Everyone needs your time and money right now, I know. But it is important to DEFEAT MEASURE 11 IN SOUTH DAKOTA and women there need your help. Consider it, and consider phone banking for Obama this weekend. One point of phone banking now is to get people to vote early – that is that much momentum that is built up, and that many fewer people to organize on election day. The pro-lifers in South Dakota are thinking the same thing – a yes vote on Measure 11 is an important step toward reversing Roe v. Wade and getting abortion banned nationwide.
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I just applied for something external that I will not get, but I applied. It is a good step, as I have not applied for anything external on my own behalf for some time. To do it I had to tell myself a story about my recent record that is not the one I usually tell. The one I usually tell is a series of questions, along the lines of: what are the dark reasons why you do not have a better record? The one I have now invented has these elements:
1. I really was destroyed by Reeducation. The dates on my vita do not coincide with this since I had so much submitted and forthcoming at the time of destruction that publications streamed out for eight more years. But they had all been written before I entered the space of death. It was not laziness, it was trauma.
1.5. No matter what anyone may say, and no matter what version of things I have myself tried on, this was at one time my chosen career, not one I only fell into, but a considered choice. It was not an obedient choice, either. I still think I should have left when I originally planned to do so, but that does not mean I shold not have gone to it in the first place.
2. I did not come to this place out of weakness or ineptitude but because it was the most solid option I had at the time. I came with a plan I did not implement and should have. In retrospect it was possible and it was the plan I should have implemented. However circumstances, even circumstances of which I am only now becoming aware, advocated against it and my our second choice plan failed – as, considering coldly and impartially at the time, I had warned it was liable to do. Of the people involved in this plan – a plan made by one-eyed, leaderless junior faculty to rescue itself from a terrible situation – only I have not escaped, which also means only I have survived. Circumstances now are far more propitious for an updated version of the original plan. I have two eyes and I am working alone. (On important things one should always work alone.)
3. I should stop feeling hopeless, therefore. My files and my vita are salads of unfinished projects but Servetus says I am erudite. (That means in reality, I am on my way to it.) There is gold in those files and as my Lima card reader said, if I remember I am still their equal they will strengthen me and I will walk to my limit.
EN VIDA
Un hombre se levanta y mira el universo
Con sus pastores cálidos de primera mañana
Un hombre se incorpora y mira sus misterios
Multiplicados en sorpresas de aire y piedra
En peso sobre el pecho de niño atardecido
Que llora un mundo que lo ahoga
Y siempre comienza fuera de sus manos
Un hombre se incorpora y mira las estrellas
Delante de las fuentes de sí mismas
Ocultando su ser y diciendo que son…
Los astros inspirados en su calma de suelo
Con los labios callados
Y sus alientos que envuelven climas preferidos
Un hombre se levanta y se mira desnudo
Y tan lleno de herencias tan vestido
De cosas que no sabe de donde le vienen
Tan solitario y en eterno diálogo
Para que el universo no se le muera en las entrañas
Un hombre se levanta y se acerca a sus pasos
Se acerca temblando a su destino hospitalario
A su manera de ser vida
Con las alas abiertas y las heridas de la tierra en su garganta
Un hombre se acerca a su andar de signo triste
A su manera de ser muerte
Con las células dadas a otras formas
Un hombre se levanta y se acerca al corazón
Para ahondar la vida que lo ahoga
Espera el brote de un árbol en su espalda
Y llora porque la noche hace llorar al mar
Un hombre se levanta y se llena de recuerdos
Desarticula los sepulcros
Contempla los destinos y los augurios de la fuerza
Y contempla las flores que se salen de madre
Y se contempla
Trasladado de piedra a ruido de eternidad
Y escucha y se escucha
Siente andar en sus pies las selvas que se abrigan en el verano
Y se entrega al olvido
Un hombre se levanta y marcha hacia sus límites
–V.H.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Reeducation: This is not valid. You are not valid for it. You are not valid. The way to show validity is to fail at this.
Friends: Keep on, that is not true.
Practicality (PZ): Correct, but it is too late, I am already ruined for this. It is time to make another decision. I have made it.
Friends: No. Roll it back.
PZ then quit without quitting. Now, even if real quitting is to happen, restarting has to happen first.
As with everything I say, it applies to my way of thinking and experiences, but maybe not yours. However, it occurs to me that one of the ways that primal thought processing was useful to me was that I could create an opposition to the evil forces in my life — let us call them for now “reeducation”. This oppositional force I created had a particular mood, feeling and identity, and would often speak to me, at times required, about how I had a moral imperative to overturn the force of injustice.
Pre-Oedipal processes give us access to a creative splitting of metaphysical reality, to embodying our ideas with an almost palpable emotional and intellectual quality, and so on. So, it is possible to conjure up a spirit from within that will enable you to fight reeducation, and will give you the strength (and sometimes the wisdom) concerning how to do this.
Yes – that is more or less what this weblog is supposed to do!
Yes, indeed. But I meant you could give your combatant a name and an identity. I think mine was “antichrist”, which, of course, I derived from Nietzsche.
It’s Professor Zero! Or at least: the original PZ, before that narrator started bleeding into the author.
OK — but you need to equip her with superordinary qualities, not those pertaining to everyday life but rather with a transcendental mission to fight what is degrading and/or a force of ignorance that is re-education.
(It seems to me that to mobilise the creative dimension of the pre-Oedipal field, one must think in terms of forces. So your force must be for good, for enlightenment and freedom and so on, against Reeducation’s force of darkness and restriction. So PZ must be able to wear a force-shield.)
By the way, can you help me with a definition?
What is the word for stages of individual maturity that echo evolutionary stages of development of the human race?
PZ was supposed to put on a force-shield but is only now actually acquiring it. The original idea was that PZ started from the ground up, precisely from the pre-Oedipal realm. But the whole thing was slightly too foggy – perhaps.
Stages of individual maturity – OMG, I read that as a child in my parents’ Dr. Spock book! What *is* it? Anyone, help!
The pre-Oedipal stage and the pre-Oedipal field are two separate things, and there is no returning (except metaphorically perhaps) to the former.
The pre-Oedipal field, however, can be accessed at will by one who has a certain amount of skill. It is kind of the same as auto-hypnosis. I have used that on a number of occasions — for instance, when skydiving, I have told myself that the air is really only very thick water, and diving into water is something I am not afraid of.
Auto-hypnosis, like being at the beach or in yoga. The yoga teacher said tonight “as where you were before” and I thought “before you were born.”
Strangely though I claim to be able to remember the pre-Oedipal stage. One of my first memories with speech connected to it is of realizing I had left the [pre-Oedipal] and would not be able to get back. I wanted to think one could go back and forth but rationally could not see how that would be possible. I decided to do a Ph.D. and discover that but because I had formulated my question in terms of language and access to language, how it blocks access to other things, I ended up in languages and am still not really good on the semiotic order and on things pre-Oedipal. I don’t know that I understand all of this well enough that the concepts I am citing actually fit my memories and experience – I am speaking as a layperson here. I need to study it all seriously to rewrite/finish my novel MADRID.
I don’t have explicit memories of it. I do have at least one very vivid memory, though, at the age of two and a half. My sister — a year and a half younger than I — had just learned to walk, and my parents were saying so. She was walking along the badmington court at the side of the house, and I remember thinking, “this is such an important day, that my sister has just learned to walk. I must always remember it.”
The pre-Oedipal stage is between 1 and 3. I may have other memories from the time, but I cannot place my exact age. I remember, for instance, a rainy day, and going to vote in a brown tent. My father carried me, although I didn’t want to be carried. I wanted to know what the process was about, but he wouldn’t tell me. I was deeply, deeply frustrated with the answers he gave, which seemed evasive. I haven’t done deep research on when rhodesian elections took place, although someone in the know reprimanded me that I had made the wrong guess as to time, since “no elections were held during that time.” Maybe I placed myself as too old? (or, conversely, too young?) The memory itself is vivid, however.
I like this story that you invented for yourself to get through the application process. It is inspiring. You are erudite. And I sincerely hope that you do get what you applied for.
Hi Kiita and gracias! Erudite, but fragmented. I think this story is the most real story.
Jennifer – I remember my third birthday party and most of that year. I have isolated memories from earlier, but I can remember that when I was three, I had more early memories than now. The earliest fragment is from before I could walk, being in a playpen with a jungle gym.
But I remember age three better than some subsequent years because it was the year of really acquiring a sophisticated level of English. I could still remember how it felt to be someone who couldn’t formulate so many complex sentences and thoughts.
I considered that language was amusing and interesting, a powerful technology, but that it was losing me my connection to the planets.
Right. I think I stayed much longer at the pre-Oedipal level than you did. At least until I migrated, at the age of 16, I still relied on the general presence of an atmosphere, or the power of gesture, to express what I wanted to say. I think this is because the culture I came from was largely pre-industrial, and conventional modes of communication were not fully systematised yet.
So after 16, I migrated, and it was as if I had to start again to learn how to ‘speak’. I also think this difficulty was related to the fact that those who have lived in the industrialised first world for a long time have an ego-centred perspective that I was by no means familiar with. In fact, I had not been exposed to this perspective or approach for the first 16 years of my life.
The other aspect of this is that my parents did not speak to me as an adult, or share their concerns. To them I was a child, with childish concerns, who would magically come into adult awareness at the stage of puberty. So my emotional relationship was not with them but with my peers.
So, in all, I had to teach myself how to understand the Western cultural approach through reading lots of books. It was too late to learn it from my peers in my late teens.
So: one *can* stay at that level that long?
Not completely. Actually I was far from logocentric, and kept a great distance from that approach, which I see as a feature of not relying heavily upon language in order to think. (Of course, this approach rather limits communication with outsiders, too, although it seems to work effectively enough with those who see the world as you do.) I would say that my psyche was constructed in terms of the Jungian ideal, but not, perhaps, in terms of the Freudian ideal, because my pre-Oedipal self and my ego were on a par with each other, as a kind of interrelationship and duality without hierarchy. (Freud, however, seems to favour the idea of ego domination, which to Jung would be “ego inflation”).
So when I came to Australia, I was shocked at the way people treated each other — it seemed so cold and negative. They barely skimmed the surface in terms of relating to the people underneath. I reacted with recoil against this mode of behaviour, which seemed to embrace thanatos, rather than eros.
It was this, more than the cultural differences, that stymied me.
To clarify my thought in the first two paragraphs, I tended to relate concretely to my environment (which was a huge part of my meaning) rather than abstractly and inwardly.
It does seem to me though that that coldness *is* one of the keys to Anglo middle class culture.
It seems to me that the way people adress each other here (although not at the University), they are shouting and yelling through layers of psychic deadness. It’s almost as if when they want you to do something different they raise their voice and harshen their tone, and emit something like, “Stop! Stop! Stop!” as if they were addressing a locomotive that had lost its breaks.
I often wonder why, if people here want me to do something differently, they don’t just ask me to. But in my past experiences, they take the approach I’ve just described, and I end thinking them idiotic.
Yes, I notice a lot of that too, at least in pockets.
Very common here. Perhaps more so because I’m read as foreign and the Other.