I am reading this book on the recommendation of Liz. It is smart. If I had not investigated its subject matter quite thoroughly before reading it, I might find it yet more epoch-making. On the other hand, I might not understand it so well.
It has given me another insight on Reeducation. I have had this insight before, but it lodged only partially in my consciousness. That is why I had to re-have the insight, so to speak.
Reeducation kept saying I had too much “control.” It wanted me to give and give. It would have taken my last drop of blood if I had allowed it. But if you give up that much ground, you compromise too much of your self. That is of course what Madame, here, was trying to get me to do and it is why, beyond the obvious reasons, I find her so unpleasant.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Yeah well once you lose the last drop of your blood — your buffer against the harshness of the world — you get to enter the exciting religious terrain of bipolar highs and lows, depending on how you perceive the community to be responding to you on any particular day. Fun!
OMG – is that how bipolars are created?! Abuse, of course, does destablize, but more specifically, the characters in this novel I sometimes teach (I’ve mentioned it before, Deep Rivers, by J.M. Arguedas) have these mysterious mood swings. The obvious explanation for it in context has to do with colonialism. A student informs me that these are also what people who have been victims of severe abuse experience.
I think it is how bipolars are created. I saw this result in my father, after he submitted to everything that any ideologue told him to do. He lost the stabilising ego-centre, and began to respond to the world in more extreme ways.
That’s very interesting. So it would explain why my mother was called ‘manic-depressive’ when reacting to abuse from my father … and perhaps it would explain why Americans are now acting out so much, we have Bush the abusive ideologue.
Yeah, maybe she was worn down so much, she lost much of her ego buffer — and Americans, too. But there are ways of avoiding such processes of being worn down — if one can see them for what they are. My own life’s strategy has been NOTHING other than a process of preventing what has happened to my father from also happening to me. That has been primary for me. If I ever want to try to understand myself, I need to remind myself only of this.
You can avoid being worn down by adopting a defensive position in relation to power, by choosing your own independent values and sticking to them, by detachment from abusive people, and so forth.
Yes and interesting. My life’s strategy was preventing what happened to my mother from happening to me. But there is, of course, more to say on that.
In *Deep Rivers* the abuse is universal and everyone is doomed. It goes back centuries. And for what? So a few men on horseback can do their macho thing? That was my grandmother’s family.
Isn’t it amazing about Deep Rivers and abuse? One of my students says it is the reaction to abuse, the reaction of abuse victims, to go through the odd mood swings the narrator and some of the other characters experience. Arguedas, the author, was a sexual abuse victim in some form, also. He has a story in which the possibly autobiographical character, a child, has to accompany an older man on a rape expedition and is basically forced to watch. He was a successful person – career as writer and ethnomusicologist, family, became rector of a good university and so on – but suffered from depression all his life and finally committed suicide.