I
In Reeducation, when I requested that we take a more realistic and less destructive approach, I pointed out with rhetorical intention that if we continued on our current path, I would need psychotropic drugs. I was finding it difficult to inflict as much pain upon myself as Reeducation required, and had I been capable of articulating the issue in those terms, I would have seen what was happening.
My strategy failed. I did not get a new Reeducative approach, but I did get the drugs. They were very powerful and could dull almost any pain. I could stay up all night inflicting Reeducative writing exercises upon myself, yet work all day the next day without the body aches I associate with sleep deprivation. I could skip meals. My mind dulled and I became more accepting of poor logic. I felt oddly disconnected from my body, as though it were not myself but some alien thing.
A friend asked whether I were being drugged so I could be abused and I said absolutely not, you do not understand the situation. I now understand her question in a very profound way and although I lost the friendship due to this incident (Reeducation said I needed to lose my friends, and abusive people will do what they can to isolate you), I am very glad she asked.
II
The other night as I was being harangued by telephone by a certain individual I did not tell off because of the need to be professional and polite, and because of my empathy with this person’s difficult situation, I who do not drink because it costs money and leads to smoking opened a bottle of wine and drank almost half of it.
I then walked (I could do this because the call was on a cell phone) to the corner store and bought a pack of cigarettes, and smoked until the call ended.
Are you drugging yourself so you can be abused? I asked myself then, and said yes.
III
By the time this post comes up my life will be arranged such that it will resemble life in a health spa. It is entirely within my power to create this situation and when you read this post, that will have been the situation for several days.
IV
ÈPA BÀBÁ OXALÁ. Oxalá lives on a mountaintop.
V
Being in Reeducation really was like having a monkey on one’s back. It made me erratic, as I sought for every moment of lucidity I could, but knew these moments would not come at regular intervals. I did not understanding why this was now the case, for it had never been before. I have had diminished powers and life habits ever since. Yet I was never able to alienate myself entirely from the kind of strength it takes to rise.
VI
Since I originally wrote this we have been bicycling and kayaking, and it is such a beautiful spring. Next we will go to the beach.
I honestly think getting into Reeducation was like getting addicted to drugs. It was [like] being controlled by something crazy, an insane authority that had to be managed, while one tried desperately to continue with real life. Slowly but surely, Reeducation and the struggle for survival within it took up more and more energy and time, and life became harder and harder to manage.
Reeducation billed itself as health, and everyone I asked said it was the right place to be. That was why I concluded that I was insane and had no future.
VII
I also had an argument about handling bullies. One should be able to manage them, I was told. One should be able to treat them such that their bullying characteristics never become an issue in the first place. If they do, one should be able to tell them to stop, and this should work. One should therefore be able to keep such people in one’s life without trouble.
I have not yet gotten a clear explanation of why one should. I also think all of these recommendations beg the question. The issue is that if a bully does not figure out how to get at you, and you do not witness them bullying others, then you may not even realize they are a bully. Usually, however, one discovers that someone is a bully because they already have found a way to do their work.
At that point, just telling them you are otherwise occupied will not work, because they have already figured out how to get around that or bulldoze over it. You have to keep a stronger wall up and a greater distance. The idea that you should just “draw a boundary” and keep dealing with them as before is absolutely ridiculous. It is like saying you should continue to see someone who has hit you, but be smarter about avoiding getting hit again.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
At that point, just telling them you are otherwise occupied will not work, because they have already figured out how to get around that or bulldoze over it. You have to keep a stronger wall up and a greater distance. The idea that you should just “draw a boundary” and keep dealing with them as before is absolutely ridiculous. It is like saying you should continue to see someone who has hit you, but be smarter about avoiding getting hit again.
I think we are dealing here with two different paradigms of the human soul. One is the traditional paradigm that only sees the surface of the human being and does not take into account the half-submerged dynamics. I believe that the more advanced way of seeing this is as you in fact do. You see that people control each other with unconscious or half-conscious dynamics.
I was just reading Doris Lessing — a snippet of her Going Home, a while ago — and I think what frustrates me most about her writing is her old-fashioned idea that there are, in the world, good people and there are trashy people, and that she has, through the perspectives of her authorial vision, the clear capacity to tell them apart. To me, the world is not made up of morally high grade people versus morally low grade people so much as it is made up of people who are relatively healthy versus those who are relatively sick. A morally high grade person can become sick, if the quality of the environment is condusive to that. Somebody sick might gradually regain their spiritual health in due time.
But people who have an eternal sameness about them, by which one can recognise their moral worthiness that never seems to change no matter what their moral circumstances are like — I don’t think such people exist.
That’s interesting on Lessing. Different paradigms of soul, probably yes.
Although I myself now think of “sicker” people as trashy and morally low grade. I would not have started doing this had I not lost patience with the outrageously poor behavior of certain people. At some point, no matter how bad they feel, I want them to act at least marginally civilized. Although you are of course right that people change.
*
Unconscious or half conscious dynamics, yes. The person I am ranting about today, because she is half justifying bullies, sees this too, but uses it as an explanation. Because it is unconscious or half conscious, they cannot help it, so we should forgive them and deal with them, or something like this. Ridiculous. I really, really have learned that it does NOT work to negotiate like that, or make allowances like that, you have to get away and stay away, i.e. actually defend yourself, not engage in all this shadow boxing.
What I am more interested in, in terms of the two theories of the soul, is not so much surface vs. the submerged but simple, mechanistic models versus more complex ones. In this New Ager’s opinion, people should be and work like machines, it seems to me. I disagree.
Back to Lessing. I should really read her. I wonder whether the good/trashy idea is a way to avoid politics. Is seems strange to suggest that of her. The one book of hers I read did not seem to enable this good/trashy paradigm although I would have to look again … such a paradigm would work REALLY well to evade discussion of the effects of colonialism and so on, and sounds really 19th century British.
Lessing’s writing does seem to reinstate an idea of class, even as she takes an more explicit ‘communist’ position. I wonder if this is why so many of her readers found her writing amenable to their tastes. They could comfortably sit in judgement of the crass behaviour/tastes/morality of the colonials whilst not eschewing their own pretensions of being in an appropriate social class. She does lend herself fairly consistently to such a reading.
In this New Ager’s opinion, people should be and work like machines, it seems to me. I disagree.
the idea of the human as machine is the bourgeois ideal. how else can you count on x amount of labour in exactly y amount of time, unless humans are in fact machines?
Communists in my experience are quite conservative socially and very class conscious.
Machine, bourgeois ideal, yes indeed … keep reminding me of this.
Mike said as much to me, that those who joined the official communist party were nothing but liberals — ie. not really revolutionary or radical in their thoughts and ideas. Nonetheless, Lessing waged effective spiritual warfare in her writing. After all, we tend to delight in having someone to look down upon, especially if such looking down marks us as having class and so on. I think Marechera tells us the truth about what it means to live under colonialism. So does my writing, which mirrors Marechera’s in truth-telling and intent. But Lessing’s? Not so much. I see her as a kind of middle class spin doctor.
This would explain her popularity in certain quarters.
The bourgeoisie have ruined human relations for a time to come, because their idea of strength is actually equivalent to the machine. Since nobody can live up to that, people start to operate in this terrible underhand way, taking something from others like bullies. That is why I prefer to associate with black Zimbabweans on facebook — because their society hasn’t reached this stage for them yet. They’re not yet set for autodestruct.
That’s a very interesting analysis of it.
Odd thought: one of the colleagues I have who most acts this way, most assumes the world is this way, is a Deleuze/Guattari fan … which makes me mistrust Deleuze/Guattari. Perhaps what it is is that he needs them, I don’t know, the way people go to churches not because they are ethical but because they need to learn to be. ?
(He’s power mad and makes that assumption about everyone else. I shouldn’t be surprised: we’ve got feminists who are only that in their research and teaching, not in service/administration or in real life, and we have the Lessing attitude. I am just rambling because I am so irritated at something entirely different IRL today.)
It’s amazing how much various philosophical teachings seem to be distorted or to come out differently depending on who reads them. I have never seen any use for D&G. They seem kind of watered down Nietzsche and some other stuff. And then we have Nietzsche, whom I know the most about, but most readers have assimilated him to their capitalism, and somehow receive a reading that they should take, take, take, because this is what their Lordship wants. Ultimately, though, this taking attitude — it turns them into psychological vampires, which is to say it turns them into sick priests of a new ideological order. This is exactly, and to a point of precision, the opposite of the ideal that Nietzsche himself lauded. It’s the human state he condemned.
Sick priests of a new ideological order, that’s very exact.
My brain is hurting because it’s so late, so this is my last and not very coherent comment tonight (this morning), but — one common phenomenon I’ve never been able to stand are the D&Gites and other postmodernites who rage against Descartes because they do not like order, and they think they can take advantage of disorder to continue to disseminate their bourgeois chaos.
Bourgeois chaos is my illumination phrase of the day and I am sure there is something to it, but I am not good enough at philosophy to explain it. But it does seem to me that what a lot of people are up to is sowing superficial chaos so that they can appear to question, but then quickly reaffirm the bourgeois order. I should study such as to be able to explore, refine, and then examine this hypothesis.
I can only barely perceive it because I am really not from this. Staring out at the meditative Pacific throughout the 60s, when people were raising profound questions, does not lend itself to the absorption of the bourgeois-chaotic model, and spending a lot of time later in the non first world doesn’t, either.
The result is that when people try to project it into me, or assume that it is what I am in because it is what they are in and it is universal, I do not even recognize what they are doing or know what they could be thinking of. I’m like, “you think WHAT? you believe WHAT? you live in WHAT universe?
I’m a little tired, too — still processing a backlog of thesis ideas.
The chaos thing is what I cannot stand. It undermines tranquility and beauty and takes a hell of a lot of energy to process it. It seems to be some kind of ideal or accepted standard for modern education, though. It’s very much against my aesthetics.
I am feeling a strong attraction to the 18th century, when lucidity was radical.
Chaos, standard for modern education, yes, and I’m against it. But it seems to be the general assumption about life, too.
The concrete people against whom I am now raging are not even in education. They’re in my ceramics circle. They all assume everyone has utterly conformist, and also utterly self destructive instincts that they cannot control.
Their entire conversation is based on the idea of finding ways to keep this putative modus operandi in check, and not believing it is possible. Will you actually be able to resist x, y, or z? they keep asking in disbelief. I keep wondering, how immature and weak ARE they, really? At a psychological level I’d say they are a child abuse circle — wherein, now, one actor is the abuser and the other two take it. But I notice that their ideas also permeated Reeducation, which was where I learned about mainstream society and its mores, so I think they’re not just an aberration but an example somehow of what our societal ill is (that I am calling bourgeois chaos for lack of a better term).
This is the key concept so I am quoting it:
“The bourgeoisie have ruined human relations for a time to come, because their idea of strength is actually equivalent to the machine. Since nobody can live up to that, people start to operate in this terrible underhand way, taking something from others like bullies.”
Also: “Sick priests of a new ideological order.”
The culture I was brought up within, in the suburbs of Africa, was also very 18th century and lucid — and radical in its lucidity against the backdrop of brutal Africa in quite a lot of ways. So I miss that, and I know it is possible for humans to behave differently. It’s not just ‘human nature’ that makes the present day norm to be fairly chaotic.
Anyway, the only evidence I have nowadays that there is a pretty undisciplined and chaotic society out there is when I allow my creativity or intellect to roam too far, and some panicked individual attempts to rein me in, for fear that I have wandered off into the devil’s zone of evil or pathological weakness. Also, when I consider that boundaries — actual property boundaries — are treated without reverence. I mean, to the degree that anyone can use the playing field and leave their trash on it, there is a certain lack of reverence, which is very contemporary in its flavour.
YES. Precisely.
Lately I have been thinking about the best way to deal with bullies too. It seems to me most of the times we’re afraid of interaction not because there’s an objective risk involved (like getting beaten up, up sacked, etc) but because we’re afraid of the kind of person we become in the presence of others. We don’t like the power they have over us of turning us into someone we don’t want to be, and everyone has that kind of power over everyone.
Seeing as we can’t change the world, and we can’t change others, and we have very little power to change the dynamics of a relationship, one should just give up on that, and focus on simply having self-control. Not in the sense of pretending we’re not really angry, or repressing those negative thoughts and emotions within ourselves. But in the sense of inwardly acknowledging them, yes, and then willfully choosing not to act upon them. One may feel like, for instance, beating up one’s spouse because she makes us angry. But that would turn us into someone we don’t want to be. One can decide to not hit her, or not take that drink, or engage in any other type of behavior that we disapprove of, not for the sake of improving our relationship with others or to control them — but simply to not give up control over ourselves to others; to maintain ones’ self-respect and the identity we want to have. In other words, if other people can be like the poison that turns our Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde, we may be helpless to feel Mr. Hyde inside us. But we can, if we so choose, not to act the way Mr. Hyde wants us to.
I believe in that case we won’t be as afraid of ourselves anymore, and in consequence other people won’t be as frightening either.
J – This last paragraph is exactly what I also notice about contemporary society. And I guess that however it happened, I also was not brought up to believe the present day norm was natural, necessary, and so on.
Yes, and especially this is good for me to hear:
“…but simply to not give up control over ourselves to others…”
Having been raised with the idea that to be in relationship is to allow anyone to do anything to one, out of gratitude that they have even recognized one’s existence (which one does not deserve), I still have the tendency to think it is my job to put up with s***.
I therefore put up with more of it than I should, until I realize the person has really gone too far … at which point I come up fighting tooth and nail, and they never understand why I have exiled them.
I always get criticized then for having let them get that far in the first place. For some reason, it seems that since I gave an inch I now OWE a mile … at least in their logic.
So I should perhaps start by not letting them engage me: if they provoke a defensive reaction, if what they have to say makes me want to drug myself in some way so as to be able to continue to listen, then it means they’ve gone too far.
*
I just had a re-illumination. People keep telling me I would not receive outrageous behavior if I drew better boundaries but I think it is that I don’t recognize abuse for what it is, because the way abusive people present themselves is as [poor] people needing a hand up.