This is another of my magic charms against Reeducation. As we know, it was said there that I had too much personal power and was not in enough pain. I therefore tried hard to relinquish power and to feel pain.
Later I discovered that I had in fact not been deluded the first 35 years of my life. It was not illegitimate to make decisions for oneself and to put events, both negative and positive, in perspective. I have understood that what Reeducation disliked was merely vitality and maturity.
I still have terrible habits, however, gained from my attempt to retrain myself. And now that torture is in the news, I understand why it was that I experienced Reeducation like a series of torture sessions. It was, effectively. It said, “You have no power here. We are increasing pain levels and you have no choice but to submit.”
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Hmm..well one of the things sparring teaches you is that you can experience pain and at the same time decide not to submit. In fact it teaches you to tolerate pain whilst using all your resources not to submit. Hostility is not a sign that you are doing something wrong in sparring. What it means is that the other person is fighting their game and that you are fighting yours. More specifically, it teaches you to see that you and the other person are not the same person. They have their hostility and what this means is only that they are hostile. It has no moral significance in the universe.
I find that people try to use all sorts of mechanisms to try to make you responsible for their feelings — and most of these efforts on their part are unconscious. Emotional blackmail of various sorts was a way of getting attention from mummy and daddy. But whether this can have an effect on you mostly comes down to a person’s “reach”. Are they in a strong enough position (which does not mean that they themselves are strong inside–they’re usually weak) to make you have to go along with their agenda. If so, they can reach into your guard position. But if not, it is merely a feint, and nothing to worry about.
“I find that people try to use all sorts of mechanisms to try to make you responsible for their feelings — and most of these efforts on their part are unconscious.”
This is definitely true and I do not remember it often enough.
Strong enough position – well, my Reeducator was in one because he was a Reeducator, one is supposed to listen to them – and I gave him power.
Strong enough position – well, my Reeducator was in one because he was a Reeducator, one is supposed to listen to them – and I gave him power.
I wonder if this has to do with the reality that under the bourgeois system of values, we are all trained to be thin skinned. In other words, power more or less transfuses out through our skins (psychically, but like osmosis) into the bodies politic of those deemed to be more powerful than we?
For all of their espousal of individualism, it does seem to be a feature of bourgeois consciousness (or unconsciousness, perhaps) that they allow their personal power to escape from them in this way.
Ah! Yesterday I spent time in the presence of the eloi (at an academic conference). I tend to avoid these kinds of things as a rule, because it is always so disheartening for me to be exposed to people who are passive in this way. In Australia, my psyche is attracted to those other psyches that are sociologically called “working class”. These are the others who have psychic skins as thick as mine. But the academic strata, pronouncing truths that do not come from personal experience, seem very weak to my eyes.
That was one of the main points of Reeducation: you had to become even more thin-skinned – it was more “appropriate” and more “healthy.”
That of course if applied to someone like my X, and perhaps framed differently, would be true. He is the kind of person phrases “Anger is a shield for fear” was invented for.
I also find the passivity of academics one of the hardest aspects of the “profession” to take.
I actually don’t think that the academics even realise that they are being passive. It’s kind of funny, that. Anyway, there is one academic who kind of got offside from me, and she always asks the kind of questions which are designed to say, very subtly, “You are a morlock!”, so I kind of had a tiny amount of fun with that, acknowledging that I indeed am that. (Too subtle for anyone else to pick up, I think.)
Actually the passivity is more like a delayed maturation in the way it feels. Like as a group there is a consensus that we should all fester in the womb.
The other aspect of what I saw, culturally, that I had difficulty with, was a lack of any real diversity. Or rather, diversity was expressed somehow as a means to becoming assimilated in a homogeneous whole of consensual consciousness.
But why is this automatically a goal — never mind THE goal?
Isn’t this mystical sense that we are all somehow interlinked a form of delayed onset of maturity — as if we were all suckling on Society’s gigantic teets?
But this suckling on teets thing, all in tiny cubicles definining one’s “selfhood” is surely something very funny indeed. I mean, we are all nurturing ourselves separately, and yet with a sense of mystical “togetherness” — and this is the underlying feeling of the academic conference. We are not so much there to learn as to suckle. The very, very tenuous selfhood that is allowed to suckle here is surely on its way to great things — if only it will allow itself to be born some day.
Oh! And I’ve just realised that I am talking in the mode of kangaroos — the joey in the pouch who is both “born” but not ready to be born at the same time.
“Like as a group there is a consensus that we should all fester in the womb.”
Yes – and on with the diversity/homogeneity thing also, and on the kangaroo analogy, that’s hilarious.
And yet, although they have little individuality and are eager to have less & conform more, they are also incredibly egotistical.
On the thin skin – it is one reason why I prefer to be in points south (far south, just a little south and you’d be on an oil rig) or else west of the Rockies, where people are less invasive than all these Americans I keep having to deal with here.
And yet, although they have little individuality and are eager to have less & conform more, they are also incredibly egotistical.
Yes, but the egotism is defensive and comes from a feeling of being robbed, but not knowing quite how.
One of the odd things, these days, in myself — I don’t have the energy either for egotism or defensiveness. I noticed this for the first time at the conference yesterday. It was like I had returned to a much more natural state, finally, after my Western cultural travails. I can finally say to people, “Like me or hate me, but this is how I am.” It doesn’t bother me to be liked or hated by these people — actually it feels about the same, since I know that in bourgeois circles like can turn to hate, through a flash of jealousy.
since I know that in bourgeois circles like can turn to hate, through a flash of jealousy.
IN other words, this is low level sparring. I’m in it for the duration — no sudden moves.
Ah, low level sparring. Once again, Reeducation: it wanted that. Being in it for the duration was what they called being unfeeling and in denial. (I am starting to see more and more.)
Egotism out of a feeling of being robbed, but not knowing how – that is interesting. It serves them well for a certain kind of (low level) “success.” This is a huge price to pay in my view.
Egotism out of a feeling of being robbed, but not knowing how – that is interesting. It serves them well for a certain kind of (low level) “success.” This is a huge price to pay in my view.
Yeah, but I really don’t think they know they’re paying it. They have nothing to compare their own worldviews to. I mean theoretically they do, but the hardest thing to do is to get out of using one’s own mindset as a filter which screens and interprets everything one comes across back into the expected image of the world already projected by one’s own mindset. It is the old problem of A PRIORI.
But actually, I think that what is fundamentally wrong with many of the advanced cultures is that the more ‘advanced’ they are, the more there is a focus on the internal realm of culture, thinking and ideas, so that an atrophication of the spirit gradually develops. The lack that becomes codified within the advanced cultural context is that of personal experience. People don’t have enough of it — and they are not taught how to go and seek it. Collectively, they have lost that skill.
Consequently, they are resentful of those who do have personal experience. It seems like they have a richness that the others (no matter how affluent) cannot afford — which their own culture has surreptitiously talked them out of possessing. Those who do not have enough personal experience (and who do not trust the value of personal experience they do have) become spiritually emaciated.
Just like it is difficult to do sparring if you are physically emaciated, it is difficult to go out and GET personal experience if you are spiritually emaciated. You are too weak. You don’t know why. (I speak from personal experience — how I was in my early 20s.)
So, people are certainly paying a big price but they don’t know it; they cannot know it. They sense that something is wrong, and they try to use egotism as ballast — and sometimes this works to some degree.
To blend it all together here……..I know by experience that personal experience is hated by others. Hated to the point that it is often called a lie, not true, hence, I’m often not believed.
I’m often not believed….which is why I have taken the liberty to create my own characters. All are true, yet none are true depending on the whatever is acceptable at that moment by whoever is in charge of deciding the acceptable.
Yeah, people disbelieve personal experience (and we know this from pesonal experience). I think that part of the problem is the way that personal experience has been codified under Modernism. I had a troll write to me recently that I should stop talking about my personal experiences because what I was really talking about was not my life but my “problems”.
So it seems that there is a tendency to encode the talking about one’s personal experiences as the talking about “one’s problems” — ie the negative aspects of life, which cannot be redeemed, but just “are”.
If this attidude (that personal experiences are actually just “problems”) is seen as a expressiom of a form of Western dualism, then perhaps it involves the issue of contingency versus universalism (as two episemological strata of the mind — the latter being the dominant and desired mode of thinking.) To talk about what is personal is somehow seen as making oneself to be “special” through not referencing one’s own case through the lens of the universal and its abstractions. Thus, talking about oneself makes it seem as if one’s self is actually unique whereas everybody else is “the same” — their identities subsumed under the generalities of universalising abstractions. (Perhaps this is why the troll asserted — “You don’t care about anybody else!” — an assertion patently untrue but understandable if to to talk about one’s personal experience means to deny, to some degreee, the value of universalising modes of thinking. To devalue such universalising interpretations of the world would seem, to some, like actually denying the world on behalf of one’s own specialness. But this is to confuse ideas and ways of thinking with the actual phenomenological realities of the world.
It appears that the personal is only OK if it fits, and thus confirms some really common or widely accepted paradigm.
Right. Humanity is acceptable so long as it promotes order. Otherwise it isn’t.
But I have noticed that artists often have the opposite impulse — indeed it is in myself as well as Marechera.
Marechera, for instance, very, very close-sighted, decided he didn’t want to see the world any more. So henceforth he stopped wearing his spectacles, and had no idea who was talking to him — whether he had met them before or not.
I am myself beset with a similar vagueness. There are questions that I could ask about identity but that I refuse to ask. I prefer the softening of reality that my permitted uncertainty gives me, rather than having everything in a harsh light. This is kinder, this is more humanistic, this is more artistic — but above it, it allows me to be open to experience without pre-guessing reality. There are worse things in life than making mistakes — the worse one being the condition of being too afraid to try something different.
So I don’t want to see things too clearly –and it seems inhumanly crude to even judge people on what I think I see about them. I make judgements, if negative, always with the hope that I’ll be proven wrong, and never with the aspiration that I will be 100 per cent correct in my judgements. To finalise any kind of judgement about a person is a kind of death sentence. I don’t want to impose it.
Yes – the blurriness is good. And art as an irruption of humanity, yes indeed. It has been said before but it is worth remembering.
Or, to put it in a slightly different light:
To you the enigma-intoxicated, the twilight-enjoyers, whose souls are allured by flutes to every treacherous gulf:
—For ye dislike to grope at a thread with cowardly hand; and where ye can divine, there do ye hate to calculate—
To you only do I tell the enigma that I saw—the vision of the lonesomest one.—
Zarathustra. I know this because I googled it and of course, one can read the whole book on line. Very tempting to start reading it and figuring it out.
Let me know if you need any help.
Anyway, the section I posted above has to do with an expansion of my theme about artistic vision being blurred vision. For the artist, life is a series of treacherous gulfs, because s/he is attracted to mysteries which seem more mysterious (and ARE more dangerous) because of blurred vision. The artist is not, after all, an accountant, who determines from the age of 20 how to earn the best amount of money in life and which career path to follow. Her life is more precipitous than that, and necessarily so. So there is the emphasis on guessing rather than calculating, which is part of what makes life more interesting, artistically.
This is followed by the idea that the artist has a moral imperative to find their own way alone. Such a deliberate aloneness is also fraught with danger, because (as the passage goes on) there are various opportunities to be misunderstood, plus the varius attacks from superego.
AHA, thanks for this study aid, it is very interesting, in part because I am in the midst of grading and class preparation on Things Completely Different, so I couldn’t go and read Zarathustra today – although it would have been more instructive and I will probably read it for Christmas or some such thing.
Yeah, have a read of it later. The best study aid I ever read (after having made a lot of progress by myself) is the one that said the final subsection of the book (book 4?) is a kind of unwinding of the book’s epistemological assertions — a kind of light-hearted mockery of its earlier claims.
The point of reading it this way is that this book is very undogmatic.
That is very interesting!