Whiteman of Reeducation: Z, you must realize you are not a god!
Reeducand Z: Gracious. It appears I believe I am a god! The worst of it is, I do not realize that I believe this! I must learn to see that I believe this, and then discard the belief!
Savage Z: Whiteman of Reeducation, is there something I have said or done to indicate to you that I believe I am a god?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I wonder what sort of god Whiteman means? There are so many of the poor things that it’s quite confusing to imagine oneself as simply A god rather than THE god. But, of course, it’s debatable which is THE god at any particular time. Suggest that Whiteman reads Freud. It might help him.
Oh, and you, of course.
Which text of Freud should this whiteman read? This would be very revealing – do say!
***
The god he means – supposedly, any of the many, but really, the Christian God. He was trying to use one of the principles of the 12 steps. If you have an alcoholic relative, then you were raised to try to keep their antics under control. Now you try to make more people do things and imagine you can control the uncontrollable.
I b**** about it because, since to get Reeducated you have to give up control of something, I gave up control of some of the kinds of things one ought to be on top of in one’s life … if one is grown up and responsible, anyway.
***
What would be meant by all of this *in religion* is that one should renounce false idols and walk the path of the Tao. That I would never dispute, but this idea that if you have X in your past, you have Y in your present, etc., and that you should be so dependent upon a personalized, anthropomorphic God, is really authoritarian.
Part of the Whiteman’s burden is thinking he is The God, and he can’t figure out for the life of him why ignorant natives in pajamas and tennis shoes keep kicking his butt.
OMG Case that is brilliant!!!
I had figured out that Reeducation was designed for authoritarian men who thought they knew best and would be better served to realize they did not.
However it had, in fact, precisely these colonial resonances.
He should read them all. It will keep him busy and maybe prevent him from irritating you.
Today’s letter touches on exactly that point.
Case – the letter is great! Charlie – OK, if I run into this whiteman I will say so. I was actually rather alarmed to discover he had not read any of Freud, only heard about him in textbooks. This should have been a major tipoff but at the time I was kind and took it for a mere sign of the postmodernity of which my traditionalist self ought to become more tolerant.
What can I say about this?
I really don’t understand the context of it so well as the other commentators seem to.
I will say that I have learned a lot from Bataille about embracing immanence, which is kind of like the situation of the god come to Earth, but is really not all that god-like because gods are not contingent beings.
I think that as humans we have an idea of the sacred, and that the sacred is also part of our identities. We cannot believe that we are merely animals — and, as Bataille points out, the consequences would be really for the worse if we started to take that line. Eroticism, for instance, would disappear, to be replaced by animal sexuality. (The latter seems to be something that the pornographic industry has actually achieved.)
So, we need a sense of the sacred, and to some degree feeling ‘godlike’ is a good and proper feature of our feeling human.
But the transcendent human god is a very different thing from the immanent human god. To transcend one’s contingency is to falsify reality. One lives ‘above’ reality instead of in it. Illusions abound. To be “in” contingency is not to hold oneself apart from reality, as if one had an all too precious soul which would be contaminated by reality. One lets go of this idea of transcendence, to wallow in the dirt of reality. But by doing so, one doesn’t lose one’s godlike nature. One assures that it corresponds with the human and the necessary. It is a much more lively and interesting position, to correspond in the immediacy with Lord Chance.
That is of course about the real sacred – whereas the Reeducative ‘god’ is mere cultism.
Another thing Reeducation couldn’t ‘grock’ about me – already being in the space of the sacred.
Few people are in the space of the sacred, because few people are not irremediably damaged by their upbringings. So it is automatic to presume that you are not in the space of the sacred.
I think that one of the things I am awkwardly trying to say in my Marechera paper is that he somehow kept a lot of the magic of his childhood, even as an adult. He claims in at least two places that he didn’t even register that he was black until it was pointed out to him in various ways.
Most people are forced to lose their sense of the sacred through adjustment to the social order. Reality becomes dry and cynical for them — the fascist’s wry version of reality, within which innocence has to be stomped out as if it were too much presumption to live joyfully. But Marechera has that innocent joy about him throughout his short life. Even in the harshest of circumstances that sense of the sacred was not stamped out.
But this is rare…so rare!
Ay. So that is what it is. And it is what the Reeducator turned out to be frustrated with – as he put it, he was envious because I had a “core” – !
Magic of childhood, I have never doubted it … and in Reeducation was supposed to have experienced horrors that would have stamped it out.
Some horrors, sure, but not *that* earth shaking and there was magic. I always did know I was a privileged person but then this explains why there are so many people I cannot figure out.
I suppose this is why people need religions, then.
I think that if you have a really vital childhood, you will always be at odds with those who have been treated more or less badly, or not been allowed to run around and explore nature freely. You will always have an ally in your memories of your previous experiences and how free they were. But you will also always have enemies in those who sense this difference in you as a sign of privilege, and who seek to make you equal to them by bringing you down. (Also, many people will lack the imagination to be able to reflect that their own dry experiences may not be universal.)
Very interesting. It seems to mean the middle classes have the deadest childhoods – ?
That could be. I don’t know. I was brought up in the pre-speed (ad-hd) medicine era, and in the pre- “I can’t allow my child to roam free lest a child molester or a broken arm takes hold of them” era.
So, I don’t know, I don’t know.