the way I experienced life growing up.

I've spent 12 years delving for useful ethnographic information in my autobiography, and I can honestly say that at least for the first 16 years of my life I experienced nothing of envious competitiveness with any of my friends.

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I guess this is controversial, but I was just stating facts from introspection.

the structure of Marechera's shamanistic development

Reblogged from Nietzsche's hairs:

There are five shamanic stages to be found in Marechera’s life

1. THE STABLE “GOOD” WORLD—idealised as such, even if not so in actuality.

2. THE INTERVENTION OF EVIL AS DESTABILISING FORCE (LEADING TO DEPERSONALISATION AND DEREALISATION)

3. THE INTERNAL “TAMING” OF THESE FORCES FOR CREATIVE AND PRODUCTIVE ENDEAVOUR

4. THE ACQUISITION OF POWER (INCLUDING KNOWLEDGE AS POWER), POWERS OF TRANSFORMATION AND INSIGHT INTO HOW THINGS ACTUALLY WORK ‘BENEATH THE SURFACE”

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jetlag in the Soviet Kingdom

Reblogged from Nietzsche's hairs:

Jetlag has its own superordinary effect. It still lingers -- and it is restricting my diet, making me prefer sleep rather than something to eat. I do not crave social company so much as I crave sleep, although I sometimes have these strange mad longings for things familar - the sun, the sound of a lover's voice, familiar tones and faces.

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I was not happy that I couldn't go to Zimbabwe, due to it's political status at that time, and had to go to the UK instead. Actually, I'm just making fun.

from shamanic solitudes:shamanic doubling

Reblogged from Nietzsche's hairs:

Here is a quote from shamanic solitudes:

[...E]motions felt by the shaman can suddenly appear. This happened with the shaman Ram Rai, who, during the dance, saw from far off the photo of his recently deceased brother, standing on a shelf. Ram Rai burst into tears. These were not the tears of Laladum , but the tears of a man, who re-emerged at that particular moment.

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Apes in Capes: a critique of Nietzsche through a shamanistic lens

Reblogged from Nietzsche's hairs:

I've been reading Nietzsche more through a shamanistic lens lately and it is quite clear to me what is going on here, that is what dynamic is driving his need to oscillate between the surface of life and its meaning and its depths.

Quite clearly, the self-cruelty that he sees as being necessary for obtaining knowledge is akin to the shaman's self-cruelty in choosing to associate with death.

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an insight about Nietzsche and shamanism

How to tell if you are projecting……..

There’s much complexity to the psychoanalytic term,  ”pre-oedipal state”.    Different writers also give it different meanings and weight.  For those who follow Klein,  along the lines of Bion and Meltzer, there are gradations between being in the paranoid-schizoid position and being able to accept the value of others.  Some of the later practitioners define the nature of the gradation as a movement between paranoid-schizoid subjective position and the so-called depressive position, the latter being where others come to figure as separate objects in their own right.  The process of this separation may be gradated and yet still called pre-oedipal.  One is either at the earlier stage or the later stage of separation from subjective states suggestive of ontological unity with others. 

If you think you don’t view the world through some or various gradations of this consciousness, you are nonetheless still bound to do so as it is part of “human nature” and indeed, if the world were not given coherence by means of your unconscious projections, you would see yourself as being equal to every other person, whilst not having many essential characteristics that differentiate your identity from others.  The ability to recognize and to have a more precise individuality applies to few —  and it takes many years to be able to separate oneself from others, particularly one’s family.  The political forces governing one’s childhood both help and thwart adult identity. 

This psychologically ubiquitous, regressive part of our consciousness is particularly adept at bringing us into conformity with power hierarchies by re-proportioning parts of our personality to be able to accept our place within them as “natural”. We project the sense of self-competency upwards in the hierarchy, and the sense of our own incompetency downwards towards those who are defined as lower than us in the social/political hierarchy. That’s how it is and how reality is distorted and people attain particular gradations of positive or negative identities, depending on where they are in the social hierarchy. 

At the same time, the  altogether human tendency to project into others is so natural to human social relations that one would not do justice to the human mind to label this dimension as always and inevitably pathological. I will explain how there can be something positive involved in our capacity to project. 

In some cases, the “pre-oedipal field” can also have a positive value if it is not entirely immature but has developed towards appreciating others. Shamanistic initiation ought to bring about such a sense of the nature of being as sharing one’s existence with others — for, to empathize also involves projecting, only we project our understanding and sensations into situations that are not purely to do with us.

MIND BODY DUALISM IN THE HOUSE OF HUNGER

Reblogged from Nietzsche's hairs:

This is the site of the author’s wound. Shamanism could be construed as a way of rebuilding the body as a material body, starting with the bones. Mind body dualism exacerbates the sense of the abject, that Kristeva refers to as a natural process of maturity, and which she sees as being consolidated by learning to speak. The author’s distaste for Immaculate’s sexuality, as well as his sense that “on the threshold of puberty” (in the short story) language was being separated from him indicate the breaking point which splits the tree down the middle.

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Ps <---> D

Reblogged from Nietzsche's hairs:

According to my understanding of Bion, the mechanism of projective identification functions in terms of our need to have others process emotional material into a digestible (and communicable) form for us.

"I cannot tolerate this state of mind -- you have it," is the preconscious motive governing projective identification. Actually it is only a part of our mind that we require the other to have, the part that arouses anxiety.

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