I have begun reading Dambudzo Marechera’s The Black Insider, a type of novel. My alter ego promised the Paper Chaser to read Thus Spake Zarathustra in 2008, and told A Room of Our Own she would read Bleak House. By reading these three books, I am sure one can learn a great deal.
Also on my list for this year are Dedra Johnson, Sandrine’s Letter to Tomorrow, and something of Émile Durkheim, I think, although this is just an impression I have long had – his actual titles daunt me.
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Lent begins today and everyone is giving up something. I am not Catholic but for Lent I am going to continue to give up – well, I was going to say pain and obedience, but when I heard myself think those words, I realized what I am continuing to give up might be more properly termed masochism. (Before I thought of “pain and obedience” I was going to say anorexia, meaning the self-limitation, extreme self-criticism, self-doubt, and resignation to unacceptable situations which was taught in Reeducation.) All of these terms apply, but Kiita has added self-sabotage, which sums it all up quite neatly.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Well I had a dream of you just before I woke up. You were in a huge hotel suite, surrounded by your collection of art (well, that is a reference to the Freudian professor, no doubt). But I wanted to have a look, so I crawled inside on my hands and knees into the next room. And you saw me and said it could be dangerous. Then you began a story about a worker who could not longer sell pineapples because the bosses wanted it for a few cents cheaper. The story was so terribly sad that I began to cry. At which point you changed gender (you were now a Chilean man), and said, “I was injured twice in secondary school — are you going to cry about that, too?”
What a fascinating dream. I do have a collection of art of sorts, mostly folk art. And then the dream has the pain aspect… Hmmm… I am not sure of the meaning of this but I am fascinated.
I think you were an investigative journalist and I wanted to learn the tricks of the trade.
Investigative journalist is my *true* fantasy career. Law is the “practical” fantasy but investigative journalist is the fantasy I never followed up on … always caught up in dealing with the here and now of the semester. Now that law school looks so expensive and some people are (again) telling me I sound happy about the idea but that the reality is grimmer, I wonder …
Good things to give up!
I refuse to observe Lent on general principle, however, because I think I’ve given up enough, thank you very much. 😉
I think you should try for investigative journalism — on a freelance basis.
ep – 🙂
J – Yes – I don’t know how the rest of my comment above got cut off, but it said I could start investigative journalism on a freelance basis from here. *This* was one of the things I had realized over the summer – so the idea’s not even new, I just need to stop getting drawn away from my True Purposes by low level work c*** – !!!
Well you should start doing it. So you already have tenure, I think, and you could just start publishing elsewhere rather than in academic journals. Change your intellectual allegiance.
I’m with estrellapolar. I’ve tried to come up with things to give up but I need every resource and bad habit I have to keep afloat everyday. This would make a good meme, though. If I had to choose, I’d give up self-sabotage.
J – yes. Exactly.
K – self-sabotage, yes, I will add this to my list right now! Maybe if I tell myself I only have to give it up 40 days, and I can indulge in it on Sundays if I like 😉 No but really, I’d like to dump it permanently.
Here’s something quoting Marechera that appeared in my mail box today:
The Times
February 7, 2008
Blast of disapproval for Robert Mugabe rival
Jan Raath in Harare
The emergence of a new rival to President Mugabe, challenging him for the presidency from within the ruling party’s own ranks, has been greeted by Zimbabwe’s media with more than the usual bile reserved for the 83-year-old leader’s opponents.
The state-controlled daily newspaper, The Herald, said yesterday that the announcement by Simba Makoni, a politburo member, that he would be standing for president in elections on March 29 was less than the “bombshell” described by most mainstream media. It was “the loud fart all silently agree never happened,” it said, quoting from Dambudzo Marechera, the late Zimbabwean author.
! That’s pretty funny. And so – Marechera’s phrases are that well known, to be referenced in this way! 🙂
I don’t think his phrases are so well known. He is being co-opted by a wanna-be totalitarian government’s mouthpiece.
Here is the original poem:
IDENTIFY THE IDENTITY PARADE
I am the luggage no one will claim;
The out-of-place turd all deny
Responsibility;
The incredulous sneer all tuck away
beneath bland smiles;
The loud fart all silently agree never
happened;
The sheer bad breath you politely confront
with mouthwashed platitudes: “After all, it’s POETRY.”
I am the rat every cat secretly admires;
The cat every dog secretly fears;
The pervert every honest citizen suprises
in his own mirror: POET.
—
But his remark is being used to undermine a welcome opposition base within the ruling Zanu-Pf regime.
I like the poem. So: is it a famous one? Perhaps one can hope the appropriation will backfire on the government in some way 😉
Yes maybe some day they will look at themselves in the mirror. Maybe.
I am unsure about masochism but I can definitely get behind giving up self-sabotage. On bad habits, for me the question comes up of where the line is between survival bad habits and destruction bad habits. Most of bad habits are on a spectrum somewhere between those poles. I can’t write without x, but the single minded pursuit of x will kill me.
Bad habits, yes. My bad habits came from Reeducation: self-limitation, obedience to authority, lack of control in my own life / relinquishing control to others. I am trying to teach myself to expand back into a larger mental and psychic space, with some ease to it.
To me this point about reeducation and lack of control is crucial, Z–in general I think it is a bad idea to teach people that they lack control. It may have some limited value as an insight in some contexts, but the way that twelvestepping teaches this as a general principle for dealing with the world is frightening. It seems to me almost gauged to backfire.
Merci, Servetus! I agree. Yes, very limited contexts, as in, my mother believes that if she exerts enough social control we will still have family dinners that look normal even if my father is dead drunk.
The dictum ACCEPT that you have NO CONTROL was the worst one and most frightening of the sentences I got from my incompetent shrink. It was like being in a torture chamber (isn’t that what they say to you in torture chambers, by the way)?
I’d have seen it in context better if I’d been in an actual 12 stepping group, but it was my shrink who was the confused 12 stepper, so I got it at one remove as it were, didn’t know where it was coming from or how laissez-faire, non-judgmental old me had been suddenly diagnosed as having control issues.
I had hilarious arguments with my 12 stepping shrink who kept saying I “should not” have as much “control” over life (i.e. have my life in order to the degree that I did) but also wanted me to control things I couldn’t. The funniest example to an academic was this:
WM: Why don’t you go work for University X?
PZ: That would be very nice. In fact, I did apply to University X the one time it had a position open in my subfield. I didn’t get it, but if something else opens up, I will apply again.
WM: What? Are you saying you must wait until they have a position open – in your SUBfield? You are being too pessimistic! Thinking you won’t get hired unless there is a position open, and insisting that the position must be in your SUBfield, is ARROGANT and it is a SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY!
PZ: It is not I who insist on a position in my subfield. It is that any university which advertises in a particular subfield, really wants to cover it. Also, Federal law requires that universities make hires which actually correspond to the job announcements they publish.
WM: You sound informed when you say that, but really you are just trying to rationalize your unwillingness to apply to University X.
! And on and on!
Well the right wing as a rule haven’t figured out how reality works. They think it is something in your head that you project outwards towards the world, making things happen.
This is key – not knowing how reality works – and living in a world of bourgeois idealism, I suppose.
It does explain why people think I have a sixth sense – I tend to know what is going to happen in a given situation and it is not out of second sight, clairvoyance or anything like that, it is from looking at what the current situation is, what factors contribute to its perpetuation, what variables there are, where the force of entropy lies, what the possible outcomes are, and which, considering the forces in play, is the most likely one. People do not want to consider things so impartially, even when I tell them the most likely outcome is in fact the one they hope for.
They want to keep reality behind a veil, it seems, and be buffeted about by it, but I would rather prepare for it – and influence it if possible – but NOT count on magic. (This is of course why I am too scientific and cold for a woman.)
Yes, the sixth sense thing is really just a human being who hasn’t had their feelers blunted by society.
Funny thing is I’m finding that reading Marechera’s work has very much enhanced my sixth sense. I am finding it hard to consider that my mindset was very different when I first started reading him. However, now I’m having the opposite feeling that others are speaking and acting too slowly and way too much on the surface. It’s like my sixth sense is rushing ahead of them already and finding the terrain arid or green. I want them to cut to the chase — to the nature of the terrain — and be able to sum up a whole lot more in one single go. My intuition is a sharpened razor-blade which just can’t stand the limited pace of everyday thinking.
Yes. And having just written the teaching meme, I note that the reason I liked going to school where I did was that most people were as sharp as I or sharper, so one was not held back. This is why I am not a great teacher for the masses in the middle – I hate to plod, and I constantly forget that the majority are not filling in the blanks on their own. I’m good at picking up on the buried intelligence of those who are behind, and pushing the advanced people ahead, but I have trouble relating to those who are strongly committed to remaining behind the veil because I don’t know what that experience is like (whereas I do understand what it is like to be out and out bewildered ;-)).
Yeah to everything you said.
I don’t much understand the veil, either, although to some (small) degree I succumbed to it when I lost the sense of my African roots. I’ve found those again, now, however, due to my reading of Marechera.
It seems to rest on there being an intrinsic difference between an organic intellect — one that processes the material it encounters and somehow naturally and automically reformulates it by making it one’s own — as compared to tracing the patterns of the walls of data blindly, and writing down a “copy” of what one believes one has encounters. Marechera’s writing gets you up to speed to approach things in the first way.
This is my most essential complaint about academia. Instead of organic intellects, you get simulacra (with a few tantalizing exceptions, of course).
Yes, I felt that as well. And the thing is when you do get an organic intellect, it seems to others as if they had encountered something insane.
The one aspect, which is of course the unfamiliarity of outsides with how work in academia is distributed, is perhaps forgivable. No one in my family gets this either (why can’t you just find work by us?).
But as you note, the conversation is self-contradictory. Accept that you control nothing, but then try to take control of where you work. Either you have no control, or you have some. But formal logic dictates that the first statement precludes the second. The problem is that too many illogical people go into counseling. Coming to terms with your feelings and their interface with the world around you should not mean having to abandon thinking as a way of doing that–but people who themselves cannot think logically are always threatened by people who can.
I met Reeducation through a support group as a teenager and thank my pubertarian catankerousness for the resistance that I developed to it. My problem wasn’t that I had to accept I had no control over my father’s drinking. That was an axiom of my life and making it through the evenings. My problem was that he had no control over his drinking. It was not my problem, it was his. And although he couldn’t accept that he had no control over his drinking, he still had no control over his drinking. So it was also an axiom of his life. It wasn’t something to be accepted or not accepted, it was a feature of our lives, and key to this was that it wasn’t making any of us better.
“people who themselves cannot think logically are always threatened by people who can”
That’s the thing I discovered all too late. But it’s true. Also, I think too many abusive people go into counseling – the same way too many authoritarian people go into teaching. I view people who say “I just love teaching” or “I just love helping people” as dangerous, because they are power mad !!!
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That having been said, I did attend actual Al-Anon for a while much later, because my ex, a type I diabetic, would use low blood sugar attacks to manipulate people, particularly me, and I knew I needed a group like Diabetic-Anon if it existed, because he was trying to get me to be as codependent as possible and it was starting to work.
In Al-Anon I met a lot of people similar to my confused, 12 stepping shrink and my very codependent mother. They all thought they could control the uncontrollable. They were also very judgmental, constantly criticizing, and they believed they were better than other people – “seeing the world as a ladder and everyone on their step” is how they put it. And they would do or had done insane things and then rationalized them.
That’s when I realized what my 12 stepping shrink’s paradigm had been. “If you have an alcoholic relative, you MUST be controlling and judgmental, irrational and rationalizing; you MUST also believe yourself superior to other people for no good reason.”
P.S. Servetus – I just realized another thing people dislike – the ability to be actually objective.
They think it’s a choice between a self-interested “objectivity” which is compromised with power, and a helpless subjectivity which is powerless but virtuous because it is “feeling” and capable of “empathy.”
In my opinion they need to realize that objectivity is fine and freeing – and is not self-interested, and is likely more compassionate than is the popular sturm und drang.
I ought to develop a post on that. I ought to add a discussion of it and related issues of “professionalism” and “professsionalization” to my infamous, out of field article in progress. I ought to remember these things and I hope that writing this comment helps me to do so.
They think it’s a choice between a self-interested “objectivity” which is compromised with power, and a helpless subjectivity which is powerless but virtuous because it is “feeling” and capable of “empathy.”
As I was just discussing with Mike — the law of the jungle is supposed to guide basic self interest. Only it doesn’t.
I think that all too often accepting a paradigm of the law of the jungle as one’s objective guide to living can be hugely debilitating.
Because your success in enacting your part as a member of a species that lives in a jungle is actually fraught with all sorts of dependent principles.
The main problem you will have is that you are entirely reliant upon the spectacle of your ape-like gestures having an resounding primitive impact upon the regressive part of the brains of those drawn to the spectacle or your acts. So if you are a big boss you want to impress that upon others by doing powerful damage or making powerful threats. Yet, whilst this presses people’s panic buttons, and often gets a simpering response, it doesn’t always work that way. Just one principle that you can’t really rely upon when you are in civilisation.
For example, there are those like myself, who have been born and bred in a briar patch, and who have learned to stay calm — a calmness that comes from the centre of our beings and is, moreover, enhanced at a time of crisis, like being in the eye of a storm. We see the ape-like gestures and behaviour for what it is. And we think and reflect to ourselves something like: “Yes, buster, I do see you. And so, however long it takes I am determined to be calm and bring you down, for you have now committed the ultimate sin by degrading my idea of human nature.”
I think I tend to favor the law of the Tao and, of course, Gracian’s maxims on integrity, written in time of great strife and/but derived from the ancients (who of course sound like contemplative sages but in reality themselves lived in times of great strife).
Good point on law of the jungle *not* being “every man for himself” but informed by all of these dependencies, many of them pretty dysfunctional (at least for any form of civil and somewhat illuminated society). Why have those kinds of dependencies, calling it individualism or something, when you can have actual invidual integrity and also cooperation and mutuality?
I think I tend to favor the law of the Tao and, of course, Gracian’s maxims on integrity, written in time of great strife and/but derived from the ancients (who of course sound like contemplative sages but in reality themselves lived in times of great strife).
So do I when things are running relatively smoothly, but otherwise consider me a white bloodcell in the veins of humanity.
Why have those kinds of dependencies, calling it individualism or something, when you can have actual invidual integrity and also cooperation and mutuality?
I think because humanity has been dumbed down so much (and culturally bluntened) so that these dependencies are not seen for what they are. Social darwinism has replaced religion to some large degree, and has a religious form of implicit belief, which is not based upon logic or empirical evidence. So in terms of your previous description, there is an idea that “objectivity” implies social darwinistic selfishness and that it can’t be anything else. The word objectivity has been usurped to mean exactly that and no more or no less. But actually the success of this notion of objectivity is based entirely on social consensus and NOT on some scientific truth underlying or preceding social consensus. That is what is being missed. And that, in itself, forms the blindspot of the opponent, from which point of view it is possible to take him out.
(Sorry if this sounds personal, but as Nietzsche says, you don’t really know the intensity of the battle until it becomes personal for you.)
“Social darwinism has replaced religion to some large degree, and has a religious form of implicit belief, which is not based upon logic or empirical evidence.”
So true.
“And that, in itself, forms the blindspot of the opponent, from which point of view it is possible to take him out.”
AHA! This is also true in my experience, although I don’t let myself have that experience often enough as I have tended at certain points to get cowed by power.
AHA! This is also true in my experience, although I don’t let myself have that experience often enough as I have tended at certain points to get cowed by power.
It’s just a matter of seeing what is there and remaining calm about it. Often the person will take themselves out by themselves.
But I think you know this?
Yes but not well enough / or perhaps it hasn’t been my experience for all situations. I’ve found on several occasions I had to do something active – even if it’s just cc’ing a memo to the right person.
There is no harm in doing something active. But the main thing is not to step into the line of the person’s attack. The main thing is to realise that if you do not do this, they have nowhere to go. You can employ a zen mind. This is ultra-objectivity. But social Darwinism is a form of extreme subjectivism which uses up a lot of psychic (soul) fuel. Those who uphold this position will get tired very easily. It isn’t a natural position to hold, but rather one that has been wrought under the strains of capitalist society. A zen form of passive observation is actually more active in a way, more powerful than this kind of fraught subjectivism. You just need to know how to step offline from the direct attack. Eventually, because this is an unnatural position for the proponent to hold, he will start to undo himself.
But you can certainly fire off an email and give him a push in that direction.
The cc (in that example) just means look: I’m not playing or wasting time, and I’m bringing in a powerful witness to signal that to you. (I work in a very sexist culture.)
Not to step into their line of attack, CORRECT. My typical error is to keep a Zen mind and not move into the line of attack, *but also* not to move out of the way. And occasionally I do step into the line of attack, which is always disastrous.
Very interesting on social Darwinism as tiring … I’ve seen this, but I tend to forget it, as I my default assumption is, ah well, Powers That Be are on their side.
All stuff I’ve consolidated through boxing.
Yes, I see that! 🙂 Useful. Everyone needs martial arts, I am deciding.
More boxing than martial arts.
Step offline. Consider how not to waste your energy. Make every punch count.
OK, boxing. I now see the attraction of it.
That is good that you do. I don’t know that I do, but since I have been doing it I have learned a lot of much more general lessons about life.
By the way, check my blog. I am now a grandmother to a Liberian refugee.
Wow, you really are … is your son Australian?
I realized the deal with boxing when you explained it because it put together the way men who know how to box (I know a few of these, I live in a macho type state) talk about techniques for dealing with life in general.
My ‘son’ is Liberian. Actually he says his parents were killed in a war.
Yeah, who would have thought you could get actual life lessons from boxing — it is, after all, a Western style.